Sveta had much less to say, but she sat with Lev and held his hand, and when I asked her what had made her fall in love with him, she replied, ‘I knew he was my future. When he was not there, I would look for him, and he would always appear by my side. That is love.’
Sveta
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In the mind of the ordinary peasant the Tsar was not just a kingly ruler but a god on earth. He thought of him as a father-figure who knew all the peasants personally by name, understood their problems in all their minute details, and, if it were not for the evil boyars who surrounded him, would satisfy their demands. Hence the peasant tradition of sending direct appeals to the Tsar.
Orlando FigesTags: autocracy
For the Romanov regime fell under the weight of its own internal contradictions. It was not overthrown.
Orlando FigesThe currents of modern civilization had somehow passed it by, and as he returned to it now, fresh from the sides of England and France, Sergei Semenov saw only familiar signs of backwardness and decay.
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To the less privileged it was this arbitrariness that made the regime's power feel so oppressive. There were no clear principles or regulations which enabled the individual to challenge authority or the state.
Orlando FigesTags: autocracy
The only way, they argued, to prevent a revolution was to rule Russia with an iron hand. This meant defending the autocratic principle, the unchecked powers of the police, the hegemony of the nobility, and the moral domination of the Church, against the liberal and secular challenges of the urban-industrialize order.
Orlando FigesTags: autocracy
Their notion of training was to march the men up and down in parades and reviews: these were nice to look at and gave them the impression of military discipline and precision, but as a preparation for a modern war they had no value whatsoever.
Orlando FigesTags: military
The peasant also found another use for this sacred object. 'He says of the icon: "It's good for praying -- and you can cover the pots with it too.
Orlando FigesTags: religious-icon
The 'noble savage' whom the Populists had seen in the simple peasant was, as Gorky now concluded, no more than a romantic illusion. And the more he experienced the everyday life of the peasant, the more he denounced them as savage and barbaric.
Orlando FigesTags: peasants
These romantic visions of the peasantry were constantly undone by contact with reality, often with devastating consequences for their bearers. The populists, who invested much of themselves in their conception of the peasants, suffered the most in this respect, since the disintegration of that conception threatened to undermine not only their radical beliefs but also their own self-identity.
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