558 SEER, 84, 3, JULY 2006 also remarksthe thoughtfulnessof many of the commanders. Clausewitzmet many such when he servedwith the Russian army in the war of I8I2, and his great book On Warin part reflectsthat Russian experience. London PHILIPLONGWORTH Kusber, Jan. Eliten-undVolksbildung imZarenreich wdhrend desi8. undin derersten Hd!ftedesI9. Jahrhunderts. Studien zur Diskurs,Gesetzgebung und Umsetzung. Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte des ostlichen Europa, 65. Franz Steiner, Wiesbaden, 2004. ix + 497 pp. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Indexes. ?75.00 (paperback). PROFESSORKUSBER's monograph is his Habilitationschrifi from the Universityof Kiel. He set himself the task of tracing the evolution of Russia's education system from I700 to I850; in fact the first half-centuryreceives rather slight treatment, and the core of the book is the period from 1780 onwards. Going beyond merely institutionalterms, he not only follows the official measures and legislation involved and their implementation, but also seeks to relate these to the discoursesabout education currentand dominant in Russia (and Europe) in the period. This is a subject on which an enormous amount has already been written and published besides copious footnotes, the bibliography here is thirty-seven pages long but Kusber has also made considerable use of St Petersburg archives and manuscript collections. His focus and methodology are defined by approving quotation from the educational historian K.-E. Jeismann: 'Which part of the population is covered by scientificeducation, the way in which a new socialbody or stratumconstitutes itselffrom social careersborne by this educationalladder:these questionswill interest a research orientationwhich combines enquiry into institutionaland social phenomena and into the history of ideas and at the same time places ever greater emphasis on regional and local relations' (p. 7). (Prof. Kusber's own style, while somewhat dense, is fortunately less convoluted than the language here.)Lookingat the reign of CatherineII, Kusberconcludesthat in rejecting Betskoi's somewhat unworldly 'enlightened' approach to national education, Catherine neverthelessretained the expectation that well-educated subjects would generate a 'middle estate' which would both benefit the economy and the administration, and be capable of thinking for itself: the subversivepotential of this only became apparent to her at the end of her reign. (While quoting one of George Yaney's articles, Kusber does not mention his seminal Systematization ofRussianGovernment [I973] which analysed the Imperial period as a whole along these lines.) Kusber emphasizes the social-disciplinary intention behind the 1786 school statute, with its co-educational and supra-estate emphases, 'normal' teaching methodology and didactic text-book On theDutiesof Man and Citizen.Catherine and her adviserswere seekingto extend the functionalelite of the statewell beyond the narrow confines of the traditional nobility, but not however to replace the latter, despite the increasing discussion of such possibilities in educational discourse, which also generated criticismof the school statute from both left and right. REVIEWS 559 The long genesis of the I786 legislationand its dependence upon preceding discourse/discussion are contrastedwith the rapid emergence of the I803-04 statute. This was the product of a small close group, a unique construct still beholden to late-Enlightenmentideas, and to Polish conceptions, but much more strongly structuredthan its predecessor;and it influenced rather than reflected consequent early-nineteenth-centurydiscourse, which in any case came to use education as a battle-ground for politics. The basically liberal principlesof the two statutesneverthelessremained and informededucational discourse under Nicholas I, despite his government's attempts in I828 and I835 to lessen autonomy in the interests of 'supervision' and 'order'. The effects of these institutionaland intellectual developments on the 'functional elite' are examined in depth.Jeismann's enquiryas to the formationof a 'new social body or stratum'is answeredin the negative in so far as no new specific estate-based group emerged. But development of the educational arena enabled an unprecedented social mixing and fluidity. Kusber concludes that Russia at the turn of the eighteenthto nineteenth centurypossessedan education system which, while it encompassed very few, was in its 'flexibilityand its multiplicitouscontent "more modern" than the Empire's state and social constitution'(p. 445). This is an impressivebook. It offersa wealth of factual information, and a widely-conceived interpretativeframework.Apart from a very few factual slips (for instance, the treatment of the Nakaz on p. I43), it appears largely...