Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach by Choi Chatterjee (review)

After the collapse of the Soviet Empire, it seemed to many in the West that history had reached its end and liberal democracy and capitalism were the future of mankind. Some even romantically toyed with the idea of "a world without Russia."¹ However, the recent tragedy in Ukraine has reminded everyone that the euphoric announcement of the death of the Soviet Empire in 1991 was a premature move. As Choi Chatterjee beautifully puts it, "Collapsing empires are dangerous places that leave treacherous eddies and shoals in their wake" (P. 145). Chatterjee's book appears to be a timely read for anyone who seeks to understand Russia's continuing relevance in the world. Yet this is not a book about Russia's intellectual and cultural achievements throughout centuries, its civilizational contribution to mankind and the modern world, or its "struggle for survival" in the world arena of Great Powers.² Rather, it is a comparative history of British and Russian imperial-isms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as the afterlives of these two hegemonic empires. In this sense, the title of the book does not fully capture the comparative dimension of the book's structure.

The highlight of the book is its comparative biographical approach coupled with structural analysis. Each of the seven chapters, arranged chronologically, juxtaposes a pair of characters from either the center or the periphery of the British and the Russian/Soviet Empires and situates the protagonists' lives and their ideas in the broader historical context. Chatterjee has followed three principles in her selection of the cast of characters. First, the characters have to "exemplify an important historical event or process that distinguished the empire of their origin" and "provide important insight into the era" (P. 9). Second, the characters' biographies should demonstrate complexity, even contradictions and moral ambiguity in their thinking over time. Third, the characters would represent visions of the world that challenged the modernization paradigm of the industrial age. Hence, the book includes a somewhat unusual yet fascinating constellation of writers, journalists, historians, revolutionaries, theologians, educators, and environmental activists: Leo Tolstoy and Rabindranath Tagore, Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaia and Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Vasily Klyuchevsky and G. M. Trevelyan, Emma Goldman and M. N. Roy, Mukhamet Shayakhmetov and Wangari Maathai, Zainab Al-Ghazali and Urszula Dudziak, Anna Politkovskaya and Arundhati Roy. Each of them grappled with the industrial modernity and the imperial or national space they inhabited in their own ways. Overall, Chatterjee's narration succeeds in giving "a flesh and blood dimension to abstract historical processes" (P. 8) and balances well the perennial tension between structure and agency in history writing. In this process, she also brilliantly synthesizes and highlights some of the core themes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century world history: the complex relationship between empire and nation-state, the state and the individual, the ideological and historiographical construction of the socialism versus capitalism binary, as well as modern understandings of selfhood, subjectivity, and humanity's relationship with nature.

The book brings historiographical interventions on two fronts. First, Chatterjee interrogates the origins and impact of the dominant explanatory schema in Russian and Soviet studies, namely, the liberal West versus the autocratic Russia binary. How did Russia become the quintessential illiberal Other? Second, Chatterjee offers a revisionist account of twentieth-century history, especially that of the Cold War, which is usually narrated through a series of binaries such as socialism versus capitalism, the right versus the left, as well as the East–West or North–South divide. Regarding the first point, Chatterjee argues that undue emphasis on Russia's despotism and unfreedom became a powerful trope and "a brilliant political and ideological maneuver" that "deflected attention from the patently similar patterns of exploitation and oppression in the British Empire" (P. 167). Without denying the brutality and violence inflicted by the Russian state, Chatterjee contends that Russian imperialism was not sui generis when compared to other European empires...