Society
See also: History of Russian culture, Russian literature, Russian opera, Technology in the Russian Empire, and Cinema of the Russian EmpireIt was a rural society spread over vast spaces; in 1913, 80% of the people were peasants. Soviet historiography proclaimed that the Russian Empire of the 19th century was characterized by systemic crisis, which impoverished the workers and peasants and culminated in the revolutions of the early 20th century. Recent research by Russian scholars disputes this interpretation. Mironov assesses the effects of the reforms of latter 19th-century especially in terms of the 1861 emancipation of the serfs, agricultural output trends, various standard of living indicators, and taxation of peasants. He argues that they brought about measurable improvements in social welfare. More generally, he finds that the well-being of the Russian people declined during the most of the 18th century, but increased slowly from the end of the 18th century to 1914.
Read more about this topic: Empire Of Russia
Famous quotes containing the word society:
“A society in which adults are estranged from the world of children, and often from their own childhood, tends to hear children’s speech only as a foreign language, or as a lie.... Children have been treated ... as congenital fibbers, fakers and fantasisers.”
—Beatrix Campbell (b. 1947)
“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
—Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901)
“One great Society alone on Earth,
The noble Living, and the noble Dead.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)