The 1812 War and the Civilizing Process in Russia

When Russian memoirists after about 1850 looked back on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which was as far back as living memory extended, they detected a change in the way middling and elite Russians thought and behaved. The priest Filipp F. Ismailov, recalling his own childhood and education, wrote that: There was much that was dark [in the early nineteenth century], but at the time, Russia itself was dark. Coarseness, foolishness, and vulgarity prevailed in everything.1