Manfred Hildermeier: Geschichte Russlands. Vom Mittelalter bis zur Oktoberrevolution. München: Beck, 2013. 1504 S., 11 Ktn., 36 Tab., 1 Graph. = Historische Bibliothek der Gerda Henkel Stiftung. ISBN: 978-3-406-64551-8

Manfred Hildermeier: Geschichte Russlands. Vom Mittelalter bis zur Oktoberrevolution. München: Beck, 2013. 1504 S., 11 Ktn., 36 Tab., 1 Graph. = Historische Bibliothek der Gerda Henkel Stiftung. ISBN: 978-3-406-64551-8.

What Is Europe to Us?
Russia and the World in Manfred Hildermeier’s Geschichte Russlands

When Fedor Dostoevskii famously asked “What Is Asia to Us?” after General Skobelev stormed the Central Asian fortress of Geok Tepe in 1881, he was really musing about his country’s relationship to Europe. Despite having first been posed nearly two centuries ago, the question of Russia and the West continues to intrigue. Indeed, during the two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union it has become all the more urgent as its heir continues to seek its place in the world. Even “Snob”, the crossbreed glossy monthly lifestyle magazine cum “thick” journal targeted at well-heeled Russians, recently entered into the fray with Nikolai Uskov’s column, “Why Russia Lagged behind Europe” (Nikolai Uskov: Pochemu Rossiia otstala ot Evropy, part 1, in: Snob (26.12.2013), http://www.snob.ru/selected/entry/69908; part 2, in: Snob (03.01.2014), http://www.snob.ru/selected/entry/70174. While it draws a different conclusion, the new history of pre-revolutionary Russia by Manfred Hildermeier likewise contributes to the discussion – albeit more exhaustively.

Manfred Hildermeier is a professor at Göttingen best known for his histories of the Soviet Union and the Russian Revolution, although he has also written prolifically about earlier topics. Aimed at the non-scholarly “layman”, his “Geschichte Russlands” is the first important survey of Russia’s past in German since the late Günther Stökl’s authoritative “Russische Geschichte”, which initially appeared in 1962. Given the momentous changes in Russian historiography after 1991, its publication is timely; “Geschichte Russlands” may well take the place of its predecessor as the standard textbook for his compatriots. At the same time, its considerable length – over 1300 pages of densely-packed text – is likely to limit its appeal to only the most determined and patient readers outside of the classroom.

Hildermeier makes his intention clear from the outset. His key question (“Gretchenfrage”) concerns Russia’s continental affinity, especially with regard to its “backwardness” vis-à-vis the West. The author’s answer is unqualified: “Russia’s past predominantly belongs to European history.” Rejecting any sonderweg, Eurasian or otherwise, he adds, “Despite more or less permanent peculiarities, the tsardom became a European power.” (p. 24) It is in this context that Hildermeier discusses Russian foreign relations up to 1917.

At the very start of its recorded history, Russia’s Kievan ancestor was closely linked to the West. After all, Varangian adventurers founded the state sometime during the ninth century in search of a trade route from their Scandinavian homeland to Byzantium. Conversion to Orthodoxy about a hundred years later put Kiev in Constantinople’s Greek orbit, which would set it apart from it from its Latin East European neighbours in the coming centuries. Nevertheless, commercial and dynastic ties also bound Rus’ to the West. According to Hildermeier, the East Slavic realm combined Swedish and Byzantine elements, thereby becoming a “‘hybrid’ … much like France was an amalgam of the relics of Rome’s political order and Germanic personal ties.” (p. 121) While Kiev’s princes warred and traded with Pechenegs, Polovtsians and others to the East, their relations with the Orient at the time had little durable influence.

Of course, the cataclysmic Mongol onslaught in the early thirteenth century did have a major impact on Russia’s past. Yet, taking issue with Eurasianist historians like George Vernadsky, Hildermeier does not detect many direct traces of the Mongol Yoke. Even before Batu Khan’s onslaught, the Eastern Slavic political centre of gravity had been shifting from Kiev deeper into the forests north-east. Despite the principality’s relatively humble origins, Moscow eventually came out on top thanks to its collaboration with the Golden Horde. Nevertheless, “the structure and character of the Muscovite state developed autochtonously – according to its own traditions.” (p. 128) Hildermeier categorically rejects any notions of post-Mongol Russia as an Oriental despotism; There was no “legacy of Genghis Khan”.

Foreign relations during the earlier period get short shrift, but Hildermeier does pay more attention to the subject from Ivan IV’s reign on. The emphasis here is on Europe. As the author explains, “[Russia’s] ambitions and border lay in the West, colonisation and the frontier were in the East.” (p. 280) There are two pages about Ivan’s conquest of Kazan, some mention of further expansion in Siberia through the age of Catherine II, as well as a brief section devoted to “compensatory imperialism” in Central and East Asia during the nineteenth century. However, aside from Ottoman Turkey, which after all until the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 was also a European power, tsarism’s Eastern diplomacy gets little coverage. Even the latter discussion of Asian expansion is mostly concerned with comparing St Petersburg’s colonialism to that of the other European powers during the era of high imperialism.

Beginning with Ivan’s “lethal, indeed fatal” decades-long Livonian campaigns during the sixteenth century’s second half, the treatment of relations with the West, both in war and peace, is refreshingly thorough. Whereas diplomatic history has long been the poor relation of Russian studies in North America, Hildermeier gives the topic the attention it deserves. It is the story of a state that emerges from relative isolation on Europe’s periphery in the late Middle Ages to full membership in the “Pentarchy” (along with Britain, France, Prussia and Austria) of the most powerful states by the eighteenth century, thanks largely to the achievements of Peter I and Catherine II, and reaching its zenith at the start of the nineteenth as the virtual arbiter of continental politics after defeating Napoleon. Despite its humiliation during the Crimean War at mid-century, the empire continued to play a leading role among the chancelleries of Europe until its demise in 1917.

The basic pattern of Russia’s relationship with Europe, as Hildermeier repeatedly stresses, is one from “transfer” to “integration” (“Verflechtung”). When Ivan III first invited the Bolognese architect Aristotle Fioravanti to help build the Kremlin’s Cathedral of the Dormition in 1474, Muscovy was an unschooled younger brother of the European family. By the last decade of its existence, Imperial Russia was a mature adult: Its vibrant culture was a major player in Europe’s arts and letters. St Petersburg was a modern metropolis, in the same league as Paris, London and Berlin. Even the rigidly autocratic political order, which had initially set the tsardom apart from the West was modifying as a civil society found its voice and the Duma heralded a nascent parliamentary constitutionalism. While the course of Russia’s reintegration into European civilisation was a little different, Hildermeier’s schema recalls that of the traditional “liberal school”, which saw the ancien régime as well on the way to becoming a modern state (in the Western sense) had it not been for the tragic accident of the Bolshevik coup in October 1917. The Western historiography of Russia, it seems, has come full circle, at least at Göttingen.

Hildermeier is careful to avoid clichés in his survey. Thus he is reluctant to exaggerate Russia’s backwardness. As he points out, Western accounts of Muscovy described “customs, behaviours and norms that one or two centuries earlier … they would have encountered in their own culture”. The author suggests that in certain respects pre-Petrine habits were superior, such as “frequent visits to the sauna when in Europe’s aristocratic courts perfume replaced bathing” (p. 382) or the fact that Russian gentlemen did not carry swords on the street, unlike their Renaissance counterparts. By the same token, he reminds us that Russia’s turn to the West had already begun well before Peter’s reign, while Nicholas I laid the groundwork for Alexander II’s “Great Reforms”.

On the whole, Hildermeier’s treatment of Russian foreign relations is balanced and contains few surprises. He makes the intriguing suggestion that, despite its shortcomings, Alexander I’s “Holy Alliance” anticipated the United Nations as a means to avoid conflict through peaceful negation. My only reservation concerns the author’s apparent nostalgia for the “Coalition of the Three Black Eagles” of St Petersburg, Berlin and Vienna. By contrast, he characterises Russia’s growing intimacy with France and Britain in the years leading up to the Great War as “unnatural”. The implication seems to be that, because of their similar political orders, the Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs made more logical partners with the Romanovs. But there was a clear geopolitical logic to the new constellation, even if the ultimate result was catastrophic. By the late nineteenth century, Russia was engaged in a bitter rivalry over the Balkans with the Dual Monarchy, while Wilhelmine Germany’s growing military prowess inevitably aroused concern in its neighbour to the east. It is one of the very few quibbles I have with Hildermeier’s magisterial “Geschichte Russlands”.

David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, St. Catharines, ON, Kanada