Composed of a broad range of documents from the Soviet archives, many never before published, Freeze's book is the first authoritative collection of primary materials on the social history of Imperial Russia. Organized into three chronological sections--the reign of Catherine the Great in the1760s, the reform movements of the 1860s, and the rising tide of revolution in 1905-06, the collection offers a valuable basis for the comparison of social groups with each other and over the period leading up to the cataclysm of 1917.