russia's rulers under the old regime.by dominic lieven

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Russia's Rulers under the Old Regime. by Dominic Lieven Review by: Alfred J. Rieber Slavic Review, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 1015-1016 Published by: Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2500485 . Accessed: 14/06/2014 16:59 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 of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Slavic Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.2.32.109 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 16:59:12 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Russia's Rulers under the Old Regime.by Dominic Lieven

Russia's Rulers under the Old Regime. by Dominic LievenReview by: Alfred J. RieberSlavic Review, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Winter, 1991), pp. 1015-1016Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2500485 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 16:59

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 [email protected].

.

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 185.2.32.109 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 16:59:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Russia's Rulers under the Old Regime.by Dominic Lieven

Book Reviews 1015

France for the remainder of the century and beyond. Marx, on the other hand, resided in Paris just under a year and had little extensive contact with French intellectual life (his associations were mainly with radical agitators) although, as Kramer assumes rather than demonstrates, he did obtain a pretty good picture of the working class. The experience, Kramer argues, (on the basis of the so-called Paris manuscripts), was significant for Marx's "standing Hegel on his head" and developing his own concept of alienation. Marx's effect on France and the French, Kramer admits, was minimal and the feedback to his German homeland long delayed.

Kramer's book raises several questions in my mind. First is a methodological difficulty: In order to demonstrate the effect of Paris, French culture, politics, life or ideas, on the works of the three men, it is not sufficient to show chronological synchrony. To borrow from his faddish jar- gon, the context is not a given, the historian has to show precisely and specifically how it affected the text. One has to examine the acta, scripta, and dicta of the particular author (and his sources) in great detail and depth-give a genuinely "thick" explication de texte-and provide full data on the French sources of the effect. This Kramer fails to do (especially in the case of Marx and Mickiewicz), and it is hard to see how he could have done so in relying entirely on translated texts; nor is his command of the French, and especially Polish, background very sure.

Second, Kramer seems to believe that it is sufficient to show that an author (thinker) was plunged into a given foreign milieu to draw the conclusion that it had a seminal role for him and his work. This is far from always being the case. Exile (in the broad sense as Kramer has it) can also lead to a turn inward, to a refusal to see the alien and unfriendly environment, and to the development of an isolationist chauvinism. Furthermore, Kramer underestimates the common cultural background and antecedants of his three heroes and their French hosts. Heine and Mickiewicz were romantic poets and some of the characteristics of their work that Kramer as- cribes to contact with Paris were merely common goods of all romantic thought and art-they shared their view of the people with the Slavophiles, who never were exiles, and Marx merely transfered it onto the proletariat. Kramer correctly notes that the exiles were attracted to some French ideas and figures of an earlier generation (for example, Heine to Comte de Saint-Simon, Marx to Gracchus Babeuf) and, as a result transmitted an outdated image of French culture to their homelands. This feature, however, is common to most foreign borrowings and influences.

Finally, Kramer has a constricted view of his subject. Not only are his three cases so diverse as to make any generalization from their experiences quite questionable, but, by practically igno- ring the wider circle of exiles in Paris at the time (although he gives a partial list in the appen- dix), he misses the opportunity for analyzing and reflecting on their contribution to the emer- gence of crucial cultural, political, and ideological trends in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nor would it have been amiss to cast a glance, be it ever so furtive, on the experiences of the twentieth century; it would have helped us to understand the universalization of western cul- ture. Kramer has done a good preliminary research job; it is to be hoped that his next book will also explain and interpret the crucial phenomenon of exile and refuge and its role in furthering an understanding of culture-our own as well as that of the "other."

MARC RAEFF

Tenafly, NJ

RUSSIA'S RULERS UNDER THE OLD REGIME. By Dominic Lieven. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1989. Photographs. Tables. xxii, 407 pp. $35.00, cloth.

Dominic Lieven has chosen to study as "the most representative group" in the ruling elite of late imperial Russia the 215 members of the State Council appointed by Nicholas II between 1894 and 1914. He approaches his subject from two perspectives. First, he has compiled a collective biography based on quantitative data covering social origins, education, and career patterns; second, he has provided chapter-length biographical sketches of selected members-A. N. Kulomzin, P. N. Durnovo, the Obolenskii brothers-who illustrate the wide variety of individ-

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Page 3: Russia's Rulers under the Old Regime.by Dominic Lieven

1016 Slavic Review

ual types within the collective. His stated purpose is to determine the responsibility of the ruling elite for the collapse of the monarchy in 1917. Yet he shows little interest in the institutional role of the State Council in political life. There is virtually no analysis of its legislative record, the voting patterns of its members or the formation of political groupings and, after 1907, parties. His conclusion is that "all in all, the calibre of Russian senior officialdom was not in my view the key element in the collapse of the Old Regime . . ." (p. 294). Although by no means uncritical, his book presents the ruling elite in a more sympathetic light than any study I know of.

Lieven begins by tracing elite history from medieval origins through the beginning of the professionalization of the bureaucracy in the midnineteenth century. Next, a profile of the elite distills the main characteristics of the State Council: a landed, mainly wealthy, predominantly hereditary group, well educated in privileged schools, with special training in finance and law, experienced in local government, civilians rather than soldiers who were concentrated in the elite departments of interior, finance and the state chancellery, and grouped around an inner core that shared close personal and social relations and membership in the Imperial Yacht Club. In its broad outlines nothing is surprising here, but Lieven is not satisfied to demonstrate uniformity. He refines the general picture by exploring the varieties of educational experience among mili- tary schools, universities, and noble. elite schools (corps de pages and school of guards sub- ensigns). Overall he concludes that training for professional roles was more like that of the En- glish gentleman than the Prussian bureaucratic specialist. He extols the high cultural level of the Russian nobility, citing the examples of great literary and musical figures; but of course Lev Tolstoy and Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov did not sit in the State Council. The in-service training of the Russian bureaucratic elite also displayed more loose and undemanding attitudes than the Prussians. The chin system, he argues, was less important than it has appeared. More distinc- tions appear with the distribution of professionally trained personel among the various minis- tries. But again the factors for success tend to be school-regiment-family connections. Despite evidence of favoritism and clientelism, the bureaucratic elite, Lieven concludes, "in some re- spects . . . approached the Weberian ideal type," merit being the "single most important fact in ensuring one's rise to the top of the Russian civil service" (p. 292). Lieven, however, includes in his definition of merit the elusive non-Weberian quality of tact.

Lieven writes gracefully; his range of sources is impressively broad including much unpub- lished material from Soviet and western archives as well as most of the pertinent secondary literature. His portrait of Nicholas II, again not uncritical but nevertheless sympathetic, should be balanced by the recent work of Andrew Verner and Richard Wortman.

When it comes to evaluating the ruling elite's political record, Lieven comes close to being apologetic. He admits that the elite's main weakness was its insular character and its distance from the masses but implies that given time it might have closed the gap. He places greater emphasis on the objective circumstances-the late abolition of serfdom, the great strain of mod- ernization, the poverty of the country-in justifying the elite's resort to "forceful repression (as) the only effective weapon to hand" to impose social control in early twentieth century Russia. But what of the responsibility of that elite for the late abolition of serfdom-and the incomplete nature of the liberation-and its part in resisting capitalism and social reform? These important questions go unasked and unanswered.

ALFRED J. RIEBER

University of Pennsylvania

LIBERAL CITY, CONSERVATIVE STATE: MOSCOW AND RUSSIA'S URBAN CRISIS, 1906-1914. By Robert W. Thurston. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Maps. Photographs. Tables. Cloth.

Robert Thurston's account of municipal politics in Moscow after 1905 chronicles the efforts of an emergent liberal leadership in the city duma to create a progressive and humane urban space

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