Nicholas II: Twilight of the Empire. by Dominic LievenReview by: David A. J. MaceySlavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Winter, 1994), pp. 1162-1164Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2500888 .

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1162 Slavic Review

quered Novgorodian and Tatar lands. Skrynnikov sees the Time of troubles not as a class struggle pitting peasants against nobles, but as a civil war led by warring factions from this fractured elite. Robert Crummey's short study of the upper Oka princes shows that a "boyar aristocracy" or znat' persisted through the seventeenth century, in spite of the elite's many divisions. Although Brenda Meehan-Waters has elsewhere demonstrated the continued presence of leading "aristocratic" families in petrine government, S.O. Schmidt thinks that Peter's promulgation of the Table of Ranks shook the foundations of aristocratic control. By 1750, he observes, it had already grown unfashionable for Russian nobles to base their social prestige on high birth. The transformation of public discourse attendant on western influence led, Marc Raeff thinks, to the introduction of meritocratic and even "individualistic" tendencies that may have further fractured the elite. Meanwhile, as the Russian Empire expanded, the ethnically Russian elements of the nobility were augmented by Poles, Baltic Germans, Moldavians, Scotsmen (!) and other national groups. The process of ethnic and cultural differentiation is examined here by Matei Cazacu, Paul Dukes and Roger Bartlett, among others.

A third set of questions relates to the general rubric of Russian political culture. Margarita Bychkova's essay on Muscovite coronation rituals illustrates how an origi- nally Byzantine rite was adapted to Russian ideological and social conditions, and how it dramatized the superiority of Moscow's grand duke over other princes and boyars. Andre Berelowitch sees the nobility as part of a "shame society" and he argues that the resolution of disputes over honor in Muscovy resembled the way such disputes have been resolved in other shame societies. S.O. Schmidt's engaging overview of public consciousness traces the evolution of the nobiliary ideal from state service in the sixteenth century to conceptions of moral rectitude, honest citizenship and patri- otism in the nineteenth century. His analysis reinforces at certain points Raeff's well known ideas about the evolution of the service mentality from a narrowly bureaucratic to a broader humanitarian notion. Interestingly for a scholar educated in the Soviet period, Schmidt's assessment of the nobility's contribution to Russian culture is almost uniformly positive. Raeff, in contrast, is more critical of the nobility, whom he sees as virtually passive receptors of Peter's "revolution" and as culture-beaiers whose system of values was "ambiguous," internally contradictory and in some ways deleterious.

I consider the volume in hand a major contribution to scholarship and applaud the editors of Cahiers du monde russe et sovietique for their role in its preparation.

G.M. HAMBUIRG Uraiversity of Notre Dame

Nicholas II: Twilight of the Empire. By Dominic Lieven. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994. xii, 292 pp. Index. Plates. $24.00, hard bound.

Since the onset of glasnost', nostalgia, the obvious analogies with the current era of reform as well as efforts to discover a "usable past" have resulted in a constant stream of pictorial histories, biographies and TV documentaries by both professionlal histo- rians and popular writers devoted to the last of the Romanovs. However, none of them has substantively changed our basic knowledge of the period leading up to the revo- lution of 1917. Lieven's book, on the other hand, builds on the author's earlier studies of government, aristocracy and foreign policy to develop new insights into this trou- bled period. Moreover, in contrast to the only other comparable work, Andrew Ver- ner's The Crisis of Russian Autocracy, which sees 1917 as already predetermined in the 1905 revolution, Lieven's approach is consistently open-ended and recognizes the possibility of "alternatives" right down to the abdication.

Lieven distinguishes between short- and long-term possibilities. In his view, the central problem of Nicholas's reign was the regime's ability to weather the crisis of transition from an agriculturally based, monarchical regime whose main basis of social support was the aristocracy and, to a lesser extent, the peasantry to an industrially

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Book Reviews 1163

based regime that would have had to find its support within the urban business and educated classes of society and, consequently, also to begin sharing power with them. This suggests a rather familiar dynamic: the contradiction between the "inevitable" task of economic modernization and the preservation of a traditional political struc- ture. However, while acknowledging the very real challenges posed by this transition, Lieven argues that Russia's long-term prospects were quite positive, particularly when one allows that other states either had already successfully made this transition or were in the process of doing so. Indeed, while occasionally a little strained, it is precisely this comparative framework that enables the author to offer new insights about an otherwise familiar story. Nor has he merely exchanged one teleology for another, for it is in his analysis of the political contingencies that the open-endedness of his approach is manifest. Even failure, when it came, did not nmake revolution inevitable. As contemporary experience has demonstrated, some form of conservative authoritarianism was even more likely.

Russia's actual historical path is the true core of Lieven's book. Inevitably, he places considerable emphasis on the role of Russia's aspirations to and preservation of great power status as well as of the governmental system, or lack thereof. There was, he argues, no opting out of the European dominated balance-of-power system. For Russia's rulers, the choice between "Asia" and "Europe," dependence or inde- pendence, was no choice at all. Meanwhile, the principal political problem was to maintain and broaden the regime's basis of support. However, this task was compli- cated by developments beyond Russia's control: in the diplomatic sphere, the growing influence of nationalism and the arms race made war a real threat; in the domestic sphere, the development of a coherent ideology of opposition provided a seemingly viable alternative to tsarism.

The denouenment was determined by Russia's specific social characteristics: the weakness of both aristocracy and business classes; the anti-state orientation of the peasantry; the rift between the regime and the educated classes, student and adult, and the urban proletariat; the widespread unpopularity of the modernization project; and, of course, Russia's poverty, which complicated everything. However, given that this is a political biography, less attention is devoted to the analysis of such issues than to Nicholas's specific contribution to the way in which each of these essentially structural problems played themselves out.

And here, according to Lieven, the key factor that ultimately prevented Russia from negotiating the shoals of modernization was not Nicholas's indecisiveness, suggestiveness or hypocrisy, nor even the role of "dark forces," German sympathies or even the "food crisis." Rather, it was his isolation. Many factors contributed: his upbringing, the early death of his father, his education, his marriage to Alix, his love of the military, his identification with the provincial aristocracy, a hemophilic heir, his discomfort outside the family circle-all of which meant that he neither understood politics nor had a political program. And, given the monarchical structure of Russian government, it was impossible for any other political leader to emerge to fill the void. As a result, government was divided between aristocratic amateurs, with whom Nicho- las felt a strong kinship, and professional bureaucrats, from whom he was profoundly alienated and whom he suspected of trying to usurp his power. It is this disunity, moreover, that explains the near fatal decisions which led to the revolution of 1905 as well as the subsequent failure to develop the necessary links with society. As a result, the ministers were caught between tsar and duma. The ensuing paralysis and wide- spread fatalism drove Russia towards the abyss. WWI was the final straw.

In the end, the Nicholas we are presented with is a sympathetic even idealistic figure-certainly not the evil genius of Russia's collapse. Moreover, his calmness and fatalism come across as positive features rather than as products of ignorance or obscurantism. In the last analysis, the collapse of the empire had less to do with Nicholas's personal role than his symbolic function as its sole unifier. Once he was gone, there was nothing to hold it together.

Altogether, this book is an innovative and valuable addition to the literature. If made available in paper, it could not only be profitably used in undergraduate surveys

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1164 Slavic Review

as an alternative to the Charques or Rogger volumes, it would also provide a useful biographical/institutional counterbalance to the standard works of social history.

DAVID AJ. MACEY Middlebury College

The Scar of Revolution: Custine, Tocqueville, and thte Romantic Imagination. By Irenla Grud- zinska Gross. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 190 pp. Index. Hard bound.

As our libraries give evidence, Alexis de Tocqueville and Astolphe de Custine-two French aristocrats who played major roles on the French scene in the first half of the 19th century-have been frequent subjects of critical and scholarly analysis. Between them, however, there existed striking similarities in their life experiences, their- writ- ings, and their world views. Surprisingly, despite these parallels, there has been no comparative study focusing on these matters until the publication of Irena Grudzinlska Gross's The Scar of Revolution. These analogies the author furthel- redefines in her- interpretation of the violence incurred by the French revolution and its impact on both writers; also she takes note in this volume of their literary output as influenced by French romanticism, in particular Fran?ois-Ren6 de Chateaubrianld, and finally on their philosophy, an eclectic combination of Catholicism, ai-istocr-atism ancd their un- derstanding of foreign cultures.

To follow this symmetry Grudzinska Gross focuses on Custine's 1839 journley to Russia and on Tocqueville's travels throughout America within the same decade in 1831. Both writers produced accounts of their visits that transgressed the popular genre of a travelogue and instead gave it the shape of a political exploration of the respective countries. Specifically, the books Grudzinska Gross concentrates on are Custine's La Russie en 1839 and Tocqueville's De la dcmocratie en Amerique. In acldition the author includes in her analysis of Tocqueville's writing his brief travel account entitled "Voyage au Lac Oneida," two entries in his American notebooks and a rather revealing letter to a relative.

By this unorthodox inclusion Grudzinska Gross was able to delineate Tocqueville's vision of the poetic Amer-ica as symbolized by virginal forests ancd then to oppose this visioIn to the backdrop of a socio-political America. As she takes pains to point out, this non-systematic, poetic vision was also present in fragmentary form in a work of otherwise masterly precision as De la d~rnocratie en Ameraque surely is. This type of representation was determined earlier by Chateaubriand's image of the continenlt as recorded in his early American- writings and whose thoughts he embodied in one of his protagonists, the romantic outsider Rene. According to Grudzinska Gross's anal- ysis, it was the character of Rene whom Tocqueville unconsciously followed while visiting the woodlands of America. Thus Tocqueville-generally perceived as a thinker shaped by the Enlightenment-can now be viewed as a writer who incorporated in his treatise the stereotypical language of romantic fiction prevalent in his day.

Consistent with her survey, the author employs a similar approach of questioning well established truths in her interpretation of Custine's visioIn of Russia that has been generally regarded as bearing the stamp of unprecedented originality. As she coI- vincingly argues, Custine did not write fi-om a blank slate, but was very much apart of the intellectual and political tradition of the conservative Catholic view of Russia that went as far back as the fifteenth'century and the writings of Sigmun-d Herber-stein and others. It should be noted, however, that in her intertextual reading of the com- binecd texts that formed this tradition Custinle's intellectual prowess is not climinished, for his premonitions regarding the future role of Russia proved-in the main-ac- curate.

Both Custine and Tocqueville approached the foreign cultures of Russia and the United States in ways that were shaped by their own backgrounds ancd personal ex- perience. Their confi-ontations with the cultures of the countries they tour-ed were of

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