Book excerpt: This fully revised and updated volume of A Social History of Imperial Russia is a comprehensive synthesis of Russian social history from Peter the Great to the October Revolution of 1917. Boris Mironov begins with background information on pre-Petrine Russia and then focuses on the crucial events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He demonstrates how social events in this period--including the creation of a modernized autocratic state, the abolition of serfdom, increasing urbanization, and the first stirrings of capitalism (to name a few)--played out in the Revolution, and beyond.