This paper reconstructs the origins and the meaning of the “Most Illustrious and Incomparable Order of Antisobres,” that was to be instituted in 1728 in St Petersburg by Duke de Liria, the Spanish ambassador. While this unusual fraternal society might have never taken off the ground and...

Luxury has always been an intrinsic part of world history, but only in the 18th century the core of this phenomenon came up for discussion in Europe. During these debates the concept of luxury was gradually demoralized by economic liberalism and reshaped as “modern and more objective economic...

The paper explores the first translations of W. H. Auden into Russian in the context of the cultural projects of the Stalinist USSR in the 1930s. With ideological distinctions across the borders sometimes even more perceptible than linguistic, the translation was bound to be cultural as well as...

This article uses the records of monastic account books to assess the level of prices in Russia in the second half of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The data from these books allow us to construct salt and rye price series, and identify prices of other goods for single years....

Education in early modern Russia has been traditionally described as imported from the West; secular; imposed by the state – or more specifically, by Peter I himself – from above on the unwilling population; driven by the military needs, and therefore, technical. This chapter seeks to...

This article studies the evolution of housing rents in St. Petersburg between 1880 and 1917, covering an eventful period of Russian and world history. We collect and digitize over 5,000 rental advertisements from a local newspaper, which we use together with geo-coded addresses and detailed...

The article deals with the notion "undergoverness" in the context of the 18th century Russia. It was an attempt to get away from the general discussion based on the number of state officials per capita.The study is devoted to the analysis of the poll tax collection mechanism. We use the new data...

The Russian hunters used to kill animals in the Arctic long before the 18th c. However, the Petrine modernization has changed their life strongly. The Government has put the new goals in order to make the Russian blubber industry some kind of a driving force for the Europeanization of the...

This article explores how Bolshevik/Soviet authorities took on and adapted the Russian imperial topography of power i.e. the system of special structures that intended to convey state ideology (monuments to tsars and statesmen, emperors' residences with their various ceremonial spaces,...

Studies of interconnections between social, technological, economic and cultural forces belong to the trend of modernisation studies in the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century. Modernisation implies the establishment and growth of institutions and infrastructures that are...