The Phenomenology of the Russian Autocracy at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century Through the Optics of “Political Everyday Life”

Abstract

This article discusses one of the main issues in K. A. Solovyov’s 2018 monograph on the political system of the Russian Empire from Emperor Alexander III until the reforms of 1905–1906. Solovyov, a chief research fellow of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, states that the regime in this period should be studied from the point of view of “the political everyday life”. This would help scholars develop a “new political history” and reconstruct the past in a way closer to historical reality than is done at present. This approach has met criticism. Despite a number of successful examples of the use of Solovyov’s optics of “political everyday life,” it is not sufficiently comprehensive or robust for understanding the phenomenology of the late autocracy, because it does not take into account the most important features of this regime: the status of the monarch and the nature of his power. Those phenomena cannot be understood in the context of exclusively administrative practices. To support this claim, the author analyzes both the concepts of political thinkers Solovyov studied and did not mention. The author suggests that the prism of “everyday life” cannot provide a correct interpretation of events.