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Reviewed by:
  • Pokhody russkikh voisk pri Ivane III (The Campaigns of the Russian Armies under Ivan III), and: Warfare, State, and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500-1700, and: Ivan the Terrible: A Military History, and: Starodubskaia voina, 1534-1537: Iz istorii russko-litovskikh otnoshenii (The Starodub War, 1534-37: From the History of Russian-Lithuanian Relations), and: Moskovskie vybornye polki soldatskogo stroia v nachal'nyi period svoei istorii, 1656-1671 gg. (The Muscovite Select Regiments of the Infantry in the Early Phase of Their History, 1656-71)
  • Carol B. Stevens
Iurii Georgievich Alekseev , Pokhody russkikh voisk pri Ivane III (The Campaigns of the Russian Armies under Ivan III). 464 pp. St. Petersburg: Peterburgskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, 2007. ISBN 5288041914.
Brian L. Davies , Warfare, State, and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500-1700. 272 pp. New York: Routledge, 2007. ISBN 0415239850, $115.00 (cloth); 0415239868, $39.95 (paper).
Alexander Filjushkin , Ivan the Terrible: A Military History. 304 pp. London: Frontline Books, 2008. ISBN 1848325043. $50.00.
Mikhail Markovich Krom , Starodubskaia voina, 1534-1537: Iz istorii russko-litovskikh otnoshenii (The Starodub War, 1534-37: From the History of Russian-Lithuanian Relations). 139 pp. Moscow: Rubezhi XXI, 2008. ISBN 5347000043.
Aleksandr Vital'evich Malov , Moskovskie vybornye polki soldatskogo stroia v nachal'nyi period svoei istorii, 1656-1671 gg. (The Muscovite Select Regiments of the Infantry in the Early Phase of Their History, 1656-71). 622 pp. Moscow: Drevlekhranilishche, 2006. ISBN 5936461068.

Muscovite military history is beginning to reflect a new and healthy diversity of methods and approaches. For military history, the constraints of an earlier historiography are not solely those imposed by nationalist, Marxist, or Cold War paradigms. Rather, the field has disproportionately produced grand overviews of military systems. A significant majority of studies of any scope has explicitly or implicitly compared Russian arms to a generalized European military "gold standard" or to particular European military practices. Where military Europeanization has dominated Russian military history, it has also discouraged historians from treating the history of Russia's military encounters to the east and south as an integral part of the examination; Peter I's battle on the Pruth is but one prominent example. The recent historiography, by [End Page 889] contrast, includes practitioners of the New Military History—the analysis of the broader framework of military change, including social structures, political attitudes, and generally the relationships of military institutions and attitudes toward society at large. Nevertheless, the Russian field continues, as it has for generations, to be influenced by magisterial tomes on military tactics and systems and by a deep-seated inclination to compare Russian arms to a rather fictive ideal of the "modern" West European military.

The volumes under review here offer a sampling of more recent and diverse approaches to the study of military events. These approaches, including careful source examination and a reevaluation of important concepts such as "Europeanization," provide the opportunity to discuss military change in new ways: first, by including new conflicts, developments, and ideas (especially those without an explicitly Europeanizing agenda) in the existing understanding of military change, and second, by increasingly integrating military history into discussions of Muscovite state making and social evolution. In short, the new approaches make military affairs a more integral element of Muscovite history writing as a whole.

Iurii Alekseev, author of Pokhody russkikh voisk pri Ivane III, is not generally seen as a military historian at all. In writing about Ivan III's military campaigns, he uses military developments to trace the process of political consolidation in Moscow. There is much about the work that is extremely helpful and satisfying. The author follows several different kinds of military events, from confrontations locally instigated and launched by the forces of individual cities or regions, even by town militias (gorodskie opolcheniia), to those coordinated with and instigated by the forces of the grand prince. In the early years of Ivan's reign, military practice is shown to have been quite ad hoc: local princes and principalities undertook military actions without much consultation with the developing Muscovite center. In 1463, for example, the actions of Pskov's own troops and their Muscovite leadership were not coordinated with the apparently spontaneous and nearly...

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