The Cambridge History of Russia. Vol. 1, From Early Rus' to 1689 by Maureen PerrieReview by: Paul BushkovitchSlavic Review, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Spring, 2008), pp. 228-229Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27652807 .

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228 Slavic Review

gr?s; and second, the difference between Russians and Russophones sometimes becomes

very noticeable when possible directions of outmigration are at stake. Thus, Russophone

Germans and Jews have more choice in this regard than do ethnic Russians, since they can

emigrate, not only to Russia, but also to Germany and Israel, respectively. It is not surpris

ing that most of them have already left Central Asia.

Only the future can reveal whether the majority of Russians in Kyrgyzstan and other

Central Asian countries will eventually emigrate or not, and it is useless to embark on idle

speculations. Kosmarskaia has described the situation as it is at the moment, and she has

done this in a sophisticated and convincing way. Her book should be read by everyone who

studies Russian minorities in Central Asia.

Anatoly M. Khazanov

University of Wisconsin, Madison

The Cambridge History of Russia. Vol. 1, From Early Rus' to 1689. Ed. Maureen Perrie. Cam

bridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xxii, 777 pp. Notes. Bibliography.

Chronology. Glossary. Index. Plates. Figures. Maps. $185.00, hard bound.

Works of reference designed to survey the whole history of a country and provide an

introduction for the nonspecialist reader seem to fall into two types. One is the tightly edited volume presenting the subject

as currently understood. The other is a collection of

essays in which the authors present their own points of view on

subjects of their particular

expertise. The first volume of the Cambridge history of Russia falls into the latter camp, the points of view being those of Anglo-American and a few Russian historians of Russia.

There are many fine chapters here, but there is also much overlap and mutual disagree ment, enough to make using it difficult for the nonspecialist.

The first two hundred pages take the story from the beginnings of Rus' to the middle of the fifteenth century. A rather skimpy account of the geography (Denis J. B. Shaw) and a somewhat idiosyncratic chapter on

early Rus' (Jonathan Shepard) make for a slow start, but Simon Franklin's superb account of the eleventh-century state and society makes up for it. Martin Dimnik and Janet Martin's relentlessly dynastic history of the Rus' principali ties and the rise of Moscow provide

a reliable summary of events but not much analysis.

Especially regrettable is the absence of the economic and social history of these centuries, in spite of V. L. Ianin's brief but excellent description of medieval Novgorod. The nonspe cialist reader will be better served for almost all of these topics by Martin's own Medieval

Russia, 980-1584(1995). To some extent the weakness of the earlier chapters reflects the predominant con

centration of Anglo-American historians on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For

the same reasons, the rest of the volume offers a thorough account of politics, society, and

culture in those centuries. Chapters by Donald Ostrowski, Sergei Bogatyrev, A. P. Pavlov, and Maureen Perrie cover

political history from 1462 to 1613. There is no narrative of

political events for the seventeenth century, but Marshall Poe describes the political insti

tutions for that period and Brian Davies covers local administration and warfare. Culture

and the church, including the schism, are not neglected (David B. Miller and Robert O.

Crummey). Michael S. Flier's succinct account of political ideas and rituals is one of the best chapters in the volume, with emphasis properly on the idea of Moscow as the New

Jerusalem and not the marginal Third Rome. Lindsey Hughes concludes the volume with a

quick survey of art and architecture, poetry, and other arts within the continued domi nance of religious culture.

Perhaps the most welcome innovation over previous surveys of earlier Russian his

tory are the chapters on the peasantry and serfdom (Richard Hellie), on towns and trade

(Shaw and Hellie), law (Hellie and Nancy Shields Kollmann), popular revolts (Perrie), and Michael Khodarkovsky's two chapters

on the various non-Russian peoples. Taken to

gether they provide a picture of a much more

complex society and state than existing accounts.

The price of these riches is that contradictory accounts are provided of the same

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Book Reviews 229

events and some phenomena are neither explained nor satisfactorily placed in any larger framework. The volume includes at least four irreconcilable views on the nature of the

Russian state. Ostrowski tells us that the basis of the state structure was Mongol (a view not

widely accepted) and that the system rested on the consensus of the elite with a weak ruler

("the grand prince of Muscovy ruled with sharply circumscribed powers," 215). Hellie, in his various chapters, prefers to think of the state as "hypertrophie" (364), with an au

tocratic ruler who followed the sixth-century Byzantine deacon Agapetus in thinking he

was God's vicegerent on earth. Poe, who sees basic continuity across the two centuries,

believes that the ruling elite was greedy and power-hungry and the tsar was one of them,

perhaps putting him in the middle between Hellie and Ostrowski. Bogatyrev and Pavlov

see a complex balance of powerful tsar, powerful councilors, and continual back and forth

among them. The uninitiated reader is left to navigate among these viewpoints with no

real guide, for the editor's brief remarks on historiography in the introduction focus on

meta-issues like Marxism and not on the disagreements among the authors in the volume.

To make things worse, the reader has no indication that, for example, Ostrowski and

Hellie present rather extreme formulations of views that also exist in less idiosyncratic forms. The same is true of the chapters

on law and society. Hellie's views of the towns

are hard to fit with Shaw's, and Kollmann offers a quite different conception of law and

society than Hellie. How is the uninitiated reader to reconcile Hellie's statement that

85 percent of the population were serfs with Kollmann's that large areas of Russia did not

know serfdom?

To add to the confusion, there is considerable overlap among the chapters. Shaw and

Hellie cover much the same ground, even though their views sharply conflict. In some

cases the reverse is the problem: Khodarkovsky's account of non-Russians in the seven

teenth century omits the Ukrainian Hetmanate, arguably the most important of Russia's

acquisitions since Siberia in the 1580s. Davies tells the story of the Ukrainian Cossacks and

their acceptance of Tsar Alexei's overlordship, but in the context of military history. Thus

the story of the Hetmanate and Russia after 1667 is absent from the volume, yet it is surely as

important as that of Siberia.

The editor introduces her volume as "authoritative and reliable." The latter, some au

thorial quirkiness aside, is mostly true, but an authoritative volume needs to be consistent,

or if that cannot be achieved, it must explain the place of the various voices. As it is, the

result is more a collection of (mostly excellent) articles than a book of reference.

Paul Bushkovitch

Yale University

The Cambridge History of Russia. Vol. 2, Imperial Russia, 1689-1917. Ed. Dominic Lieven.

Cambridge, Eng.: University of Cambridge Press, 2006. xxviii, 765 pp. Notes. Bibliog

raphy. Chronology. Index. Plates. Tables. Maps. $185.00, hard bound.

This book is the second of three that together aspire?as the jacket states?to present "a

definitive new history of Russia from early Rus' to the [Soviet Union's] successor states."

The volumes are edited by well-known specialists who have commissioned contributions

from scholars primarily from the Anglophone world but also from continental Europe. Al

though the promises of a book jacket should not be taken too literally, projects of this sort

inevitably raise questions. What is the purpose and target readership of these volumes? Are

they intended to be a reference work, consulted for their individual articles, or an actual

history, contributing to contemporary scholarship? These aims are not mutually exclusive,

but they do mark two poles of a continuum, each requiring a rather different kind of read

ing. Indeed, the title of the series evokes the second pole, in noteworthy contrast to its

predecessor, the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union (1982; rev. ed., 1994).

In sum, how well does this series juggle encyclopedic coverage with historical narrative?

The time frame for this middle volume is appropriate, if conventional: the reign of

Peter the Great to the February Revolution of 1917. The editor, Dominic Lieven, who

has written extensively on the political history of imperial Russia, has given primacy to

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