Wortman, Richard. Russian Monarchy: Representation and Rule (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 371 The book begins with a contextualized placing of the Russian Free Economic Society alongside equivalent bodies in the UK, continental Europe and North America, and this is perhaps the book’s most important contribution: to situate the Russian example within a wider trend. Other highlights are a detailed account of Catherine’s attitude to the Society and her role in initiating various projects within it, and a breakdown by topic of the content of the Society’s main journal publication in its first ten years of publication. The analysis of how the Society interacted with peasant customs is also notable. The demise of the Society in 1915 is explained as a result of its refusal to revise its charter to include a ‘third element’ of zemstvo professionals following an Imperial Decree in 1899. My only serious criticism is of the design of the book’s cover. Instead of reproducing an eighteenth-century text published by the Society, and other such examples inside, or historical photos of its key members, the cover is adorned by a dull photo of what looks like a dilapidated old plough-wheel. The author even describes examples of such Society publications in the text: ‘Gracing the cover was Catherine’s personal coat of arms, featuring bees swarming around their hive’ (p. 28): sounds delightful, why not illustrate it for readers? Other than that, the book makes an important contribution to enhancing historical understanding of the role of the Free Economic Society in wider Russian life. London Vincent Barnett Wortman, Richard. Russian Monarchy: Representation and Rule. Imperial Encounters in Russian History. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2013. xxvi + 332 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $85.00. This book brings together twelve of Richard Wortman’s essays on aspects of the Russian monarchy, spanning more than thirty years of writing on the topic. The symbolic significance of monarchies has been widely explored in other European contexts, but Wortman’s work is the first to examine the Russian case in detail. The heart of Wortman’s view of tsarism is that the Russian monarchy was an active and central part in the politics of the empire. He shows how monarchs influenced the development of policy but, more significantly, Wortman’s work demonstrates how successive Russian rulers represented themselves and their families as a ‘concrete expression of the nation’. His essays discuss the monarchy in different contexts — law, nation and empire — and analyse how the Russian monarch transcended the state itself. The representation of Russian monarchs, Wortman argues, transmitted this transcendence and was designed to provide narratives that emphasized the Russian nation. He shows, in ‘The Representation of Dynasty and “Fundamental Laws”’ how the SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 372 significance of a ruling dynasty was established by Nicholas I, seeing it as exemplifying the Russian nation. Nicholas II, however, broke the tie between the monarchy and the apparatus of the state, as he sought to demonstrate the dynasty’s historical roots and its base in pre-reform Russia. Part of this divorce between monarch and state involved a physical detachment from St Petersburg, the Petrine-founded capital, and a growing concentration on Moscow, the ancient religious centre of the nation. In ‘Moscow and Petersburg: the Problem of Political Center’, Wortman suggests that the monarch’s ambivalence about his capital city reflected a much deeper ambiguity about the nature of Russia’s autocracy and its conflicting traditions. The two essays in this collection that deal with the imperial family are especially stimulating: the Russian imperial family has very rarely been the subject of serious scholarly attention and Wortman’s analysis suggests that the importance that was ascribed to the family relationship gave the Russian monarchy a powerful moral dimension in its appeal to the nation. The dynastic principle was made tangible through the promotion of the imperial family, as a further means of strengthening the bonds between monarchy and nation. He argues that the elision of the imperial family with the state meant that attacking the principle of Russia’s autocracy became akin to an attack on one’s own father. The final three essays in this collection deal with the relationship between the monarchy and the Russian empire...