New Perspectives on Muscovite History Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990

Russia in the age of Ivan the Great, Ivan the Terrible and the first Romanovs may appear exotic and remote but it has not remained immune from the rediscovery and reclamation of the Russian past inspired by glasnost. Amongst the controversial issues in Muscovite history tackled in this volume, which brings together eleven scholars from the USA, the former USSR, the UK and Germany, are the debts owed by Western cartographers to early Russian mapmakers and the nature and origins of the Time of Troubles, long viewed by Marxist-Leninist historians as a 'peasant war'. Articles on Novgorod and Pskov offer fresh thoughts on alternative paths of political development, while studies of estate economy, landholding and military service in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provide statistical analysis based on archival research, throwing light on the precarious status of Russia's 'middle service class'. The collection ends with the impression of a foreigner in Moscow on the eve of Peter the Great's reforms.