russia against napoleon: the true story of the campaigns of war and peaceby dominic lieven
TRANSCRIPT
Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace by DOMINICLIEVENReview by: ROBERT LEGVOLDForeign Affairs, Vol. 89, No. 3 (May/June 2010), p. 147Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25680954 .
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Recent Books
dealing with not only places where nation alism is ascendant but also places where it
has fizzled and addressing not just collec
tive violence on a grand scale, such as the
Balkan wars, but also mass mobilizations
short of war, such as the periodic violence
in the Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. His treatment of the fall of com
munism in Eastern Europe and the disin
tegration of the Soviet Union is thoughtful but somewhat tenuously linked to the books core themes. Each step of the way, he reflects on the state of the study of na
tionalism, beginning with the early, mostly British thinkers who carved out the field. If their ideas endure largely unimproved, it is, he suggests, because their rich, his
torically grounded approach and readiness to borrow across disciplines have given
way to studies more concerned with the
rigorous manipulation of data than an
expansive notion of evidence, and more
concerned with the application of formal
theory than unfettered imagination.
Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the
Campaigns of Warand'Peace, by dominic
lieven. Viking, 2010, 656 pp. $35.95. This is a large, booming riposte to all those histories and novels that downplay Russia's
role in Napoleons ultimate defeat, leaving the credit mostly to "General Winter"
or, according to Tolstoyan myth, to the
patriotism of the Russian people. No,
says Lieven, the Russian government itself defeated Napoleon, and it did so because Tsar Alexander I and his war
minister had anticipated the war, knew
the enemy and his weaknesses, and had
designed a superior strategy. "From the
start," Lieven writes, "their plan was to wear
down Napoleon by a defensive campaign in Russia, and then to pursue the defeated
enemy back over the frontier and raise a
European insurrection against him." Hence, the importance of the years 1813-14. This
was the decisive phase of the Napoleonic Wars, but it has been neglected thanks to self-serving retellings found in British, French, and Prussian histories and in later
Russian novels and musical overtures.
Lieven not only makes his case in rich,
probing detail; he also encases it in a fluent reading of Russia's larger political and social dynamics during this period.
The Road to Independence for Kosovo: A Chronicle of theAhtisaari Plan, by
henry h. perritt, jr. Cambridge
University Press, 2009,328 pp. $85.00. Kosovo's declaration of independence, in
2008, was the last?or, alas, possibly only the latest?chapter in the painful and com
plex demise of Yugoslavia. Perritt comes as
close as an outsider can to opening doors
into the chambers where the political forces of Belgrade and Pristina tangled and diplomats from Russia, the eu, and the
United States struggled to craft the least
destabilizing disposition of Kosovo nearly ten years after the nato-led war broke
Serbia's hold over it. His account makes
plain that independence (and not just some
form of autonomy or partition) was in
the cards from the start. But to get there
without running over the Russians and, if
possible, while reconciling the Serbs and
holding the eu constituency together was
no mean diplomatic feat. In the end, only the last of these objectives was achieved.
Sympathetic as Perritt is to the Kosovars'
cause, he notes how much uncertainty
persists about future Russian behavior, the prospects of an independent Kosovo, and the ability of the un Security Council to deal with the next comparable crisis.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS - May/June 2010 [147]
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