REVIEWS 559 parliaments or estates general, municipal corporations, universities, and independent courts of law, in other words those medieval institutions that nourished the evolution of a conception of laws and obligations higher than those of the state (7The Russian Constitutional Experiment,1973, chapter i). All of these institutionslong precede, of course, I700. The strengthof Malia'sbook is that he remindsus how often we have been wrong about Russia. The weaknessis that by ignoring all that precedes i 700 and all but the physical features of the cultural gradient, he neglects the formation and the persistentessence of the Russian political traditionand its contrast with the other traditions of the continent. The writing of history oblivious of traditionscarcely differsfrom social science. The past, too, has a past, and it is not irrelevant. Char-lottesville, firginia HUGH RAGSDALE Hoffmann, David L., and Kotsonis, Yanni (eds). RussianModernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices, 1800-I950. Macmillan, Basingstokeand St Martin's Press, New York, 2000. Viii + 279 pp. Notes. Index. JJ5o.oo: $65.00. THEreviewerapproachedthisbookwithsome interesthavingrecentlyworked through a number of volumes on the history of reform in Russia and the successes and failures resulting from those various and quite conscious campaigns, from the time of Peterthe Great to the era of Putin'sascendancy. Many questions arise from such material particularlythe question of why Russia seemed to remain resolutelyunder-reformedand backwardin the face of advances elsewhere, particularlyamong its rivals in the West and Japan. What was it that stunted the impact of modernizing processes there?Was it something in the political cultureor merelysomethingin the water? At first sight, the Hoffmann-Kotsonis volume seemed to be yet another revisionist collection by younger historians intent on undermining old shiboleths by a case of exaggeration in the opposite direction to the current wisdom of the age. By the conclusion, it became clear that there was more to it than some defence of Russiaagainstwhat many have viewed as an atrocious trackrecordof violence and poor imitationof thingswestern. The basic proposition of the book is that Russia did not miss out on much of the process of modernization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries(as arguablyit had earlier,underthe Mongols and theirauthoritariansuccessors, in the case of say the Renaissance and Reformation),but ratherthat it shared in many aspectsof the modernizingprocessgoing on elsewhere. The concept of modernizationis looked at in the introductionand a review provided of the subsequent articles in the book. Those chapters then look at modernization in Russia in a sometimes surprisingbut wide range of fields from corporal punishment and diary writing to nationalism and biological engineering.Each of thepresentationswasthe resultofpapersand consequent discussionsatNew YorkUniversity,theMassachusettsInstituteof Technology and the Universityof Marylandover the period 1995- i 997. Each is provided with a fullset of notes at the end of the relevantchapter. 560 SEER, 79, 3, 2001 The concluding chapter summarizesthe findingsof the variouspapers and brings the whole endeavour together. The work is rounded off with a unified index. So, does the enterprisehave a worthwhile basis and how well does it fulfil its objectives? Personally the present writer found the introduction rather heavy going perhapsthe resultof a styleusing social science typejargon in abundance, perhaps the result of setting up too grandiose a canard to shoot down. Did and do many academics and other writers seriously believe that Russia did not make significant advances in the two centuries in question? Surelynot. Many would say that the bulkof literature,particularlythat of the 1920S to the I950S, was heavily weighted in the other direction, and not just the literature emanating from the Soviet Union. Was this not the country where the elephantwas discovered,everythingwasinvented, andpoliticaland economic advance unstoppable (accordingto the Webbs, BernardShaw and theirall too numeroussuccessors)?The factremainsthat the countrydid start late with formalizedfeudal laws and was late in coming out of that condition, only to re-introduceserfdom, in the shape of collectivization, resistingall the evidence that it was failing to deliver the goods and the wealth it was so confidentlypredicted would follow. The same is true with other indicatorsof modernization. Yes, Russia did win Nobel Prizes for fundamental groundbreakingwork in the sciences, but remarkablyfew of them given the size of her population and her resourcebase. Did the systemgenerallyacknowledge and encourage innovation or generally stifleit in a significantrange of fields...