Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and its Rivals

For a long time I was pondering the following paradox: why the level of humanities in British Universities is so low, given their incredibly high reputation for "hard" sciences. The only idea, which came to my mind so far, was that the humanities in UK exist not for scholarship but to house scions of "good families" who are not ruthless enough for intelligence services or banking and not crooked enough for politics.

Certainly, Prince Dominic Lieven  is no historian. For the professional historian would need to sit several years each in archives of St. Petersburg, Istambul and Vienna, and to read XVII century Turkish handwriting to attempt coverage as broad as his. But he is a good political scientist--albeit relying mostly on the secondary sources--to paint the picture of decline and fall of Empires in as broad strokes as his. As usual with the non-professional history, especially coming from the UK universities, it combines many brilliant insights with off-hand remarks as well as plausible but unsupported and, frequently, unproven stories. And in the case of D. L., this is true to an excessive degree, reflecting his general brilliance and flamboyance but also playing fast and loose with facts.

Lieven stands head and shoulders above most Western Russia-studies academics and I do not want to malign him by this review. The weak points of his book are shared by most, if not all, contemporary UK and US studies of Russia and the region, while the strong points are his alone. One of the weaknesses common not only for the Russia studies but also for all contemporary political science is anachronistic myopia. That is, there is overriding assumption that the societies of Western Europe and Americas were always economically prosperous and democratic. Say it, for instance, about Spanish Empire between 1700 and 1976. Tellingly, Spanish Empire is almost absent from Lieven's narrative.

The truth is that before the Industrial Revolution (which was embraced by non-English societies only late in 1800s), China and India rivaled the most developed of the Western countries in terms of wealth and economic development. In 1900, in all probability, the majority of Chinese and Indians were worse off than in 1700. Similarly, in the era when the arable and pastures were the main source of wealth, subjects of the Russian Empire were very well-off. And few of 1900 observers would count Italy, not to speak of Spain, Greece or Portugal, as wealthier or more advanced technologically than Russia (as well as Argentina and Brazil). Only the autarkic experiments of the latter threw them back for a half-century.

Another tendency, common for Lieven and all contemporary political scientists writing about history, is to ignore inconvenient factual realities in favor of generalizing concepts. Lieven ignores Russian Zemski Sobor (proto-parliament encompassing all estates, even freeholder peasants) and Boyar Duma. When writing that Russian aristocracy did not have rights enshrined in law as the English Magna Charta, and therefore had more in common with contemporary Turkish warrior elites, he fails to recognize that Early Modern Italy, Spain, or Scandinavia had completely different models of interaction of the nobility with the sovereign. The concept of vassalage was totally alien in Prussia as well, where all nobles were connected directly to the sovereign (first the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, then the Grand Duke) without mediation by their local overlord, etc. etc.

But at least, before the World War I, he does not veer that much off course, or my knowledge of Ottoman (little) and Hapsburg Empires (significant) is insufficient to notice them. That is in his description of XX century events his anachronistic myopia (e.g. Europe was mostly democratic and prosperous in the interwar period), as well as the uglier staples of the British historiography, which get better of him. Among these are diminution of Armenian Genocide and the idea that the Jewish Shoah was an unfortunate product of one man's lunacy--in fact Antisemitism was the main selling point of the Nazi Party inside Germany--and its only selling point in Romania, Hungary, Ukraine and the Baltic States. Without its uncompromising 'Juden Raus' stance, Nazi would be a small sect among other parties opposing the Versailles settlement.

Lieven pronounces that the main reason for collapse of the USSR was its inability to provide living standards anywhere near contemporary developed Western nations and consequential diminution of Communist ideology he is widely off the mark. If this were so, USSR had to collapse in 1920-30s rather than in 1990s, and China, Cuba and North Korea (and also Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) would not outlive it. While it is futile to ascribe complex historical phenomena to a particular reason, most of the ruling Communist Parties were able to adapt, or, in the case of North Korea, entrench. Why this did not (or could not) happen in the Soviet Union is a separate question partly covered by Lieven but left as muddled after his discussion as before it.