Palmer summed it up nicely: behind its tsarist autocratic facade, a country of chronic instability and violence.
There were several things, biggies, the Rooskies had never had:
Renaissance
Western Christianity
Reformation (bad as it was)
The Rooskies had had, instead, the Mongols, the Greek Orthodox Church, and Muslims.
They did have some quote Enlightenment, among the nobility and bureaucracy; Peter had been a reformer; and some bourgeois interest as well, as Palmer acknowledges, for all the good it did them.
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