Gyula Szvak (red.): Samozvancy i samozvančestvo v Moskovii. Materialy meždunarodnogo naučnogo seminara (25 maia 2009 g., Budapešt) [Usurpatoren und Usurpation im Moskauer Reich. Vorträge eines wissenschaftlichen Tagung (Budapest, 25. Mai 2009). Budapešt: Russica Pannonicana, 2010. 197 S. ISBN: 978-963-7730-54-2

Gyula Szvak (red.): Samozvancy i samozvančestvo v Moskovii. Materialy meždunarodnogo naučnogo seminara (25 maia 2009 g., Budapešt) [Usurpatoren und Usurpation im Moskauer Reich. Vorträge eines wissenschaftlichen Tagung (Budapest, 25. Mai 2009). Budapešt: Russica Pannonicana, 2010. 197 S. ISBN: 978-963-7730-54-2.

Gyula Szvak, who has done so much to further international discussion of significant questions of Russian history, publishes here yet another volume of challenging academic papers. In his introduction, he rightly points out that pretenders have constituted a world-historical problem that can be approached scientifically. Then, in one of the contributions, Szvak suggests that the Russian people were not more stupid and credulous than others, but found themselves in particular circumstances, such as the presence of Cossacks, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. O. G. Usenko discerns three types of pretenders: those who kept their own name; ‘clowns under a mask’, assuming a title, and elusive phantoms. He goes on to investigate terminological, heuristic and methodological questions. Maureen Perrie distinguishes between inter-dynastic and intra-dynastic pretenders. She concludes that the question of legitimacy was decided relatively easily in both cases: the true tsar could readily be separated from usurpers, or protected from them. While N. M. Rogozhin gives emphasis to the material and ideological difficulties inherent in the formation of the Muscovite state in the seventeenth century, I. O. Tiumentsev concentrates on the origins of the pretender phenomenon at its beginning, stressing its necessity as a symbol for social discontent. Closing the focus, D. V. Liseitsev describes the prikaz apparatus during the reign of the first false Dmitrii and V. V. Dubovik scrutinises genealogical records of the pretender Timofei Akindinov. Finally, much more broadly, A. V. Buganov considers the socio-utopian ideas of the Russians, taking them up to Napoleonic and even Soviet times. Here, at least some mention might have been made of pretenders from the 1920s to the 1950s as chronicled by V. V. Alekseev and M. Iu. Nechaeva: Voskresshie Romanovy? [sic] K istorii samozvanchestva v Rossii XX veka. 2 toma. Ekaterinburg, 2000, 2002.

If Henry Tudor had not triumphed in the battle of Bosworth in 1485, his dynasty would not have lasted through the sixteenth century, and he himself would have been dismissed as a pretender. Catherine the Great would have been comparatively unknown had she not acquiesced in the murder of her husband and assumed a throne to which she had no title. In other words, the victors have indeed received more of a place in history than the losers, a balance which this book considerably redresses. It thus serves to indicate the similarity between pretenders and traitors as encapsulated by Sir Walter Raleigh at the beginning of the key seventeenth century: “Treason ne’er prospers, Here’s the reason, When it doth prosper, None dare call it treason.”

Paul Dukes, Aberdeen