or особый путь). Or contrariwise, that all of them were “normal”. But that would be to bait a deadly historiographical trap. At a certain level of analysis, every European society was “special” and by 1914 all of them contained (and often shared) similar social, political and cultural features that might characterize them as normal. Moreover, the idea of a path carries teleological implications that should be resisted. The only solution to the problem lies in comparative history. But there is insufficient space for that in this paper. All that can be done is to assert and then attempt to document that the Russian Empire participated in all these four major transformations but that the rhythm of change was sufficiently different from the other major belligerent powers to help explain why it collapsed so suddenly in the midst of the war before its armies had been decisively defeated on the battlefield unlike what happened to the German, Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. This paper argues that four phenomena defined the peculiarities of Russia’s historical experience before 1914: 1) a multiplicity of social identifications; 2) the uneven and belated development of Russian capitalism; 3) the fragmentation and particularism of the big social aggregations; and 4) the fragmentation of politics.

Ever since the reign of Peter I (“the Great”) the tsar and the ruler and his/her closest advisers had sought unsuccessfully to impose order from above on the variety of social identifications inherited from Muscovite Russia. Peter’s introduction of service ranking, Catherine’s attempt to create an intermediate urban class, Nicholas I belated codification of the soslovie system, the steps toward a common citizenship advanced by the reformers under Alexander II and again after the revolution of 1905 were, at best, only partial successes. From below people resisted or, as the large “floating” population testified, evaded the categories invented or imposed from above. Moreover, agents of autocracy often failed to implement or openly contradicted imperial legislation aimed at fixing the social order. Within the population there was abundant evidence of an insufficient awareness of one’s assigned place in society, a lack of self-consciously belonging to a group that was externally defined by its socio-economic condition (as a class) or its ethno-linguistic characteristics (as a nationality).

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