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>Mastering circumstances: Power, privilege, and self-preservation in the Russian provincial administration of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility, 1795--1812.
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Mastering circumstances: Power, privilege, and self-preservation in the Russian provincial administration of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility, 1795--1812.
Between the First Polish Partition of 1772 and the Third, and final, Partition of 1795, approximately 11,250,000 inhabitants and 463,200 sq.km. of territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth came under Russian rule. From the time of their annexation, they were believed to be an integral part of the imperial domestic government and were as influenced by changes in rulers and administrators, practices and institutions as the other provinces.; This study is concerned with the circumstances of the Polish provinces during the critical years of 1795–1812 and addresses three basic questions: how and in what ways the Russian administration exercised power in a region inhabited by a ruling elite with a different culture and political tradition; how and in what ways the Polish-Lithuanian regional noble estate (or szlachta) responded to those circumstances of imperial rule; and how autocracy and aristocracy mastered the vagaries of circumstance during an era of domestic and international turbulence—in the wake of the Partitions and during the era of the French revolution and Napoleonic wars. It is concerned with the territories that comprised the lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Belorus/White Russia and which were designated as the “Polish Provinces.” It examines the means by which the provinces became attached to the Russian empire and remained under imperial rule in spite of historic antipathies between the societies and cultures and French offers of liberation. As the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been preeminently a “Republic of Nobles,” the emphasis is on how the Russian autocrats managed the szlachta.; The Polish-Lithuanian nobility cast their lot with the Russian empire for reasons that involved power, privilege, and self-preservation. Russian imperial power and authority were diffused and adopted on the periphery of the empire in a manner that not only accomplished the central government's basic objectives but also proved acceptable to the local elite. While the men and methods by which the imperial government established its rule within the provinces were important factors in binding the regions to central authority, equally important were szlachta perceptions, expectations, and reception of imperial instrumentalities of rule.
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