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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. 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...