Tuesday 24 May on newsstands with the newspaper the second issue of the series on the great families of history: the text by Cristiano Ragni on the events of the tsars
at the end of the troubled epoch following the extinction of the Rjurikidi family (862-1598) which zemskij sobor – a feudal assembly – chose as czar, in 1613, Michail Romnov, from whom the family originates of rulers who remained on the throne of Russia until 1917.
In the manuals of modern history the problem of the relationship between the geographic location of Russia in the Eurasian continental mass and the orientations of the ruling dynasty appears in an iterative way. refractory to all Asiaticism and open to marriage alliances in the Germanic area, but unable to shift the axis of its politics in the European space. The will of Europeanization imposed by Peter the Great (1672-1725) and the resistances it encountered, both at the noble and popular level, for the consequences it produced in the connective tissue of national culture and its institutions, lay the foundation of this relationship. In most cases, the word Europeanization appears as a synonym for a modernization that does not allow for deviations from the autocratic system.
Opening up to Europe is an obligatory path to enter, according to the dynasty’s ambitions, the circle of world powers. This means building a large state and, above all, military apparatus able to make us perceive, both internally and externally, an Empire capable of acting towards the West and towards the East.
The author of the historiographical model was the writer Nikolaj Karamzin (1766-1826) who, from a position favorable to the integration of Russia into Europe as Peter had understood it (an approach without negotiations on the autocratic principle), passed, after the French Revolution, to a negative judgment on that experience, thus initiating the conservative reading shared by the regime until its extinction. Karamzin he went so far as to argue that the idea of redesigning Russia through European reforms had been a humiliation inflicted by Pietro on national pride, having made the country’s power depend on the imitation of foreign systems. The same scheme of interpretation imposed itself, as if to close the cycle of enlightened despotism extraneous to the Russian spirit, regarding the Enlightenment ideas to which Catherine II (on the throne from 1762 to 1796) seemed to want to adapt her cultural and political action.
Catherine was succeeded by emperors who, in a different way, oriented the discourse on the involvement of Russia in the history of the great powers that dominated the continent militarily and economically. In the Manifesto of July 13, 1801, Alexander I adopted an interlocutory position and proclaimed the principle of armed neutrality: Russia did not enter the field of conflict between the European states, but remained on the alert to defend the country from any aggression, maximizing the military and minimizing the weight of the few reforms of Petrine ancestry. It was like believing that this conflict, which took the form of a struggle for economic hegemony, could remain confined to the western and central areas of Europe, repositioning Russia in its own space. The Napoleonic aggression blew up the scheme of armed neutrality in Austerlitz (1805), but the great patriotic war with which the Russian emperor responded to the aggression of the French emperor in 1812 changed both the involvement of the dynasty in European politics and the awareness of being a great power in the world.
Alexander’s residual reformism was obliterated by the force with which the dynasty reorganized after 1825, when Nicholas I took the throne: Russia became not only a police state, but presented itself to Europe as its anti-model, almost desirous, overturning the Petrine attitude, to be the object of imitation if the foundation of the ancient regime was to be saved.
It could also be argued that the move to Alexander II, promoter of the only major reforms the dynasty has undertaken, is an original development adjustment to allow Russia to remain a great power. But the debate that opened in the senatorial commissions shows that the models to look at (from the abolition of serfdom to the restructuring of the administrative and judicial system) had been drawn from the European archive and that, if there was an originality, it lay in reducing its scope and effectiveness.
From the moment in which, with Alexander III, the late constitutional project of Alexander II was canceled and, with Nicholas II, the alternation of openings and closures to the demand of civil society was reproduced, we are witnessing the decline of the dynasty which during the First World War disappeared from the scene with the revolution of February 1917.
The thirty-volume series
The book by Cristiano Ragni is out on Tuesday 24 May on newsstands with Corriere della Sera and with the weekly Oggi Romnov at a price of € 7.90 plus the cost of the newspaper or magazine. This is the second title in the Great dynasties of history series, edited by Barbara Biscotti, which offers readers a review of thirty volumes on the royal, imperial and aristocratic families that have marked the events of Italy and the whole of Europe over the centuries. . Emerged from the beginning of the seventeenth century, after the confused and bloody period of troubles, with the accession to the throne of Tsar Michael I, the Romnov dynasty reigned over Russia for three centuries, expanding its influence to make it a leading power . The most important exponent was undoubtedly Peter I, known as the Great, who strove to modernize the country, even with ruthless methods, and achieved notable military successes. Even greater than the rest were those of Alexander I, who in 1812 defeated Napoleon. But the inability to reform the autocracy and the disasters of the First World War will mark the fate of their successor Nicholas II. And Russia will become, until 1991, the Soviet Union. The third volume of the series will be on newsstands on Tuesday 31 May, Borgia by Giuseppe Mrozek Eliszezynski, on sale at a price of € 7.90 plus the cost of the newspaper or weekly, like all other subsequent titles. Followed by: Gian Luca d’Errico, Gonzaga (7 June); Paolo Formicone, Bourbon (June 14); Patrizia Biscarini, Montefeltro (June 21st); Emanuele Melilli, Tudor (June 28); Betrice Del Bo, Visconti (July 5); Renata Salvarani, It is (July 12).
May 23, 2022 (change May 23, 2022 | 20:55)
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