Books by Richard Wortman

Russian Monarchy: Representation and Rule is devoted to studies of the political culture of the Russian monarchy as it influenced aspects of historical development such as law, representations of family, and concepts of nation and empire. The articles show how the narratives described in the author¿s two-volume study, Scenarios of Power, guided monarchical rule, shaped the thought patterns not only of the tsar and the imperial family but also of the political and social elite, and set the parameters of compromise that so constrained the policies of imperial Russia.

The Russian populists were intellectuals who saw the hope for transformation of Russian society in an alliance between peasantry and intelligentsia. They endowed the peasant with their own socialist ideas and in his institutions they saw the embryo of a just future life. Professor Wortman sees populism not as a defined ideology but as a group of shared attitudes and preconceptions.