Vladimir the Russian Viking by Vladimir VolkoffReview by: George P. MajeskaThe American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 1 (Feb., 1988), pp. 191-192Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1865790 .

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Modern Europe 191

contains no surprises but much detail based on impressively solid research.

C. EARL EDMONDSON

Davidson College

KAREL KAPLAN. Die politischen Prozesse in der Tschechoslowakei 1948-1954. (Veroffentlichungen des Collegium Carolinum, number 48.) Munich: R. Oldenbourg. 1986. Pp. 228.

A former Communist party official, Karel Kaplan, has produced an extremely informative account of the political trials that took place in Communist Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1954. For his study Kaplan has surveyed many unique source materials, which he consulted during the 1960s in the secret archives of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia and other state authorities. His narrative is largely based on the wealth of primary sources that he took with him when he left the country in 1976.

Since we live with the consequences of wartime decisions and since every year the number of those who had nothing to do with the atrocities of the early Communist era increases, there is a growing tendency to trivialize the Communist experience of 1948-54 in East Central Europe and to forget the ghastly nature of past brutalities. In Czechoslovakia alone some one hundred thousand people were sentenced by courts, innocent victims of political persecution.

The task of a historian is primarily to report on the past honestly and objectively. Kaplan does just that. In the first part of his book, he presents the political trials not as an aberration of Stalinism but rather as an indispensable part of the initial stage in the construction of a Communist system. The Prague regime used the trials chiefly as a device to help solve various social and political issues and to destroy existing social and political structures as well as national traditions. Ideology was mostly of sec- ondary importance, used to prop up Soviet interests and to maintain and promote an all-embracing Communist dictatorship. The second part of the study covers the six years of the regime up to 1954. The first wave of trials in 1948 was still closely linked to the February takeover. Successive trials against the military, former political parties, the church, foreign powers, selected economists, and, ulti- mately, top Communist officials themselves marked the main steps.

Kaplan is at his best when he details factual descriptions. One could take exception to his inclu- sion of Nazi collaborators in the postwar trials. There are moments when one wishes for a more probing analysis, even though the study makes no pretense to being a work of deep scholarship or

perception. His largest single contribution is his penetrating discussion of the trials as key elements in the Communist mechanism of power. Among the lists compiled by the author, those detailing the individual trials will prove of future value. The volume will take a well-deserved place in the litera- ture dealing with the inner workings of Communist regimes.

RADOMIR V. LUZA Tulane University

VLADIMIR VOLKOFF. Vladimir the Russian Viking. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook. 1985. Pp. xxiv, 384.

In a marvelously lively fashion this work portrays the development of Prince Vladimir, the Christian- izer of Rus', from an excited child in his grandmoth- er's palace in a Kiev under Pecheneg attack to a dying ruler exhorting his children to princely and Christian deeds (in words the author borrows from the Testament of Vladimir's great-grandson, Vladimir Monomakh). In between Vladimir Volkoff attempts to re-create the prince's life down to his campaigns and conversations. The book reads like a novel with resonances from various sources for the history of Kievan Rus', and, despite the Library of Congress call number assigned it and the author's protestations to the contrary, it is better as a novel than as history.

The work's major shortcoming as history results from Volkoffs preference for telling a good story rather than investigating the historical problems surrounding the life of the first Christian ruler of Rus'. The author has obviously read the basic sources for the Kievan period, but, rather than evaluating them critically and studying the scholarly literature they have evoked, he mines the material, willy-nilly, for anecdotes. Apparently because they tell good stories, the author draws on the "unreli- able" Joachim Chronicle, as well as on Icelandic sagas and Russian folk epics (byliny), with little apparent attention to the reliability of their information. To describe Vladimir's bureaucracy, Volkoff projects back two generations information from the Pravda of Iaroslav's Sons on officials in charge of princely estates, with no hint as to the massive modern scholarship on the question of the very existence of private princely estates in the Kievan realm. Is a sixteenth-century letter of a patriarch of Constantinople to the Russian tsar on whom he depends for alms an appropriate source for the "imperial" regalia supposedly worn by Vladimir I in the tenth century? Perhaps it might be, if the thesis were argued cogently, but rarely does the author argue his case; he simply presents his material. More often than not, the basic material in the book is

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192 Reviews of Books

correct, but that is not enough for good history; readers must be able to depend on it (and this book has a significant number of factual errors) or be able to check it themselves in the sources and scholarship (and the endnotes are not sufficient to allow this).

This book is not successful as "the first complete biography of the extraordinary prince who founded the Russian state and converted his people to Chris- tianity," as the dust cover would have it, but it does capture some of the lusty spirit of the tenth-century Kievan court much as a Monty Python film might do.

GEORGE P. MAJESKA

University of Maryland

CHARLES J. HALPERIN. The Tatar Yoke. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica. 1986. Pp. 231. $15.95.

Basing his work on original insights formulated by Michael Cherniavsky, Charles J. Halperin has be- come preeminent among American authorities on the Mongol-Tatar period in Russian history. This is illustrated by his more than twenty articles on the topic over approximately the past ten years and, most strikingly, by the appearance of his Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History in 1985 and of the present volume.

Perhaps moved by criticism that the bibliography of Russia and the Golden Horde was a trifle skimpy and one-sided, this time Halperin includes a thorough list of the Soviet literature (mainly historical and textological monographs) on the subject, which he often comments on in the notes. Western scholars concerned with these issues are not neglected.

Halperin has developed a provocative theory and has not been afraid to take on the prerevolutionary, Soviet, and other historical establishments concern- ing a theme over which passions understandably run high. His thesis is that Muscovite "bookmen" of the Mongol-Tatar period consciously refused to admit or discuss the fact that Russia had been conquered by and was obliged to remain subservient to Mongol-Tatar suzerains for well over two centu- ries. This does not mean their writings contain no information pointing in the opposite direction, but they were motivated by a hostility toward the Tatars that was purely religious in origin. Modern histori- ography in a secular age of nationalism has been unable to understand or cope with such an attitude.

To demonstrate his contention, in five central chapters that form the core of the book Halperin relates the content and discusses the provenance and language of principal writings of the time. He investigates the chronicles' portrayal of the Mongols' initial foray into Russia under Batu, the "martyr- dom" of Prince Mikhail of Chernigov, the 1327 uprising in Tver', the Battle of Kulikovo, and the

civil war in Vasilii II's time. He analyzes the Lives of Aleksandr Nevskii, the five sermons of Serapion of Vladimir, the story of Baskak Akhmed of Kursk, the Skazanie o Mamaevom poboishche, the Zadonshchina, and Vassian Rylo's "Epistle to the Ugra," to name but a few. He frequently cites examples from the sources to show that Russian leaders not only ac- knowledged but respected the legitimacy of a Tatar ruler descended directly from the house of Ching- gis-khan.

Old favorites appear in a fresh light. Fascinating insights abound: no source here portrays Dmitrii Donskoi and his boyars and prelates exulting that they have at last freed Russia from a Tatar yoke; Halperin convincingly explodes the stubborn myth that the roots of Soviet expansionism should be sought in the "doctrine" of Moscow the Third Rome.

One might raise a few cavils. Halperin regularly writes about "Russia" as opposed to the "Golden Horde." It would surely have strengthened his po- sition if he had further emphasized the lack of unity among the Russian princes during the Mongol- Tatar period; even at the end of Ivan III's reign there were still appanage rulers capable of offering resistance to Moscow. The religious establishment was the exclusive custodian of the written word during this epoch. Perhaps it might be possible to invert the argumentum ex silentio by saying that others in other walks of life in Muscovy may have viewed the Mongol-Tatars differently, in more secular terms. But these are quibbles in no way detracting from the book's intriguing thesis or the way in which Halperin has used the original sources to prove his case. An index would have been helpful.

HUGH F. GRAHAM

California State College, Bakersfield

J. L. BLACK. G. F. Miller and the Imperial Russian Academy. Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press. 1986. Pp. xi, 290. $34.00.

Born in 1705 in Herford, Westphalia, Gerhard Friedrich Muller arrived in Russia in 1725 with the sole purpose of learning the Russian language and becoming a Russian historian. He immediately be- came associated with the newly founded St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, at first as a grad- uate student and after 1731 as a professor of his- tory. Actively engaged in academic affairs, both scholarly and administrative, Muller played an im- portant role in transforming the fledgling academy into a dynamic and internationally respected insti- tution. Between 1754 and 1765 he occupied the powerful position of secretary of the academy. He authored the first history of the academy. As a

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