Dominic Lieven Research Articles

In the Shadow of the Gods: The Emperor in World History, by Dominic Lieven

It has been claimed that the history of the world is the history of empires. From Sargon of Akkad (c.2334–2279 BCE), empires and emperors have been an ever-present feature across the world and throughout history. In Dominic Lieven’s formulation, empires are vast territories with great resources, that rule over ‘many and diverse peoples’, and possess great power: unless for ‘a significant part of its life a state [has] played a major role in the history of a sizeable slice of the globe it does not deserve the name of empire’ (pp. 27–9). Lieven opens this impressive book by acknowledging that the topic is too vast for a single volume, and there is much that cannot be included or known. Rather, this ‘is a collective biography of [Eurasian] emperors and an anatomy of hereditary imperial monarchy as a type of polity’ (p. 1). A central aspect of the work is Lieven’s focus on the ‘personalities’ of the emperors in question, as ‘personalities of top leaders often disappear behind the office they hold and the behaviour it imposes on them’ (p. 2). This runs parallel with several themes that permeate the work: ‘the human life cycle, the dynamics of family politics, the role of women, the politics of succession and the training of heirs’ as well as leadership and what it meant to be an emperor (p. 3). This is achieved through a mixture of biography and ‘empathy’, in a world outlook that focuses on Eurasian empires but moves beyond Eurocentrism to provide a more inclusive assessment of the experience of being an emperor.

Russian State Mind from the Point of View of the Osman-Russian Imperial Comparative Studies

To adequately formulate the problem of the empire in history and in modern Russia, a distance is required in relation to concepts that are developed by representatives of official science and propaganda within Russia and by Russian scientists outside the country. The concept of distance allows to master the theoretical space of the solid work of Dominic Lieven in the context of modern Russian transformations with simultaneous distancing from political conjuncture and intellectual and political fashions. These refinements make it possible to introduce the necessary concretization into the concept of D. Lieven and to determine the agenda of the discussion on the problem of Russian state mind in the context of the Ottoman-Russian comparative studies. The article systemizes the general problems of the Russian Empire until 1917 and poses the problem of their reproduction in modern Russia.

Dominic Lieven.The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution.

Dominic Lieven.<i>The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution</i>.

Lieven, Dominic Towards the Flame: Empire, War, and the End of Tsarist Russia (review)

SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 752 “hurrah!” But tomorrow will be holding red flags’ (p. 148). Nevertheless, the rightists soldiered on with a wide variety of civic projects, including charitable undertakings, anti-alcoholism campaigns and outreach among university students. Student activists insisted on keeping separate politics and learning (Gilbert mistranslates this term as ‘science’). Interestingly, many rightist organizations supported a fairly ‘inclusive role for women’ (p. 179). The right gradually declined during these years, according to Gilbert, because of factionalism, ideological disputes and the deeply unpopular Beilis Affair. The author’s wonder at ‘the inability of moderate and extreme rightists to work together’ (p. 216) is hard to understand; one found the same inability among Russian leftists. In fact, if one replaced the Beilis Affair with the Azef Affair, then the Russian left declined for the same reasons as the Russian right. Exploring such commonalities would have increased the study’s analytical power. The book includes a helpful glossary of rightist individuals and organizations and a detailed map of the Pale of Settlement. Unfortunately, the editors let slip many typos; clarity of expression could have been much improved. Uniformly lowercase section titles — e.g. ‘Revolutionary odessa’ — are sometimes jarring. A few references do not seem to corroborate assertions advanced in the text. Gilbert is generally fair and objective, but occasionally displays a partisan attitude, for example, evincing surprise that rightist organizations should engage in charity. There are significant errors of fact or conceptualization: the Kadets did not see themselves as ‘tsarists’ (p. 6), the Holy Brotherhood was not shut ‘down soon after its formation’ (p. 25), and there could be no such thing as ‘a right-wing civil society’ (p. 155) since civil society is the aggregate of all civic activism. Despite these concerns, the book greatly increases our knowledge of the Russian right. Department of History Jonathan Daly University of Illinois at Chicago Lieven, Dominic. Towards the Flame: Empire, War, and the End of Tsarist Russia. Allen Lane, London, 2015. xv + 429 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Index. £25.00. Every thirty years, Dominic Lieven writes a field-defining book on the origins of World War One. In 1983, he penned a thin volume entitled Russia and the Origins of the First World War, which argued that Russia took an aggressive stance and escalated the July Crisis primarily because ‘capitulation to open Austro-German coercion would have dealt a tremendous blow to Russia’s prestige and thus to her ability to defend her interests and retain her clients REVIEWS 753 and allies in the Near East’ (p. 147). Lieven still holds this position today, but the book that supports his claim is now much richer, thanks to a wealth of archival evidence and a career spent thinking about the Russian Empire, Russian statesmen, and the aristocratic milieu from which they sprang. Readers should be aware that, titles notwithstanding (the title in the US is The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution), this book focuses largely on the period before 1914. There is one brief chapter on World War One and one concise chapter on the July Crisis; together they account for roughly fifty pages of a 370-page book. Time-pressed readers should not, however, skip directly to these chapters, for the real strength of the book lies in the picture it paints of the Russian foreign policy establishment between 1905 and 1914. This is a study of a small but important group. In Russia, fewer than 200 men were eligible for diplomatic posts, and Lieven’s goal is to understand their mindset and their decisions. What were the cultural predispositions associated with their social class? What books and briefing papers shaped their view of the world beyond their windows? What events drove their understanding of the motives and tactics of their allies and enemies? Lieven has answers to all of these questions. His archival research is essential, though not because he found any ‘smoking guns’. There are no hidden transcripts of the meetings between Russian Tsar and French President in July 1914 and no blueprint for world domination craftily followed. Instead, the archival documents allow him to demonstrate the range of policies debated...

The Cossack Myth: History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires, by Serhii Plokhy

The Myth: History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires, by Serhii Plokhy. New Studies in European History. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2012. xvi, 386 pp. $100.95 US, (cloth). While the construction and growth of modern identity is a topic that has attracted scholarly attention many years, historians of empire have more recently sought to explore the intertwined nature of nations and empires. Rather than representing mutually exclusive categories, movements generally developed within the cradle of empire. As Dominic Lieven (2001), Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper (2010), Eagle Glassheim (2005), Pieter Judson (2006) and others have argued, activists, particularly in the early nineteenth century, often sought integration into (and status within) larger imperial frameworks rather than independence from imperial control. With his recent monograph The Myth, Serhii Plokhy contributes a thought-provoking and insightful study to this growing field of literature, examining the complex interrelationship between elites, Great Russian dissidents, Ukrainian nationalists and imperial state officials, demonstrating the overlapping and complex relationships within which such individuals lived. While based in part on historical events, the Cossack (as Plokhy calls it) emerged as an attempt to protect the noble status and privileges of elites as they were integrated into the imperial Russian estate system during the reign of Aleksandr I. From an elite discourse, the myth expanded (in the interpretation of later Ukrainian nationalists such as Taras Shevchenko) to incorporate Ukrainian peasants as well as elites, ultimately providing the basis modern Ukrainian nationalism. At the heart of Plokhy's analysis is the mysterious text History of the Rus', a work which began to circulate amongst members of the elite in the early nineteenth century. Composed by an unknown author, Plokhy relates the History to similar national mystifications that emerged around the same time among Scots in the British Empire and Czechs in the Habsburg Empire (pp. 10-11). While the strength of the nationalist interpretation of the text is irrefutable in the present day, Plokhy effectively uncovers a number of competing interpretations of the History that offer alternate understandings of its significance. For the Decembrist Konstantin Ryleev, the History seemed to embody his own struggle against autocracy, while Aleksandr Pushkin, the History was an admirable work of imperial Russian patriotism (pp. 52-55). For Taras Shevchenko, by contrast, the History embodied the love of the Cossacks for their native Ukraine (p. 60). In the Soviet context, the fortune of the History waxed and waned along with Communist Party attitudes towards Ukrainian nationalism in general. The book as a whole is organized as a scholarly piece of detective work. Over the course of seventeen meticulously researched chapters, Plokhy suggests several potential authors the text: members of the elite, Orthodox clergy, and members of the imperial bureaucracy (often, as he notes, these categories themselves overlapped). Fie also traces the temporal transformation of the History's interpretations: a means of asserting the importance of the elite (thereby ensuring them a place within the Russian nobility); a narrative of, and inspiration for, modern Ukrainian nation-building; and a dissident text that threatened to pull apart first the Russian empire and later the Soviet Union. …

Tolstoy on war: narrative art and historical truth in War and peace

Rick McPeak and Donna Tussing Orwin, eds. Tolstoy on War. Narrative Art and Historical Truth in War and Peace. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2012. 246 pp. Illustrations. Bibliography. Index. $24.95, paper.Editors Rick McPeak and Donna Orwin issued this volume to commemorate bicentennial of Battle of Borodino during Napoleon's fateful invasion in Russia. The recently taken photograph in colour on cover features a premonitory thickening of atmospheric pressure before a summer thunderstorm over deserted field at Borodino. In a matter of minutes, all of it will be drenched in torrential rain and lut by lightning-the chuich cupola with a gilded tip, lush meadows, and trees. Pushkin's line the thunderstonn of immediately comes to mind. If asked about defining feature of volume, I would have to say, keeping in mind subtlety of this first prompt, that from front matter to index it is essays' enduring sensitivity to relationship between historical past and present. The editors and authors should be congratulated and thanked for providing readers with what constitutes a beautiful collaborative effort of specialists in several fields in humanities and social sciences. With help of Lev Tolstoi, essays disambiguate dogmatic uses of fiction in order to prove narrower disciplinary concerns of a given social science or humanities industry. With help of their open-eyed disciplinary honesty and rigour, they explain complex origin and shared afterlife of a literary masteipiece that cannot be bounded to a single cohort of knowledge or specialty.The volume asks, through skilled interpolations by both editors, what books do to a liberal arts education in order to prosecute violence virtuously (p. 193). Attractively produced and meticulously edited, volume includes twelve illuminating essays with detailed annotations that add significantly to provide answer to question above at same time as they aid and enrich our understanding of Tolstoi's methods and approaches to artistic recreation of war. Drawn into action are Dmitrii Likhachev and Anthony Kwame Appiah, Ulysses Grant and Douglas MacArthur, Caesar and Carl von Clausewitz, Plutarch and Cassirer, Honore de Balzac and Herman Melville, Madame Blavatsky and Frantz Fanon. There is something new on eveiy page, perhaps unexpected, but always to point.Every essay is memorable. Dominic Lieven addresses Tolstoi's famous claim that morale is most powerful factor for victoiy and finds strong corroboration for this claim in Russian army's unusual record of tenacity in 1812. Against enduring misconception, Alexander Martin portrays Moscow of 1812 as a cosmopolitan, thriving city, which learns momentous lessons about invader and its future paths through catastrophe that it suffers and survives. Allan Forrest focuses on Tolstoi's representations of French, finding that French inform Tolstoi about importance of multiculturahsm within Empire, as well as about social democratic power activated in response to heroic pressure issuing from great Jeff Love and Gaiy Saul Morsonuse vehicles of language and representation in order to assess possibility of T olstoi's dismantling grand narratives and myth of men. The same democratizing tendency can be observed in Dan Ungurianu's and Donna Orwin's essays probing Tolstoi's text against historical and military sources and eyewitness responses. …

Dominic Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814; Janet Hartley, Russia 1762–1825: Military Power, the State, and the People

Dominic Lieven, <i>Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814</i>; Janet Hartley, <i>Russia 1762–1825: Military Power, the State, and the People</i>

Metropole, Colony, and Imperial Citizenship in the Russian Empire

We are not Englishmen, who in India strive by no means to mingle with the native races and who for this reason, sooner or later, may pay with the loss of that country, where they will have no ties of relationship; our strength, by contrast, up until now has consisted in that we assimilated the defeated blending with them peacefully. --Mikhail Veniukov (1) Russia's supposedly ambivalent identity between Europe and Asia long exercised a peculiar fascination for historians seeking to understand the nature of Russian imperialism. In the 19th century, an era when it is often assumed that biological racism and the creation of difference were becoming a universal justification for colonial rule, the Russian Empire was seen, and has continued to be seen, as an intriguing exception. As the opening quotation from the famous military geographer Mikhail Veniukov suggests, there has never been any shortage of those prepared to claim that Russian imperialism was distinctively tolerant and assimilationist when contrasted with the imperialism of the other European powers. Ideas of pan-Asian kinship and a seeming lack of political privileges for Russians suggested that access to power was determined largely by social status rather than ethnicity or religion, with the Russians themselves becoming the victims of their own enterprise. (2) The existence of an Asianist imagined geography of the empire appeared to set Russian culture apart from that of Britain or France. (3) The most common alternative to this view of Russian imperialism was nationalist historiography which described the empire and its Soviet successor as a prison of peoples, or at the very least understood Russia's history as a series of separate historiographies. (4) Both sides of this debate were heavily influenced by emigre writings, from the self-indulgent fantasies of the Eurasianists to the polemics produced by disappointed Ukrainian, Georgian, or Tatar exiles, who claimed that a brief moment of independence had been crushed by a new and still darker form of Russian imperialism. (5) While the latter school at least acknowledged the empire's diversity and tried to give a (very partial) idea of what had destroyed the tsarist regime, neither made any real attempt to understand how it had functioned and held together for so long, beyond invoking either mystic geographical determinism or the use of force. Above all, perhaps, both approaches privileged the study of identity through the written products of high culture at the expense of making serious attempts to understand how such a vast polity was governed. The imperial turn in both Russian and Western scholarship since the early 1990s (prompted in large part by the opening up of provincial archives in the former USSR, which finally allowed Western historians to do serious empirical research on Russian rule over non-Russians) has seen an extraordinary blossoming of works that increasingly try to understand the empire on its own terms. (6) Dominic Lieven's and Kimitaka Matsuzato's calls for a greater focus on the reasons for cohesion, rather than the artificially divided national historiographies that emerged between the 1970s and the 1990s, has been widely answered; and recent scholarship has placed a greater and welcome emphasis on exploring the empire's territorial divisions and administration and on the plurality of regional approaches to governance. (7) Perhaps the most prominent and ambitious example of this new trend is a collective volume edited by Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatolyi Remnev, which offers a rich variety of perspectives on the places, and hierarchies of the Russian Empire. (8) Not one of the contributions to this book, however, deals with the Russian Empire's most obviously colonial region, Central Asia. This is a serious omission: Turkestan and the steppe cannot be viewed as uncharacteristic administrative anomalies which somehow do not fit an alternative, all-Russian pattern. …

Spaces of Entanglement

Spaces of Entanglement Andreas Kappeler (bio) The imperial turn, which for the past 25 years has directed the attention of historians toward empires, may have lost its first impetus, but as the journals Ab Imperio and Kritika as well as recent collective volumes and research projects have shown, it is by no means spent. The collapse of the Soviet Union initially revived interest in Edward Gibbon's question about "the decline and fall" of empires, but "imperiology" has since passed from explaining the breakdown of empires to asking not why they collapsed but how they survived for centuries, how they were organized and structured, and how imperial rule was established and maintained. Scholars have abandoned the metaphor of the "prison of peoples" for a more affirmative position that stresses the relatively peaceful coexistence of diverse peoples and societies under the rule of one dynasty, in contrast to the murderous history of the nation-state. This has led to various comparative projects, monographs, and collective volumes. Studies that examine the Romanov and Ottoman empires include Dominic Lieven's pioneering book as well as comparative projects and collective volumes edited by Alexei Miller, Alfred Rieber, and Kimitaka Matsuzato.1 These and other studies are mostly not comparative in the strict sense, however, but instead juxtapose chapters or articles on each of two or more empires and attempt a comparison only in the introduction and conclusion. Thus the potential of comparative history is far from exhausted. The most recent comparative study is the ambitious and stimulating Empires in World History by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper. It encompasses a very long period from the ancient Roman and Chinese empires to the 20th century, including the Ottoman and Romanov empires, and places world history into an imperial framework: "Empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as in [End Page 477] the sixteenth, existed in relation to each other." Questions of "imperial intersections," competition, and imitation are thus included.2 By adopting this orientation, the work reflects a new trend in "imperiology" that asks about contacts and interactions between empires. This new direction is connected with a trend in historical sciences toward cultural transfers, transnational history, histoire croisée, and shared or entangled history. The first such studies concerned the interactions between the Western maritime empires and between France and Germany; later ones examined those between Germany and Poland and between Germany and Russia (for example, the special issue of Kritika on Germany and Russia in the first half of the 20th century).3 The histoire croisée of the Russians and Ottomans has been neglected so far, despite its importance for both empires. It lasted at least five centuries, longer than the relations Russia had with any other empire. Their interactions were shaped initially by a competition for the heritage of the Byzantine and Mongol empires and by a military, political, and cultural preponderance of the Ottomans. During the 18th century, the balance of power was reversed and the relationship was characterized by numerous wars, most of them ending with Russian victories. One recent publication includes six contributions on the Ottoman Empire, six on the Russian Empire, and one (by Marsha Siefert) comparing communications in both empires. Although the book's title is Comparing Empires, the subtitle is about "encounters and transfers." The interactions concern, however, mainly transfers from Western Europe to the Ottoman and Romanov empires; direct Russo-Ottoman entanglements are treated only sporadically.4 In 2010, the first collective volume devoted to the entangled history of the Russian Empire with other empires was published. It is focused on cultural transfers from the West European empires to Russia, considered here as a European "imperium inter pares." Only two articles touch on the Ottoman dimension. Vladimir Bobrovnikov compares the experiences of Russia in the Caucasus and of France in Algeria—two regions, parts of which had formerly been under Ottoman rule—and looks for interactions between the two colonial powers as well as borrowings from the Ottomans. A case study on Bessarabia [End Page 478] by Andrei Kushko and Victor Taki deals directly with the Russo-Ottoman entanglement in the border region of Bessarabia.5 Whether the Ottoman Empire, too, was an "imperium inter...

Imperial Entanglements : Two New Histories of Russia's Western and Southern Borderlands

Imperial Entanglements: Two New Histories of Russia's Western and Southern Borderlands G. M. Hamburg (bio) Robert D. Crews , For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia. viii + 463 pp. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. ISBN 0674021649. $29.95. Mikhail Dmitrievich Dolbilov and Aleksei Il´ich Miller, Zapadnye okrainy Rossiiskoi imperii [The Western Borderlands of the Russian Empire]. 608 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006. ISBN 586793425X. These days, one of the most active research fields in modern Russian history is borderlands history: that is, the history of non-Russian peoples living on the empire's peripheries, understood either in isolation from the Great Russian heartland or in dynamic relationship to it.1 Because this subject encompasses a central dimension of Eurasian history—Russia's status as a multinational, multi-confessional polity—the intellectual attractiveness of studying it is self-evident. Since as little as 20 years ago one could not confidently have predicted that scholarship would move so vigorously in this direction, we should ask why so many scholars both in post-Soviet Russia and the West have now opted to write on the borderlands. In the Soviet Union, of course, writing the history of non-Russian peoples was a serious enterprise from the very beginning of Soviet power, but much of the scholarship that appeared in the early Soviet period was attuned to party doctrine and thus not inclined to investigate important questions such [End Page 407] as the place of religious affiliation in nationality politics.2 Moreover, certain issues like Russian–Jewish relations were so sensitive that, at times, they were virtually off-limits to scholars.3 In addition, borderlands scholarship occasionally became the virtual preserve of academics who either belonged to one of the non-Russian nationalities or lived in one of the non-Russian republics; meanwhile, the "commanding heights" of the historical profession were occupied by historians who wrote the history of the heartland.4 This professional constellation began to disintegrate in the Gorbachev and post-Soviet periods, but its breakdown did not immediately lead to a concentration on borderlands history. Indeed, if we imagine scholarship proceeding in waves, the [End Page 408] first wave, lasting from the late 1980s through the early 1990s, issued from a fascination with liberalism and reform in imperial Russia; the second wave, beginning in the early 1990s and still continuing at present, arose from a revival in Russian conservatism and a concomitant interest in the relative durability of the Russian empire compared with the Soviet Union. Borderlands history is the third wave of scholarship since the late 1980s. Its numerous sources include: the shattering of old taboos that hindered research on the subject; the realization that the Russian empire managed its national minorities for 300 years without experiencing the kind of "meltdown" that occurred in the last years of Soviet power; the knowledge that post-Soviet Russia, being a "post-imperial empire," must also attend to nationality problems of various kinds, many of them inherited from the Soviet system or from the Russian empire; the opening of archives in former borderlands regions that were once difficult to access, even for Russians; Western scholarly research in borderlands history that reinforces Russian interest in the subject; and the revival of certain classical problems in international relations—namely, tensions between Poland and Russia over the Western border zone, and tensions between Russia and Islamic states over the Caucasus and Central Asia. Western scholarly interest in the imperial borderlands developed in a slightly different fashion. In Britain, for example, historians have long paid attention to the non-Russians along the southern rim of the Russian empire, probably because these peoples have been near neighbors of Britain's own empire.5 Moreover, the desire to compare the operation of competing empires has animated many British scholars, from imperial taxonomists like Arnold Toynbee and Niall Ferguson to Russian specialists like Dominic Lieven.6 In France, which has had its own empire located partly in Muslim societies, there has been a long-standing fascination with Russia's Islamic subjects in the Caucasus, in Tatar regions, and in Central Asia.7 Moreover, French [End Page 409] scholarship on the multinational composition of...

Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda: Entsiklopediia (review)

Reviewed by: Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda: Entsiklopediia Dominic Lieven V. M. Bezotosnyi et al., eds., Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda: Entsiklopediia [The Great Patriotic War of 1812: An Encyclopedia]. 878 pp. Moscow: Rosspen, 2004. ISBN 582430324X. This remarkable and splendid volume is divided into four very unequal parts. The first is a brief history of the 1812 campaign. The third section is a 15-page chronology of the European wars between 1812 and 1815. The fourth and final section is a glossary of military terms in use in the period of the Napoleonic Wars, with particular reference to the Russian army. Since many of these terms are obscure and not to be found even in large Russian–English dictionaries, this section is invaluable. With a thoroughness typical of this volume, many line drawings are provided to illustrate the terms. Since one is frequently dealing with details of uniforms, weapons, and equipment, these illustrations are priceless in explaining precisely what the term means. The core of the volume is the second section. This is 811 pages long, and each page has three columns. The book could very easily have been produced as a two-volume edition, with each volume 1,000 pages long. This comment may give the unfair impression that the work is squashed, produced in small print, or hard to follow. None of this is true because the volume is of larger-than-normal size. The many illustrations are an excellent accompaniment to the text: they really do help to illustrate and explain the entries. The one area where a little more space would have been valuable are the maps, but this is true of every work of military history published in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. I dream of the day when someone reproduces Bogdanovich's superb maps from his seven-volume history of the wars of 1812–14. 1These are much better than anything published in the West in the last 50 years, including even the large-format atlas of Esposito and Elting. 2 [End Page 133] The core second section of the volume contains thousands of articles by a wide range of experts, who are overwhelmingly from Russia or the former USSR but include some French scholars. Most of the articles cover events of 1812 (battles, skirmishes, sieges, treaties, camps), generals as well as key political and diplomatic figures, and military units ranging from regiments to corps and armies. There are, however, a large number of articles on other matters. To note them all would be impossible. They include military pieces on plans, intelligence-gathering, staffs, and other operational matters; on logistics, including arsenals, arms factories, requisitioning, and food supply; on such personnel issues as recruitment, officer training, cantonists, ranks, and rewards; and on many other aspects of the campaign. They also, however, cover politics—government institutions, peasant disturbances, state finances—and diplomacy (policies, treaties, subsidies, etc.). Beyond these essential topics there is also a range of articles on monuments and archives and even some specific key documents relating to 1812. The latter include laws such as the Statute on the Field Army, plans (e.g., the important analysis of April 1812 by Army Intelligence Chief Colonel P. A. Chuikevich) and General Barclay de Tolly's thoughts both in preparation for the 1812 campaign and in retrospect. One outstanding piece in the encyclopedia is an eight-page (i.e., 24 columns) entry on the war's historiography. This piece provides an excellent example of the volume's main qualities. It is extremely thorough and comprehensive in its coverage. It has long sections on Russian, French, German, Polish, Italian, British, and American literature on the war. Nothing of significance is omitted. In addition, however, the interpretation of this historiography is balanced, fair, and full of insight into the contemporary political and other pressures which influenced—even sometimes dictated—approaches and judgments. The change since Soviet times is immense. The Russian scholars know about foreign scholarship, have absorbed its views into their own academic mainstream, and have thrown naively nationalist and parochial judgments overboard. But they remain immensely knowledgeable about 1812, far superior to almost anyone in the West. It is more than time for their knowledge and...

Империя, История и Современный Мировой Порядок

SUMMARY: Dominic Lieven chose to respond to the discussion piece “New Imperial History” in the form of a review article on the current debates on the conceptualization of empire as an analytical category in the disciplines of political science, international relations, and history. Lieven continues to stress the centrality of power in the conception of empire and envisages a mutually beneficial dialogue between historians and political scientists in the process of explicating the relationship of power in the history of empires and the world and making the analysis of power sensitive to the variety of historical contexts. Lieven contends that it is possible to form a precise definition of the analytical concept of empire, the prerequisite for which is the uncoupling of two concepts: empire and imperialism. For Lieven, the elaboration of a more precise definition of empire is linked to a reconstruction of meanings of the concept of empire in the long term and in different cultural contexts, the most distinctive of which is the German concept of Reich . However, Lieven argues that this analysis does not yield an unambiguous picture and therefore he resorts to conceptualizing the structural features of power, geopolitics, the management of multiethnicity, rule without consent, and military, cultural, and ideological hegemony. Overall, Lieven brings up the longevity of empires and defines empires as historical phenomena that underpin the contemporary state of international relations and political configurations in former imperial regions of the world. In this respect, empire evolves into a legacy and a model that might help scholars understand the genesis and dilemmas of the three imperial centers in the present world: China, the EU and the US.

Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, by Niall Ferguson (London: Allen Lane, 2002; New York: Basic Books, 2003); Empire: How Spain Became a World Power 1492–1763, by Henry Kamen (London: Penguin, 2002; New York: Harper Collins, 2003); Empire:

Four books with one title—Empire—are the subject of this essay.Simply including the plural would have extended the list still further: see Susan E. Alcock, Terence N. D'Altroy, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Carla M. Sinopoli, eds., Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). I am grateful to Jane Burbank, Antonio Feros, and Molly Nolan for comments on a previous draft of this article. All were published within the past few years, and the interest they have generated reveals a widespread concern with the exercise of power on a vast scale, beyond the limits of national or continental boundaries. Yet the contemporary use of the word “empire” as a metaphor for unbounded power sits uneasily with scholarship on actual historical empires. Many historians have been trying to show that the long-term survival of empires depended on their rulers limiting their transformative ambitions even as they extended their power. The new interest in empires is nonetheless valuable because it suggests that scholars and intellectuals are emerging from their obsession with the nation-state, seen as the inevitable outcome of a movement from empire to nation, and as the political form characteristic of the “modern” era, which some scholars think is now giving way to new forms of global connections. Empire is being discovered in the past, in the present, and in the future.

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:Julie A Buckler, The Literary Lorgnette: Attending Opera in Imperial Russia.Sergey M Solovyov, Vladimir Solovyov: His Life and Creative Evolution.Leslie Dorfman Davis, Serapion Sister: The Poetry of Elizaveta Polonskaja.Sergei Bogatyrev, The Sovereign and His Counsellors: Ritualised Consultations in Muscovite Political Culture, 1350s–1570s.Isolde Thyrêt, Between God and the Tsar: Religious Symbolism and the Royal Women of Muscovite Russia.Kimitaka Matsuzato, ed., Zemskii fenomen: Politologicheskii podkhod.Abraham Ascher, P. A. Stolypin: The Search for Stability in Late Imperial Russia.Virginia Martin, Law and Custom in the Steppe: The Kazakhs of the Middle Horde and Russian Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century.Barbara T. and Jehanne M Gheith Norton, eds., An Improper Profession: Women, Gender, and Journalism in Late Imperial Russia.Lindsey Hughes, ed., Peter the Great and the West: New Perspectives.Anthony Cross, Catherine the Great and the British: A Pot‐Pourri of Essays.G. S. Smith, D. S. Mirsky: A Russian‐English Life, 1890–1939.Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals.Guive Mirfendereski, A Diplomatic History of the Caspian Sea: Treaties, Diaries, and Other Stories.Norman E. Saul, War and Revolution: The United States and Russia, 1914–1921.Rex A. Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917.Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, Lenin.Peter Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War I.Manfred Hildermeier, Die Sowjetunion, 1917–1991.Christopher Lawrence Zugger, The Forgotten: Catholics of the Soviet Empire from Lenin through Stalin.Balzhan Zhimbiev, History of the Urbanisation of a Siberian City: Ulan‐Ude.Dietmar Neutatz, Die Moskauer Metro: Von den ersten Plänen bis zur Groβbaustelle des Stalinismus (1897–1935).Paul R. Gregory, ed., Behind the Façade of Stalin's Command Economy: Evidence from the Soviet State and Party Archives.David R. Stone, Hammer and Rifle: The Militarization of the Soviet Union, 1926–1933.Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin.Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution.Timothy R. Vogt, Denazification in Soviet‐Occupied Germany: Brandenburg, 1945–1948.Samuel H. Baron, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk, 1962.Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000.Paul Hollander, Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism.Stephen L. Webber, School, Reform and Society in the New Russia.Jeni and Albert Motivans Klugman, eds., Single Parents and Child Welfare in the New Russia.Petra Rethmann, Tundra Passages: History and Gender in the Russian Far East.Vlad E. Genin, ed., The Anatomy of Russian Defense Conversion.Stephen Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post‐Communist Russia.Peter Naray, Russia and the World Trade Organization.

Empire: the Russian Empire and its rivals

This ambitious book explores the role of empire in world history. What does it mean to be an empire? How does one empire differ from another? Why does an empire rise and why fall? Why have empires flourished in some eras and regions of the world but not in others? On an unusually wide canvas, Dominic Lieven addresses all these questions. His central focus is on the rise and fall of empire in Russia and the Soviet Union. The dynamics of empire's history in Russia are explored through comparisons not only between the tsarist and Soviet periods but also between Russia, its great contemporaries and rivals of the Ottoman, Habsburg and British empires, and a broad range of other cases from ancient China and Rome to the present-day United States, Indonesia, India and the European Union. Dominic Lieven shows that many of empire's dilemmas still have force in today's world. His perspective throws light on the current crisis in the former USSR by comparing post-Soviet problems and dangers with the upheavals caused by the collapse of other leading powers' empires. A fresh view of many of today's most intractable issues is also provided, from the troubles in Ulster to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and the fate of Russian, British, German and Asian diasporas stranded by the collapse of empire.

Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals, London: John Murray, 2000

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Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals by Dominic Lieven (review)

Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals by Dominic Lieven (review)

The Aristocracy in Europe, 1815-1914. By Dominic Lieven (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. xxiv plus 308pp. $29.50)

Journal Article The Aristocracy in Europe, 1815–1914. By Dominic Lieven (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. xxiv plus 308pp. $29.50) Get access Walter L. Arnstein Walter L. Arnstein University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 28, Issue 2, Winter 1994, Pages 408–410, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh/28.2.408 Published: 01 December 1994

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Russia's Rulers Under the Old Regime. Dominic Lieven

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsRussia's Rulers Under the Old Regime. Dominic Lieven Thomas S. PearsonThomas S. Pearson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 63, Number 4Dec., 1991 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/244422 Views: 2Total views on this site Copyright 1991 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.