Late Imperial Russia: Problems and Prospects. Essays in Honour of R. B. McKean by Ian D. Thatcher (review)

Abstract

582 SEER, 85, 3, JULY 2OO7 1670 is a paean to a London risen from the ashes of theGreat Fire.With the prelate Isaac Basire's recommendation he tried his luck at Oxford, where he was financially aided byMerton College and stayed for two terms,bidding the university farewell in 1671 inLatin verse. Here G?m?ri helpfully refersback to one of numerous earlier papers ('Erd?lyi k?lto a XVII. sz?zadbeli Londonban' in his Angol-magyarkapcsolatokaXVI-XVIL sz?zadban, Budapest, 1989), though, again, itwould not have costmuch to add that thispoem is just thirty-three lines long.And Pal J?szber?nyi actually founded a language school inLondon around 1662: evidence of how well Hungarians knew their Latin (which remained the official language ofHungary well into the nineteenth century) and how quickly English students lost theirs after the rupturewith Rome. As these highlights and the numbers indicate, the results of the author's labours are often invaluable and well worth publicizing. Indeed, what is needed now isan interpretation ofwhat thisflow of peregrinators contributed to thewhole range of British-Hungarian contacts and relations in the quarter of a millennium that is covered. Some notes towards this are given in the Introduction, which mentions, for example, James Jakab) Bogdanyi, Queen Anne's court painter, some of whose paintings can be seen at Hampton Court; but there is, apparendy, no room here to refer to our main source for the latter, an article by L?szl? Orsz?gh. Those who came to Britain but not as students are specifically excluded from the scope of the book (perforce by the series inwhich itappears), and are not very accurately recalled by the author: for example, Hungarians who reached the British Isles in the course of their attempt to collect money (quite a story: theTurks held their families ransom) are, in at least six cases, known by name, because they applied for begging permits from the Privy Council. Their total number, however, is given here variously as 'thirteen' (on p. 15) and 'about 10' (on p. 17). In fact, theremust have been a score or more of such Hungarian visitors. The full story of British-Hungarian contacts over these years is a fascinating tale which, as suggested by this scrupulous but perhaps overly terse Hungarian-language summary of an important part of it, well deserves a wider, English-reading audience. School ofSlavonic andEast European Studies Peter Sherwood University CollegeLondon Thatcher, Ian D. (ed.). Late ImperialRussia: Problems and Prospects.Essays in Honour ofR. B. McKean. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2005. viii + 208 pp. Notes. Index. ?50.00; ?14.99. In view of the fact thatBob McKean has written not only a massive work of fundamental research (StPetersburg BetweenRevolutions: Workers andRevolutionaries, June igoy-February igiy, New Haven, CT and London, 1990) but also more than one brief teaching aid (e.g. Between theRevolutions:Russia igoj to igiy, London, 1998), he deserved a festschriftwhich has things to say to both specialists and generalists. The contributors to Late ImperialRussia have risen to this challenge by taking the opportunity, where they can, to relate their specialist knowledge to that 'optimist/pessimist' debate about late imperial REVIEWS 583 Russia which loomed large in the early part ofMcKean's career and has enjoyed something of a revival since the collapse of the Soviet Union. If the FirstWorld War had not supervened, could the tsarist regime have met the challenges itfaced? Ian Thatcher points out inhis editorial introduction to the book that the point ofmuch ofMcKean's work has been to challenge Leopold Haimson's famously negative answer to thisquestion. Dr Thatcher's later discussion of 'Late imperial urban workers', however ? the subject to which both Haimson and McKean have devoted such a largemeasure of their scholarly attention ? eventually comes down on the side of the elements inMcKean's approach to the subject which imply that, ultimately, the Romanovs' prospects were not very good. Iain Lauchlan might be said to be on the other side of the fence, for he concludes a wide-ranging discussion of 'The Okhrana: security policing in late imperial Russia' by saying that the tsar's police 'won the battle of wits against the revolutionary underground' and that...