Three Histories and Some Magic Tales

Russia's People of Empire

Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present

Stephen M. Norris and Willard Sunderland, eds. (Indiana University Press, $35)

Should you find yourself so unlucky to be in the company of someone arguing for a "Russia for Russians" or similar nationalistic nonsense, you would do well to have this book in your arsenal. Not for flinging at the fool, of course, but for citation and reasoned argument. As if that gets one very far these days...

In any event, as this book makes patently clear in its 31 biographical essays, Russia is a complex, multi-ethnic state founded, shaped and expanded by rulers, leaders, thinkers and artists who came from a wide variety of nations, confessions and traditions. Yes, we all know about Catherine the Great (German) and Stalin (Georgian), but there have been a broad variety of souls, from Lomonosov, Gogol and Borodin, to Bagration, Shamil and Mannerheim, who have influenced all aspects of Russian culture, science and politics by injecting influences from other cultures and traditions.

The objective of this collection is to use the personal, microhistoric approach allowed by biography to "open up a view on the long-running effects of what it meant to live in a densely multicultural neighborhood." That the volume begins with biographies of Ermak Timofeyevich – the Cossack who opened up Siberia, and Simeon Bekbulatovich – the Tatar prince that Ivan IV installed on the Kremlin throne for a year, and ends with the writer Boris Akunin and the Kremlin puppeteer Vladislav Surkov, gives a sense of the breadth of its coverage.

It would be silly to expect that the fullness of Russian cultural diversity could be expressed in a single 350-page book, and the editors well admit they have no such pretensions. But it is an invaluable start down the road to grasping the often sadly overlooked diversity that Russians will joke about ("scratch a Russian and you find a Tatar") but rarely embrace (contrast the continued discrimination against Tatars with the reality that Tatar princes and descendants of the Mongols were instrumental in the expansion of the Russian empire under Ivan IV).

Each biography here opens a door onto unknown pages of history. Yes, there are biographies of the sort of better-known luminaries enumerated above. But the strength of this book is how these are balanced by biographies of unknown souls who had great influence or whose lives signified the times they lived in, from a fake Circassian princess, to a Central Asian poet, to an itinerant pretender to the Russian throne.

When the United States Invaded Russia

Woodrow Wilson's Siberian Disaster

Carl J. Richard (Rowman & Littlefield, $34)

The history of US-Russian relations is littered with forgotten episodes that had a significant impact on the trajectory of those relations. Without question, the US invasion of Russia in 1918-1920 ranks in the top tier of such events, given the degree to which it is unknown to the vast majority of Americans, and how it profoundly affected the course of Russian-American relations during the twentieth century.

Indeed, the influential historian and diplomat George Kennan felt not only that this ignominious episode made a fair post-WWI settlement impossible (which of course started the clock ticking on WWII), but that it tainted US-Russian relations and helped cement the Bolsheviks in power:

Never, surely, have countries contrived to show themselves so much at their worst as did the Allies in Russia from 1917 to 1920. Among other things, their efforts served everywhere to compromise the enemies of the Bolsheviki and to strengthen the Communists themselves. So important was this factor that I think it may well be questioned whether Bolshevism would ever have prevailed throughout Russia had the Western governments not aided its progress to power by this ill-conceived interference.

It is this very issue, the folly of foreign intervention and interference in the affairs of another nation, that drove Richard to focus on this sadly forgotten episode (he focuses just on our Siberian intervention, not on that in the North). It is one he feels "can teach us valuable lessons about the extreme difficulties inherent in counterinsurgency campaigns and thus the general inadvisability of interventions."

The US decision to intervene in Russia, Richard argues, was driven initially by President Woodrow Wilson's desire to re-open the Eastern Front in WWI, to bring Russia back into the war against Germany. But, as time and the intervention dragged on, the original purpose was overtaken by events, and mission creep led to new, inappropriate justifications, to ill-considered, anti-democratic decisions (support of the despotic Kolchak regime), to the sort of foul up Kennan so aptly summarized. As a result, the intervention, Richard states, "was a complete failure."

At a time when our country is considering the value of intervention in the Middle East, or how best to support democratic movements in nations as diverse as Russia, China, Venezuela and Egypt, history can be instructive. In this concise, well-researched volume, Richard makes the lesson of our Siberian intervention at least very plain: interventions never go as planned, and often they have the exact opposite of their intended effect.

Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov

Robert Chandler, editor (Penguin, $18)

As we were in the final stages of editing our forthcoming issue of Chtenia, themed "Dark and Scary" (comprised of tales of vampires, witches and other nefarious characters), I noted that all the tales, in addition to being strashilki (scary stories), were tales of transformation. It turns out my observation was neither new or profound. As Robert Chandler begins his introduction to this fine new collection of tales:

The magic tale... is remarkably adaptable. Transformation is its central theme, and the tales themselves seem capable of almost infinite transformation.

Now, to some degree, one could say that all fiction is about transformation, if not of the protagonist and his world, then of the reader. Yet this is a useful hook to hang this collection upon, and it does help in getting at what these stories are about, what their role was in Russian culture more widely.

Tales of this sort were usually told for the lessons they taught and, as Chandler notes, magic tales were not told lightly, for the spirits were felt to be listening.

Today we are of course far more enlightened. We can just sit back and enjoy the magic tales in this volume without the baggage of culture and superstition. And enjoy them we should. Magic tales are by definition quests, journeys, initiations, and thus filled with adventure, unlikely turns of luck and fate, and surprising endings. In a word, enjoyable diversions. Truly, who cannot be tempted to finish a story that starts "Once there was a tsar, a tsar who always did as he pleased and who lived in a country as flat as a tablecloth."

Finally, it should be noted that these translations are new, fresh, and of the highest quality. Not as that should surprise us when Chandler is behind the translator's keyboard. But it is always worth mentioning.

Rude & Barbarous Kingdom

Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-Century English Voyagers

Lloyd E. Berry & Robert O. Crummey, eds. (Univ. of Wisconsin, $34.95)

England did not discover Russia by accident in the sixteenth century, but nearly so. A British trading expedition seeking a northern passage to China was tossed about by a storm, two ships were lost, and a third took refuge in the White Sea. Its captain, Richard Chancellor, traveled on to Moscow, where he met Ivan IV (the Terrible) and negotiated trading rights for England that, for the next 100 years, were better than that Russia gave any other western power.

The trade that ensued was probably not as transformative as either side hoped, but the interaction did yield to history many remarkable and candid accounts of the first English traders and ambassadors to Muscovy. These memoirs have been collected elsewhere, but their value is greatly increased here for the superb annotations and introductions by the editors.

From the florid history of Chancellor and the terse notes of Anthony Jenkinson to the poetic letters of George Turberville, the perceptive and analytic skills of each observer varies widely, but the result, taken together, is a remarkable documentary record of Russia during the reign of Ivan the Terrible and up through the Time of Troubles.