A Story of Tension and Collapse

...In short, the subversive dialectic of empire engenders the conditions for its own demise...

...As in his earlier work, Hosking proposes a unifying interpretive theme: that Russia was far more successful in constructing an imperial identity than in envisioning a nation evolving from its diversity...

...Wisely, though, the author does not overemphasize ethnographic generalities and thereby avoids the kind of transhistorical explanations of behavior often found in fatalistic accounts of Russian political culture...

...Hosking begins with the broad structures of Russian life—the geography of the boundless steppe, the unforgiving climate, the difficulty of cultivation, and the defenseless frontiers—before moving on to discuss the peasant hut, traditional diet and drinking habits...

...The Second World War did more than any other event to crystallize Russian nationhood," Hosking asserts...

...In any event, Russia is not so much doomed (a current favorite expression of some Russians) as it is likely to err once again...

...Politically, socially, and economically," he writes, "Russia is still best understood as a network of interlocking patron-client relations...

...In his new book Geoffrey Hosking, Professor of Russian History at the University of London, nevertheless attempts such a dispassionate account...

...Meanwhile, backwardness, size, vulnerability to foreign attack, and domestic disorder, as well as the absence of civil society, made it likely that the imperial government would be authoritarian...

...Though the new course cannot be easily foreseen, a look at the trials of the past provides some guidance on paths better not taken...

...Hosking does, however, endorse the dichotomous view of Asia and the West that has so troubled Russian intellectuals...

...The empire's survival depended on stability both at the bottom and the top...

...He effectively points out, too, that much of the social linkage in Russia was based on personal ties, rather than onmore abstract law-based relationships or state organizations...

...Hosktng's story of tsarist and Soviet collapse is more pathetic than tragic...

...This is one reason why post-Soviet Russia has such difficulty in generating its own sense of civic community...

...The vastness of the canvas, the sheer distance that separates its monumental cultural achievements from the banal brutalities of its politics, the scale of its struggle against fascism, the whimper as the Soviet Union crumbled—all this and more make it nearly impossible to chronicle Russia's past with the equanimity and neutrality that ought to mark scholarship...

...Hosking believes the three choices remain open today, even as Russians struggle over the words to their national anthem and the colors of the flag they will salute...

...Still, Russia seemed to have a permanent "identity crisis...

...The author of two previous period surveys—The First Socialist Society (1985) and Russia: People and Empire 1557-1917(1997)—he is judicious in his considerations of historiographical controversies and generous in hisjudgments, conveying sympathy without excusing failures...

...were derived in large part from Asiatic practice," though Russia's cultural elite was oriented toward the West...

...The author might have emphasized amajor difference between empires and nations...

...There is a pettiness to the leaders who tried to govern or transform Russia...

...But the contradictions between state-sponsored cultural development of non-Russians on the one hand, and a more universal program of economic development on the other, created a greater national consciousness among Soviet republics that erupted once tight control was loosened by Mikhail S. Gorbachev...

...Only in Soviet times, most dramatically in the resistance to the Nazi invasion, was the State able to link "civilian and military, empire and local community" in ways that the tsars never could...

...Instead, they tend to look to good fortune to help them, while always fearing that 'evil spirits' may strike at any time...

...From these evident and uncontested observations he slips into a discussion of propensities...

...For much of its history, it was an underdeveloped empire held together by the Orthodox Church and by loyalty to the dynasty...

...Therein lies what might be seen as the great irony of both tsarism and the USSR: No matter how the regimes were originallyjustified—by conquest, divine right, the mantle of history, the vanguard of the working class—once the people acquired a level of development, understanding and aspiration, the inequitable, hierarchical rule of an imposed authority could no longer be sustained...

...Apparently Russians are capable of great exertion for a short period yet are not, as the great 19th-century historian Vasily O. Klyuchevsky noted, given to "steady, moderate, measured work...

...It could not decide whether it would be the center of an Eastern Orthodox ecumene (the Third Rome desired by the Church), a national home for the Eastern Slavs (an option favored by conservative politicians and the PanSlavs), or a multiethnic empire with an overarching civic identity (the usual stance of the monarchs and bureaucratic nobles...

...We are further told that Russians are "disinclined to plan ahead or to invest steady calculated effort in any enterprise...

...Writing with enviable lucidity, he sets out to dispel the current negativeness and general ambivalence that characterize both Western and native assessments of Russia's role in the world...

...Most of them appear to have been out of touch with the enduring nature of the people...

...He claims confidently that most of "Russia's demotic sociopolitical institutions...

...A decade later, how it will conceive its new identity remains unclear...

...Hosking employs the "national characteristic" to explain "why Russians make good soldiers, provided they are properly led," but neglects to suggest how this distinguishes them from anyone else...

...According to Hosking, these enduring mentalities, including a notoriously xenophobic sense of us and them, insider and outsider, have their origins in the "tightly knit and interdependent community" of the Russian village...

...His general argument is compelling, despite a fuzziness about what he means by "nation" and "empire...

...He appears to be saying that a gigantic, ethnically diverse, 19th-century Russian state, with deep divisions between rulers and ruled, prevented the formation of a "large, territorially extended and socially differentiated aggregate of people who share a sense of a common fate or of belonging together" (to borrow the definition of nation in his Russia: People and Empire...

...Indeed, the very success of tsarist modernizers and of Communist revolutionaries in creating urban, literate, mobile constituents made it impossible to keep those subjects from becoming full citizens...

...Unable to establish full nationhood within the framework of empire, the Russian people now had a unique opportunity to re-imagine itself...

...author, "The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR and the Successor States" Russia's history, more than that of almost any other country, lends itself to passion and polemic...

...At least in principle, the former are hierarchical and inequitable in the relationship between the rulers and the people, while the latter are egalitarian and participatory, based on popular sovereignty and a notion of citizenship...