Imperatritsa Maria Feodorovna: Dnevniki, Pis'ma, Vospominania

by Julia Kudrina

Moscow: Moskva Olma-Press, 2001

318 pages, 45 black and white photographs.

A review by Greg King

As new Romanov titles continue to flood the Russian market, it was inevitable that someone would eventually turn to the subject of Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna. Wife of Alexander III and mother of Nicholas II, Marie Feodorovna lived through pivotal events in the last decades of the Empire, exercising influence both good and bad over those in power. This book comes scarcely a year after Coryne Hall's exhaustive biography of Marie Feodorovna, Little Mother of Russia, so comparisons between the two books are just as inevitable. There is no doubt that each author accessed materials unavailable to the other, and provides a unique perspective on this enigmatic woman. The cross-section of memoirs, files, accounts, and letters in each book stand largely on their own. Where Hall's book relied primarily on Western sources, Kudrina largely utilizes material in Russian archives.

Kudrina has previously specialized in study of the Romanovs and most particularly in the Dowager Empress, writing a series of articles for Russian periodicals on her life, as well as contributing to Marie Feodorovna, the authoritative catalogue from the 1997 Danish exhibition. As such, she examines the Dowager Empress's life in a critical fashion. The presentation of much original material also adds greatly to the book, drawing as it does on many of the personal letters between Marie Feodorovna and her family in the Russian State Archives.

One pronounced contrast between Kudrina and Hall is their analysis of the Dowager Empress's political influence. This is perhaps because Hall focused to a large extent on Marie Feodorovna as a woman, wife, and mother. Kudrina pays little attention to the majority of personal information available on the Dowager Empress to instead discuss at length significant episodes in her life as Empress and Dowager Empress. "Marie Feodorovna undoubtedly played a critical role in helping shape her eldest son's character," Kudrina writes, "and this influence was not always exercised with discretion." To Kudrina, Alexander III and Marie Feodorovna are largely responsible for the immaturity of their son, and for the decisions to keep him ignorant of the duties of his future role. It is perhaps a contentious point, but one that Kudrina is careful to document with the evidence which supports it.

Where Kudrina's book fails is in any attempt to present a comprehensive accumulation of evidence available in the West. Kudrina makes only brief use of well-known memoirs and autobiographies related to the Dowager Empress, and Hall clearly did a more thorough job of mining the scattered sources which were available to her. In the last ten years, a number of Russian books on the Romanovs have appeared, but few have attempted to integrate their undoubtedly unique material with that which exists outside their own country. Kudrina certainly had an opportunity to do so, as she mentions most of the known titles in her footnotes and bibliographical information.

As such, Kudrina's book is far short of Hall's in scope and comprehension. It is undoubtedly a worthwhile addition to any library, containing, as it does, a number of previously unpublished letters and documents, and it has an added bonus of a Russian analysis of the Dowager Empress's life and role, as seen through Russian sources. The two sections of black and white photographs are well-known, which is a shame considering the amount of photographic material available in the same archives where Kudrina did much of her research. In the end, the two latest biographies of Marie Feodorovna compliment, rather than contrast, with each other; taken together, they provide a thorough look at the Dowager Empress and her role in the last years of Imperial Russia.