Isabel De Madariaga

Catherine the Great

Believers in the theory of enlightened despotism thought that Russia was the ideal country in which to apply their ideas. Since it had no ancient institutions which would need to be rooted up, it was a blank page on which the philosophe might inscribe what he wished.1 Nothing could be less true. When Catherine seized the throne in 1762, Russia was an absolute monarchy, placed at the despotic end of the spectrum which extended through the Prussia of Frederick II to the France of Louis XV.2 There were no institutional limitations on the power of the ruler, who was even entitled to name his, or more often her, successor. There were no constituted bodies or ‘estates’, no ‘intermediate powers’ of the kind that existed elsewhere in Europe. As head of the executive the sovereign exercised authority through a series of functional colleges headed by boards under presidents, whose work was co-ordinated by an appointed administrative Senate of some twenty or thirty people. This misleadingly-named body had no legislative powers, which were lodged entirely in the ruler. Local administration had been allowed to collapse into an under-financed chaos when Peter I’s top-heavy organisation was dismantled in 1727.

Reviews : Edward C. Thaden, Interpreting History: Collective Essays on Russia's Relations with Europe, Social Science Monographs/Columbia University Press, 1990; x + 315 pp.; no price given

Professor E. Thaden has for many years written at some length on Russian and Soviet historiography, (how does one describe post-coup historiography? post-Soviet?) on Russian foreign policy, on Russian conservative political thought, on the nationality policy of tsarist Russia, on modern Russian history in general and on the history of the western borderlands of tsarist Russia and of Finland. The present collection of sixteen essays ’ranges’, as the preface states, over forty years and is divided into four groups: historiography; Russian diplomacy in the Balkans before 1914; modern nationalism and nationality policy; and, finally, the relations of Russia with the Baltic.

Review Article : Tamara Talbot Rice, Elizabeth Empress of Russia, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, I970. 23I pp. £2.75:

Miller’s previous contribution to the field was A Wife for the Pretender, a saga of the adventures of Charles Wogan in freeing Princess Clementina Sobieska from the clutches of the Emperor, thereby allowing her to marry James III and subsequently to make the Jacobite court the laughing-stock of Europe. The author has chosen to open her new biography by ignoring the most famous and controversial birth in western European history. Instead, Dr Miller begins her account of the Pretender with the arrival of Mary of Modena and the infant Prince of Wales at Boulogne in December 1688 (’the weather remained stormy, menacing seas battered the beaches’, p. 2I), a method which presents two difficulties: first, one is never quite certain why James II was run out of England and second, when the warming-pan myth is first mentioned on p. 264, the uninitiated reader is likely to be puzzled by the reference. Nor is one’s confidence in Dr Miller increased by her acceptance at face value (pp. 261-4) of An English Traveller at Rome (London, 1721) as the work of a young Whig gentleman, rather than the very clever piece of Jacobite propaganda it was. Her grasp of both British and European history of the period is unsure, to say the least; while her references often leave a great deal to be desired (’HMC, Vol. I, pp. 486-7’ is hardly descriptive). Two-thirds of James is devoted to the period before 1719, when Dr Miller’s major source, the HMC Stuart MSS., ends: only the remaining 116 pages cover the last forty-seven years of James III’s life. The author, without citing any references whatsoever, devotes the early chapters to an entirely suppositional hero-worship on the part of the Pretender for his older illegitimate brother, the Marshal-Duke of Berwick, ignoring the fact that James, so heavily influenced-if not dominated-by his mother, undoubtedly shared Mary of Modena’s disdain for James Il’s bastards (although he was quite prepared to use Berwick as his influential liaison with the