The Vlachs: The History of a Balkan People by T. J. WinnifrithReview by: Dennis DeletantThe Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 67, No. 4 (Oct., 1989), pp. 632-633Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4210123 .

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632 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW

non-specialist or non-Russian-speaker, making accessible a body of material both enlightening and memorable, combining documents of state with memoirs, contemporary journalism, a few statistical tables. It goes in fact well beyond its stated narrow aim. The introduction successfully surveys the eight sections into which the material is divided: Government Structure and Personnel, Mechanisms of Control, The Rural Scene, Urban Growth, Society and the Regime, Foreign Policy, Education and Culture, Nationalities. Never- theless, the book does not avoid some of the dangers of anthologies. The material is largely well chosen, and much of it Englished for the first time. But selection is not always balanced. The economy, for instance, and the financial and taxation systems hardly appear, despite the introduction's emphasis on economic development and the obvious importance of finance for the emanci- pation settlement and industrialization. At the 'micro' level there is inade- quate glossing of authors excerpted and their biases; and some choices are partial and unrepresentative. The single, downbeat, piece on the fate of household serfs (document 3.6), to give one example, can be contradicted by the equally personal but upbeat account to be found in Vera Figner's memoirs; neither of these accounts mentions the exodus of dvorovye to the towns. The introduction is judicious, challenging in separating the emancipation from other reforms, but somewhat old-fashioned in ignoring current debates on the development of the countryside and the status of the nobility I86I-I9I7. However, every reviewer of such a collection will have his or her own particular preferences; and what is offered here is well worth having. The inflated price will keep it out of reach of its most likely audience; Macmillan should rapidly bring out a cheap paper edition. School of Slavonic and East European Studies R. P. BARTLETT University ofLondon

Winnifrith, T. J. The Vlachs: The History ofa Balkan People. Duckworth, London, I987. viii + I49 pp. Notes. Maps.'Bibliography. Index. ?i8.oo.

IN the ethnic tensions that still rend the Balkans little is heard of the Vlachs, a formerly itinerant people who now live in isolated villages in and around the Pindus mountains of Northern Greece. The principal reason is that, unlike the Albanians of Kosovo, the Hungarians of Transylvania or the Turks in Bulgaria, the Vlachs are neither clamorous nor clamoured over by a mother state that sees them as a threatened national minority, nor are they in turn perceived as a threat to the integrity and cohesion of the dominant nation in the state, in their case, the Greeks. If the Vlachs can claim any patron it is to the Rumanian state that they could mostjustifiably turn, since they share their language and early history with the Latin speakers of the Balkans. Indeed at the beginning of this century the Rumanian government did offer itself as their protector; today, sadly, it is doubtful whether the Vlachs would want to identity themselves with a state which has manoeuvred itself into the position of a pariah amongst much of the international community.

Tom Winnifrith's most welcome monograph is only the second to appear in English this century. Its predecessor, A.J. B. Wace and M. S. Thompson's The Nomads of the Balkans, appeared in I 9 I 4 and concentrated on the oral literature

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REVIEWS 633

and contemporary history of the Vlachs. Winnifrith provides both a sequel and a companion to this work by taking us in their footsteps, and by tackling the Vlachs' early history. It is when he revisits several of the Vlach villages described by Wace and Thompson, notes the changes, and gives personal observations of the people and their attitudes that the author is entertaining.

The early history of the Vlachs is an uncertain affair. Winnifrith gives the reader an account of the fate of the Latin speakers of the Balkans where speculation plays a major part, as it must inevitably do in the absence of written testimony to these peoples following the invasions of assorted barbar- ians and the Slavs until the Vlachs' emergence into history in the late tenth century in a Byzantine source. The space devoted to assessing the value of the conjecture represents almost half of the book, which is elegantly written. Yet comparison with the twenty-six pages allotted to the Vlachs' fortunes from the fall of Byzantium to the present day confirms that the main focus is the early period. The subtitle 'The History of a Balkan People' can only further disappoint expectations. To be fair, Winnifrith admits the summary treatment of the Vlachs' modern and contemporary history, and raises hopes with his intended researches in these periods. This reviewer eagerly awaits them.

School of Slavonic and East European Studies DENNIS DELETANT

University ofLondon

Durman, Karel. Lost Illusions. Russian Policies towards Bulgaria in I877-I887. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Uppsala Studies on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe No. i. Uppsala, I988. I84pp. Bibliography. Index. S.Kr. I25.00.

THE rise and fall of Russian influence in Bulgaria between I877 and I887 is a fascinating case-study of the strengths, weaknesses, and motivating forces of Russian expansion in the Balkans. C. E. Black's pioneering Establishment of Constitutional Government in Bulgaria (I 943) and Charles and BarbaraJelavich's Tsarist Russia and Balkan Nationalism ... (I958) are the fundamental English- language sources on the subject and Durman refers to them frequently. He has used much the same body of sources as theJelavichs, including Foreign Office papers, but has made more use of Russian memoirs published before 19 I 4, of some new documentary material up to I879 published recently in the Soviet Union, and a cautious use of the disputed 'Occupation Fund' documents which the Jelavichs reject as unreliable. Katkov's editorials in Moskovskie vedomosti have been used thoroughly as well as other press materials through reports and summaries in the British Foreign Office papers. Durman's work is an interesting and energetically written study passionately committed to 'challenging the myth of Russo-Bulgarian "eternal friendship"'. In this Durman is to an extent tilting at windmills as such a view is only reflected in the cruder Eastern bloc propaganda and not in recent Bulgarian studies which Durman has used. But for a Czech who has experienced two such disappoint- ing 'liberations' this feeling is understandable and it provides a useful focus for the work. The emphasis is, however, on the most aggressive aspects of what was never a single coherent Russian policy in this period. A check of some of

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