Description: Intimate Empire tells the story of the Mansurovs, a small noble family who played a momentous role in the Russian Empire, as they struggled to reassert the countries importance on the global stage after their defeat in the Crimean War, showing how three generations of a family advanced the intertwined causes of the Russian Empire and Orthodoxy.
Review Quotes: "The book makes an original contribution to our understanding of the private networks of elite families in imperial Russia, while reminding us that transnational individuals served as potent agents and powerful tools of empire." -- Lucien Frary, The Russian Review
"With Intimate Empire, Alexa von Winning has achieved a great success. The book adds many innovative thoughts to the genre of historical family biographies. It demonstrates the complex, by no means frictionless relationship between Church and autocracy in the late Tsarist Empire, and repeatedly broadens the perspective beyond the russian-imperial scope." -- H-Soz-Kult von, Benedikt Tondera, Institute for History, Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg"Alexa von Winning's Intimate Empire: The Mansurov Family in Russia and the Orthodox East, 1855-1936 is...an impressive work of scholarship." -- Russell E. Martin, The Kritika "In this fascinating study of the noble Mansurov family from the time of the Crimean War through the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet era, Alexa von Winning traces "the family's network in paper and stone" so as to "determine the impact of their private network on the history of the Russian Empire, both on the edges and in the centre"." -- Francesca Silano, Canadian-American Slavic Studies"This is a fascinating history of a family whose lives provide windows into numerous aspects of late imperial and Soviet Russia, from the nature of family life to the activities of noble families in state service, as well as into the imperial agenda and activities of the final Romanov Tsars." -- Katy Turton, Revolutionary Russia