SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 896 Bushkovitch, Paul. A Concise History of Russia. Cambridge Concise Histories. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2012. xxiv + 491 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Further reading. Index. £19.99: $27.99 (paperback). The word ‘concise’ is relative. Bushkovitch’s book contains 459 pages of text, more than twice the length of most other books in the Cambridge University Press series to which it belongs. Arguably, this is justified, since Rus´/Muscovy/ the Russian Empire/the Soviet Union/the Russian Federation has a very long and complicated history. Certainly, the book covers a lot of ground succinctly, on the whole clearly, with few errors, and it is good to see full weight given to the earlier centuries. It is especially good on economic and cultural history, which often get short shrift in overall treatments of Russia. Bushkovich’s brief accounts of the lives of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, musicians, painters and architects, followed by summaries of their significance, are particularly vivid. Russia’s changing geopolitical position among the powers of Europe and Asia is skilfully presented. Religious history is well covered up to the early eighteenth century, after which for some reason it appears only in passing; especially strange is the omission of the restoration of the Orthodox Church Patriarchate, both during the revolution of 1917 and again under Stalin in 1943. Bushkovitch declares in his Introduction that he will avoid narrating the ‘unfolding of one or another idea’, and that he ‘seeks above all to tell the story and explain it where possible’; he then adds that ‘in many cases explanations are hard to come by’ (p. xviii). He has followed his own prescription to a fault. He narrates successions of events baldly and usually without any attempt at overt interpretation. It is of course good to avoid the well-worn teleology, according to which everything before 1917 leads towards the revolution, and everything thereafter to the collapse of the USSR. All the same, most readers who seek this kind of overview will surely want to know how the author understands what he recounts or at least what the major competing lines of interpretation have been. Without such explicit authorial intervention, a latent interpretation tends to emerge anyway between the lines. For example, for the nineteenth century Bushkovitch implies an on-going struggle between liberals he approves of and reactionaries he dislikes. He does not offer an explanation of why liberal reform was so difficult to implement. The abstention from interpretation is especially frustrating in Bushkovitch’s account of the early Soviet period. He implies, without explicitly saying so, that Stalin’s terror was the natural outcome of a single-party regime attempting radical social and economic change. Yet in the twentieth century plenty of authoritarian regimes drove rapid modernization without generating the grotesque levels of mass murder which the Communists were responsible for; only China and Cambodia are comparable with the Soviet Union. In the last REVIEWS 897 ten to fifteen years historians have written much about what might explain the distinctive nature of the Soviet terror, but Bushkovitch does not draw on it. Bushkovitch also interprets by omission. Presumably deliberately, he never mentions the concept of ‘Moscow the Third Rome’. It is certainly arguable that many previous historians have exaggerated its importance, and it is true that in the history of the state it played no direct role, but as a religious and cultural motif it stimulated Russians’ imaginations from the sixteenth right up to the twentieth century. The book has a chapter on ‘Russia as Empire’, but it is mainly an account of the campaigns of conquest and of the characteristics of the major non-Russian nationalities. Bushkovitch does not consider the problems of administering such a huge and diverse territory, or what effect those problems had on the Russianstate—asubjectwhichhasgeneratedaconsiderableandlivelyhistorical literature in the last two decades. And what is one to make of his comment that the Russian Empire was ‘not impressive […] by British standards’ (p. 249)? The Russian Empire lasted longer than the British and was not disfigured by the racism which vitiated many of the latter’s positive features. The two empires were very different, and neither can...
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Apr 8, 2017
Qi Zhang 
Open Access