Alfred J. Rieber - The Imperial Russian Project: Autocratic Politics, Economic Development, and Social Fragmentation

YANNI KOTSONIS

As historians we are centrally concerned with change over time, and we reach all too easily for a simple mechanism that allows us to sort what is continuous from what has changed; hence continuity and change. Alfred Riebers collection of essays, and indeed his work in general, is not that kind of history, which would lead to an all too superficial rendering of the facts. Our breath taken away by the ubiquity of violence at certain times, we might narrate Russia as more or less violent enamoured of a particular actor, we may locate change in the persons rise and fall. Fair enough, but we risk losing track of the larger polity that made one or another kind of violence possible, or of the fact that violence could be of one or another significance; and we may obscure the institutions and the polity to which the person pertained.

In relating the large to the small, and the short-term to the long-term, Rieber offers a historical style that has informed the field for decades. His work is about persistence amid novelty and he has us marvel at both. It is an effort to appreciate new facts and events in a context of enduring analytic categories. It is about the movement generated by the relationship between persons and institutions that somehow amounts to a direction and a goal, in an ongoing interplay of the small and the large. The direction and the exigencies, and the full-scale mobilizations, are given shape by a shared relationship with power in the personal guise of the autocrat and the institutional guise of the state. Riebers works are full of detail, of the many ideas, biographies, politics, favours, disfavours, comings, goings, rises, falls, and venalities, but Rieber appreciates these as parts of an unmistakable direction that allows him to speak at once about the recurring motifs of Russian history while detecting in them what is new. Each category emerges different and differently, but the category itself is ever present and persistent. Even when the whole system sinks into the sediment and collapses in 1917, we can make sense of it through the persistent categories of analysis themselves, which in this case is a matter of power and its fragmentation. Peering past 1917, as Rieber has in his most recent work, the essays lay the groundwork for understanding a new quest that began as soon as the old order was given up for lost. The quest was joined by more and more seemingly inimical groups, as activists from across the political and social spectra sought to reconstitute social and political power, using one of the legacies of the old regime: the state and the state idea. This, it seems to me, was a legacy of the old regime that far outlasted autocracy.

The most persistent category for Rieber, it should be clear already, is power as a generic, with autocracy as its historical manifestation in Russia in the imperial period. It begins in these essays as sacred and personal, a matter of faith in and sheer obedience to the autocrat, with the person, the institutions, and the ideas in something of a heliocentric system of privilege and obligation. To be sure, Rieber shows that this system had complicated mechanisms and practices that made it lived by the actors in question. It began as a small (in population) order of servitors, involving very few people in the late seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, to the point that they can be named, their persons associated with specific demeanours and ideas, and their biographies and travails recounted in some detail (chapters 13). The populations became larger as the nineteenth century drew to a close, so that the actors are better narrated as large collectives of bureaucrats with a new ethos of professionalism (chapter 9). The service ethos of the gentry had its attendant personal ambitions, squabbles, and corruptions and the estate maintained an anachronistic reference to birth and status (chapter 10), but the overriding subject is the relationship of the nobility, however defined and constituted, to power more broadly. This endured, as different and changing persons and institutions showed a remarkably consistent preoccupation with their standing with regard to the autocrat and the institutions through which they served. The legal estates do change and to a large extent they lose their coherence and anchoring in the polity (chapters 1012). They are joined by new criteria for advancement, in tension with the pre-Petrine legacies, so that by the 1890s it is possible to be well positioned in the bureaucracy thanks to a higher degree and no pedigree or land, nor even pretentions to pedigree and land; banking and finance might seem more lucrative (chapter 9). Even here one surmises, as I think Rieber does, that this is a new rendering of an old problem of status and competence (chapters 56), and even then it is a problem nestled in the larger field of power as it reshaped itself over time: who should govern, on what basis, and in the name of who or what?