REVIEWS 545 of the opportunitiesprovidedby Tsar AlexanderI after I8 I5, and holds a fine line between emphasizing the disastrousconsequences of the i830-3I and I863-64 uprisings and appreciating the Romantic patriotism that inspired them (there is a moving paragraph on Chopin on p. I37). He notes, and applauds, the greater political realism that set in after the Warsaw rising of I944. His assessment of the Second Republic is measured but broadly optimistic. He manages to convey the cataclysmic losses of WorldWar Two without emotional hyperbole, and calmly reminds English-speakingreaders of the achievementsof the Polishundergroundstateand armedforcesin exile. There was no scope for a Polish Quisling or Peain, but, although there were significantand honourable exceptions, including that of the government-inexile , 'terrorgraduallynumbed the moralresponsesof many'to the Holocaust of the Jews (p. 232). Zawadzki'sverdict on Communist rule is damning. Yet the Polishnation seems to have emerged fromthe experience in astonishingly good mental and moralhealth. The book finisheson the rosynote of the entry of a stable, dynamic and democratic Poland into NATO and imminently (?) into the EU. The book featurestwelve clear maps and forty-ninewell chosen illustrationswith informativecaptions. SchoolofModernHistorg RICHARD BUTTERWICK Queen's University Betfast Poe, Marshall T. A PeopleBornto Slavery'.Russiain EarlyModernEuropean Ethnography, 1476-I748. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 2000. XiV + 293 pp. Notes. Illustrations.Bibliographies.Index. /32.50. THE first fragmentary accounts of Muscovite Russia which appeared in western Europe in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, though they left no doubt that its rulerwielded greatpower over his subjects,did not in general paint him as exceptionally tyrannicalor his subjectsas little better than slaves.Yetby the second half of the sixteenthcenturythiswas the picture which more and more dominated western views of the country. How did it become establishedand, more important, how far was itjustified?These are the questions which Professor Poe attempts to answer in this thoroughly researched and stimulating book, based on the accounts left by almost a hundredforeignerswho lived and travelledin Russia, the majorityof them in the sixteenth centuryand the firstdecades of the seventeenth. A chapter is devoted to the comments of European diplomats. These were not, in general, a particularlywell-informedsourceof information.Usually in Russiaforonly a shorttime, speakingno Russian,regardedby theirhostswith deep suspicion and granted little or no freedom of movement, they were not well placed to discussany aspect of Russianlife with real knowledge.Another chapter deals with the records of their experience left by what ProfessorPoe calls 'residents'-westerners who lived andworkedin Russia as mercenaries, merchants or doctors. These were much better placed to grasp Russian realities, for they often spent much more time in the country than the diplomats, had greater freedom of movement and could speakthe language. Yetthepicturepainted by most of them, of a despotismfarmore extremethan 546 SEER, 8o, 3, 2002 anything conceivable in western Europe and a total subjection and powerlessnessof the ordinaryRussian, a subjectionwhich he had no wish to throw off and even welcomed, was strikinglysimilarto that drawnby the diplomats. The account which consolidated this view of Russian government was, of course, the Rerum moscoviticarum commentarii of Sigismund von Herberstein, to which another chapter is devoted. This brings out well the popularity and influence of the book, after its publication in 1549, during the second half of the sixteenthcenturyand beyond. The two chapterswhich follow attempt to place the governance of Russia, as it developed from Ivan III to the accession of Peter I, in the context of Europeanpolitical ideas and political assumptionsin general. Here Professor Poe's touch seems to become rather less sure; and in particular the four western writers on whose work he concentrates, Bodin, Sir Walter Raleigh, the German political theoristHerman Conring and the Croat Iurii Krizhanich , seem a curiousquartetto choose forthispurpose.However thisdiscussion allowshim to put forwardthe centralargumentof thebook thatwesterners, approaching Russia from a different tradition and with very different and usually unspoken assumptions,were almost bound to misjudge the country and misunderstand its system of government. This argument he develops powerfully and persuasively in the last chapter, the most challenging and thought-provoking in the book. Foreigners,he claims, exaggerated the real differencesbetween Russia and the rest of Europe. In part this was simply a matter of the inevitable difficulties of gaining...