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Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, Malden, MA and Oxford, 2009, £95, $199.95.
ISBN: 978 1 4051 3560 3. Blackwell Companions to World History
There is a grandeur and sweep about Russian history which many writers have found irresistible. It offers a potent mix of physical vastness, seismic upheavals and human slaughter on a large scale. That means there is plenty of meat on the Russian bone for historians to gnaw at and it has generated some big questions which I feel A Companion to Russian History should address. Is Russian imperialism explained by Russia's age-old fear of invasion? Was the communist dictatorship more to do with Tsarist tradition than Marxist doctrine? Was the crash programme of modernization in the 1930s an historical necessity? Is Russian culture truly "of the west"? I do not feel these debates get a proper airing in this book.
There are 28 contributions here, each one addressing a particular theme in Russian History. They combine history, historiography and bibliography. The first third of the book is devoted to Russia's early period: the Russia of the Dark Ages, mediaeval Muscovy and the House of Rurik. The remaining two sections begin with Peter the Great who died in 1725. We then get ten solid chapters on the Romanovs and ten more on Lenin, Stalin and beyond.
Thematically the book is quite varied, touching on the church, serfdom, industrialization, bureaucracy, the nationalities question and women's rights. The essays are tantalizingly brief at about 18...