The Last Tsar : The Abdication of Nicholas II and The Fall of the Romanovs by Tsuyosh Hasegawa. 2024 - 467 Pages

 

The Last Tsar : The Abdication of Nicholas II and The Fall of the Romanovs by Tsuyosh HasegawaThe Last Tsar -2024 - 467 Pages

Anyone with a serious interest in late Romanov history,  the Russian Revolution or World War One should seriously consider readingThe Last Tsar : The Abdication of Nicholas II and The Fall of the Romanovs by Tsuyosh Hasegawa.   

When Tsar Nicholas II fell from power in 1917, Imperial Russia faced a series of overlapping crises, from war to social unrest. Though Nicholas’s life is often described as tragic, it was not fate that doomed the Romanovs—it was poor leadership and a blinkered faith in autocracy.   

 

Based on a trove of new archival discoveries, The Last Tsar narrates how Nicholas’s resistance to reform doomed the monarchy. Encompassing the captivating personalities of the era—the bumbling Nicholas, his spiteful wife Alexandra, the family’s faith healer Rasputin—it untangles the dramatic struggle by Russia’s aristocratic, military, and legislative elite to reform the monarchy. By rejecting compromise, Nicholas undermined his supporters at crucial moments. His blunders cleared the way for all-out civil war and the eventual rise of the Soviet Union.  

 

Definitive and engrossing, The Last Tsar uncovers how Nicholas II stumbled into revolution, taking his family, the Romanov dynasty, and the whole Russian Empire down with him.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is professor emeritus in history at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The award-winning author of many books on Russian history, World War II, and the Cold War, he lives in Santa Barbara, California.

The Ruble: A Political History by Ekaterina Anatolʹevna Pravilova -2023- 435 pages

 I highly recommend The Ruble: A Political History to anyone with a serious interest in Pre-revoluntunary Russian History.

The Ruble is a political history of Russian money from Catherine the Great to Vladimir Lenin. It traces the evolution of the Russian state and society through the analysis of monetary reforms. The Ruble argues that currency constituted an important element of Russian political organization - first, autocratic, and then socialist, while monetary reforms were considered as the means of enabling or preventing political transformations. The Ruble shows how politics affected finance and explains why Russia's financial system remained unstable for many decades. Russian imperial government considered certain financial models, such as the independence of the bank of issue, to be incompatible with the principles of autocratic monarchy. The ruble represented a projection of monarchal power and a tool of imperial expansion. Russian government used emission to finance imperial wars and prioritized geopolitical successes over economic development. Russia was the last European empire to join the gold standard system, and the gold ruble differed from other gold-based currencies of the world. The Ruble analyzes the phenomena of the "autocratic" and "Soviet" gold standards and argues that the gold-based ruble differed from other currencies of the gold-standard system. Despite the preponderance of the conservative trend in monetary policy, Russian economists, liberal politicians and intellectuals argued for a radical reform of Russian money and wanted to liberate the ruble from the tutelage of the state. From Catherine the Great's reform until the 1920s, the ruble remained an object of many political programs, utopian projects, and economic ideologies"--

The Table of Contents 

Acknowledgments

Introduction: the ruble's stories

Assignats: from paper substitutes to paper money

Autocracy or representation? the political philosophy of money in the age of Napoleon and after

The end of Assignats

Paper money in the era of the "great reforms"

Ruble's wars

Witte's rollercoaster

The autocratic standard

Practicing the gold standard

The gold syndrome

War and the end of the gold ruble

A revolution that did not happen

Epilogue: The ruble that cannot be spent

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

"She is the Rosengarten Chair of Modern and Contemporary History; Professor of History; Acting Director, Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian 

A native of St. Petersburg (Russia), Professor Ekaterina Pravilova received her Ph.D. from the Russian Academy of Sciences. She was a research scholar at the Academy of Sciences, and taught history at the European University at St. Petersburg from 2002 to 2006. She joined the faculty at Princeton in the fall of 2006. Her research interests vary greatly, ranging from the development of Russian law, economy and governance, to the study of imperial art and historiography". From The Department of History of Princeton University 

In the interest of full disclosure I was given a review copy of this book.

Mel Ulm

Thec Ruling Familiies of Rus: Clan, Family and Kingdom by Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrowski - 2023- 300 Pages

 The Ruling Families of Rus- Clan, Family and Kingdom by Christian Raffensperger and Donald Ostrowski - 2023- 300 Pages

Kyivan Rus’ was a state in northeastern Europe from the late ninth to the mid-sixteenth century that encompassed a variety of peoples, including Lithuanians, Polish, and Ottomans. The Ruling Families of Rus explores the areas history through local families, revealing how the concept of family rule developed over the centuries into what we understand as now as dynasties. The authors spend a good bit of time talking about, using a term from David Fisher, what are called "historical fallacies". One such fallacy is to start from a point in history after the era you are studying and portray the past only as it leads to the future. In the case of Russian studies it would often taken history as an inevitable march to the Romonovs.

"In other words, as Fischer states it, this represents ‘a complex anachronism , in which the antecedent in a narrative series is falsified by being defined or interpreted in terms of the consequent’. The historians’ fallacy here, in what may be a classic example, judges the relevance of events in early Rus in terms of their leading to the creation of the Russian dynastic state, from the end of the fifteenth until the beginning of the sixteenth century. However, there is another chronological dimension that will lead eventually to the present-day state of Russia. In this respect, according to Fischer, what has been created is ‘the mistaken idea that the proper way to do history is to prune away the dead branches of the past and to preserve the green buds and twigs which have grown into the dark forest of our contemporary world’. 30 The various branches of the history tree that do not lead to the present are chopped off as irrelevant.What we have tried to do in this book is to study early Rus until the sixteenth century from the point of view of the people who lived it, what they knew and what they didn’t know at the time. Our evidence tells us that, among other things, they did not know that they were part of a dynasty. They did, however, know that they were part of a family." From the text.

Ascension to the throne in the period was not strictly through the oldest son. First it would pass through the ruler's brothers. Rulers saw themselves as part of a family, not a dynasty.

Each of the 12 chapters focuses on the family of a different ruler. Marriages were arranged to increase power, develop trade and promote peace.

Some rulers paid tribute to the Mungals, church architecture was adapted from the Byzantine Empire.

Here is how the authors tell us Rus began

" the locals proved to be unable to rule themselves and, thus, the ‘Varangian Rus’ were invited back to rule over them: ‘Our land is great and rich, but there is no order in it . Come to rule and reign over us.’ Thus, the author of the much later pvl account, writing at the behest of the descendants of these same Rus, or at least for people claiming descent from them, had now created a proper origin story – not one of conquest and bloodshed, but one where their ancestors were invited in as saviours and peacekeepers by a local population who were unable to take care The explorations of these Scandinavian travellers seemed eventually to turn to conquest or, at least, tribute-taking, as recorded by the pvl. However, only a few years later, the pvlsays that: ‘The tributaries of the Varangians drove them back beyond the sea and, refusing them further tribute, set out to govern themselves.’ This expulsion of the tribute-taking Scandinavians is the real beginning of the creation story of Rus"

This book took my knowledge of Russian History much further back than the Romanovs. I highly reccomend it to all into Russian or Medieval European history.

Christian Raffensperger is the Kenneth E. Wray Chair in the Humanities at Wittenberg University.

Donald Ostrowski is a lecturer at the Harvard Extension School and an associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Mel Ulm