THE CONVERSATION PIECE

Tag: history

  • REVIEW: Timothy S. Miller, The Birth of the Hospital in the Byzantine Empire. Baltimore, MD; The Johns Hopkins University Press; 1985.

    With The Birth of the Hospital In the Byzantine Empire, Dr. Timothy Miller has produced a work of assiduous scholarship. Miller provides a thorough, comprehensive account of the birth of the hospital in the East Roman Empire of the 4th century, its evolution through the 13th century, and its decline and ultimate destruction at the hands of the Turks in 1453. Exploring the relationship between the nascent Xenon and the Orthodox Church is arguably the secondary objective of this meticulously researched work. An illuminating description, of astonishing detail, of the emergence of the hospital out of early Christian philanthropic institutions is contained therein. Dr. Miller draws on a wide range of sources to support his contentions throughout, including monastic typika, hagiographical text, imperial edicts, iconographical and archaeological evidence. His level of erudition is made evident by the intimidating frequency of ancient greek terminology throughout the text. Miller’s survey emphatically asserts the importance of the Xenon, and its place within the complex web of interdependent social, political, religious, and economic spheres that formed the society of the East Roman Empire. 

    Classical Greek medicine from Hippocrates to Galen had a profound influence on the development of the medical profession from the early Christian age through to the middle ages; the emergence of the hospital in Byzantium can also be attributed to the influence of Hellenic physicians of antiquity. It is in this context that Miller places the early Xenones. The cultural and religious assimilation of medicinal traditions originating from pagan ancient Greece into mainstream Byzantine theological doctrine regarding philanthropic institutions under the purview of the church is discussed in detail by Miller in support of his arguments in this volume.  In support of this acceptance of secular medicinal expertise by the Episcopal leadership, Miller points out a general shift away from belief in the power of healing miracles (examples of early pagan temples where afflicted would go to receive guidance from the god of healing, or early christian healing via prayer are both given by Miller) and toward the gradual assembly of a body of accepted medical practice, which was both clinical and secular in nature, that was embraced by the Christian Church in the 4th century as the best method of charitable healing.  In his exploration of the terms used to refer to early Byazantine philanthropic institutions, Miller attempts to impose a degree of philological clarity on the ambiguity stemming from the variety of words found in Hagiographical sources as well as typika. In the chapter on Eastern Christianity, Miller gives specific examples of ecclesiastical support of the practice of medicine in the context of Agape, or charity. He clearly expresses the importance of the acceptance of secular medicine by Christian institutions throughout the book, though with particular detail in this chapter. The relationship between Byzantine Ecclesia and historically pagan medicine is further illustrated by Miller’s inclusion of various christian metaphors which invoke medical terminology to express religious concepts. A prime example of this is the emergence of the phrase “The Great Physician” into the parlance of greek theologians, as far back as the third century, to refer to Christ. “Since greek society considered good doctors the most charitable of men, it was fitting for Greek Christians to see christ as the paramount physician.” (P. 58). 

    In support of his main arguments, Miller demonstrates a rigorous capacity for historiographical inquiry. In tracing the development of the hospital in Byzantium, Miller asserts the claim that not only did the hospital, in the modern sense, originate in the Byzantine Empire, but the most advanced medical institutions in the whole of human history before the 19th century were forged through a unique mixture of religiosity, professionalism and statecraft. One of his main arguments is that the Xenones of Byzantium have more in common with modern hospitals than any charitable institution from antiquity to the industrial revolution. Miller finds evidence for autopsies, as well as bloodless surgery for the removal of kidney stones, among other feats of early medicine that occurred centuries ahead of their time. The specific inclusion of evidence supporting the performance of autopsies by Byzantine physicians is further indicative of an unprecedented level of clinical advancement. In addition to the considerable time devoted to the Xenones themselves, Miller fastidiously elucidates for the reader the political and social undercurrents of support and opposition surrounding these early medical institutions. He supplements his arguments with an almost endless assortment of historical and historiographical data. In developing the argument of the technological superiority of the Xenones, (compared to the philanthropic institutions of the Latin West) Miller describes how the level of optimization of function and efficiency reached by Byzantine hospitals by the 12th century was such that they had instituted, at the Pantokrator Xenon at least, in addition to the normal course of treatment of patients in varying stages of convalescence, a system akin to a modern residency, wherein physicians in training observe doctors at the hospital to learn the craft. This fact gives substantial support to the position, advanced by Miller, that Byzantine hospitals were unrivaled by anything in the Latin West nor the East until modernity. According to Miller, certain 12th century Xenones even had physicians assigned to treat clients on an outpatient basis. This supports the contention that Byzantine hospitals attained a degree of sophistication and efficiency, in function as well as administration, unmatched anywhere in history until the mid 19th century. 

    Miller emphasizes that the development of institutions like the Pantokrator Xenon in Byzantium, analogous to modern hospitals in function, would have been almost impossible without the support of the Christian church. In the case of the Pantokrator, the hospital (Nosokomeia) itself was only one part of a larger, monastic structure. Its inclusion therein is a perfect metaphor for the growth of the hospital in Byzantium within the framework of religious charity. While highlighting the stimulating effect which the acceptance of secular medicinal methods within the episcopal leadership of Byzantium had on the development of philanthropic institutions like Xenones, Miller identifies cooccurring practical catalysts which necessitated the allocation of resources toward the creation, administration and maintenance of hospitals in Byzantium. “Practical demands, not Christian views on secular medicine and its physicians, actually brought the first hospitals into existence.” (p. 67) 

    In Chapter 5, Miller places the emergence of the first hospital qua hospital in the fourth century, in the East Roman Empire. “The decades of the fourth century, then, witnessed the birth of the hospital.” (p. 68). While Miller spends a portion of the book exploring the crucial role of the early christian church in the creation of the hospital, he also incorporates into his arguments various social, political, demographic and economic reasons that led to the establishment of early hospitals in Byzantium. “The altered world of the fourth century forced bishops to address social problems and physical suffering on a grand scale. In attempting to meet these needs, bishops and their advisors developed the panoply of philanthropic institutions including the hospitals which emerged by the end of the century.” (p. 69). The financial hardship experienced by city governments in the 4th century, Miller explains, was exacerbated by wealthy local politicians pursuing senatorial positions which, if attained, exempted them from taxation. Miller also illustrates how religious strife in the form of Christological controversies that emerged out of the Council of Nicaea, Arianism in particular, accelerated the proliferation of philanthropic institutions such as Xenones throughout the eastern territories. “Even the most spiritual pastors, however, were no doubt aware of the political implications of successful charitable operations.” (p. 74).  “As part of their efforts to win popularity among the demos, factions promoted conspicuous charitable activities…” (p. 76) The efficacy of Miller’s central argument is supported by the inclusion of a nuanced analysis of the precise combination of social, political and religious forces that created the hospital. 

    The involvement of the Imperial state in the administration and promotion of Xenones is advanced by Miller in his examination of the role of the Emperor in legislative decisions. He explores the part Emperor Justinian played in the evolution of the capacity of Xenones to effectively administer medical treatment when he mandated, by fiat, that the public physicians (archiatroi), renowned throughout Byzantine society, were henceforth required to practice at the Xenones. Miller highlights the fact that this reform of the public physicians essentially redirected all of the Empire’s urban medical expertise into the Xenodocheia. He goes on to describe how the reforms outlined in Justinian’s innovative legislation made hospitals the best funded and most important philanthropic institutions in the entirety of the Empire: “As a result of Justinian’s reforms the hospitals became the largest of the christian charities.” (p. 105).  Justinian fused the best practicing secular physicians to the Xenon system. This lead to the Xenon system becoming the nexus of Byzantine medicine from 550 to the early 13th century. Miller asserts that the bureaucratic system of professional development and duty which Justinian inaugurated in the mid sixth century by assigning physicians to Xenones has no analogue anywhere in ancient or medieval history.

    The christian virtues of love and charity, according to Miller, are at least partly responsible for the survival of the hospital in Byzantium during the chaos of the brutal conflicts that took place in the 7th century. Other elements of Byzantine society which allowed the Xenones to survive were, according to Miller, the political and ideological conceptions of the role of the Imperial state and the Episcopacy in facilitating the health and wellbeing of Byzantine society. Miller devotes an entire chapter to the relationship between Xenones and Orthodox monks. There are sections of the text which one has to summon a certain amount of willpower to traverse, the monastic chapter is a case in point. Notwithstanding this criticism, Miller artfully develops his arguments throughout with adroit use of source material. In the chapter The Hospital In Action, Miller is able to effectively conjure up an image in the mind of the reader of what these Xenones must have looked like. What at first seems like a rather narrow scope of subject matter, becomes, by virtue of the care and detail with which Miller explores the intersection of different socio-religious and political elements within Byzantine society which impacted the development of the Xenones, an elaborate historiographical mosaic.

    In establishing a qualitative assessment of Miller’s work, it is important to evaluate the degree to which the thesis is supported by argument and evidence throughout. The purpose of this study was to establish the origin of the hospital in the modern sense, with evidence, firmly in the East Roman Empire, in the mid 4th century. In addition to this primary goal, the work also sought to prove that Christianity; the christian virtue of philanthropy in particular, was responsible for accelerating the development and evolution of the hospital. Miller’s tertiary objective was to provide an account of the various political, social, and economic forces that impacted the development of the hospital, as well as advancements in the corpus of medical knowledge in Byzantium. While Miller succeeds at each of these, he is especially successful at the second. The rigorous investigation of the role of the church in providing a culture which embraces secular medicine inherited from classical Hellas, in allocating resources to expedite the development of the Xenones, and in fostering a social climate wherein medical practitioners are valued members of the wider Christian society, is the aspect of this work where Miller exceeds his aim. The level of historiographical nuance and depth is remarkable in Miller’s account of the gradual transition from early philanthropic institutions to extraordinary feats of organization and charity like the Pantokrator Xenon. This fascinating work is a composite of medical, religious, and social history. Miller expertly addresses each of the central arguments he laid out in the opening pages, but the work on the Church stands out as the most noteworthy aspect of this well -researched survey. Although seemingly limited to medical history at first glance, The Birth of the Hospital In the Byzantine Empire is a worthwhile read for anyone seriously interested in the Eastern Roman Empire. 

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  • Review: Roger Crowley, 1453: The Holy War For Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West, New York, Hyperion, 2005

    The Byzantine Empire, when Constantinople fell to the marauding Ottomans under Mehmet II, had already been reduced to a mere shadow of its former splendor. After centuries of decline following the death of Emperor Andronikos I, and tensions with the West leading to Byzantium’s diplomatic isolation from the rest of Christendom, the Empire was in no position to counter Ottoman aggression. What had long been the preeminent polity not only in the Mediterranean, but arguably the World, had been irreparably truncated by foreign conquest, civil war, intrigue, and the gradual loss of military power. The Great Schism had irrevocably severed Byzantine religious and diplomatic relations with much of the Latin West. This rupture would reach a climax during the events of the Fourth Crusade, when the city of Constantine the Great would be viciously sacked and looted by fellow Christians. The events of Crowley’s book occur nearly two centuries after the reclamation of Constantinople from Latin occupiers by Michael VIII Palaiologos. 

    A descendent of Michael VIII, Emperor Constantine XI, would find himself called to fulfill a difficult destiny. The fall of an Empire that had lasted for more than a Millennium, and the heroically doomed attempts to save it, give Crowley’s work a Homeric undertone; there is a sense of tragic grandeur throughout 1453. In the course of human history few events rival the fall of Constantinople in terms of the widespread, far-reaching consequences it would have. It has, indeed, echoed through time. Considered by many historians to be the definitive end of the Middle Ages, the Fall of Constantinople sent shockwaves across the late-medieval West. It confirmed the emergence of an ambitious, technologically advanced Islamic polity, with designs on further Westward expansion, and shifted geopolitics by closing a vitally important East-West trade route. Even the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt would be made apprehensive by the young Sultan Mehmet II, and rightly so. For several centuries, following the collapse of the world’s oldest Christian Empire, the Ottoman advance would continue into Europe and the Levant before being thwarted at Vienna.

    Roger Crowley uses a range of historiographical accounts to piece together a rich and cinematic description of the fall of the greatest city of the Middle Ages. The level of detail contained in the book is astonishing. Various sources are synthesized into a larger, cohesive narrative. A clash of civilizations, with inverse trajectories; one at the close of its existence and one near the beginning, is featured within Crowley’s engaging tale. One finishes the book with a sense of the irresistible march of time, the rise and fall of great kingdoms; and no small part of Weltschmerz. Faith plays a prominent role in the lives of each side of this immortal battle; the Orthodox citizens of the beleaguered city of Constantinople, praying for intercession from God, and the culturally diverse Ottoman army, with soldiers of different faiths united, often against their will, under the banner of Islam. Despite the presence of a number of Christian troops who had been captured by the rampaging Ottoman threat and forced to serve the Sultan, there remained a large core of Muslim faithful among his troops. 

    1453 is the story of a people at the end of their history. The Empire that began with Constantine ended thusly with Constantine. There is an undercurrent of prophetic fatalism that Crowley insists, believably, was present in the civilians who experienced the siege. The amount of personalization and anecdote are part of what makes 1453 so captivating; seemingly incidental details add much to the characterization of the victims of the Ottoman sack. Crowley’s skillful account of the grueling six-week ordeal can be characterized as a successful attempt to convey events as they must have seemed to the participants themselves. Heartbreaking scenes such as when Emperor Constantine, valiantly defending his city against all odds, breaks down into tears after receiving critically bad news serve as enriching examples of pathos. 

    Far beyond a simple historical regurgitation of names, dates and sequences of events, 1453 devotes a considerable portion of its 266 pages to giving the reader a comprehensive look at the religious, social and psychological state of the citizenry experiencing this cataclysmic event. It painstakingly recounts the religious rituals observed, the motivations for perseverance, the undulations of morale, and in some cases the eschatological resignation of citizens so tired and scared they they come to feel that hope is a curse. Crowley brilliantly succeeds at providing a powerful snapshot of the psyche of a people on the verge of destruction. The fervent prayers in St. Sophia; the observance of divine liturgy hours before the final Ottoman attack; the exhausted families reverting to superstition and taking solace in prophecy; all these disparate pieces come together to create an extremely poignant impression.  The psychology of the average citizen is explored in the passages that discuss the emotional effect certain meteorological anomalies had on the people inside the city: “Alarmed, people ran to see what was happening and cried aloud when they looked up at the dome of St. Sophia. A strange light was flickering on the roof. The excitable Nestor Iskander described what he saw: “at the top of the window a large flame of fire issuing forth…those who had seen it were benumbed; they began to wail and cry out in Greek: ‘Lord have mercy!” (p. 178-179). Crowley isn’t interested solely in the broad narrative contours; he endeavors to paint a vivid picture of the hopes and fears of regular people inside the city walls. The overall emotional impact of the story is magnified considerably by these intimate portrayals of humanity in the midst of catastrophe; particular attention is paid to the role religion played in the final moments of Byzantium’s existence.

    One comes away from reading 1453 with a more intimate sense of what the inhabitants of Constantinople, who witnessed the final brutalization of their capital, must have experienced. This is unusual as far as historical non-fiction. The trend is to focus exclusively on the political and military leaders. While Crowley does go into detail about both Mehmet II and Constantine XI, these leaders do not absorb the entirety of the narrative focus. Import is assigned to other facets of the siege as well. The Hungarian iron founder Orban receives several pages dedicated to the description of his incredibly difficult craft, cannon forging, which provided the Ottomans with a crucial technological edge. One would be hard-pressed to find a historian who’d claim the Ottomans could have conquered Constantinople without artillery. On another note about the narrative color Crowley employs in his telling, the complex and multi-national character of the Ottoman forces is explored to great effect.  Terms like Seraglio, Janissary, and Vizier are introduced to the Ottoman-naive reader. 

    The book concludes with a disclaimer, citing the lack of consistent eyewitness testimony  as requiring of scholars a parsing out of the more unbelievable accounts from the realistic ones in formulating a coherent sequence of events for the siege. The fact that 1453 is not an academic work, being relatively accessible and not shrouded in technical didacticism, does not make it any less impressive; in fact it is arguably more effective as a narrative piece as a result. Although 1453 is fairly straightforward, the writing is sophisticated, and not without scholarly merit. Crowley highlights the historical importance of the fall of Constantinople by placing emphasis on the wider ideological and religious struggle which was renewed and intensified across Europe after 1453. The Ottomans, under Mehmet II, would make it as far as the Italian peninsula before the death of the conqueror. The expansion of the Ottoman Islamic polity gave rise to fervent Islamophobia in the West despite the indifference that Western leaders, secular and religious, showed to Constantinople’s plight in the years leading up to the siege of 1453. On finishing 1453, one is struck by the degree to which Europeans lamented the loss of a city which they did almost nothing to protect. Repeated diplomatic missions were embarked upon by Byzantine Emperors seeking assistance with the Turkish threat. In the end, a tiny force of foreigners would be there to aid in the defense of the city in the weeks leading to the fall. Crowley describes the term Saracen falling out of lexical prominence as the catch-all word for Islamic peoples, being replaced by Turk. The spirit of Jihad was nourished by the conquest of Constantinople, and the Ottoman political program took on an imperialistic dimension. 

    The adjective Cinematic, used before in this review, remains the most salient term with which to describe the style of 1453. Scenes have been etched into my memory, as though I saw them in person, or at least on a screen: Mehmet II, aware of the faltering resolve of his army, rallying support for a final attack with evocations of the Islamic law of 3 days of plunder for any city taken by force without surrender; Constantine XI, the final Palaiologoi Emperor, sharing a final moment with friend George Sphrantzes on the land wall on the eve of the final Ottoman incursion; these are only some examples. Then there’s the intense scene of Mehmet entering Hagia Sophia to find one of his men destroying the floor, the mercurial Sultan supposedly having him executed that day. It is a testament to any medium for scenes to be portrayed memorably; in this case, 1453 is a rousing success. Although in its later chapters it becomes painful to watch the exhausted defenders succumb to their fate, the refusal to capitulate; the stalwart perseverance with which Constantine XI faced his Empire’s destruction, in the face of a foe so irreconcilably different as to be incomprehensible to the Byzantine Christian; the inner strength with which the byzantines confronted pure moral and religious terror; these are all immensely inspiring to the reader existing in a mundane realm of screens and social media. 

    The heroic defense, while it lasted, some 6 weeks, was in every sense a collaborative effort. The Byzantines were joined by several thousand Italians; Venetians and Genoese, each with vested interests in keeping Constantinople out of the hands of the Ottoman juggernaut which had already taken all of Asia Minor and much of the Balkans. The tertiary main character of Crowley’s account is Giovanni Giustiniani. This Genoese nobleman came to defend Constantinople on his own accord, and at his own expense. He came along with 700 well armored soldiers, and played a critical role in repulsing wave after wave of Ottoman troops. In particular, the fastidiousness that he and his men summoned when they painstakingly repaired the damaged outer walls again and again, filling them with dirt, branches, barrels and anything they could find, proved invaluable to stopping the momentum of the siege up until the very end. Crowley emphasizes how his injury, and subsequent departure from the city at the last minute, marked a turning point in the siege. The 700 Genoese, seeing their leader gone, decided all was lost and followed him, creating an opening in the defense which the Ottomans immediately sensed and exploited. Whether this is true or not, that Giustiniani ended up tipping the scales after his injury, the way it is folded into the larger narrative serves only to add to the dramatic flair of Crowley’s telling. A single quasi-criticism emerging from this would be the fact that the role of the native Greek defenders seemed relegated to the background while various Italians occupied much of the foreground. Crowley obviously felt that it was important to highlight the multinational character of the defenders, but the point of focus, at times, seemed to linger on Giustianni and his Genoese contingent to the exclusion of the Constantinopolitan residents. 

    Crowley attributes the dearth of Ottoman first-hand accounts to the preliterate character of Ottoman society at the time of the siege. Despite this, narration from the perspective of Constantine XI is extremely limited. Crowley alleges the historical record is unclear about the precise death of the final Byzantine Emperor, and while the book goes into some detail as to Constantine’s behavior during the ordeal of the siege, Mehmet II features more prominently in the narrative. Crowley’s work attempts to provide the reader with a psychological profile of the young Sultan; exploring his motivations, his preoccupation with the city, and his self-identification with figures from history, such as Alexander (somewhat ironically), in what seems like a manic self-aggrandizement common to despots. The degree to which the work explores the character of the respective leaders is lopsided; Constantine XI receives only a fraction of the attention and narrative focus. The reasons for this are decidedly opaque, but, perhaps it was intentionally done to avoid the possibility of accusations of islamophobia in our overly politicized culture. If there is one single criticism that would warrant voicing, it is that 1453 would benefit from a symmetrically allocated narrative focus between the two leaders. 

    Ultimately, a thoughtful assessment of 1453 observes an account of the fall of Constantinople with superb narrative emphasis. Crowley succeeds in producing an extremely engaging, entertaining, and emotionally devastating chronicle of the final days of a once great city, inhabited by still great people. Although the survivors of the Ottoman conquest would go on to become a Byzantine diaspora, there would never again be a Byzantine Empire. The decision to employ a narrative style that holds the experience of the unnamed denizen as equally important to that of the leader makes the tale all the more engrossing, after all, the world is no longer made up of Emperors or heroes of legend; only celebrities and anonymous denizens; the age of immortal deeds is over, perhaps it ended with the Fall of Constantinople.

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  • Review: Kotkin, Stephen. Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000. New York, NY. Oxford University Press, 2001.

    Stephen Kotkin is not sympathetic to the promises of socialism, a fact that is made abundantly clear throughout the 220 pages of Armageddon Averted, a historical autopsy of the decline and fall of the U.S.S.R. However, he is surpiringly even-handed and measured in his treatment of the principle actors in the collossal drama that unfolded during the last few years of Gorbachev’s rule and the Yeltsinite parade of nepotism, venality, and elite self-enrichment. While some of Kotkin’s politics clearly influence his diagnoses, which is true for all historians, he doesn’t dissemble or disguise his faith in the capitalist system, which is refreshing and makes it easier to make allowances for bias when assessing his work. No mere laundry list of everything evil and awful about the late Soviet system, Kotkin presents a thoughtful, analytical examination of what he sees as terminal illnesses having infected the Soviet body politic. In so doing, he brings a novel perspective in his assertion that, contrary to popular periodizations of the phenomena, the collapse did not end with the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., but continued throughout the 1990s and into Putin’s early rule.

    In Armageddon Averted, Kotkin makes an effort to rebuff certain assumptions and tropes that have melted into the popular understanding of the Soviet collapse. For example, Kotkin challenges narratives that continue to have some weight: that Russia’s transition to capitalism didn’t work because oligarchs stole everything (there is some truth to this), or that privitization and market reform didn’t work at first because of mistaken advice from the West, or predatory loans from the IMF, among others. Kotkin seems unable to mention Russian oligarchs without downplaying the scope of their influence on Russian political and economic life. These narratives, and others are subjected to scrutiny throughout parts of the work. They are replaced by a consistent postulation that is reiterated time and again in the work; that endemic liabilities and inherent problems of design caused the failure of the Soviet Union. A central question that Kotkin attempts to answer is why, when the Soviet Union possessed untold military capability and nuclear ordnance, was none of its might employed to try to hold onto power and territory. Significant time and page space is dedicated to exploring the fact that the Soviet Union seemed to, to quote Dylan Thomas, “go gently into that good night” rather than make use of war as a Clausewitzian “politics by other means.” 

    Kotkin lays much of the blame for the Soviet Union’s dissolution on Mikhail Gorbachev. In a chapter titled ‘The Drama of Reform,” he opines: “Thus, the “real drama of reform,” obscured by fixation on the conservatives, featured a virtuoso tactician’s unwitting, yet extraordinarily deft dismantling of the Soviet system—from the planned economy, to the ideological legitimacy for socialism, to the Union.”(84-85)  The purportedly inadvertent shift from a unitary system to a federal one is described as occuring after Gorbachev, for political reasons, purposely marginalized the Secretariat. According to Kotkin, Gorbachev had this conception of the political conflict between a reforming impulse and a conservative impulse, in Soviet high office, as being the essential explanation for why Perestroika faced obstacles. Kotkin insists that, ironically, Gorbachev’s very attempts to reform and save the system are what lead to its rapid deterioration and destruction. When hamstringing the Secretariat, Gorbachev had the image of Krushchev’s ouster by the party apparat fresh in his mind; a reformer is expelled from power by entrenched, conservative bureaucrats, this is the lesson that was absorbed. 

    At the same time, while Gorbachev is situated at the decision making nucleus at the heart of the late-stage Soviet behemouth slouching towards destruction and dissolution, Kotkin presents him in a nuanced manner without ever oversimplifying the nature of his role. The Gorbachev presented in Kotkin’s book is a man grappling with the growing gulf between his own ideological loyalties and the obvious contradictions of a system he tries desperately to reform, change, and finally terminate. This is not a completely unsympathetic portrayal. Kotkin makes sure to emphasize the amazing political skill and adroit calculus the final General Secretary uses to push Perestroika and Glasnost through an often recalcitrant party and state apparatus. He also painstakingly points out the fact that Gorbachev, when confronted with failure and defeat, the seccession of the satilite republics and impending fall of the Russian Soviet Republic, he deliberately chose to avoid projections of hard power to prevent dissolution or simply retaliate. While Kotkin expresses his ideological, political, and social qualms with the system Gorbachev tried to save, he also gives credit to the leader’s restraint. 

    Significantly less of the book is dedicated to the Yeltsin presidency and its incubation of Putin’s political career. The focus is predominately on Gorbachev’s 1985-1991 reign, although Yeltsin’s rise is mentioned and several snapshots of his rule are included, such as the bombing of parliament in 1993, or his drunken antics. If there is any aspect of Armageddon Averted that might benefit from additional attention it would have to be Yeltsin’s presidency, and his relationship with Putin. Most of Kotkin’s book is exceptionally well-written and clearly well-researched.  The occasional flippant sentence might chafe certain readers like “But analysts who continued to attribute Russia’s boom to the dumn luck of sky-high oil prices needed to spend a weekend in Nigeria, where they should inquire about the middle-class bonanza (200).” This is both funny and callous and maybe funny because of the callousness, but it seems out of place in a serious examination like Armageddon Averted. Occasional glimpses of what seems like anti-russian sentiment are shown as well, with sentences like “….anti-corruption struggle, which in Russia always risked becoming a settling of political and economic scores (204).” This is certainly a true statement, but it is not uniquely true for Russia; it happens all over the world, including in our great nation. A fair, I think not undeserved, criticism of Kotkin’s treatment of Russia’s problems is that he seems to hint that corruption is somehow congenital to Russians at times (even if it is). Kotkin describes, in the chapters on privitization post-Gorbachev, a carnival of frenzied, kleptocratic officials enriching themselves at the expense of the Russian people and state.

    The difficulties of Russian legal reform, working from the inherited juridical architecture that survived the Soviet collapse, are explored in some detail in the chapter “Democracy Without Liberalism?” The transition phase from late-stage Sovietism to fledgling Yeltsinite “democracy”, in its physical plant, was a kind of liminal zone between then and now; Soviet infrastructure was absorbed wholesale to serve the new dispensation; the massive, sprawling KGB compounds in Moscow were simply repurposed, along with most of the other offices. Kotkin uses this as a metaphor for his argument, which is extended throughout much of the book, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was due to structural, institutional shortcomings, and that a critical mistake of the Russian Federation was that it used what remained of Soviet institutions, likely from political and economic inertia, to form the foundation of the “new” system. 

    “Russia’s challenge was not cultural or economic but institutional, a problem of governability, especially of its governing institutions.” (168) A major theme of Kotkin’s book is demonstrated here in miniature. One might even say the central burden of the work is to locate the main problem of the late Soviet empire in its institutional composition, that the system itself was doomed. Kotkin also places importance on what he deems a misplaced faith in the reformability of party-led socialism on the part of Gorbachev and his generation. The post-Stalinist conviction that Lenin had been different, that Stalin was a deviation from the promise of socialism plays a role here. Kotkin writes: “In fact, Lenin had not been less dictatorial or less ruthless than Stalin. But the myth that Lenin had been different, the myth of a redeemable party-led socialism, turned out to be of overriding importance. It had, in the post-Second World War conjuncture, the dissolving impact on Soviet structures that the First World War had on the then intact Habsburg state.”(174)

    One argument that Kotkin posits repeatedly throughout Armageddon Averted is that Soviet Socialism, no matter what the specific conditions of its existence, was fundamentally, absolutely, unreformable. He even goes as far as to say it was “proved” that it was impossible to reform the system. This line of argument is easy, with historical hindsight, to make with an air of certainty, but not without a certain obvious weakness, namely, that the proposition —Because A (the collapse) happened under B conditions (Gorbachev’s rule) then C (the system is irredeemably doomed; unreformable) is the only possible outcome for any other scenario—simply doesn’t hold logical water. The fact that the reforms initiated by Gorbachev failed to reinforce Soviet socialism against the pressures causing its destruction is evidence of the unviability of Gorbachevian reform Socialism, not of an abstracted universal certainty of failure regardless of internal and external conditions, which Kotkin seems to imply here. 

    Perestroika is presented as a success in the sense that it, contrary to its stated aims, put a metaphorical dagger in the staggering body of Soviet socialism, and allowed the festering elite bureaucracy to feed itself on the remains. “In this light, perestroika should be judged as a stunning success. Reform socialism also, unintentionally, incited Soviet elites to tear their system apart, which they did with gusto. In this light, too, perestroika was a success.”(181) One can sense thinnly masked delight at Kotkin’s repeated highlighting of the inadvertent nature of Perestroika’s counterproductive results. Kotkin conveys the fact that, unlike the common assumption that the Soviet elite was displaced by the rapacious opportunists who profited from privitization, the Soviet elite was largely preserved during the transition, becoming, in large part, the Yetsinite elite. The widespread corruption that had been a blight on the Soviet system simply continued after the transition to the Russo-market anti-liberal 90s system.  

    In the epilogue of Armageddon Averted, Kotkin gives readers a short analysis of the Putin years, Russia’s startling rise to economic relevance, and Medvedev’s presidency. The relationship with China is emphasized and comparisons are drawn between the two large powers whose authoritarian market economies both took off in the 2000s. The legacy of Soviet bureaucratic bloat is portrayed as mostly erased by the Putin era economic resurgence, or at least made irrelevant. Overall, the book does an excellent job of giving readers a powerful impression of a system in its death throes and the difficult transition that followed its demise. His clear, lucid historical writing illuminates the contours of Soviet degradation and inertia. Kotkin’s command of the subject matter is impressive, and though he is not ideologically hospitable to the ideals of Marxism or socialism, he manages to keep a sense of balance when discussing the downfall and dissolution of one of the most powerful Empires in human history, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.


     

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  • Review: De Madariaga, Isabel. Catherine the Great: A Short History. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002.

    Isabel De Madariaga’s Catherine the Great: A Short History provides the reader with an account of the crucial narrative contours of the rise and reign of Empress Catherine II of Russia. The work is a survey of a period of Russian history that is critically important yet largely overlooked. While not a detailed study or examination, De Madariaga’s Short History attempts to familiarize the reader with those salient historical episodes and developments that, taken in aggregate, coalesce into the Catherinite epoch. The clear object of De Madariaga’s work here is to give readers a reasonable summation of Catherine’s reign that can serve well as a stepping stone for further research and reading. The author executes these goals with a powerful sense of history and a clear command of the material. 

    Throughout A Short History, in dealing with Catherine II’s reign, De Madariaga casts the Empress in a consistently sympathetic light. The Catherine that is portrayed herein is a reluctant autocrat or a reformer in absolutist clothing. While some attention is given to various diplomatic and military crises, the overall emphasis of the work is placed on Catherine as an intellectually curious ruler with constitutional inclinations dealing with the obstacles of the entrenched, vested interests of the gentry that keep her from enacting her most liberalizing policies. Of all the aspects of Catherine’s rule, the most time and detail are given here to the various legislative and administrative reforms she was able to complete. The intellectual appetites of Catherine are discussed at length. Though De Madariaga never attempts to deny that Catherine ruled in  the one nation that had codified and legitimized Serfdom just as it was being phased out in the rest of Europe, an effort is made to signal to the reader just how enmeshed in enlightenment thought Catherine was during her rule. Her frequent correspondence and friendship with figures such as Diderot, Montesquieu, and Voltaire are highlighted throughout this summative work. It is clear that the author wants to draw attention to the degree to which Catherine contemplated systems of government outside of Tsarist autocracy or considered modifications thereto. It is recounted with some repetition how intimately familiar she was with Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. Care is taken to inform the reader that Catherine even wrote some 700 pages of notes thereon. One could almost argue that the central burden of the work is to provide a counterargument to the prevalent narrative of Tsarism, even Tsarinaism, as unidimensional despotism; De Madariaga insists that, while Catherine shared many things in common with her autocratic successors and forbears, she was indeed a complex figure and presented, in policy choices and in concrete reforms, shades of a liberalizing tendency and even hints of constitutionalism. However, in her generous treatment of Catherine’s rule, De Madariaga seems to largely overlook the fact that nothing at all was ever done to improve the lives of the Serfs during her rule. 

    De Madariaga uses enlightenment German cameralism as a lens through which to appraise Catherine’s hints at reform. The legislative commission, as well as the Instructions, are both evidence of cameralist influence. She portrays Catherine as laying out a foundation of precedent for future reform and liberalization in Russia through the inauguration of corporate rights for each of the free estates. She admits that Catherine’s legislative achievements fell short of her aims but insists that her desires for reform were genuine. Her defense of the lack of reform during Catherine’s reign is partially based on the idea that Catherine herself was not to blame for the continued bondage of the Serfs; her ability to enact policies that would threaten the power or wealth of the nobility was limited by her political reliance on the former for legitimacy and support. Her goal for administrative reform was, according to Madariaga, essentially a complete reworking of the entire administrative apparatus of regional, provincial, and local government. The Legislative Commission that Catherine convened called for the appointment of representatives from each of the social estates, except the Serfs (except for 90 percent of the population). This, along with the creation of juridical and legal avenues for townspeople and free peasants to advocate for redress of grievance, none of which existed before, are certainly to be lauded, but whether these are reasons enough to justify giving Catherine the benefit of the doubt as much as Madariaga does in the text is uncertain. 

    Significant attention is also paid to the scale of legislative reforms attempted during Cathrine’s reign. The twin Statutes to the Townspeople and the Nobility formed the bulk of a chapter that, while providing the reader with detail and analysis, seemed to wander in the weeds a bit in terms of facts and figures and other indulgences in hyper-specificity and tedious detail. The reasonable reader of history cannot deny that, prior to Catherine, even the nobility had no formal representation in the Russian body politic; the old duma of the Boyars was dissolved long before her reign. It is understandable that the author would thus decide to dedicate significant time to the uniqueness of the political representation permitted by the legislative commission. It also bears mentioning that this representation, however unprecedented and quasi-democratizing, was limited, imperfect, and entirely confined to the free estates; Serfs were given no concessions. A criticism of Madariaga’s framing here can be made based on the fact that she largely neglects to emphasize how nearly all of Catherine’s reforms systematically ignore the plight of the Serf, even after the Pugachev uprising. 

    One area of the book that seems comparatively underdeveloped is the space devoted to Catherine’s rise. While the first chapter does establish the basic historical context in which Catherine’s seizure of power occurs, certain elements and aspects are glossed over. A prime example of this is Madariaga’s terse treatment of the plot hatched and executed to remove Peter III from power by taking his life. “According to the available evidence she was not informed of the plot to murder her husband; on the other hand she must have realized that if he remained alive he would be a constant threat to her hold on the throne, and that her supporters were unlikely to let him live.” (3) This kind of hedgy and equivocating statement alerts readers quite early on to Madariaga’s desire to spend more time on the admirable aspects of Catherine II, which are many, to the possible detriment of a more balanced view overall. While the work stops short of outright hagiography, this example of downplaying unsavory aspects of Catherine’s personality in favor of sympathetic traits is not the only one present in this survey.  In Madariaga’s dealings with Catherine’s innovations in the field of ethnic resettlement and assimilation, there are yet more jarring examples of the deliberate absence of seemingly warranted criticism. Only one paragraph is devoted to the creation of the Pale of Settlement and the double tax on Jews living in the Empire. “Yet, in spite of the broadly tolerant character of Catherine’s legislation, one of the most repressive features of nineteenth-century Russian policy towards the Jewish community dates from her reign. This was the setting up of the so-called Pale of Settlement” (141). In an earlier paragraph on the same page, De Madariaga describes the origin of Catherine’s “tolerant policy toward the Jews…” as coming from her lack of religious zealotry. Only a few paragraphs later, she describes the disproportionate tax levied on the Jewish townspeople and residents. Her insistence on coupling admissions of targeted ethnic repression with professions of Catherine’s tolerance read as incongruous and indicative of a wider pattern of emphasizing the positive aspects of Catherine’s reign and minimizing or explaining away the negative ones. 

    De Madariaga devotes considerable time to discussing the tenacity and single-mindedness with which Catherine faced the succession of crises that assailed her government. From the diplomatic intrigue, the clandestine plots to bet on a successor other than the Empress, the various Wars with Turkey, and the confusing geopolitical evolution of alliances to the massive cossack and peasant uprising led by Pugachev, each challenge Catherine faced is represented in Madariaga’s work with a detailed description of the methods the Empress used to overcome them. A picture of Catherine as a dedicated, serious ruler who relied on loyal military figures like Potemkin yet kept enough of her own initiative and strategic acumen to maintain herself in an advantageous position emerges from the narrative. Her willingness to bet on risky military solutions to diplomatic problems is presented, such as her adoption of the policy of armed neutrality to deal with the threats from the British Navy. Catherine’s Imperial character begins to truly show when she demonstrates to the other European rulers her complete willingness to commit Russian men and material to the projection of hard power in the Black Sea and elsewhere. In evaluating De Madariaga’s portrayal of Catherine as a ruler, it is important to note that the aspect of her reign that is most comprehensively dealt with, and that which has the most space dedicated to its exploration in the text, is Catherine’s various legal, administrative, and social reforms. While many dimensions of Catherine’s reign are confined to one chapter or only a page or two, the legislative and administrative reforms that she enacted are analyzed and described in a number of separate chapters. Understanding Catherine as a policymaker, influenced by Enlightenment thinkers yet still largely wedded to absolutist ideals, is made possible by the author’s detailed study of the Instructions and the dual Statutes to the Townspeople and the Nobility. 

    In distilling the grand narrative of Catherine’s thirty-year reign into an eminently readable and largely enjoyable survey, De Madariaga succeeds in producing an engaging, thoughtful account of a pivotal era in Russian History. While acknowledging Catherine’s penchant for favorites, the book refrains from a gossipy, tabloid depiction of her love life. Catherine is treated largely as any contemporaneous sovereign would be; an analysis of her policy decisions, the changes during her reign, and the impact she had on the course of Russian history are included. A certain respect for Catherine as an intellectual, as a strategist, as a stateswoman, and as a human being, is obvious in Madariaga’s treatment of the Empress. Madariaga explores the life of a sovereign who, rising through a coup, with no legitimate claim to the throne, went on to rule for more than thirty years, presided over the rise in influence of Russian military power, instituted the most comprehensive administrative reforms in Russian history as well as the first steps toward representative government, albeit imperfectly, fostered the emergence of the thitherto dormant Russian intelligentsia, and led a life of passion, learning, and romance. While the work is less than even-handed in its assessment of the downsides of Catherine’s rule, it never fails to take Catherine’s reign seriously and to impart to the reader the importance of the victories, reforms, and velleities of a complex and contradictory ruler. Ultimately, Isabel De Madariaga’s Short History is engaging, far-reaching in its areas of focus, and detailed in its examination of the reign of Catherine the Great.

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