Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals by Dominic LievenReview by: Marc RaeffSlavic Review, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 152-153Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2697007 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 17:09

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Slavic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.81 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 17:09:17 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

152 Slavic Review

Through a series of structured analyses, Rumer deepens this bleak macroeconomic picture. He opens the work by observing the social effects of dismantling the Soviet sys- tem-"up to 70 or even 80 percent of the population of Kazakstan and Kyrgyzstan are now living in poverty. The proportion is still higher in Tajikistan, where no less than 95 percent now fall under the poverty line.... The escalating impoverishment of the population ... has contributed to an uncontrolled spread of diseases like tuberculosis and hepatitis" (5). Zhukov provides the context and the supporting data and goes on to warn that "massive pauperization makes a fertile environment for the dissemination of radical ideas" (82).

The Trushins see two aspects to the economic problems confronting the five states: the rectification of structural disproportions inherited from the Soviet system and the res- olution of issues engendered by independence. They examine the partial measures gov- ernments have undertaken, notably in privatization and agrarian reform and conclude that many barriers to economic growth and liberalization remain. They emphasize "a high level of degradation of land resources and an especially irrational utilization of water re- sources" (88), which Rumer takes up in the context of the effect of the establishment of new frontiers. Thus Kyrgyzstan shut off water supply to the southern oblasts of Kazakhstan in the spring of 1999 after Kazakhstan had failed both to deliver agreed quantities of coal and to pay for Kyrgyz electricity supply, but that situation arose because Kyrgyzstan had paid neither for Kazakh natural gas nor for railway transit across Kazakh territory.

Although continuing to be strongly export-oriented-Zhukov shows that exports constituted four-fifths of the output of physical goods in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, half in Kyrgyzstan, and one-third in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan in 1997 or 1998-these coun- tries were getting poorer prices than the world market would have justified. The Trushins tabulate the percentage of exports sold below the prevailing world price in 1996: 71 per- cent in Kazakhstan, 67 percent in Uzbekistan, 63 percent in Turkmenistan, and 52 percent in Kyrgyzstan. One factor was the continued reliance on Russia, which led to further prob- lems in the wake of the financial crisis and steep devaluation there in August 1998: pro- ceeds from sales for rubles in Russia diminished and the prices of Russian goods undercut domestic producers (both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan temporarily imposed import re- strictions as a result).

In light of the shrinkage of production and demand within the former Soviet re- publics after the dissolution of the USSR, it was rational for Central Asia to seek to sell and buy in other Asian markets. Reznikova points out that trade returns underestimate the ex- tent of the shift toward these other markets because Asian partners originated much of the unrecorded "shuttle" commerce. After a detailed survey of the region's burgeoning trade with China, Japan, and South Korea, she examines Asian-Pacific corporate investments and assesses prospects for "the Silk Route of the Twenty-First Century" in energy supply, transcontinental transportation, and telecommunications. Plans for five oil and gas pipe- lines into China, Iran, and Pakistan have been announced, but at an aggregate length of over 11,000 kilometers they would cost $14 billion, a sum as yet unjustifiable as a com- mercial investment and politically impractical where crossing Afghanistan is concerned. In the longer term, nevertheless, such projects are likely to be viable and may counter Zhukov's pessimistic projection that demographic growth will exceed economic develop- ment to such an extent that "the per capita volume of goods and services available to the population in 2015 will be substantially less than it was in 1990" unless there is revision of "the capital-intensive and labour-saving character of development, which all Central Asian countries are largely forced to follow" (272).

MICHAEL KASER Universities of Birmingham and Oxford, United Kingdom

Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals. By Dominic Lieven. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. xl, 486 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Maps. $35.00, hard bound.

Dominic Lieven, professor of Russian government at the London School of Economics, is well known as a leading scholar of the last half century of imperial Russia, in particular of

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.81 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 17:09:17 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews 153

its central political institutions and personnel; his biography of Nicholas II is an insightful, comprehensive, and balanced account. In the book under review, he daringly undertakes the daunting task of comparing the history and structure of both Russian and Soviet em- pires with contemporary and rival British, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires. Lieven is an enormously well read and informed scholar with an enthusiastic and inquisitive wit. But, as Robert Harbison remarks in his Reflections on Baroque (2000) the main objective of wit is to create the sense of being propelled from one idea to another by quickly changing the subject. Mutatis mutandis, this is Lieven's way.

Following this procedure, our author makes many interesting observations and in- sightful remarks that can benefit anyone studying modern European, in particular Rus- sian, history. Yet it is hard to detect a systematic effort to draw meaningful overall conclu- sions from them. Why should this be so? In my opinion, it stems from two problems inherent in such a wide-ranging comparative approach. First, there is the fluidity of the basic conceptual term. Lieven is well aware of it, as he states in the very first sentence of his book, "the word empire has meant many different things to different people from dif- ferent countries at different times" (3). He further remarks, "never has the definition of empire been more important and contentious than in contemporary Russia" (5). Unfor- tunately, after surveying the history of the connotations of, and polemics concerning, the term empire in the course of two millennia, Lieven himself fails to give us a clear and satis- factory working definition of his key word. He admits that much in his conclusion by stat- ing that a rigorous and "scientific" definition would prove unusable. In fact, he appears to be content to call empire a polity of vast dimensions with diverse populations. To my mind, this is insufficient.

The second problem stems from his selection of the empires that he compares with the Russian-Soviet empire and with each other. To say simply that they all called them- selves empires, were "European," and were in conflict at one time or another, for longer or shorter periods, is not a serious criterion; one wonders, for example, about exclu- sions-like France. Nor is the chronological framework, circa 1450 to 1990, satisfactory either. It does not make sufficient allowance for profound structural transformations occurring in each empire over the course of these many centuries, and not necessarily at the same time or for the same reasons. Certainly, to compare an overseas empire with a landlocked one, as Lieven does when discussing the British colonial empire and either the tsarist or the Soviet one, is a bit foolhardy, especially since he does not take adequate ac- count of the important differences between the first and second British colonial empires, on one hand, or the radical breaks in culture and ideology in Russia, on the other. Lieven may be on safer ground when comparing Russian (Soviet) with Ottoman and Habsburg realms. Here too, however, he does not proceed systematically enough, for he does not make sufficient allowances for the differences in political and social institutions in those periods when they could be compared. It might also have been helpful had he separated more sharply internal developments from the exigencies-whether real or perceived-of foreign policy.

In all fairness it should be said that Lieven is himself not unaware of these basic prob- lems. Quite correctly, in my view, he writes: "any attempt to define all-encompassing and scientific laws governing empire's aftermath would be foolish, and a more modest desire to spot some patterns across empires, and to use comparisons to sharpen understanding of individual cases is far more sensible and rewarding" (343 - 44). But this applies not only to the aftermath of empire but to his enterprise as a whole; and to spot patterns requires greater clarity of conceptualization and attention to structural and chronological prob- lems than we have here. Toward the end he also writes with disarming frankness: "In gen- eral, however, comparative history can never replace the work of specialists. It can merely shed light from unexpected angles and ask strange questions" (418). Quite true, but even angles and questions must stem from careful examination of possible geometric and chronological perspectives as well as from the specific characteristics of the "beasts" ob- served. It would also obviate the need for much repetition.

MARC RAEFF Tenafly, New Jersey

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.81 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 17:09:17 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions