History of Russia in the 19th Century. Volume 3

«History of Russia in the 19th Century» by Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor Andrei Borisovich Zubov — is not a chronological retelling of events, but a reflection on the causes that brought the possibility of the demise of «historical Russia» closer.

According to Professor Zubov, the catastrophe of the early 20th century has much deeper roots than is commonly believed. 

Careful study of these causes helps not only to better understand the past but also to explain the present.

The third volume is dedicated to the first period of the reign of Nicholas Pavlovich. The nature of «Knight Nicholas», as he was called in childhood, «Don Quixote of autocracy», as he was later referred to, was shaped by the ideas of absolute conservatism of his mentors, historian Nikolai Karamzin and General Matthias Lambsdorf: the individual is insignificant, the state is self-valuable. Clumsy, yet grandiloquent foreign policy came at a well-known price — the price of the blood of the Russian soldier, and technical breakthroughs came at the cost of the suffering and miseries of the common man. By the middle of Nicholas I's reign, perceptive observers could increasingly see the stagnation and decline of the vast country, shackled in the chains of slavery, behind the external glamour of the Court and the might of a million-strong army.