FACULTY OF SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL SCIENCES

Professor Simon Dixon (School of Slavonic and East European Studies – Department of History)

Simon Dixon returned to the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) as Sir Bernard Pares Professor of Russian History in 2008 having been a research student there in the mid-1980s. Since then, his career has taken him from a Junior Research Fellowship at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, via a Lectureship at the University of Glasgow, to the chair of Modern History at the University of Leeds. Though his books have so far been on the eighteenth century, he is now working again on the subject of his original research: the Russian Orthodox Church
c. 1800-1917.

The Instability of Russian Conservatism

Why did it prove so difficult to establish a stable form of conservatism in late-imperial Russia, widely considered one of the most reactionary regimes in European history? Simon Dixon suggests that although many loyal supporters of the tsars thought of themselves as conservatives, their attitudes towards monarchy, law, religion and governmental institutions proved to be unexpectedly subversive. Ranging backwards and forwards from its chronological focus on the nineteenth century, the lecture will also consider some contemporary implications of the subject.