The critical years from the turn of the century to the eve of the First World Warwere a time of uncertainty and crisis for Russia’s old political, socialand cultural order, but also a time of possibility, imagination and daring. Achronological narrative of events is one way to retell this contradictory story.Still useful too is rehearsing the old debate about whether Russia was headingtowards revolution in these pre-war years (the ‘pessimistic’interpretation as it has been named in the historiography and in much classroompedagogy) or was on a path, had it not been for the burdens and stresses of war,towards resolving tensions and creating a viable civil society and an adequatelyreformed political order (the ‘optimistic’ narrative). Theconventional narrative of successive events and likely outcomes, however, suggestsmore coherence, pattern and telos than the times warrant. To understand theseyears as both an end time and a beginning, and especially to understand theperceptions, values and expectations with which Russians lived these years andentered the war, the revolution and the new Soviet era, we must focus on the morecomplexly textured flux of everyday life and how people perceived theseexperiences and imagined change.

History as event

The years 1900–14 are full of events marking these times as extraordinaryyears of change and consequence. In 1903, as part of the government’songoing efforts to strengthen the state by stimulating the expansion of a modernindustrial economy, the great Trans-Siberian Railway was completed, symbolisingboth the growth of the railroad as an engine of industrial development (thedriving idea of the minister of finance, Sergei Witte) and the imperial reach ofthe state.