The practice of literary criticism came to Russia in the eighteenth century as a part of the Westernizing reforms of Emperor Peter the Great and, Empress Catherine the Great. In the 1830s and 1840s, as literary criticism became a profession, literary discussion directed at a newly emerging reading public crucially contributed to a debate about national identity, which became known as the debate between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles. Westernizers such as Ivan Turgenev, the critic Vissarion Belinsky and the reformist thinker Aleksandr Herzen wanted to follow the European trajectory laid out by Peter the Great towards a Europeanized, secular culture. The account of Russian literary criticism differs from Soviet-era accounts in its vocabulary and in its greater emphasis on cultural and intellectual networks of people and ideas. Belinsky's view of literature as the bearer of enlightened social consciousness intensified throughout the 1840s, after his break with conservative Hegelianism in 1841.

From its very beginnings the historiography of Russia in the twentieth century has been much more than an object of coolly detached scholarly contemplation. Many observers saw the USSR as the major enemy of Western civilisation, the principal threat to the stability of nations and empires, a scourge that sought to undermine the fundamental values of decent human societies. Through the inter-war years the Soviet Union offered many intellectuals a vision of a preferred future outside and beyond capitalism, but contained within the hope and faith in the USSR and communism were the seeds of disillusionment and despair. The image of an imperialist totalitarianism, spreading its red grip over the globe, was at one and the same time the product of Western anxieties and the producer of inflated fears. As the Cold War consensus of the 1950s gave way to a growing discomfort with American policy, the Soviet Union itself was evolving away from Stalinism.

Throughout the imperial period Russia's political and social elites were drawn overwhelmingly from members of the hereditary noble estate. The civil bureaucratic elite of the nineteenth century was mostly educated in one of four higher educational institutions: the Alexander Lycee and the School of Law, both exclusively noble boarding schools, and the universities of St Petersburg and Moscow. In the imperial era the Russian elites, both aristocratic and bureaucratic, were part of a broader European elite culture and society. This was more true in the nineteenth century than in the eighteenth, and it always tended to be most true the higher up the social ladder one travelled. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century the Petersburg and Moscow intellectual elite, inevitably drawn overwhelmingly from the wealthier nobility, was developing its own variation on the theme of modern European literary culture.

The multiplicity of economic, service and protoprofessional subgroups that made up the raznochintsy highlighted both the complicated structure of Russia's 'groups between' and the desire of the government to impose legal administrative controls across society. Whether historians focus attention on economic activities or state service, a dynamic relationship between governmental policy and spontaneous societal development underlies the phenomenon of the raznochintsy. On-going scholarly research shows that the conceptual and historical reality of the intelligentsia, no less than that of the raznochintsy, cannot be subordinated to any single collective meaning. Despite years of debate, argument and counter-argument, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the Russian intelligentsia had its origins in the Enlightenment culture of the educated nobility or educated service classes of the late eighteenth century. The self-conscious arrival of the intelligentsia in the 1860s showed that the 'parting of ways' had developed into ideological and social identity.

The changes introduced by Peter and his eighteenth-century successors affected women of Russia's tax-paying population, townspeople as well as peasants, primarily in negative ways. The most significant change derived from the practice of conscription that Peter introduced. Women's subordinate social status became a burning issue in the middle of the nineteenth century, as educated Russians began to subject every traditional institution to re-evaluation, the patriarchal family included. In the opinion of those on the left of Russia's emergent political spectrum, authoritarian family relations reproduced and reinforced the social and political hierarchy. Social critics intended women to play a vital role in creating a new social order, but they disagreed about the character of that role. During the revolution of 1905, women across the social spectrum mobilised in enormous numbers to demand an expansion of political rights and greater social justice.