| Summary: | This article is devoted to a discussion of B. N. Mironov’s monograph “The Russian Empire: From Tradition to Modernity,” which, according to A. V. Liarskii, is on the whole a significant step in the development of national historiography. As usual, his last book came under the spotlight and the heated debates of scientists. It discusses, based on an analysis of individual examples from Mironov’s work, the limitations and possibilities of using the cliometric approach as a means of understanding the historical process and “cliotherapy” as the goal of historiography. Based on the monograph, it clarifies ideas about the modernization of Russia as a self-contradictory process that heightened archaic social tendencies. An important part of the work done by Mironov is the attempt to seek the sources of the particularities of Russian modernization through historical psychology and anthropology, in the cultural specifics of the imperial population. Along with a warm approval of this trend, the article criticizes some features of Mironov’s “anthropological turn,” for example his attitude to folklore sources or certain conclusions about the nature of the Russian Revolution, based on the study of collective peasant beliefs and the characteristics of peasant thinking. In conclusion, the monograph is characterized as a fundamental interdisciplinary study of the modernization of the Russian empire over the long term, without which it would be difficult to imagine the development of historical scholarship over the course of the next decades.
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