The Enigmatic Tsar, his friends and his Inheritance
Russia and the Napoleonic Wars
Constitutions, Congresses and Classes under Alexander I
The Decembrist Movement
The Administrative and Social Policy of Nicholas I
The Emergence of the Russian Intelligentsia
The Russian Bear
The Politics of Emancipation
In the Wake of Emancipation
Russia and Europe
Populism

With this eagerly awaited volume, the Longman History of Russia nears completion. The new book is fully worthy of its distinguished predecessors, and its appearance will be enthusiastically welcomed. Russia's achievements in the eighteenth century made her look like a colossus, but, as David Saunders shows, the giant had feet of clay: the central theme of this book is Russia's failure to adapt to the world ushered in by the French Revolution. This was not for want of trying: Alexander I ascended the throne in 1801 with ambitions to turn the regime into a constitutional monarchy, but the Napoleonic Wars prevented him from realising his dream. His successor, Nicholas I, displayed an often underestimated adroitness in tailoring his policies to changing circumstances; but his efforts, too, foundered in international conflict, in his case the Crimean War. Alexander II went further: he abolished serfdom and revamped much of the imperial superstructure. By then, however, the growing ambitions of the dissidents went far beyond his capacity for change. Having failed to provoke a popular rising, the revolutionaries of the 1870s took up terrorism instead, and on 1 March 1881 Alexander received fatal injuries from an assassin's bomb. The murder induced a bunker-mentality in the dynasty that it was never to throw off. Was reform bound to fail? David Saunders suggests many reasons why Russia was unable to adapt. The personal failings of the tsars themselves, and the reluctance of the Russian nobility to accept the transformation of its sources of income, played their part. So, too, did an unwieldy bureaucracy that thought it knew better than the people for whom it was responsible. There was an obvious contradiction between the regime's desire to improve educational facilities and its simultaneous insistence on regulating the expression of informed opinion; yet the obsession of the intelligentsia with the values and material achievements of western Europe had its own inherent instability. And underlying all these factors, then as so often later, were the potentially explosive differences between Russians and the empire's ethnic minorities, and the government's chronic shortage of material resources. David Saunders writes with authority and panache. His themes are explored against a richly drawn background, covering the full political, diplomatic, intellectual, social and economic history of nineteenth-century Russia. Equally rewarding to specialist and layman alike, his book is a superb achievement. David Saunders is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. After taking first-class honours in Modern History at Oxford, he spent two of his doctoral years in the USSR. His earlier publications include "The Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture, 1750 - 1850" (published in 1985 by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at Edmonton), which won the 1986 prize in Ukrainian studies awarded by the Antonovych Foundation of Washington