Russian Rulers History Podcast · Mark Schauss

The Russian Imperial Era

·24 min·6 clips

The episode opens with a travel story from Hawaii. A Lyft driver turns out to be a Russian-history fan, and another ride brings a driver who knows Central Asian history well enough to keep the conversation moving from Russian and Soviet relations with places like Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan, which gives the host a comic frame for how often Russian history seems to turn up in ordinary life. From there, the show heads back to the Russian Imperial Era. It treats the imperial period as a long chain of rulers, reforms, wars, and breakdowns rather than a tidy set of separate reigns, so each ruler is placed against the institutions and crises that shaped the age. Peter the Great remains the starting point, with the founding of the Academy of Sciences as part of his westernizing push. Catherine the Great gets a close look. Her educational reforms broaden the curriculum to include the sciences, philosophy, ethics, history, and international law, while still feeding the army with officers after rigorous training. Anna's reign comes next. The show describes her support for the Academy of Sciences, the Imperial Theatre School, and a Westernizing court culture, while also noting the dislike that built up around her German circle and her rumored connection to Ernst Johann von Biron. Foreign policy stays central. Under Anna, Russia fights in the War of Polish Succession and a Russo-Turkish war, and the episode does not hide the cost, pointing to heavy Russian losses and the return of plague as a reminder that imperial ambition came with ugly human wreckage. Elizabeth follows. Her accession after the coup against Ivan VI is framed as a new Enlightenment turn, and the episode presents her as one of the more popular imperial rulers because her reign brought a fresh round of intellectual and cultural life to the throne. The chronology keeps moving through the later Romanovs. The episode tracks the way liberal reform, repression, assassination, and reaction keep alternating as the empire tries to modernize without giving up autocracy, which is why figures like Alexander II and Alexander III matter here. The end point is 1917. The final Romanov ruler is presented as badly prepared for the moment, and his abdication in February closes the imperial era with the same bluntness the show brings to the rest of the dynasty's collapse. The episode does not romanticize the empire. It treats the Russian imperial centuries as a record of state-building, cultural ambition, brutal war, and political failure, and it leaves listeners with the simple fact that the Romanov line could not survive the pressures it had spent centuries creating.

As heard by us

A brisk Romanov survey that connects reform, foreign policy, and collapse without losing the thread.

The episode handles the Russian Imperial Era as a wide imperial sweep, and that frame suits its coverage. It moves from Peter the Great and Catherine the Great through Anna, Elizabeth, and the later Romanovs, tying together educational reform, westernization, court politics,…

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Why you'd press play

You want the Romanovs from Peter the Great to 1917 in one sweep.

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