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Again, the Petrine Reform is often
seen as the starting point of the irrevocable split of Russian
society into two parts. Peter’s reforms transformed the upper levels
of Russian society while the masses remained largely unaffected by
them.
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Peter had
forced the nobility to acquire technical knowledge of Western Europe
and to adopt European styles of dress and manners. Soon many Russian
nobles even preferred to speak the languages of Western Europe
(particularly French and German) to Russian. By the nineteenth
century their world was European in dress, manners, food, education,
attitudes, and language, and was completely alien to the way of life
of the Russian popular masses.
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Thus a
cultural and ideological wall was set up between a secular
Westernized elite and the lower classes untouched by modernization.
This cultural gulf proved to have tragic consequences for Russia. In
the nineteenth century many progressively minded members of the
Russian educated classes sincerely aspired to bridge the cultural
divide and atone for the suffering of the masses. Some joined the
Russian revolutionary movement. Their radical blueprints for
improving the lot of the common people were often utopian and
unrealistic and failed to lead the Russian people to the luminous
communist future.
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