Edward Crankshaw was an expert on Russian history and this must be one of his finest works, erudite as well as highly readable and entertaining. Before the end of the Cold War this book should have been required reading for both fellow-travellers and hawks alike, showing as it does strains of Russian society which were to repeat themselves in the Soviet Union.
Crankshaw's account starts with the abortive Decembrist uprising in 1825 on the eve of the accession of Tsar Nicholas I to the throne, and ends with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in the February Revolution. About 400 pages encompass nearly 100 years of domestic and foreign affairs as Russia struggled to maintain her parity with other nations while trying to cope with suppressed dissent. The pace quickens toward the end of the book under Nicholas II, as this weak-willed man shook in the wind before a sudden wave of revolutionary violence. Crankshaw performs an admirable balancing act between portraying both the influential individuals of this period - not least the Tsars themselves - and the movements and social trends which sprang up, particularly in regard to industrialisation. The author writes from what might be called a "classic liberal" point of view, condoning neither autocracy nor revolutionaries but being all too aware of human weakness in his judgements. In fact he cites the lack of a concept of what used to be called original sin as one of the reasons for the failure of Herzen, for example, to grasp that the perfectibility of any human society must be an unattainable ideal, and by implication extends this judgement to both the Tsars (who regarded themselves as the repository of God-given wisdom in ruling Russia) and Lenin, who could not make even such a dubious claim but nevertheless regarded himself as the infallible instrument of revolution.
The book also sheds light on lesser known areas of history, or those where the Russian side has been little considered. For example, the crass incompetence of the Allied command of the Crimean war is well known, but few in the West realise how outside of Sevastopol (brilliantly defended by Totleben and his engineers) the Russian Army was equally abysmally led, with huge casualties. Similarly Crankshaw shows that despite the annihilation of the Russian Navy at Tsushima, the Russian cause in the East was by no means lost until the general in charge of Vladivostok cravenly gave up the city to the Japanese. Even then the Russians might have won had they played for time, for the Japanese had also suffered desperately on land. The little-known Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78 is also well covered. On the domestic front aspects of Russian life such as Nicholas I's military colonies and Alexander II's drive to emancipation of the serfs are also described and explained, and a number of neglected pre-revolutionary political figures such as A. A. Guchkov and P. Milyukov are also illuminated.
The casual reader will be carried along by Crankshaw's excellent vignettes of the leading actors in this drama, especially the Tsars: Nicholas I, a man more fascinated by the parade ground and the design of uniforms than by affairs of State, but who cruelly lacked the strategic talent to play the "Great Game"; Alexander II, now stubborn, now equivocating, one moment supporting reform and the next packing committees with its opponents; Alexander III, confident and upright but disastrously rigid and swayed by the reactionary ideologue Pobedonostsev; and most fatally, Nicholas II, a man who wanted little more than to be with his family but who was most unsuited to rule such a vast nation, constantly pressured by his uncomprehending German-born wife who was herself to come under the baleful influence of Rasputin. Other important players abound: the gentle tutor to Alexander II, Zhukovsky; the evil, nihilistic Nechayev, who was to form the basis for one of Dostoyevsky's most disturbing characters, the revolutionary Verkhovensky in The Devils; Witte and Stolypin, both autocrats themselves but trying to buy time for Russia to avert the looming tragedy; and the tragicomic figure of Goremykin, the time-serving Prime Minister whom the British Ambassador once encountered reading a pile of French novels, and who was to die at the hands of the St. Petersburg mob in 1918. One slight surprise is that there is little about Rasputin or the events of the First World War, partly because Crankshaw seems to regard the fateful outbreak in August 1914 as the coup de grace for the Romanovs. On the other hand he does show how Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans inflamed the situation in the years immediately preceding, and also shows how Rasputin really scandalised the establishment by effectively appointing rogues, fools and imbeciles at his own whim.
This is a good read for anyone interested in history in general and Russia in particular, and particularly anyone who has seen the film Nicholas and Alexandra, to which the author makes passing reference.
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