Intimate Empire
Journal: Oxford University Press eBooks
Year: 2022

After a humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, the Russian Empire struggled to reassert its position as a global power. A small noble family returned from the siege of Sevastopol and joined the rulers’ efforts to advance Russian standing in the decades before 1917. <italic>Leaving Home</italic> tells the story of the Mansurovs, who were known to nineteenth-century observers as resourceful imperial agents and staunch supporters of Orthodoxy. In close interplay with scholarship and the media, they