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"Russia's First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty" by Chester S. L. Dunning is reviewed.
Russia's First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty. By Chester S. L. Dunning. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-271-02074-1. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiii, 657. $65.00.
Professor Dunning's splendid twelve-page historiographical introduction to his comprehensive and highly original interpretation of the Russian Smutnoe vremia (Time of Troubles) is notable for his rejection of S. F. Platonov's influential interpretation, published in 1899, of the Smuta as a dynastic crisis that sparked "class war in a vast, chaotic social revolution" (p. 6). Dunning's book demonstrates that, contrary to Platonov's account and, thus, most subsequent Western (and some Soviet) histories, "Russia's first civil war ... was definitely not a social revolution" (p. 4) against serfdom.
Commonly known short-term causes of the Smuta were Boris Godunov's effective enserfment of the peasants in 1592, the death of Tsar Fedor in 1598, the famine of 1601-03, the invasion of Russia by the pretender, Dmitrii, in 1604, Godunov's death in 1605, and Tsar Dmitrii's assassination in 1606.
Generally recognized long-term causes were the impoverishing extraction of resources to defend against Tatar raids, Russia's inability to pacify either its recently incorporated or runaway subjects along the constantly expanding southern frontier, the Livonian War (1558-83), and Ivan the Terrible's oprichnina, his state within a state. Dunning adds three more: (1) the rise of a highly bureaucratized "fiscal-military state" in response to the gunpowder revolution and, thus, new threats from the West; (2) population growth, especially as it caused new generations of pomeshniki (holders of land granted in return for military service) to scramble for ever smaller parcels of land; and (3) a "mini-ice age" which caused not only a "widespread subsistence crisis" (p. 20), but also the consequent depopulation (due to peasant and urban taxpayer flight) of that land.
Tsar Fedor's death brought an end to the Danilovich dynasty, which, according to Dunning "was increasingly seen as chosen by God to lead the Russian Orthodox population to salvation" (p. 90). But boyar-Tsar Godunov's quasi-legitimate rule became intolerable only when Ivan the Terrible's son, Dmitrii, emerged (arose?) to assert that he had escaped Godunov's plot to murder him. His arrival in Russia ignited a provincial war that soon became a civil war-and the first phase of the Smuta.
Dunning speculates that Dmitrii "may have been the real son of Ivan the Terrible" (p. 132). Even if a pretender, he believes that Dmitrii believed himself to be Ivan's son. He also discounts a Polish plot to install Dmitrii and persuasively minimizes the impact of the subsequent invasions by Poland and Sweden, given the widespread (and richly detailed) civil war that ravished Russia until 1612.
Dunning concludes with a paradox; noting that, after being elected by the Russian people in the wake of a civil, not class, war, the Romanovs' isolation and reactionary rule created "the gap between elite society and the Russian people" (p. 477) that neither the Bolsheviks nor Russia's post-Soviet rulers (to date) have been able to bridge.
Walter C. Uhler
Defense Contract Management Agency
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Copyright Society for Military History Jan 2002