АннотацияIn 1861 Tsar Alexander II emancipated the serfs. The years before and after the Edict of Emancipation were times of extraordinary political activity in Russia. They saw the birth of a revolutionary movement drawing from both conservative and radical, both Slavophile and Westernizing sources, that repeatedly challenged the authority of Russia's rulers and insisted in one way or another on the primacy of the Russian people. Socialism, populism, and radicalism, once mere topics of intellectual discussion, became social forces of transforming power. To a very great extent, these were developments brought about by young people — not only students, but youthful teachers, activists, scholars, and intellectuals. In a major study of this famous period, Abbott Gleason offers an important new interpretation of the genesis of Russian radicalism, and at the same time relates the 1860s to our own epoch. Stressing the relatedness of radical and reactionary doctrines, he explores the reasons why people held the ideas they did, and the psychology of this most remarkable of political generations. "With every year that passes," - Professor Gleason writes, - "it becomes more difficult to regard the state that issued from the Revolution as even ambiguously 'progressive,' as that term used to be employed. This perspective, and the inevitable ironies that accompany it, are built into this book. ... But the ambiguities of my attitude have certainly not diminished my admiration for the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia. Those Russian intellectuals remain, for me, about the most remarkable, many-sided, and congenial people that I have heard or read about. Their story is still, for me, an inspirational story". Abbott Gleason, forty-one, received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Since 1968, he has taught at Brown University where he is now professor of history. His first book was European and Muscovite: Ivan Kireevsky and the Origins of Slavophilism (1972). Professor Gleason is secretary of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Wood-row Wilson International Center for Scholars
