Russia on the Eve of Modernity : Popular Religion and Traditional Culture under the Last Tsars

Pioneering history of the ordinary Russians who continued to live in a pre-modern, non-Western culture in late Imperial Russia. Leonid Heretz offers an overview of traditional Russian understandings of the world, illuminating key themes ranging from peasant monarchism to apocalyptic responses to intrusions from the modern world.

Russia on the Eve of Modernity is a pioneering exploration of a world that has been largely destroyed by revolutionary upheavals and obscured in historical memory by scholarly focus on elites. Drawing on traditional religious texts, ethnographic materials and contemporary accounts, this book brings to light the ideas and perceptions of the ordinary Russian people of the towns and countryside who continued to live in a pre-modern, non-Western culture that showed great resilience to the very end of the Romanov Empire. Leonid Heretz offers an overview of traditional Russian understandings of the world and its workings, and shows popular responses to events from the assassination of Alexander II to the First World War. This history of ordinary Russians illuminates key themes ranging from peasant monarchism to apocalyptic responses to intrusions from the modern world and will appeal to scholars of Russian history and the history of religion in modern Europe.