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This covers the history of Russia from the defeat of Napoleon to the eve of World War I. It is the first such work by a post-Soviet Russian scholar to appear in English. It examines the decay of the two central institutions of tsarist Russia: serfdom and autocracy; the major social groups and how they reacted to the Great Reforms.

By the early years of the twentieth century, the two major socialist parties in Russia, the Social Democrats and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, had taken shape. But these two parties did not win the adherence of all of Russia's revolutionary activists. There existed in addition a series of small extremist groups that formed what might be called the “militant fringe” of the revolutionary movement. These groups differed among themselves on programs, methods and ultimate objectives, but they all rejected the leading parties as insufficiently committed to revolution or too slow-moving in their tactics to achieve it. Although they never attained the numerical or organizational strength of the SD's and SR's, they remained a significant element in the revolutionary movement and left their mark on Russia's political life. The three main components of the militant fringe were the anarchists, the SR Maximalists, and the Makhaevists. Of these the Makhaevists are almost unknown today, although they formed organizations in several cities and rivalled the Maximalists and anarchists for the allegiance of the revolutionary extremists. An account of their program and activities will help to shed light on a segment of the Russian political spectrum whose insight into Russia's social and political condition has been underestimated, and on the revolutionary role of its smallest but in many ways most original element.

\"Leon Trotsky and World War One, August 1914-February 1917\" by Ian D. Thatcher is reviewed.

The first chapter traces the background to the volynka. With the end of the civil war in 1920 there was widespread expectation that war communism's controls would be eased. Instead, the Communist Party instituted measures to militarize the industrial labour force -- including concentration camps for labour \"deserters\" (14-5) -- and to close down all private trade in foodstuffs, which threatened the towns with starvation. [Jonathan Aves] feels that there was an ideological component to the Bolsheviks' actions, a utopian belief that a full-scale socialist society could be achieved by pursuing the methods that had been so successful in fighting the civil war. But the ready resort to force against the workers, the increasing reliance on the secret police (the Cheka) as an instrument of coercion, and the automatic branding of any expression of protest as the work of counter-revolutionaries suggest that militaristic attitudes and methods had now become ingrained in the party, reemerging even more strongly in Stalin's collectivization and industrialization campaigns. Trotsky was in the forefront of efforts to militarize the labour force, but even Lenin, in his denunciation of \"factionalism\" at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, \"metaphorically\" threatened to bring a loaded machine gun to bear against recalcitrant factionalists. The remark so scandalized the party that he felt obliged to apologize the next day. (178)

The roots of Russia's distinctive historical character go back to the early middle Ages, when tribes of Eastern Slavs began to colonize the vast expanses of the East European plain. A few years later, the peasants gave their own response to the intensification of serfdom in the form of the vast uprising led by Emelian Pugachev, termed a \"peasant war\" in Soviet historiography. The methods of rule customary in the Golden Horde served as a model in many respects for the methods employed in the unification of the Russian lands. By the end of the fifteenth century, Moscow had become the spiritual and religious as well as the political center of the Russian lands. In 1775, Catherine II's statute on the administration of the provinces gave the nobility a large share of local administrative, police, and judicial power. Catherine II's favorite grandson, Alexander had been educated by the Swiss republican Frederic-Cesar La Harpe in the spirit of the French Enlightenment.