Scholarship and Myth in the Shaping of East Slavic Premodernity

Scholarship and Myth in the Shaping of East Slavic Premodernity Simon Franklin (bio) Donald Ostrowski, Russia in the Early Modern World: The Continuity of Change. 574 pp. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022. ISBN-13 978-1793634221. 49. 99. Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrowski, The Ruling Families of Rus: Clan, Family, and Kingdom. 320 pp. London: Reaktion Books, 2023. ISBN-13 978-1789147155. 35. 00. Scholars question conventional wisdom; political mythologizers appropriate, simplify, and reinforce it. Populist quasi-historical mythmakers can find wider resonance than scholarship but are increasingly disconnected from it. Preoccupied as they tend to be with making their countries great again, decolonization is not on their agenda. In the meantime, scholars get on with their day job of challenging embedded assumptions in the narratives through which the past is framed, in the chapter headings of received history, in the concepts and categories of its representation. Donald Ostrowski is among the most productive, wide-ranging, versatile, and provocative scholars of medieval and early modern East Slav history and texts. It is somehow appropriate that his latest two books—one under his sole authorship, the other written jointly with Christian Raffensperger—should together span almost a millennium. Each seeks to reframe its subject. However, although they happen to overlap for half a century or so either side of 1500, that is the extent of their complementarity. In their focus and methods they are entirely different from each other. Ostrowski's Russia in the Early Modern World is an immensely ambitious and impressive attempt at thematic, deep-structure but wide-angled End Page 381 history, focusing on Muscovy and the Russian Empire but ranging dynamically and comparatively across Eurasia, or even Afro-Eurasia, from the mid-15th century to the start of the 19th century. The Ruling Families of Rus, though also with a considerable chronological and geographic span, is almost wholly concerned with political narratives of the families of the remarkably resilient clan of the Volodimerovichi. Besides telling its own story, each book also sets up a target to be knocked down. For the earlier period, the target is the idea that Rus´ was ruled by a "dynasty"—or, more precisely, that rulers thought of their own legitimacy in dynastic terms. For the later period, the target is the idea that the age and initiatives of Peter I ("the Great") represent any kind of significant divide in the history of Russia, the schema that divides Russian history into distinct pre-Petrine and post-Petrine epochs separated by a Petrine revolution. Russia in the Early Modern World is thematic rather than sequentially narrative. It consists of a substantial introduction on the terms and frameworks in which Russian history has tended to be represented, and a conclusion that deals head-on with the question of Peter's role and significance ("Putting Peter in His Place"). Sandwiched between them is the meat of the book, seven chapters on seven topics: the ecological zones of the Eurasian heartlands and the growth of empire; the ruling classes and court politics; military technology and tactics; Russia's preindustrial economy and the practice of enlisting foreigners to provide skills that were lacking locally; institutions and the legal system; relations with the Church; and "an interpretive commentary" on Early Modern Russian culture. Wherever Ostrowski looks, the Petrine myth seems unsustainable. Russia did not become an empire only when or because Peter declared it to be one. Muscovite imperial expansion began at least in the mid-16th century with the conquest of Kazan or, arguably, earlier. The empire expanded over three centuries, with no notable acceleration under Peter. The Russian military started its Europeanization at least from the 1650s, and a victory such as Poltava owed nothing to Petrine reform. Russia was engaged in international commerce, and with the Eurasian economy in general, throughout its early modernity, so the commercial economy was not kick-started at the turn of the 18th century. For the entire early modern period Russia was a dynastic state, whose highest regular organ of governance was the sovereign in council. But what about Peter's "window on the west"? Surely he initiated the transition from self-contained, xenophobic Muscovy to actively westernizing St. Petersburg? Not. . .