In the final years of the Russian Empire, debates over Russia's "backwardness" could be found throughout the public sphere. Russia's kopeck newspapers, the empire's most popular press outlets, regularly examined "backwardness" in comparative perspective, relating perceptions of Russian underdevelopment to perceptions of Western modernity in every aspect of life. This talk explores how late imperial Russia's kopeck newspapers constructed images of Russian backwardness and Western modernity, and how they instrumentalized those images to argue that Russia's future lay in imitating the West.
