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381 Ab Imperio, 4/2007 Andrew GENTES William C. Fuller, Jr., The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006). xiii+286 pp. Maps, Photographs, Bibliography, Index. ISBN: 978-0-8014-4426-5 (hardcover edition). Since the end of the Cold War the causes for tsarism’s collapse have received greater scrutiny. Studies by Peter Gatrell, Rex Wade, and Orlando Figes, for example, address numerous factors besides the autocratic turpitude or revolutionary deviance traditionally emphasized.1 Through his analysis of two notorious trials and their complicated antecedents , Fuller now adds fantasies of treason to these factors. He begins his book with a dramatic account of the March 1915 field court-martial and conviction of Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Nikolaevich Miasoedov, which he links to the second judicial travesty these treasonous fantasies produced – a kangaroo court’s September 1917 conviction of war minister General VladimirAleksandrovich Sukhomlinov. Each man was charged with treason: the former immediately hanged; the latter sentenced to penal labor for life but pardoned in mid-1918 by the Bolshevik government. Wasting no time basking in the Communists’ provisional largesse, Sukhomlinov escaped to Germany, where he lived in poverty until freezing to death on a Berlin park bench eight years later. These dramatic episodes form the center of a sticky ball Fuller proceeds to unravel . This is no mean feat, since the evidential trail wends through memoirs , letters, second-hand accounts, contemporary newspaper stories, and archival memoranda to acquaint us with scoundrels, nymphomaniacs, double agents, lotharios, lesbians, desperate businessmen, still-moredesperate gamblers, mistresses, back-stabbing politicians, the weakwilled tsar himself, and the selfaggrandizing Alexander Kerenskii, all with something to hide and none completely forthcoming in their relationships with either Miasoedov or Sukhomlinov. Of this pair, Miasoedov is the more interesting. A natural risktaker , he was victim to both his own hubris and forces of circumstance. After joining the gendarmerie he was posted in 1894 to Verzhbolovo, a railroad stop on the border with East Prussia through which goods and intelligence passed and where foreign dignitaries briefly paused. Miasoedov was therefore well1 Peter Gatrell. Russia’s First World War:ASocial and Economic History. Harlow, 2005; Rex Wade. The Russian Revolution, 1917. 2nd ed. Cambridge, 2005; Orlando Figes. A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution. New York, 1996. 382 Рецензии/Reviews placed to acquire the information necessary for his job, to meet the contacts he needed to further his private business schemes, and to fête Russian and foreign bigwigs to heighten his self-importance. Among other coups he got himself invited to Wilhelm II’s annual hunt (which Fuller reminds us consisted of the kaiser and his party standing on a wooden deck and blasting away at fauna chased towards them by servants), and in so doing acquired a reputation beyond both his social and geographical station in life. This particular “friendship,” alongside those with other Germans and, notably , Jews, figured prominently in the circumstantial case that led to his execution. Miasoedov was by then further tainted by charges made in 1906 that he was dealing in contraband . This charge did not stick, but it did force him into resigning his commission. He began working for a Jewish-owned steamship company but money was tight, not least because he was supporting a mistress who incidentally plied her time as a prostitute while urging him to leave his wife. The Miasoedovs’ misery only increased when their eight year-old son was crushed to death by an elevator. Miasoedov’s fate soon intertwined with that of Sukhomlinov, who “by late 1906… had consolidated a reputation as a philo-Semite and something of a liberal, making him an object of loathing on the extreme nationalist right” (P. 46). Like so many of Fuller’s protagonists Sukhomlinov led a kind of double-life writing short-stories and essays under the pseudonym “Ostap Bondarenko.” But his métier was as a politician, his official promotions due largely to his charm and convivial hospitality. Fuller adds that he was a womanizer like Miasoedov , but offers little evidence of this. Nevertheless, the sexagenarian general took extraordinary measures to win the much younger Ekaterina Viktorovna Butovich away...

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