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"A century ago, the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty was toppled, replaced first by an interim government and then by the world's first self-proclaimed socialist society. This was no narrative of ten earth-shaking days but one of months and years of compounding strife, a struggle for power by competing ideologies and regions and classes and political parties and ethnicities, all rushing to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the tsarist regime, brought down by the First World War, that massive exercise in state-driven violence. At the center of it all is the unlikely triumph of Lenin's Bolsheviks, first in their ruthless seizure of power and then, by institutionalizing violence and terror, their eventual victory over equally brutal but less effective opponents. For seven years, through war, revolutionary upheaval, and civil strife, one Russia replaced another; old institutions and ways of life were wiped away or adapted to new purposes. Laura Engelstein's monumental new history of the Russian Revolution brings to life the events that sparked and then fueled the revolution as it spread out across the vestiges of an entire empire--from St. Petersburg and Moscow across the Steppes, the Caucuses, and Siberia, to the Pacific Rim. Russia in Flames is a vivid account of a state in crisis so profound and transformative that it not only shook the world but irrevocably altered it"--Provided by publisher

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Transliteration and Spelling/ Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Part One. Disciplining Change: Law And Medicine -- 1. Revising the Old Moral Order: Family Relations and Reproductive Sex -- 2. Gender and the Juridical Subject: Sodomy, Prostitution, and Rape -- 3. Power and Crime in the Domestic Order -- 4. Female Sexual Deviance and the Western Medical Model -- 5. Morality and the Wooden Spoon: Syphilis, Social Class, and Sexual Behavi6r -- Part Two. Confronting Disorder: The Widened Public Field -- 6. Eros and Revolution: The Problem of Male Desire -- 7. End of Innocence and Loss of Control -- 8. Sex and the Anti-Semite: Vasilii Rozanov' s Patriarchal Eroticism -- 9. Abortion and the New Woman -- 10. From Avant-Garde to Boulevard: Literary Sex -- Conclusion -- Primary Sources Cited -- Index

Twentieth-century Russia, in all its political incarnations, lacked the basic features of the Western liberal model: the rule of law, civil society, and an uncensored public sphere. In Slavophile Empire, the leading historian Laura Engelstein pays particular attention to the Slavophiles and their heirs, whose aversion to the secular individualism of the West and embrace of an idealized version of the native past established a pattern of thinking that had an enduring impact on Russian political life.Imperial Russia did not lack for partisans of Western-style liberalism, but they were outnumbered, to the right and to the left, by those who favored illiberal options. In the book's rigorously argued chapters, Engelstein asks how Russia's identity as a cultural nation at the core of an imperial state came to be defined in terms of this antiliberal consensus. She examines debates on religion and secularism, on the role of culture and the law under a traditional regime presiding over a modernizing society, on the status of the empire's ethnic peripheries, and on the spirit needed to mobilize a multinational empire in times of war. These debates, she argues, did not predetermine the kind of system that emerged after 1917, but they foreshadowed elements of a political culture that are still in evidence today.

Combined underdevelopment : discipline and the law in Imperial and Soviet Russia -- Revolution and the theater of public life : the triumph of extremes -- The dream of civil society : the law, the state, and religious toleration -- Holy Russia in modern times : the Slavophile quest for the lost faith -- Orthodox self-reflection in a modernizing age : the case of Ivan and Natal'ia Kireevskii -- Between art and icon : Aleksandr Ivanov's Russian Christ -- The old Slavophile steed : failed nationalism and the philosophers' Jewish problem