For example, a Mari congress preserved sacred groves that led to instances of ... should foreshadow great things soon to come. I am certain that ... the continuation of the great Russian historical tradition as personified by V. O.. Kliuchevskii ...
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Ivanov shows how national minorities experienced land redistribution differently from Russian peasants. For example, a Mari congress preserved sacred groves that led to instances of inter-ethnic conflict when neighbouring Tatars defiled these spaces. Land divisions opened up tensions within the village, but I was surprised that the documents did not reveal many peasants referencing age-old land claims or disputes between villages over contested claims to land, both of which I have found in other sources. This is, as far as I know, the only collection of documents that captures the spirit of this critical episode in the countryside. It can be invaluable to students who want to explore village-level dynamics. The main weakness of this volume is that it does not give the reader a sense of the larger political context of spring 1918, including the state of the soviet infrastructure, grain requisitioning and anti-Soviet disturbances. Ivanov also missed a chance to include documents on state land improvement programmes, such as irrigation and peat manufacturing, or on the organisation of cooperatives and collective farms. These are small points for such a rich volume. A new wave of document collections marking the centennials of the First World War and the 1917 revolution will soon be released. These two high-quality volumes should foreshadow great things soon to come. I am certain that provincial presses will produce wonderful document collections that highlight the diversity of Russia’s experiences in the revolutionary era and delve much deeper into local politics and social ecologies than most centrally produced volumes. I know that I will seek out these wonderful collections. Aaron B. Retish Wayne State University © 2011, Aaron B. Retish DOI: 10.1080/09546545.2011.570923 N. A. Rozhkov, Izbrannye trudy, compiled and with an introductory essay by O. V. Volobuev, annotated by A. Iu. Morozov. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010. Pp. 735. ISBN 978-5-8243-1229-4 This is an extremely important and invaluable publication. It is no exaggeration to claim that decades of discussions of Russian and Soviet historiography have been misconstrued or inadequately interpreted because they failed to take into account the work of N. A. Rozhkov (1868–1927). Not only did Rozhkov’s work best represent the continuation of the great Russian historical tradition as personified by V. O. Kliuchevskii (1841–1911), but he was a much more interesting and original historian than his contemporary and nemesis, M. N. Pokrovskii (1868–1932), who emerged as the leader of the Soviet historical profession in the first decade of Soviet rule. Not since 1965 has any of Pokrovskii’s work been published in Russia and a volume containing a selection of Rozhkov’s writings has not been published in over a century. Rozhkov is one of very few historians to be commemorated in the impressive 118volume collection that comprises the Institute of Social Thought’s so-called ‘Library of Domestic Social Thought From Ancient Times to the Early Twentieth Century’. This massive work surveys the achievements of Russia’s greatest thinkers and Rozhkov is alongside such distinguished historians as Karamzin, Solov′ev, Kliuchevskii and
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Miliukov. Historians who are able to read Russian have immediate access to Rozhkov’s theory of history through a thoughtful selection of his many writings, some of which are difficult to obtain. O. V. Volobuev can be credited for playing a huge part in bringing this volume to light. Over many years, he has produced numerous articles and papers dealing with different aspects of Rozhkov’s work and, as a result, more than any other individual he has been responsible for raising the interest in and awareness of this important historian, revolutionary and thinker. Volobuev’s highly informative introductory essay provides not only an extremely good brief biography of Rozhkov, but also gives readers a comprehensive set of references from which they are able to continue any future examination of this prolific and complex individual. The nine writings reproduced in this selection are not presented in strict chronological or thematic order, but they do represent some of Rozhkov’s finest historical works. Their main aim is to acquaint the reader with the key historical concepts that comprise the theoretical bases of all of Rozhkov’s major publications. In the first two selected works, Istoriia, moral’ i politika and Nauchnoe mirosozertsanie i istoriia, first published in 1904 and 1903 respectively, Rozhkov outlines the key principles of his theory of history: namely, that history is scientific; all human existence can be explained in terms of a scientific model governed by a series of laws; and political action is based on sociological laws derived from historical research. In the third work, Sel′skoe khoziaistvo Moskovskoi Rusi v XVI veke i ego vliianie na sotsial ′nopoliticheskii stroi togo vremeni, originally published in 1900, Rozhkov argues that the ‘development of the natural economy led to the triumph of the pomest′e system and monastic landownership in most parts of the state’ and this, in turn, ‘caused the decline of agriculture’ (p. 114). The decline of agricultural production was accompanied by the fall of the landowning class of princes and boyars, which in turn allowed the creation of a money economy with an extensive market. These factors opened the way for Muscovite autocracy and serfdom (p. 115). The rise of autocracy in Russia is examined in greater detail in the fifth work, Proiskhozhdenie samoderzhaviia v Rossii (1906), included in the selection. The fourth work entitled Psikhologiia kharaktera i sotsiologiia, originally published as three essays in the journal Obrazovanie between 1900 and 1902, concludes the introduction to Rozhkov’s theory of history up to 1905. This is a particularly important selection because it contains some of Rozhkov’s most innovative and original research and yet is the least studied aspect of his work. In this long article, Rozhkov tries to prove that just as society evolves in a regular, law-governed fashion and it is possible to study the economic evolution of society, so it is possible to study the psychological evolution of society. He goes on to establish a classification of the psychological types. In short, he believed that there were five basic psychological types: egoists (egoisty), individualists (individualisty), aestheticists (estetiki), people of an ethical mould (eticheskii sklad) and analysts (analitiki). With this classification, Rozhkov believed that ‘all the main features concerning the psychology of character are exhausted: everything of a psychological variety can be placed under one of the categories mentioned’ (p. 208). Not only is psychology given independent status as a science, but the study of psychological phenomena occupies a very important place in his study. Osnovnye zakony razvitiia obshchestvennykh iavlenii (Kratkii ocherk sotsiologii) and Osnovy nauchnoi filosofii, originally published in 1907 and 1911 respectively, provide readers with a brief outline of Rozhkov’s theory of history as developed by him between the revolutions. In the first, he provides a complete summary of the laws of social statics and
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social dynamics that he believed explained all social evolution, while the latter challenges the significance of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, especially as expounded by Lenin in Materialism and Empiriocriticism. Rozhkov shows that his philosophical beliefs have always been influenced by a deterministic and evolutionary form of positivism, which explains why it was easier for him to embrace the politics of liquidationism and Menshevism as well as the scientific theory of energetics. In fact, Rozhkov’s attempt to show how his theory of energetics applied to history best illustrates how he interpreted the notion of dialectical materialism. The inclusion of the rare and little known article entitled Velikaia frantsuzskaia i russkaia revoliutsii is not only interesting but very significant. First published in 1919 in the Menshevik journal Mysl′, in which he had collaborated, Rozhkov compares the French and Russian Revolutions arguing that both were a product of the level of capitalist development in each country. In France, the revolution occurred ‘at the dawn of the development of industrial capitalism, of machine industry’, which is why it was aimed at ‘aristocratic absolutism (dvorianskii absoliutizm) and it was marked by the transfer of power from the hands of the nobility to the hands of the commercial, industrial and agricultural bourgeoisie’. In short, France became a bourgeois, capitalist country (p. 567). The Russian Revolution, on the other hand, took place at a time when the progressive countries of the West, England and France, had already begun to exhibit signs of capitalist imperialism. This meant that events in Russia were greatly influenced by foreign capital interests that ensured autocracy and the peasantry survived alongside the newly formed Russian bourgeoisie (p. 568). In Ocherk istorii truda v Rossii, originally published in 1924, Rozhkov goes on to explain how Russia’s capitalist development came to lag centuries behind the capitalist economies of countries like England and France. Essentially, he believed that unlike Western European countries, Russia’s commodity economy began by having to meet the demands of a very wide market (p. 623) and it did so by developing serfdom (p. 631). He added that the transition from a natural to a money economy in Russia began in the sixteenth century and continued right through to his day. Published the year of Lenin’s death, and the year Rozhkov was allowed to return to Moscow after being in exile in Pskov for about 18 months, Rozhkov concluded his work by stating his belief that the only way an ‘unorganised’, ‘incomplete and uncultured’ Russian working class was going to survive the revolutionary period and protect its gains was by defending socialism (p. 660). The selected works of Rozhkov is a timely volume, the content of which not only provides an excellent summary of Rozhkov’s theory of history and how it evolved in the three main periods of this important thinker’s life, but offers a fresh and thoughtprovoking perspective that contributes significantly to our understanding of Russian and Soviet historiography. The meticulous annotations by A. Iu. Morozov add valuable information about the text, making it easier for today’s specialist and non-specialist readers alike to appreciate the many references used throughout this invaluable collection. As a result of this long overdue publication, it will no longer be possible to ignore Rozhkov’s outstanding contribution to Russian social thought. John Gonzalez Rozhkov Historical Research Centre © 2011, John Gonzalez DOI: 10.1080/09546545.2011.570926
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