Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849-1915 by Francis W Wcislo (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 903 late imperial Russia continues the theme of female piety opened by Worobec. Instead of examining women’s practices, Shevzov analyses the complicated images found in popular hagiographical literature on Mary, and speculates on its influence on women’s religious beliefs and actions. She also looks at how clergymen, responding to the women’s movement, elaborated on women’s roles as mothers and helpmates, while ‘hail[ing] Mary theologically as the first genuinely emancipated woman’ (p. 86). The final essay serves as sobering reminder, however, of women’s continued vulnerability to abuse. Starting from an unsubstantiated assumption that women’s status declined from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Marianna G. Muravyeva analyses laws and criminal statistics to demonstrate how women lacked protection from rape and domestic violence. Her conclusions run counter to the findings of other essays, some of which document gradual if uneven improvement in women’s lives and opportunities over the course of the nineteenth century. In the end it seems difficult, and perhaps also beside the point, to isolate an overarching trajectory in the lives of nineteenth-century Russian women, when the research by these scholars confirms the salience of numerous factors — class, education, legal and social norms, and even individual personality — in producing the rich diversity of women’s historical experiences. Department of History Adele Lindenmeyr Villanova University, Pennsylvania Wcislo, Francis W. Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849–1915. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2011. xiv + 314 pp. Map. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £35.00. As Minister of Finance between 1892 and 1903, signatory to the peace treaty that followed the Russo-Japanese war, and author of the manifesto that granted Russia new political freedoms and an elected assembly in October 1905, Sergei Witte truly shaped the political and economic landscape of the Russia of his times. In this new biography, however, Francis Wcislo is interested not so much in Witte’s impact on Russia, as in the assumptions and aspirations of his imperial generation. Tales of Imperial Russia delves into Witte’s own narratives about, and understanding of, the Russia of his day. It projects us into a late-nineteenth-century world of confidence, optimism, expansion and modernization, and then confronts us with the challenges that the revolutionary years presented. Wcislo’s book is a dialogue with two substantial memoirs that Witte wrote in the years following his fall from the favour of tsar Nicholas II in 1906 — Zapisi Grafa Vitte 1907–1912 and Vospominaniia (razskazy v stenograficheskoi zapisi) Grafa Sergeia Iul´evicha Vitte. The exculpatory nature of these memoirs has SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 904 often been noted, but Wcislo exploits them as a window onto a period decades wider than Witte’s years in power. I had misgivings at first about this narrative about someone else’s narrative. At times the author accomplishes his task very elegantly, however, weaving in archival material and the memories of Witte’s family, fellow students, acquaintances and adversaries. In the first chapter, for example, Wcislo tells us about Witte’s early years in the Caucasus. He compares the ‘soldierly exploits’ in the frontier region that Witte remembered, with the burned out villages, trampled grain fields and destroyed homes recalled by Witte’s uncle Rostislav Fadeev. In the penultimate chapter we first find Witte in France in 1906, formulating his own account of the tumultuous events of 1904–05, and the author then neatly works back to document Witte’s place in those events. At other times, the author seems uncomfortable with his own approach. On one occasion he invites ‘those uncomfortable with an introspection born of cultural criticism’ to take stock (p. 56); on another he comments that ‘scholars might consider [his narrative] a hermeneutic; others will find the constituent elements of Witte’s imperial dreams’ (p. 96). Wcislo’s sense of Witte as a dreamer and a story-teller is sometimes beautifully conveyed, but at other times clumsily expressed — for example when he tells us ‘that Europeans dreamed in the last decades of the nineteenth century goes without saying’ (p. 92) or that ‘travellers [around the Russian Empire] were not necessarily imperial dreamers’ (p. 95). There...