Russia and the Wider World in Historical Perspective: Essays for Paul Dukes by Cathryn s> Brennan Murray Frame (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 35I Brennan, Cathryn and Frame, Murray (eds). Russiaand the WiderWorldin HistoricalPerspective: Essaysfor PaulDukes.Macmillan, Basingstoke and London, and St Martin's Press, New York, 2000. xviii + 234 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. C52.50. SOME Festschriftenare rather dry, formal affairs. This one, by contrast, is intensely personal in tone. As the editors remark,they could easily have filled several volumes, so long was the queue of scholars anxious to pay tribute to PaulDukes, one of the wittiest,most knowledgeable,and most modest men in the field. Since Dukes has done so much to maintain contacts between Russia and the wider world not only through his prolificwritings(some of which arelistedin a Select Bibliography),but also by promoting Russian scholarship in the West there could have been no more fittingtheme for thiscollection. Since he has been a wise and generous counsellorto so many, not all of us his students, it was equally appropriate to give younger scholars a prominent place. Naturally there are the customaryproblems of uneven quality:witness here the rather windy survey by Dmitry Fedosov of 'Scotland and Russia: a Boundless Bond', and although James D. White strives to pull the threads together in some characteristicallyincisive 'Concluding Remarks', editorial breadth of vision has taken precedence over conceptual coherence. But weaknessessuchas these arefaroutweighedby the strengthsof an attractivelyproduced volume containing several strikingessays, each of which makes a significantcontributionto its subject. The most provocative chapter is by Robert B. McKean, who argues in his discussion of 'The Russian Constitutional Monarchy in Comparative Perspective ' that, between 3June I907 and the outbreakof the FirstWorldWar, Russia 'was a genuine constitutional monarchy' (p. I24). My own instinct would be to stressinsteadthe extent and significanceof royalpowerselsewhere in Europe: McKean quite properly acknowledges these, but may make too little of them. David Saunders contributes a characteristicallyincisive essay comparing Russian and Ukrainian reactions to the Balkan crisis in the midI87os . The late John Erickson explores the military dimension of Red Internationalismduring the Russian Civil War. Boris Starkovmaintains the internationalfocus in a chapter comparing 'Pathsto World Socialist Revolution : West and East'. So doesJean Houbert, whose final essay on 'Russiaand Decolonization in Eurasia' dismisses as 'unfounded' (p. 203) the alleged Muslim demographic threat to the Russian ethnos that has caused so much concern among Russian nationalists. The five remainingcontributorsfocus, in differentways, on the significance of foreignersin Russian history. Graeme Herd argues that Britishawareness of Russiain the late-seventeenthcenturyhas been underestimated:in addition to their military and diplomatic roles, foreign mercenaries such as Patrick Gordon were also a crucial link in Europe's cultural chain. Cultural intermediaries in the eighteenth century were more likely to be clerics, as Roger Bartlett suggests in his impeccably documented study of 'Foreigners, Faith and Freemasonryin the Eastern Baltic: the British Factory and Pastor Georg Ludwig Collins in Riga at the End of the Eighteenth Century'. Sarah Davies continues her investigation of popular opinion under Stalin with a 352 SEER, 82, 2, 2004 studyof ambivalent'Soviet Perceptionsof the Alliesduringthe GreatPatriotic War': 'War-time co-operation with the Allies', she concludes, 'was not sufficient to dispel the deep-rooted suspicions which had accumulated over many years' (p. I86). As Lindsey Hughes observesin her opening chapter on 'Attitudestowards Foreignersin Early Modern Russia', 'the cursed questions of Russianxenophobia and "xenophilia",of national pride and imitation, are aspotent today as ever theywere in the earlymodern period' (p. I8). SchoolofHistoiy SIMON DIXON University ofLeeds Plokhy, Serhii. Tsarsand Cossacks: A Studyin Iconography. Harvard Papers in Ukrainian Studies. Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2002. X+ 102 pp. Illustrations.Notes. Bibliography. Index. [I2.50 (paperback). UKRAINE in the earlymodern period providesan especiallyinterestingsubject for a study in cultural history. A vast territory, stretched between Catholic Poland-Lithuaniaand Orthodox Muscovy, and bordering the Tatar-dominated steppe, it lay open to the currentsof competing influences flowing from different directions. Their combination sometimes produced singular phenomena of culturalhybridization. Serhii Plokhy's TsarsandCossacks: A Studyin Iconography, explores the complex interaction of the political, religious, and artisticaspects of the iconographic types of the Pokrova, the protective mantle of the Mother of God, as it evolved in the Ukrainian lands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This cameo of a book ofjust seventy-fivepages offersthe readera richview of a society...