Download or read book Autocracy in the Provinces written by Valerie Ann Kivelson and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the possibilities for rich and varied social, cultural, and political development under the rule of an autocratic state. The author situates Muscovite history within a comparative framework, demonstrating that seventeenth-century Russia was neither backward nor peculiar, but developed its own variant of the concurrent state-building processes of Western European monarchies.