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It was long accepted throughout the European world that a father's authority over his children should be unchallengeable and that the authority of monarchs and noble lords was absolute because they, too, were "fathers" to their subjects. A profound shift in this thinking occurred during the eighteenth century, however, as increasingly critical attitudes toward paternal authoritarianism subverted the patriarchal ideology that undergirded the old regime. Recent scholarship has even linked the outbreak of the American and French Revolutions to these changing beliefs about the nature of the family. These ideas had a powerful impact among Russia's westernized upper class and drove conservatives to search for a less harshly authoritarian justification for the old regime. Much soul-searching went into their attempt to reconcile autocracy and serfdom with the respect for human dignity and the delicate moral sensibilité that were increasingly expected of any cultivated European. Slavophilism, which glorified the common people and emphasized the duties of monarch and nobility, represented one outcome of this quest. The anguished process by which proto-Slavophile beliefs evolved out of the noble culture of the Catherinian age is strikingly apparent in the turbulent biography of the poet, playwright, journalist, and amateur historian Sergei Nikolaevich Glinka.

In the opening decade of the twentieth century, the tsarist government embarked on an ambitious program of agrarian and administrative reforms that dramatically changed the rules of village politics. The most famous of these reforms, decreed on 9 November 1906 by Prime Minister Petr Stolypin, allowed peasants to claim their share of communal land as personal property and enclose it in a single parcel. This reform threatened to undermine the administrative and fiscal means through which the peasant commune had previously controlled its lands. Householders who obtained title to their land, even if they never undertook the second stage of consolidation but kept their scattered strips within the commune's open-field system, gained considerable autonomy from the village assembly of heads of household (skhod).