Translation:

If I’m not mistaken, the early modern period in Russia was the scene of escalating severity contra the Russian peasantry and the disappearance of the country’s medieval representative assemblies. The Church was also suborned to a degree it had not been before. The literary efflorescence in Russia was a 19th century phenomenon. The institution of yeoman agriculture and the restoration of elected conciliar bodies occurred during the period running from to 1861 to 1906.

Medieval Russia was a collection of sometimes-cooperative, sometimes quarreling independent principalities, ruled by members of a common family (the House of Rurik). Only Novgorod and Pskov had anything resembling popular government, and then according to a sort of Venetian-type merchant oligarchy that “hired” Russian princes under contract to run their armies (but never enter their cities). These principalities were eliminated by Ivan III and Ivan IV, but they still used the title Tsar of All the Russias to acknowledge at least a shadow of pluralism. The Church was suborned during the Time of Troubles (17c) and the patriarchate abolished by Peter the Great and restored only after the 1905 Revolution. Byzantium was the open model, but the secret one was medieval Mongolia, and the rulers who emerged from the rule of the Khans were their enforcers, who originally collected tribute, like Ivan Kalita (“the Bagman”), first prince of Muscovy.

Russia’s tangles with various Turkic states weren’t peculiar to the era of Peter and Catherine nor was Russia alone in warring on Turkic states.