The Russian General Staff and Asia, 1800-1917 by Alex MarshallReview by: Alexander MorrisonThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 87, No. 1 (Jan., 2009), pp. 133-134Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25479346 .

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REVIEWS I33

Marshall, Alex. The Russian General Staff and Asia, 1800-igiy. Roudedge Studies in the History of Russia and Eastern Europe, 4. Roudedge, London and

New York, 2006. xii + 274 pp. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?75.00.

Too often military history is held to be a narrow, specialist subject, sometimes a history of technological change, a litany of ever-more efficient ways of killing people, sometimes a

blow-by-blow account of a battle or campaign. Only

rarely is the history of an army, fleet or other military institution more fully integrated into the wider social and intellectual history of the society which it is supposed to defend. It is hard to over-estimate the importance of the

military in the Government, diplomacy and administration of the Russian

Empire, particularly in the bureaucratic nineteenth-century state, but this is

perhaps insufficiently reflected in the historiography. The most notable con tributions to date have come from John Keep, William Fuller, Allan Wildman and Bruce Menning, and Alexander Marshall's book on the Russian General Staff and the Asiatic Frontier is an immensely valuable addition. Based on extensive research in the Military-Historical Archive in Moscow, as well as on the (often very numerous) publications of the officers of the General Staff themselves, it is partly a work of institutional history, itself an under-researched area in Russia, tracing the rise and decline of the Asiatic Department of the General Staff whilst also covering the development of the Nikolaevskii

Academy of the General Staff and other specialist educational institutions. Marshall's focus however is the formation of the elite of the Russian military, the General Staff, and the emergence within it of a distinct Asiatic cadre of

military orientalists {Voennye Vostokovedy). Given the role of the military in not only defending and waging war on the

Empire's Asiatic frontiers, but also administering them, Marshall is quite justified in entitling chapter two 'The Emergence of a Colonial Military Elite'. He shows how, as a consequence of the professionalization of the officer corps in the Miliutin era, officers who won their spurs in wars along the Asiatic frontier were often preferred to aristocrats and courtiers for important com

mands and bureaucratic positions, culminating in the appointment of the

quintessential Turkestanskii General Alexei Kuropatkin as Minister of War from

1898 to 1903 (pp. 44-45). The third chapter deals with Russian military con

quests in Asia from the early eighteenth century to the annexation of Kushka in 1885, and Marshall then examines the growth of military intelligence and the acquisition of 'colonial knowledge' by the officers of the General Staff

along the vast Asiatic frontiers which resulted. China and the Far East, the Caucasus and Central Asia each have a chapter dedicated to them, and

Marshall is skilled at showing how developments on one frontier could lead to innovations on another, whilst never

forgetting that the amount of attention

devoted to Asia was normally in inverse proportion to that lavished on the

Empire's vulnerable Western frontier.

Marshall is, in my view, entirely correct to see the lengthy wars in the Caucasus as the key to understanding the development of Russian military and colonial ideas in the nineteenth century (p. 43), and in particular growing official hostility to Islam. When combined with the humiliation of defeat in

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134 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 200g

the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-05, which caused Kuropatkin to formulate the doctrine of the 'Yellow Peril' as the greatest strategic threat to Russia

(pp. 95-96), this increasing paranoia clouded the judgement of the General Staff. In his conclusion Marshall shows (pp. 183-88) how in the period leading up to the First World War 'The Myopic Guard' was distracted from the more serious threat in Europe by their concerns over pan-Islamism and the

modernization of the Japanese and Chinese armed forces, not to mention

growing tensions with the British over Afghanistan which (as Jennifer Siegel has shown in her Endgame, London and New York, 2002) were not resolved

by the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907. He concludes with some observa tions on the continuities of attitudes and personnel amongst military oriental ists into the early Soviet period, embodied most clearly in the figure of Andrei

Evgenievich Snesarev, the tsarist General Staffs leading expert on Afghani stan and British India, who would become the rector of the Institute of

Oriental Studies in Moscow from 1921 until his arrest in 1930 (p. 190). There are the usual problems with Routledge books: the copy-editing is

somewhat slipshod, and in many cases entirely new errors seem to have been

added. The volume is also horrendously overpriced at ?75.00. However, the book will be of interest not only to Russianists but also to historians working on other European colonial empires. It should be essential reading not just for

military historians, but for anyone who wants to further their understanding of that elusive concept, the 'official mind' in tsarist Russia.

School of History Alexander Morrison

University of Liverpool

Norris, Stephen M. A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity i8i2-ig4j. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2006. xiii + 277 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $40.00.

Stephen Norris seeks to demonstrate 'the visual nature of Russian nation

hood before and after 1917', a subject, he suggests, that has hitherto 'been

litde studied' (p. 3). 'Nationhood' is his preferred term for the more widely accepted 'national identity' and 'national consciousness' and he limits the visual side of his investigation solely to the lubok, although not to the lubok in

general (which he calls a genre), but to the war lubok (which he also confus

ingly calls a genre [p. 5], when it is, if anything, a sub-genre or theme). This initial confusion is compounded by the book's title, which mentions neither nationhood nor lubki as such, but does denote the self-recommending symmetry of the book's historical parameters, from the Patriotic War to the

Great Patriotic War.

Following the introductory chapter, six of the next seven chapters are devoted to the wars that were the stimulus for the mass production of lubki,

beginning with 1812 and proceeding via the Crimean War, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78, and the Russo-Japanese War, to the Great War. The excep tion is chapter three, which traces the attitude of the government and its censors towards the lubok, principally during the last decades of Nicholas Fs

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