As Europe was rocked by uprisings and revolutions during the 1830s and 1840s, one nation remained unaffected, secure in the grip of its authoritarian ruler. Russia’s Tsar Nicholas I watched while groups as disparate as English Chartists and Polish nobility protested and rose against monarchy, culminating in the Revolutions of 1848. As political upheaval set Europe alight, the Russian Empire seemed impermeable to the virus of reform, a society frozen in time, unchanging, eternal, and ultimately becoming the bulwark of ideological reaction.
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