Russian Historiography from 1880 to 1905: Pavel N. Miliukov and the Moscow School by Thomas N.Bohn. New Perspectives on Central and Eastern European Studies. New York: Berghahn, 2024. 474 pp. $179.00. ISBN 978‐1‐80539‐548‐5

Although over twenty-five years have passed since the original German-language publication of Russische Geschichtswissenschaft von 1880 bis 1905 (1998), Thomas Bohn’s book has lost none of its relevance. While most studies of Pavel Miliukov focus on his career as the leading liberal politician of the late Russian Imperial era, Russian Historiography concentrates instead on Miliukov as a historian, placing him in the wider context of what Bohn identifies as the “Moscow School” of Russian history, originating with Vasily Kliuchevsky. The book’s title is slightly misleading, though, in that it takes the story of Miliukov’s historical work beyond 1905 right through to the end of his life in exile in France in 1943. The first part of the book focuses on the teaching of history in late Imperial Russian universities and provides considerable detail on the precariousness of academic career paths at that time. The second part examines the historical research and writings of the Moscow School and especially Miliukov. Bohn argues that members of the Moscow School formed a specific “generation” that emerged from the peculiar conditions existent in Russian universities in the late nineteenth century. The School’s members broke with the historical views of the Slavophiles and the “State School,” the first of whom considered Russia’s development to have been distinct from the West and the second of whom wrote a form of top-down history concentrating on the Russian state, political leaders, and foreign affairs. In contrast, the Moscow School was more interested in social history and under the strong influence of positivism viewed history as a science whose laws it was historians’ job to determine. Miliukov himself considered Russia to be on the same historical track as Europe, albeit somewhat delayed. Bohn contends that at least in the 1890s, Miliukov “was not a liberal, but a scientist” (p. 80). He thus concludes that “it was not liberalism that determined Miliukov’s view of history, but rather the other way around: his positivist view of history led him into the camp of the Constitutional Democrats” (p. 336). According to Bohn, Miliukov’s concept of history can be viewed as having three dimensions: first, “the inner law of development—which is the same for every society”; second, “the geographic environment,” which “provides for structural differentiation of different societies through different starting conditions”; and third, “the personal factor,” which “brings the element of chance into the historical perspective” (p. 335). Miliukov’s historical determinism was therefore more moderate than that of some others as it allowed for local variation within the same general path of development. It also envisioned the end of history as being a form of Western European liberal democracy rather than communism. Miliukov was thus always a liberal rather than a communist. Bohn’s thesis that Miliukov’s theory of history determined his political position rather than vice-versa is somewhat challenged by his examination of his subject’s work in exile after the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Previous biographers have noted Miliukov’s tactical flexibility as a politician. Often, his political position was determined by what he deemed most tactically advantageous in the short term rather than by pure principle. In the same way, one sees in Miliukov’s later historical works a tendency to shift his interpretations according to his political interests. As Bohn says, at this stage of his life “he tended to instrumentalize historiography” (p. 285). Thus, his initial studies of the Russian Revolution largely dropped the sociological approach of his early work, and in line with the perceived need to restore a strong state, his output instead began to resemble that of the State School. But once the White struggle against Bolshevism failed, he switched his political hopes to the peasantry, inducing another shift of analysis, at which point Miliukov “instead borrowed from the populists,” giving a positive spin to recent developments in Russian history as involving “the elevation of the peasantry to the level of self-conscious citizenry” (pp. 289, 298). If the early Miliukov had been a historian first and a politician second, it would appear from Bohn’s account that by the end of his life the opposite was true. Parts of Russian Historiography from 1880 to 1905 involve detailed discussion of fairly esoteric topics, such as whether the Moscow School really was a “school” or whether there was, as Soviet historians claimed, a “crisis of bourgeois historiography” in late Imperial Russia. This will probably limit the book’s readership. Nonetheless, there is much of interest there for those wanting to know more about the late nineteenth century historical profession and the life and career of Pavel Miliukov.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.