Reviews for In war's dark shadow :the Russians before the Great War (Book)
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
The author of The Romanovs (1981) has written a choppy, unilluminating account of perhaps the most vividly (and extensively) chronicled period in Russian history: from circa 1890 to the Revolution. The panorama that Prof. Lincoln (History, U. of Northern Illinois) presents is broad but static: chapters are devoted to descriptions of the miseries of the peasantry who endured famine in 1891 and deprivation thereafter--until Stolypin threw them some crumbs to ensure their support in suppressing the 1905 revolutionary movement; to the archaic Russian nobility; to the misery and degradation of the urban masses; to the Romanovs; to the ill-fated war with Japan in 1905; etc. The one thing that seems to tie these topics together, in Lincoln's telling, is syphilis--which, we're told pointedly, infected a broader strata of the population in Russia than elsewhere. (Statistics having to do with prostitution also get a considerable play.) Similarly, a chapter on the sexually liberated artistic fringe--which included Diaghilev, Blok and Belyi--makes much of the poet and mystic Soloviev as a prophet of sexual pleasure, and also pronounces him (ludicrously) ""the first--and only--philosopher that nineteenth-century Russia produced."" Little historical explanation is attempted, but Lincoln tends toward the view that what was lacking in pre-Revolutionary Russia was strong leadership: the assassination of Stolypin, the one strong leader produced by the old order, should have advised him otherwise. (Russian institutions collapsed as much from their dead weight as from anything else.) Altogether, Lincoln has provided many undigested facts and much garish color--but little else. For the serious general reader, this bears no comparison with Harrison Salisbury's Black Night, White Snow (1978). Copyright ŠKirkus Reviews, used with permission.
