A History of Soviet Russia. by M. K. DziewanowskiReview by: John D. KlierSlavic Review, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Sep., 1980), pp. 495-496Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2497177 .

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Reviews 495

Zguta bases this useful study of the skornorokhi on careful and judicious analysis of a wide variety of sources-literary, liturgical, artistic, folkloric, and cadastral-and on a thorough knowledge of earlier scholarship. While the book suffers from an occasional tendency to state rather than to demonstrate hypotheses and then to build on them, it does present a coherent and, on the whole, convincing picture of the rise, fall, and importance of this little-studied phenomenon of premodern Russian life.

GEORGE P. MAJESKA University of Maryland

RUSSIA UNDER CATHERINE THE GREAT, vol. 1: SELECT DOCUMENTS ON GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY. Translated and with an introduction by Paul Dukes. Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1978. viii, 176 pp.

Designed for comparative purposes and for readers without a knowledge of Russian, this anthology aspires to provide "a composite if extremely impressionistic picture of government and society" during Catherine II's reign. The compiler acknowledges "glaring omissions" and calls his translations "mostly literal." There are ten groups of documents: the Table of Ranks of 1722, Tatishchev's treatise of around 1730, the decree on the freedom of the nobility in 1762, Catherine's directions of 1764 to Via- zeniskii, Desnitskii's governmental proposals of 1768, Polenov's analysis of serfdom, Rychkov's model instructions of 1770 to stewards, various documents about the Puga- chev Revolt, and the preambles to the Guberniia Reform of 1775 and the Charter of the Nobility of 1785, followed by synopses of those two lengthy enactments. Short introductions discuss each document. A list of select translated terms and a brief bib- liography close the slitn volume.

Anyone who has tried translating eighteenth-century Russian will sympathize with the difficulties Professor Dukes encountered. One also should recognize his service in making accessible materials largely unavailable heretofore. Nevertheless, the selection of sources and the difficult nature of the translations would seem to destine this book mainly for advanced undergraduate seminars, where students would have some familiarity with the period and could receive considerable specialized guidance. One may question the choice of documents. Several selections are barely related to the rest, and others are too truncated to be useful or are of dubious signifi- cance. Nearly all read awkwardly. Some translated terms are seriously inaccurate. The introductions are uninspired and misprints abound.

J. T. ALEXANDER

University of Kansas

A HISTORY OF SOVIET RUSSIA. By M. ?. Dziewanowski. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979. x, 406 pp. $12.95, paper.

M. K. Dziewanowski's text permits us to meditate once again on the victories and defeats which authors achieve in the eternal struggle between depth and breadth. Belying the book's title, for example, is the author's broad treatment of ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union. This is a welcome approach: readers become quickly aware that Soviet history is something more then Russian history. Conversely, breadth proves fatal to cultural history. There is no real treatment of the significant role of literature in Soviet society, and the cultural giants of the Russian and Soviet worlds are reduced to names on a list, an unfortunate but common textbook metamorphosis.

The book is divided into six sections. The first, introducing the Russian state tradition, is straightforward and traditional. The second is slightly uneven. It presents a detailed picture of Russia's economic situation on the eve of World War I while skirting the debate centering on the Duma monarchy's evolution into a viable state

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496 Slavic Review

system. The depiction of the war, with its suggestions of German-Austrian war guilt and its exaggerated picture of the empress and Rasputin, is perhaps too tradi- tional, but the discussion of the decline of the Provisional Government and the Bol- shevik victory does justice to the latest scholarship. The third section is a competent treatment of the period from 1917 to 1928, with domestic and foreign policy fully covered. Part four, devoted to the "Stalin Revolution," is often too superficial to do justice to this crucial period. Fifteen pages are hardly enough to encompass the industrialization debate, the First Five-Year Plan, and collectivization. The nature of state planning and the "accidental" nature of collectivization are slighted, as is the recent debate over whether agriculture really "paid" for industrialization.

Similar problems arise with the treatment of the Great Purge. The question of motivation is cursorily explored. By suggesting that there was usually some objective reason for arrest-such as telling political jokes-the author obscures the frequently random nature of the ezhovshchina. In focusing on the impact of the purges on the party-a necessary consideration-he neglects the wider significance of the purges for Soviet society as a whole. The concept of social "atomization" is not mentioned.

The coming of the war is well presented, as is the discussion of the Cold War. The author stresses the mutually incompatible interests of the Great Powers, instead of the demonology of the Right and Left which has often possessed Cold War his- toriography.

Entering the post-Stalin era, the author assumes an unsettling omniscience. His confident explanations of what transpired within the workings of the collective leader- ship will not warn students of the controversial nature of Kremlinology. The nature and defeat of the "Anti-Party Group," the fall of Zhukov, and other events are presented in versions which are logical, but can be debated. The two concluding chapters offer a dichotomy which should prove very useful in the classroom. A picture of the Soviet Union as a great world power, ready and willing to assert its hegemony over a West in decline, is juxtaposed to a detailed description of the crises in Soviet industrial and agricultural sectors, potential energy shortages, weaknesses in tech- nology and innovation, and the growth of demographic problems.

Hopefully, subsequent editions will correct the date of Stolypin's death from 1914 to 1911, Mendeleev's periodic table from 1896 to 1869, and note that neither Anna Akhmatova nor Marina Tsvetaeva were "swept away by the Great Purge." How must the shade of Lomonosov quake to learn that the Norman Theory has been attributed to him.

JOHN D. KLIER Fort Hays State University

LETTERS FROM RUSSIA 1919. By P. D. Ouspensky. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. xii, 59 pp. Map. $3.50, paper.

I have seldom seen a more useless little book. P. D. Uspenskii, the famous mystic and comrade of Gurdjieff, spent some months in 1919 in White-occupied Ekaterinodar. He wrote five "letters" for the British journal, New Age, in which he tried to describe the conditions in the war-torn country. The articles were very brief and now make up less than fifty short pages of text. Whatever Uspenskii's other talents, he was not a good journalist. He had no eye for the small detail which would bring his subject alive. He lacked the ability to explain to the uninformed the tremendous complexities of the political situation. Thus, his book offers little more than exclamations about how terrible things were.

Furthermore, Uspenskii had no understanding of politics. He hated the Bolsheviks, but also had little regard for monarchists, liberals, or any other segment of the political spectrum. For illustrating the sophistication of his political analysis, one example must suffice. He believed that in 1919 there were German agents in China recruiting

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