Myriad Designs and Legacies of Regret: Alfred J. Rieber's Early Articles

The corpus of Alfred Rieber's scholarly contributions ranges from the imperial to the Soviet period, encompassing institutional, social, and intellectual history, as well as the history of foreign policy, all replete with insights and challenging interpretations. This collection of articles shows the same breadth and expertise under the rubric The Imperial Russian Project: Autocratic Politics, Economic Development, and Social Fragmentation. The project's overarching goal is economic development. Rieber traces its uncertain fate from its inception with Peter the Great through the Petrine era and beyond, making his way through a formidable mass of materials to mark its successes and, more often, its failures in an unregenerate Russian social reality. He relies on a broad selection of published Russian and Western works, along with occasional archival sources relating to Moscow entrepreneurs. Along the way, pungent analyses lead to important, illuminating insights about processes he describes with such specificity that several chapters have the length and content of small books. The writing is fluent and clear, but the work requires close attention and some patience.¹ It is a book meant principally for specialists.

Of the 12 articles, 9 have been previously published, several of them with recent revisions. The earliest dates from 1977, the latest from 2004, except for his article "Social and Political Fragmentation," published in 2015, which presents a grand statement of his viewpoint as realized on the eve of World War I. In these articles, many of them scattered in out-of-the way journals and collections, Rieber elaborates the dominant themes of Russian history, united in a single-minded overall absorption with the concern for economic development and its formidable obstacles. In so doing, he bypasses current historiographical controversies on each period but sets them in the longue durée of his sweeping overview. So, for example, his initial chapter on Peter and his legacy, published in 1995, does not tarry with the varied interpretations of his reign but launches into an admiring account of his visionary policies and the later setbacks to his cause.

The volume reflects the focus of 20th-century historiography. The concern for empire, which dawned on us with the implosion of the Soviet Union, is therefore largely missing from this book; Rieber, of course, has written extensively about the subject since. He approaches his central themes armed with methodological concepts of the social sciences in vogue in the second half of the 20th century. Beginning with the notions of backwardness and modernization, he pursues their historical evolution by studying the advances of technology and the appropriation of Western ideas and methods in Russia. He invokes the concepts of interest group and bureaucratic factions when analyzing the politics of autocracy during the reform era and focuses on the social structure or absence of such as a deterrent to progressive change. In fact, he draws on these concepts sparingly, using them to illuminate developments under the autocracy—even though, as he acknowledges, the fit is approximate, as is usually the case in appropriating Western ideas and practices. Most important, he focuses on the individuals involved in these processes, using the approach of group biography and, at points, systematic prosopography. The book has a heavily biographical component, emphasizing the extent and nature of the shifts and character of personnel changes, as well as the hopes and disappointments of those involved in the successive projects to achieve what proved to be elusive goals. But Rieber does not engage the quantitative methods of studying changes in officialdom practiced earlier by P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Walter Pintner, and others.²

Yanni Kotsonis deserves great credit for conceiving and inspiring this volume and finding many of its articles. In an eloquent "Foreword," he observes that the state remains a dominant force in Rieber's narrative. "The most persistent category for Rieber ... is power as a generic, with autocracy as its historical manifestation in Russia in the imperial period." Power also [End Page...