Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals

by Dominic Lieven

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

488 pages, 45 black and white illustrations.

A review by Greg King

 Dominic Lieven, the author of a recent, thoughtful biography of Nicholas II, as well as other works on Imperial Russia, here follows a thread he briefly explored in Nicholas II: Twilight of Empire. In Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals, Lieven sets out to critically analyze the state of Russia under the last Romanovs by comparing it with other Empires in Europe, and looking at how their sovereigns coped with the growing troubles of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Lieven makes lengthy and direct comparisons between Imperial Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire, the British Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, amongst others. In looking at a myriad of topics, from economy and industrialization, to education and agriculture, the author examines firstly how the questions existed in Russia, and then how other monarchs dealt with the same problems. In so doing, he aptly demonstrates that many conditions believed to be unique to Imperial Russia-a discontent industrial class, peasants and farmers barely managing to subsist, an uncompromising bureaucracy which largely existed to widen the gulf between ruler and ruled, and frivolous aristocrats-were in fact part of the core of each of these Empires.

One of the most interesting comparisons is with Great Britain, where the sovereign, as constitutional monarch, was largely exempt from policy decisions and influence. While Russian democrats clamored for a Duma and constitution as an instant cure to the Empire's ills, Lieven shows that Queen Victoria and her successors themselves did little to alleviate the problems and sufferings of their subjects. Lieven compares the factory workers in Moscow and St. Petersburg with the poorest subjects of Victorian and Edwardian England who inhabited slums from Whitechapel to the north, showing that neither Russia nor Great Britain had adequate means for dealing with the increasing numbers of the poor and dispossessed. In addition, Lieven makes the more important and thoughtful analysis of industrial conditions in Russia to those of Great Britain at roughly the same period in their developments; in England the Industrial Revolution came early, but labor and living conditions for most workers rivaled anything in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th Century. It was Russia's misfortune, Lieven notes, that she had to come to grips with the technological developments of the 20th Century within the space of a few decades, while most other countries had a hundred years. Even then, he writes, the examples to be found in Great Britain and Austria-Hungary (Germany fared better in this respect) compared evenly with Russia at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Lieven also explores how individual monarchs responded to their changing Empires and the results, as he writes, were almost uniformly poor. While Nicholas II struggled in Russia, Franz Josef responded to demands from his multi-ethnic Empire through military force and repression, which did little to advance the view of the Habsburgs as benevolent rulers. Nor were the Sultan of Turkey, the German Kaiser, or even Queen Victoria, and King Edward, kindly disposed to the enormous changes faced by their individual countries. By laying out his case problem by problem, and example by example, Lieven manages to disarm most of the old arguments which lay the blame for the Revolution of 1917 squarely at the feet of Nicholas II, showing that only Great Britain managed to survive the tidal wave of discontent, and then, barely so. As such, this is a welcome, if somewhat different, historical perspective on the last years of the Russian Empire.