154 Book Reviews

Le Malheur Russe-Essai SW le meurtre politique, Htltne Car&e d’Encausse (Paris: Librairie Arthtme Fayard, 1988) 547 pp., 130.00FF, P.B.

The author of this book takes the view that certain nations are fated to a bloody history. Inherent in their forms of state and its relations with the people, is murder. The politics of murder, or murderous politics, is self-perpetuating from generation to generation, dynasty to dynasty, in true Agamemnon style.

Russia is such a land. From the second prince of Kiev, Igor (d. 945) to his wife Olga (d. 969) who was drenched and obsessed with revenge for her vilely murdered husband, and then Vladimir (980-1015), who imposed Byzantine Christianity on his people with an insane and frenzied fervour, so it has continued for more than a thousand years.

Compelling chapter titles sign the way: The Fratricidal Order, Rough-Hewn Tyranny, Absolute Tyranny, The Regicidal Family, The Agony of Terrorism, The Blood of Rasputin, Apocalypse. Then: Thou Shalt Not Kill. The book finishes on a note of hope that the Gorbachev reforms will end the eleven centuries-long presumption of divine and murderous rulers, and will finally break the connection between power and murder.

The book is compulsive reading and imaginatively on fire, to such an extent that a reviewer must feel reluctant in the extreme to criticize it. Nevertheless, its analytical penetration is in a curious way constrained. Instead of a systematic framework for historical interpretation into the origins and reproduction of institutions, power systems, forms of consciousness and personality, we have a Nietzschean assumption that some peoples ‘call upon themselves, if not the wrath of the gods, then at least the fury of murderers’ (p.17). And alongside an anguished view of the twentieth century as a global furnace of inexplicable mass terror and terrorism, we have that familiar gesture of the western intellectual pointing her finger at Russia-the ‘most explosive example’ of violence and masochism.

But powerful narrative the book certainly is. It catches the history of a pagan state that turned Christian, but retained a pagan rulers’ violence. Christianity only introduced a sense of martyrdom to the humble, submissive suffering of the people, and brought ideas about saints who intercede spiritually on victims’ behalf. Stalin can be felt to walk in the steps of Iaroslav the Wise (1019-1054). We can understand Stalinism a little better as a sort of secularised monastic autocracy, an idea of Russian society that was dominent from the time of Joseph of Volotsk in the sixteenth century through to the twentieth. As a history of long duration, it carries conviction.

And certainly, in its consideration of the disastrous appanage system (through which the ruler divided his possessions among all his sons), the original reasons for royal fratricide are explained, as is its intensification under Ivan III (1462-1505), who understandably wanted to end the institution. Split between tradition and political expedience however, he bequeathed an ambiguous compromise which guaranteed even greater blood and terror under Ivan the Terrible (1533-1584). This tendency in Russian history for irreconcilable contradictions to generate disaster on an always vaster scale, is brilliantly conveyed in Carrere d’Encausse’s book. But there is something unsatisfactory about the kinds of underlying explanation she gives for this peculiar imperial absolutism: such as geographical location, Mongol invasions, or replacement of Byzantium by Moscow, as the ‘Third Rome’. Religion, state, and war become so to speak, just a little too ‘autonomous’ or ‘decentred’. The reader might be willing to risk ‘essentialism’, in order to find some kind of integral explanation in terms of social, economic, cultural and ideational structures.

Tim Cloudsley

Department of Sociology, Glasgow College