:Rural Revolutions in Southern Ukraine: Peasants, Nobles, and Colonists, 1774–1905.(Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies.)

Abstract

Leonard G. Friesen's book will be a disappointment for those who want something new, original, and fresh from his study of rural revolutions in southern Ukraine, which still reflects the historiographical situation of 1990–1994, when Friesen published his major articles about the same topic. With a few exceptions he ignores literature that appeared after 1994. Friesen promises that he will explore “convergent paths” and “the ambiguities and revolutionary transformations associated with agricultural change” in southern Ukraine, the region of the Russian Empire “north of the Black and Azov seas known as ‘New Russia'” (p. 1). He sets out to study “rural New Russia's transformations from a sparsely settled frontier with relatively discrete communities in the late eighteenth century to a region of dense settlement, multifaceted societal intercourse, and even prosperity in 1900.” In this effort, he promised to “keep with recent publications” and to favor “a conceptual paradigm that errs on the side of flexibility.” According to Friesen, his “conceptual paradigm” has been “influenced by Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein and Boris Mironov” (p. 3). As it turns out, all his major theoretical influences also came from the late 1980s when the most “fashionable” theories among both Western and Soviet historians were Braudel's conception of the longue durée, Wallerstein's world-system analysis, and ideas of “cliometrics,” or mathematical approaches in historical research popularized by Mironov.