Unity, Disintegration, and Monarchy: Romanov Russia in Recent Scholarship

As is often noted, the wave of research following the collapse of the Soviet Union raised a variety of issues about the Russian past that require interpretation. Among the most popular of these nowadays are those concerned with Russia's unity—real and symbolic—and its disintegration, including consideration of what might have been done to prevent the events of 1917 or 1991. The search for answers in broad interpretive studies ultimately leads back to the history of the imperial period. Curiously enough, such fundamental causal factors as economics, foreign policy, and the activities of the Bolsheviks are often taken out of the equation. Scholars are rather reconsidering the deeper foundations of the country and its order, not least the supreme power that held together the enormous country and shaped its political, social, and cultural life. The three books under review exemplify this kind of research. They all address the issue of the monarchy as the supreme power and offer various explanations for both the stability and the instability of late Muscovite and imperial Russia.

For the British historian Lindsey Hughes, the monarchy was the dynasty. In effect, her book serves as an affirmation of the words once uttered by the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue and chosen by Hughes as an epigraph to one of the last chapters of her book: "The whole collective life of the Russian nation is so to speak summed up in tsarism. Outside tsarism there is nothing" (199). While this conclusion is not entirely new, Hughes's method of demonstrating it brings to life a beautiful story. Tsarism, as seen here, is not just a state and an administrative system, but rather a ruling family, people of flesh and blood, and an assemblage of imperial symbols without which the country could not live.

The monograph was published after Lindsey Hughes's death in the spring of 2007. As her husband, Jim Cutshall, remarks, "Most of the text ... was written when she already knew she was dying." One cannot but see here Hughes's conscious intention to assemble the whole store of her profound knowledge, acquired while investigating different issues of Russian social and cultural history, and to reconsider it in the context of the great volume of recent research produced by others.¹

Hughes begins by arguing that "for much of its existence the Romanov dynasty was strong rather than weak"; its "style of rulership represented a variation on Byzantine and European models, rather than a deviant 'Oriental' form," and for much of the period that the dynasty was in power, there was "little evidence of popular pressure to abolish or even limit autocracy" (3). Hughes believes that the history of the Russian Empire is the story of the Romanovs' historical success in controlling the biggest country in Europe—a success that is continuously neglected by recent scholarship.

Hughes regards the flow of Russian literature on the history of the dynasty in the 1990s to early 2000s as "Romanovamania," which is certainly true. Post-Soviet Romanov historiography started in the late 1980s with a boom in the biography of members of the ruling family. Readers were offered isolated chapters on each family member, in some cases put together later under one cover.² Whatever the quality of the individual articles, when combined they did not offer a picture of the whole dynasty, even if this was the goal. Hughes opposed this kind of approach and instead posited a certain unity and integrity to the dynasty.

More recently, the situation has been changing, as Hughes herself implies in the last pages...