An Introduction from the Editors

Boris Nikolaevich Mironov first came to the attention of a wide range of Russian specialists in 1999 with the publication of his monumental Sotsial´naia istoriia Rossii perioda imperii.¹ Richly documented and wide-ranging in its topics and themes, the work was a tour de force and quickly began garnering a reputation, coming out in rapid order in English translation, two lightly revised Russian editions, and now a fourth significantly expanded edition that includes substantial new material as well as a new title. Gone is the long and not exactly made-for-marketing original name. The new version is called simply Rossiiskaia imperiia: Ot traditsii k modernu (Russian Empire: From Traditions to the Modern).²

Mironov's basic argument, however, has not changed over the various editions, and it boils down to the following simple proposition: imperial Russia has been unfairly disparaged by historians—Russians as well as scholars in the West—and consequently its history, in particular the history of the late imperial period, deserves to be thoroughly reconsidered. Contrary to the view that prevailed in Soviet historiography and persists among "pessimists" in the West, the autocracy did not experience an intractable "crisis" in the late imperial era. The old regime was not doomed. Rather, as Mironov sees it, just the opposite was true: life in Russian society was steadily improving and the tsarist state, for all its troubles, was a "normal country" modernizing in much the same way as its Western peers. The critical difference was simply that modernization began later in Russia, which then necessarily intensified the inevitable tensions and disjunctures of the process. Thus the country's principal predicament, if one could call it that, by the turn of the 20th century was not "backwardness" but "asynchronicity." Russia was moving in one direction with Europe, only at a different time.

The events of 1917 did not make much of an appearance in the first edition of Sotsial´naia istoriia Rossii, but it is fair to say that it has loomed much larger in Mironov's work since then. In Blagosostoianie naseleniia i revoliutsii v imperskoi Rossii,³ for example, a major study of Russian biometrics during the imperial era that Mironov has himself described as a kind of continuation to Sotsial´naia istoriia Rossii, he made clear that the phenomenon of revolution as he sees it was at once both an integral facet of the late imperial experience (hence its place in the title of the book) and an aberration—a regrettable and avoidable detour from the country's otherwise "normal" development that was largely imposed on Russian society by the opponents of the government. Despite the fact that Russian life was generally improving over the late imperial decades, elites opposed to the monarchy could not see this because they honestly could not believe that the life of the people might be improving under autocratic rule. They thus constructed a "crisis paradigm" and worked steadily to inculcate this view within the broader public.

Indeed, neither 1905 nor 1917 would have been possible, Mironov argued in Blagosostoianie, without what he called the "brilliant PR activity" of the "liberal-radical intelligentsiia" (liberal´no-radikal´naia intelligentsiia). The revolutions were thus the product of political ambition and calculation rather than of "objective" socioeconomic conditions and, in this sense, "were not much different from … the so-called 'velvet,' 'orange,' 'pink,' and 'lilac' revolutions of … the post-Soviet era," which in his view were also orchestrated affairs and therefore, by implication, illegitimate.⁴

Reactions to these arguments in Russia have been mixed but invariably intense. Some historians have embraced Mironov's message, in particular his portrait of a successfully modernizing Russian Empire. Others have objected to what they see as the teleology implicit in his use of modernization theory and his overdrawn and conspiratorial conclusions regarding the revolution, while challenging the conclusions he draws from quantitative data. By and large, Mironov has responded by doubling down, forcefully restating his case for seeing the late empire as a going concern that was, for a variety of reasons, knocked off its otherwise "normal" arc to progress by the revolutionary detours of the era. The...