The Bentham Brothers and Russia, The Imperial Russian Constitution and the St Petersburg Panopticon

Author

Bartlett; Roger

Year

2022

Publisher

UCL Press

Language

English

ISBN

978-1-80008-238-0

Link

Last Update

01-Jun-2026

Keywords

History ; Slavic Studies ; Philosophy

Description

In the eighteenth century Russia was a newcomer to the familiar concert of European nations, an exciting or worrying outsider among the established powers. In 1703 Tsar Peter Alekseevich, Peter I, the Great, founded a new city, St Petersburg, at the eastern end of the Baltic Sea. Thereby, in the famous words of Russia’s national poet Aleksandr Pushkin, he ‘chopped a window through to Europe’.¹ Rus’, medieval Muscovite Russia, unified only in the fifteenth century under Grand Prince Ivan III, had developed as a successor state of the Mongol (‘Tatar’) empire of Chinggis Khan, part of the political configuration of...