Russia Through a Thousand Years
SCHWARTZ, HARRY
Russia Through a Thousand Years Russia: A History and an Interpretation. By Michael T. Florinsky. Macmillan. 1,511 pp. (2 vols.) $15.00. Reviewed by Harry Schwartz New York "Times" expert on...
...There will be many, for example, who will view his treatment of Ukrainian-Russian relations in the nineteenth century as the product of a "separatist," for he presents a picture of Russian double-dealing that should please even the most ardent Ukrainian nationalist...
...But that does not mean that his reading of history is necessarily correct, or that the historical lessons he draws from the experience up to 1917 are necessarily controlling today...
...I cannot certify that every fact is correct, that every interpretation is unchallengeable, or that every significant event is covered...
...But the ordinary American should not be deterred by the existence of these issues from dipping into one of the most important books on Russia ever published...
...Political affairs within Russia, foreign affairs, trends in cultural and economic life...
...Other groups like to explain Kerensky's failure by his personal incapacities or his "socialist" leanings...
...One can well believe the author when he says it took him two decades from this book's birth to its completion...
...Similarly astringent and likely to arouse disfavor among some groups is Professor Florinsky's treatment of the nationalities problem...
...These are harsh words which will be ill received by many in the ranks of professional policy-makers, exile politicians, and propagandists against Communism...
...Professor Florinsky concludes: "It seems reasonably clear in retrospect that what in 1917 was treason to the Allies and condonation of peasant lawlessness would have served, in the long run, the cause of democracy in Russia and throughout the world...
...Emperors and poets, geniuses and scoundrels, madmen and saints move through this book in the same motley array and illogical order in which they appeared in that most colorful chapter of humanity's saga, the history of the Russian people...
...It takes the reader from the founding of the Russian state in the ninth century to the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution more than a millennium later...
...The argument here can be stated briefly: Lenin won because his opponents, and Russia's Western friends, refused to face the facts...
...I am not a professional historian and make no pretense of competing with Professor Florinsky in his knowledge of Russian history...
...Such examples of going against the current could be multiplied, but the above are typical...
...It has by now become an article of faith in many circles that the development of the zemstvos (local government bodies) beginning in the 1850s, the pressures which created the Dumas after 1905, and the brief democratic government between March and November 1917 add up to a body of evidence which makes indubitable a Russian adherence to democracy to which the free world now can profitably appeal...
...Professor Florinsky's is an independent mind which refuses to follow the current political fashions or rewrite history to suit present ideological convenience...
...Debate on the issues raised in this book will undoubtedly go on for months and years among the professionals, particularly among academic historians and in exile circles...
...If Professor Florinsky is non-partisan, that does not mean he has no point of view...
...What that point of view is emerges unmistakably in his very final section, provocatively entitled "The 'Inevitability' of Bolshevism...
...But I can record that I have read no more illuminating history of Russia, none which struck me as more deliberately nonpartisan on the myriad historical issues which still divide political factions today, and certainly none more comprehensive or interesting to read...
...Moscow's Supreme Soviet is a fraud and a travesty on democratic institutions, but the mere fact that the Kremlin feels it necessary and useful to practice this fraud suggests that there may be some element in Soviet life which is not fully taken into account by Professor Florinsky's stricture on the "alien" character of "legality, constitutionality and democracy...
...Much has happened since 1917, but the roots of the post-1917 events are to be found in this narrative, and those roots will continue to play a role long after Malenkov and Khrushchev have joined Stalin...
...Kerensky should have made immediate peace and distributed the land to the peasants, for he should have recognized "that the notions of legality, constitutionality and democracy were alien to the Russian historical tradition, that the agrarian revolution could not be checked, and that the Army was unwilling to fight...
...these and other facets of the complex story are all reported with care, with understanding, and with reference to the most important sources available...
...Reviewed by Harry Schwartz New York "Times" expert on Russian affairs This is a remarkable work...
...Yet, the long journey is not arduous, for the author has combined ease of writing with great scholarship to produce a product that even the layman may read with pleasure as well as intellectual profit...
Vol. 37 • June 1954 • No. 26
