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Rehabilitating Tsarism: The Imperial Russian State and Its Historians A Review Article

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Ronald Grigor Suny
Ronald Grigor Suny
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Abstract

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Type
CSSH Discussion
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , January 1989 , pp. 168 - 179
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1989

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References

The discussion of the literature in this essay was influenced by the papers and commentaries delivered at the Third Meeting of the National Seminar for the Study of Russian Society in the Twentieth Century, held in Philadelphia, 29–30 January 1983, and particularly by the introductory remarks of Michael Confino. Neither Professor Confino, however, my colleague Geoff Eley, Daniel Field, nor John Dewald, who read an earlier draft of this review, is responsible for the views or conclusions here presented.

1 Emmons, Terence, The Russian Landed Gentry and the Peasant Emancipation of 1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Field, Daniel, The End of Serfdom: Nobility and Bureaucracy in Russia, 1855–1861 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976)Google Scholar. Zaionchkovskii's, P. A. most important works dealing with the bureaucracy and autocracy include Krizis samoderzhaviia na rubezhe 1870–1880-x godov (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo moskovskogo universiteta, 1964)Google Scholar; Rossiiskoe samoderzhavie v kontse XIX stoletiia (Politicheskaia reaktsiia 80x-nachala 90-x godov) (Moscow: Mysl', 1970)Google Scholar; and Pravitel'stvennyi apparat samoderzhavnoi Rossii v XIX v. (Moscow: Mysl', 1978)Google Scholar. English translations: Jones, David R., ed. and trans., The Russian Autocracy under Alexander III (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1976);Google ScholarHamburg, Gary, ed. and trans., The Russian Autocracy in Crisis, 1878–1882 (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and a special issue of Soviet Studies in History, 18:2 (Fall, 1979).Google Scholar

2 Sternheimer, Stephen, “Administration for Development: The Emerging Bureaucratic Elite, 1920–1930,” in Russian Officialdom, Pintner, and Rowney, , eds., 343–45Google Scholar. Stemheimer demonstrates that among the holdovers were not just tsarist bureaucrats but people from private enterprise and local administrative agencies. As late as 1928, the proportion of holdovers in the Soviet bureaucracy was almost 28 percent. For a critical appraisal of the Pinter and Rowney collection, see Field, Daniel, “No Safety in Numbers,” Slavic Review, 40:2 (Summer, 1981), 273–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Raeff, Marc, “The Bureaucratic Phenomenon of Imperial Russia, 1700–1905,” American Historical Review, 84:2 (04 1979), 401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Zaionchkovskii, , Pravitel'stvennyi apparat, 221.Google Scholar

5 Troitskii, S. M., Russkii absoliutizm i dvorianstvo v XVIII veke: Formirovanie biurokratii (Moscow, 1974), 212–16.Google Scholar

6 Pintner, Walter M., “The Evolution of Civil Officialdom, 1755–1855,” in Russian Officialdom, Pintner, and Rowney, , eds., 201.Google Scholar

7 Zaionchkovskii, , Pravitel'stvennyi apparat, 221.Google Scholar

8 Pintner, and , Rowney, eds. Russian Officialdom, 378.Google Scholar

9 Raeff, , “Bureaucratic Phenomenon,” 409.Google Scholar

10 Orlovsky, Daniel T., “Recent Studies on the Russian Bureaucracy,” Russian Review, 35:4 (10 1976), 467.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Ibid.

12 Gerschenkron, Alexander, “Soviet Marxism and Absolutism,” Slavic Review, 30:4 (12 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 868 (quoted, for example, in Orlovsky, Limits of Reform, 215, n. 24). Perhaps the most explicit rejection of class analysis is made in Hamburg, G. M., Politics of the Russian Nobility, 1881–1905 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1984), where the author disaggregates the nobility as a social class and argues that its activities resembled interest politics rather than common class actions. At the same time, Hamburg sees the Russian state as a consultative bureaucratic system in which the nobility had substantial influence on the making of policy through patronage, the press, zemstva, noble corporate institutions, voluntary organizations, and even salons.Google Scholar

13 Skopol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 27. For Perry Anderson's view of the absolutist state as “the new political carapace of a threatened nobility,” see his Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974)Google Scholar. On the Marxist discussion of state, a convenient review can be found in Martin Carnoy, The State and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

14 Orlovsky, , “Recent Studies,” 467.Google Scholar

15 Lincoln, , In the Vanguard of Reform, 207.Google Scholar

16 Orlovsky, , Limits of Reform, 11.Google Scholar

17 Whelan, , Alexander III and the State Council, 198.Google Scholar

18 Orlovsky, , Limits of Reform, 125.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., 7.

20 Raeff, , Understanding Imperial Russia, 169.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., 182.

22 Ibid., 186.

23 Ibid., 224.

24 Crummey, , Aristocrats and Servitors, 6.Google Scholar

25 Meehan-Waters, , Autocracy and Aristocracy, 92.Google Scholar

26 A useful distinction has been made in the Marxist literature on the state, following the usage by Nicos Poulantzas, between the dominant class in society and the class of actual governors of a state. Though the terms differ from writer to writer, the distinction between the dominant social class and the ruling political elite has opened up the discussion of how state officials “represent” the interests of the dominant class. Poulantzas, for example, has argued that the state represents the general political interests, rather than specific economic interests, of the dominant class. Fred Block has carried the emphasis on the relative autonomy of the state to the point of rejecting completely the idea of a class-conscious ruling class and seeing the “state managers” as acting in their specific interests while preserving the over-all form of the social system.

For more on these approaches, see Poulantzas, Nicos, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1974)Google Scholar; idem, review of Ralph Miliband's The State in Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969Google Scholar) in New Left Review, no. 58 (November-December 1969), 67–78; Miliband's reply and other essays in Ralph Miliband, Class Power and State Power: Political Essays (London: Verso, 1983)Google Scholar; and Block, Fred, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule: Notes on the Marxist Theory of the State,” Socialist Revolution, no. 33 (05-06 1977), 6–28.Google Scholar

27 Manning, , Crisis of the Old Order, 357.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., 371.

29 This analysis of the final crisis of imperial Russia, which brings together government and the landed elite, came out of the long-running seminar at Columbia University led by Haimson, Leopold H. and was first systematically presented in the collaborative volume edited by Haimson: The Politics of Rural Russia, 1905–1914 (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1979)Google Scholar. Other related works include Edelman, Robert, Gentry Politics on the Eve of the Russian Revolution: The Nationalist Party, 1907–1917 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and Hosking, Geoffrey A., The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma, 1907–1914 (London, 1973).Google Scholar

30 Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, Hoare, Quinton and Smith, Geoffrey Nowell, eds. and trans. (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 238.Google Scholar

31 Among works still in dissertation form, one might refer to Fallows, Thomas S., “Forging the Zemstvo Movement: Liberalism and Radicalism on the Volga, 1890–1905” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1981)Google Scholar; Wcislo, Francis William, “Bureaucratic Reform in Tsarist Russia: State and Local Society, 1881–1914” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1984)Google Scholar; Taranovski, Theodore, “The Politics of Counter-Reform: Autocracy and Bureaucracy in the Reign of Alexander III, 1881–1894” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1976)Google Scholar; Verner, Andrew M., “Nicholas II and the Role of the Autocrat during the First Russian Revolution, 1904–1907” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1983)Google Scholar. Recent books on state and society include: Becker, Seymour, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia (De Kalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Macey, David A. J., Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861–1906: The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms (De Kalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and John Le Donne, Ruling Russia: Politics and Administration in the Age of Absolutism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).Google Scholar