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The Baron's Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 51 (2016) 103e114
internal conflicts over doctrine which plagued the new religion in this period. Christine Shepardson's Controlling Contested Places adds significantly to this body of work by applying contemporary scholarship in human geography to bear on the problems of interpreting the role of place and space in the struggles to establish and maintain what came to be known as religious orthodoxy against discordant and divergent Christian views and the remains of the classical pagan traditions. At the core of this study is her approach of extracting new insight from the voices of the Christian leaders as they encourage their followers to transform their interpretation of the physical world of and around Antioch; Shepardson, in essence, addresses the rhetorical manipulation of the city's landscape. This process of explicating ancient texts with the specific focus on how authors were creating and redefining place and space lends itself well to a period in which the urban fabric and rural environment differed drastically from what exists today. The example of Shepardson's treatment of the relics and burial of the martyr Babylas in chapter two demonstrates the fruits of her analysis. In the middle of the fourth century, the remains of the saint were first moved, supposedly under imperial orders, into a shrine in the suburbs of Antioch in the precinct of a temple complex which had been dedicated to the pagan god Apollo, thereby attempting to rebrand the space; after a fire destroyed the temple of Apollo, a pagan emperor ordered the removal of Babylas's relics, which were eventually set in a basilica in the city that had been constructed specifically to house them. The transfer, removal, and final re-deposition of the holy remains of the saint were not simply the results of various emperors' and bishops' attempts to cleanse, reconstitute, and sanctify specific locations, but in the rhetoric of the city's preachers these actions constituted a deeper shaping of the landscape along the lines of ‘place marketing’ not just for the present but also to affect the memories of the past. Here, the contentious disputes over the movement of relics became battles for the ownership of the past and present of Antioch, in which the Christian god overcame the Greek gods and what comes to be known as orthodoxy triumphed over other forms of Christianity. Other chapters of Shepardson's book significantly expand on the use of rhetoric in the control of space outside such decisive events as the transfers of the relics of Babylas. The first chapter explores the places where both pagan and Christian rhetoric found venues for its dissemination, and the effects these activities had on locations and their control. Following the second chapter on the relics of Babylas, the third reviews some of the prodigious written output of John Chrysostom, whose sermons and homilies in Antioch during the 380s would later propel him to the position of Patriarch of Constantinople and leader of orthodox Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean; in particular, Shepardson focuses on the language he used in creating boundaries for his community of Christians by denying them access to specific urban spaces, from the theatre to the synagogues, redefining a topography of Antioch for the devout. The following two chapters reveal the rhetorical distinctions echoing the real divides between the inhabitants of the urban center of Antioch and its substantial rural hinterland, and the mapping of the sacred spaces of these regions, both real and imagined. The study concludes by exploring comparative situations across the late antique Mediterranean, highlighting the ways in which modes of thinking from geography are well suited to analyzing the problems arising from religious conflict, conversion, and pilgrimage, especially as connected to the control of space. The synthesis presented in Controlling Contested Places is exciting and very welcome. Few scholars possess the skills to
111
manage the rich scholarship on, and the vast range of secular and religious sources from Antioch and have the ability to integrate the methodologies from other disciplines in illuminating the interactions between religion, rhetoric, and space. Not only does Shepardson succeed, her work provides a clear template for further inquiry about geography and memory beyond Antioch in the world of Late Antiquity, and useful tools to address them. Edward Schoolman University of Nevada, Reno, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.05.008
Willard Sunderland, The Baron's Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2014, 368 pages, US$35 hardcover. In this magnificent book, Willard Sunderland, Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati, invites the reader to perceive the Russian Empire from a different perspective. Rather than surveying it from the vantage point of ‘policies, structures, or ideologies, as historians usually do’ (p. 7), we should step into the shoes of imperial people and look for another set of truths. Sunderland's subject may seem like a strange choice: Baron Roman Feodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg (Ungern for short), the so-called ‘mad baron’ who led a 1920 rebellion in Mongolia with the aim of restoring both the Russian and Chinese Empires. He was captured, interrogated, tried, and shot by the Bolsheviks. Yet, as Sunderland brilliantly demonstrates, if we don Ungern's cloak and wear it to trace the entirety of his life, we can ‘see’ the Empire in new ways. Adopting the microhistorical biographical approach, Sunderland refocuses the lenses often used in the history of empire. Ungern, as Sunderland notes, is useful because he lived in so many different places during his short life (he was 35 at the time of his execution). Yet the fact that his life included cities as far apart as Graz and Novonikolaevsk (now Novosibirsk), the places of his birth and death, means that we can follow Ungern to develop a mental image of the ‘great horizontal connectedness of the empire’ (p. 10). To accomplish this aim, Sunderland traveled to all the places associated with Ungern's life. The result is an engaging combination of microhistory, historical geography, and insightful travelogue. Born into the transnational, aristocratic world of late nineteenthcentury Europe, Ungern's early life was mostly spent in Estland, the Baltic province of the Russian Empire. Sunderland argues that the Germans who controlled this part of the world served as ‘de facto subcontractors for the empire’ (p. 28). Estland was slowly modernizing yet also still ‘traditional’ in its imperial makeup during the late nineteenth century, and this combination certainly shaped the trajectory of the young Ungern. After he failed out of a Reval gymnasium, Ungern was sent in 1902 by his mother to the College of Naval Cadets in St. Petersburg. The capital city became the site for ‘the conversion that would turn him into a more culturally Russianized and devoted sort of imperial subject e the kind of subject who lived for the empire rather than simply lived within it’ (p. 44). In February, 1905, he enlisted in the army and shipped out to Manchuria to fight in the Russo-Japanese War. His experiences in Manchuria and the eastern parts of the Russian Empire gave him a renewed direction, for after the war's end, Ungern returned to St. Petersburg, enrolled in the Paul the First Military Academy, and graduated as an officer in 1908. When it came time to choose his posting, Ungern looked eastward, selecting
112
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 51 (2016) 103e114
the Trans-Baikal Cossack Host located on the Chinese border. He would leave that post for the Amur Cossacks in 1910. In both places, Ungern was charged with guarding the border. In Mongolia, Ungern and his fellow Russian soldiers came to understand the expanse of empire, the ‘thin Russian line’ that lay between one empire and another, the intermingling of old, traditional, yet rapidly changing cultures. Ungern's time spent in the Far East cemented his ideas about how empires could (or should) function. The historical Ungern did not leave many traces. His reputation as a madman largely stems from his 1919 and 1920 writings, a time when he oversaw a violent uprising in Mongolia. One of Sunderland's major achievements is to historicize Ungern and the milieu in which he operated, illustrating how he was a product of his time. The young Ungern would have been shaped by his experience as a German ‘subcontractor of empire,’ while Ungern's years in the east made him aware of a very different imperial environment. Finally, the Great War provided him with a violent outlet. He fought in Eastern Prussia and in the Carpathians, was wounded five times, and earned five commendations. As Sunderland writes, ‘the war unfolded … as a titanic bloodletting between diverse and overlapping empires’ (p. 125). Losing the war undid these empires; Ungern wanted to bring them back. Ungern traveled from Persia to the Baikal region in 1917, ‘at precisely the moment when this interconnected space was beginning to break apart’ (p. 149). He began his fight to reconstitute the Russian empire. Doing so, Sunderland writes, ‘ran against the grain of centuries of political life’, for Ungern aimed to use the periphery as a power base in order to reconstitute the center (p. 154). For nearly two years Ungern oversaw a system of violence, detention, and execution. He invaded Mongolia, attacked and took Urga, gained the title of khan, and launched a pogrom against the local Jews. He did so, as his letters from the time indicate, to create ‘a central Mongolian state’ that would stretch over the region from Manchuria to the Caspian Sea (p. 180). The attempt did not last long. He attacked Bolshevik forces at Kiakhta for three months, failed, and was captured. In the 25 days between his capture and his execution in September 1920, he was taken nearly 1500 miles into Siberia, where his trial took place in Novonikolaevsk. In recounting it, Sunderland writes that Ungern and the Bolsheviks had ‘the difference of siblings’ (p. 221). Ungern and the Bolsheviks ‘both assumed that there was something self-evident about combining peoples and territories within larger conglomerations’ (p. 222). Both, in short, were products of the same empire. In the end, Sunderland writes that one of his goals was to use Ungern's life ‘to offer a tableau of the Russian Empire’ (p. 229). What we can see is a picture of the ‘staggering proposition the Russian Empire was,’ a place that ‘had to hold together Estland and the Trans-Baikal, St. Petersburg and the Amur, a German border and a Mongolian one’ (p. 230). The Baron's Cloak conjures it in brilliant detail. Stephen M. Norris Miami University of Ohio, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.05.013
Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2014, 870 pages, US$30 paperback. This is an extraordinary and seminal book, containing nothing less than a global account of the social crises of the seventeenth
century. Harnessing an enormously impressive range of sources from across the planet, this macro-study of the period has to be recognized as a tremendous achievement, simply by virtue of its scope. But there's more. Not only does Parker manage to integrate events from across the planet into a successful account, he also incorporates into the synthesis an assessment of the impact of a sharp global cooling and a succession of extreme weather events on the various social structures. Really, to do justice to the importance of a book that is original and thought-provoking, I would spend the whole review extolling its many virtues (virtues that bring the reader to a mountaintop from which the strivings of humankind in the face of adversity can be seen in their entirety). But this is a short review and instead, unfairly perhaps, I am going to focus on the issues that to my reading, introduce imperfections in the book. Firstly, there is a strong Malthusian streak underpinning the analyses of the arguments concerning the question of why some regions experienced economic and demographic growth, while others witnessed the death of hundreds of thousands of people. Invariably, the top of the list of the factors for why a region coped, or failed to cope, with the stresses of the ‘Little Ice Age’ is an assessment about whether it was coming into the period in an underpopulated or overpopulated condition. The problem with this approach is of course that such terms are relative: relative to the economy and social organization of the times. Since human beings are potentially capable of creating more than they consume, the real test of a society is whether it can adapt its economy and make changes to its social structure in order to realize that potential. Parker does acknowledge this to some extent in his final conclusion, where he points to the adoption of new technologies and new sources of energy as being potential coping strategies. If a monarch is surrounded by a strong noble class, deeply resistant to paying any tax or to surrendering any of their customary sources of income, then it will be extremely hard for that monarch to take decisive measures to improve economic efficiency by, for example, abolishing all local tolls and impediments to internal trade. Nor are peasants and merchants likely to be encouraged to adopt innovative practices by regimes that cut the ears off their spokesmen, or imprison or kill them. In other words, the question of whether a particular realm could support a certain population size was really a question of whether, in the face of climatetriggered crisis, it could witness the alteration of the social relations that were preventing the implementation of more productive techniques. Those realms that could not experienced revolution, or appalling mortalities, or both. Secondly, there is a focus in the narrative on the deeds of rulers and on contingent events, such as unfortunate decisions, untimely deaths and ‘accidents’ (for example, the moment where a samurai plotter against the Tokugawa regime caught a fever and inadvertently gave away the conspiracy). Yes, Parker does make the point that some monarchies were sooner or later likely to provoke resistance and rebellion but this is not a conclusion that is obvious from his narratives. Without wanting to get side-tracked into the debate about the role of the individual in history, or ‘butterfly effects’ in human affairs, I would say that the impression made by the narrative accounts in this book is that some regions of the planet made progress despite the harsh conditions because their rulers successfully imposed coping strategies on their populations, while other regions experienced disaster because of the failures of their rulers. This kind of history from above is unsatisfactory. What I believe was the real difference in societal resilience at this time was the difference in the ability of the masses to extract food and wealth from
internal conflicts over doctrine which plagued the new religion in this period. Christine Shepardson's Controlling Contested Places adds significantly to this body of work by applying contemporary scholarship in human geography to bear on the problems of interpreting the role of place and space in the struggles to establish and maintain what came to be known as religious orthodoxy against discordant and divergent Christian views and the remains of the classical pagan traditions. At the core of this study is her approach of extracting new insight from the voices of the Christian leaders as they encourage their followers to transform their interpretation of the physical world of and around Antioch; Shepardson, in essence, addresses the rhetorical manipulation of the city's landscape. This process of explicating ancient texts with the specific focus on how authors were creating and redefining place and space lends itself well to a period in which the urban fabric and rural environment differed drastically from what exists today. The example of Shepardson's treatment of the relics and burial of the martyr Babylas in chapter two demonstrates the fruits of her analysis. In the middle of the fourth century, the remains of the saint were first moved, supposedly under imperial orders, into a shrine in the suburbs of Antioch in the precinct of a temple complex which had been dedicated to the pagan god Apollo, thereby attempting to rebrand the space; after a fire destroyed the temple of Apollo, a pagan emperor ordered the removal of Babylas's relics, which were eventually set in a basilica in the city that had been constructed specifically to house them. The transfer, removal, and final re-deposition of the holy remains of the saint were not simply the results of various emperors' and bishops' attempts to cleanse, reconstitute, and sanctify specific locations, but in the rhetoric of the city's preachers these actions constituted a deeper shaping of the landscape along the lines of ‘place marketing’ not just for the present but also to affect the memories of the past. Here, the contentious disputes over the movement of relics became battles for the ownership of the past and present of Antioch, in which the Christian god overcame the Greek gods and what comes to be known as orthodoxy triumphed over other forms of Christianity. Other chapters of Shepardson's book significantly expand on the use of rhetoric in the control of space outside such decisive events as the transfers of the relics of Babylas. The first chapter explores the places where both pagan and Christian rhetoric found venues for its dissemination, and the effects these activities had on locations and their control. Following the second chapter on the relics of Babylas, the third reviews some of the prodigious written output of John Chrysostom, whose sermons and homilies in Antioch during the 380s would later propel him to the position of Patriarch of Constantinople and leader of orthodox Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean; in particular, Shepardson focuses on the language he used in creating boundaries for his community of Christians by denying them access to specific urban spaces, from the theatre to the synagogues, redefining a topography of Antioch for the devout. The following two chapters reveal the rhetorical distinctions echoing the real divides between the inhabitants of the urban center of Antioch and its substantial rural hinterland, and the mapping of the sacred spaces of these regions, both real and imagined. The study concludes by exploring comparative situations across the late antique Mediterranean, highlighting the ways in which modes of thinking from geography are well suited to analyzing the problems arising from religious conflict, conversion, and pilgrimage, especially as connected to the control of space. The synthesis presented in Controlling Contested Places is exciting and very welcome. Few scholars possess the skills to
111
manage the rich scholarship on, and the vast range of secular and religious sources from Antioch and have the ability to integrate the methodologies from other disciplines in illuminating the interactions between religion, rhetoric, and space. Not only does Shepardson succeed, her work provides a clear template for further inquiry about geography and memory beyond Antioch in the world of Late Antiquity, and useful tools to address them. Edward Schoolman University of Nevada, Reno, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.05.008
Willard Sunderland, The Baron's Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2014, 368 pages, US$35 hardcover. In this magnificent book, Willard Sunderland, Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati, invites the reader to perceive the Russian Empire from a different perspective. Rather than surveying it from the vantage point of ‘policies, structures, or ideologies, as historians usually do’ (p. 7), we should step into the shoes of imperial people and look for another set of truths. Sunderland's subject may seem like a strange choice: Baron Roman Feodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg (Ungern for short), the so-called ‘mad baron’ who led a 1920 rebellion in Mongolia with the aim of restoring both the Russian and Chinese Empires. He was captured, interrogated, tried, and shot by the Bolsheviks. Yet, as Sunderland brilliantly demonstrates, if we don Ungern's cloak and wear it to trace the entirety of his life, we can ‘see’ the Empire in new ways. Adopting the microhistorical biographical approach, Sunderland refocuses the lenses often used in the history of empire. Ungern, as Sunderland notes, is useful because he lived in so many different places during his short life (he was 35 at the time of his execution). Yet the fact that his life included cities as far apart as Graz and Novonikolaevsk (now Novosibirsk), the places of his birth and death, means that we can follow Ungern to develop a mental image of the ‘great horizontal connectedness of the empire’ (p. 10). To accomplish this aim, Sunderland traveled to all the places associated with Ungern's life. The result is an engaging combination of microhistory, historical geography, and insightful travelogue. Born into the transnational, aristocratic world of late nineteenthcentury Europe, Ungern's early life was mostly spent in Estland, the Baltic province of the Russian Empire. Sunderland argues that the Germans who controlled this part of the world served as ‘de facto subcontractors for the empire’ (p. 28). Estland was slowly modernizing yet also still ‘traditional’ in its imperial makeup during the late nineteenth century, and this combination certainly shaped the trajectory of the young Ungern. After he failed out of a Reval gymnasium, Ungern was sent in 1902 by his mother to the College of Naval Cadets in St. Petersburg. The capital city became the site for ‘the conversion that would turn him into a more culturally Russianized and devoted sort of imperial subject e the kind of subject who lived for the empire rather than simply lived within it’ (p. 44). In February, 1905, he enlisted in the army and shipped out to Manchuria to fight in the Russo-Japanese War. His experiences in Manchuria and the eastern parts of the Russian Empire gave him a renewed direction, for after the war's end, Ungern returned to St. Petersburg, enrolled in the Paul the First Military Academy, and graduated as an officer in 1908. When it came time to choose his posting, Ungern looked eastward, selecting
112
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 51 (2016) 103e114
the Trans-Baikal Cossack Host located on the Chinese border. He would leave that post for the Amur Cossacks in 1910. In both places, Ungern was charged with guarding the border. In Mongolia, Ungern and his fellow Russian soldiers came to understand the expanse of empire, the ‘thin Russian line’ that lay between one empire and another, the intermingling of old, traditional, yet rapidly changing cultures. Ungern's time spent in the Far East cemented his ideas about how empires could (or should) function. The historical Ungern did not leave many traces. His reputation as a madman largely stems from his 1919 and 1920 writings, a time when he oversaw a violent uprising in Mongolia. One of Sunderland's major achievements is to historicize Ungern and the milieu in which he operated, illustrating how he was a product of his time. The young Ungern would have been shaped by his experience as a German ‘subcontractor of empire,’ while Ungern's years in the east made him aware of a very different imperial environment. Finally, the Great War provided him with a violent outlet. He fought in Eastern Prussia and in the Carpathians, was wounded five times, and earned five commendations. As Sunderland writes, ‘the war unfolded … as a titanic bloodletting between diverse and overlapping empires’ (p. 125). Losing the war undid these empires; Ungern wanted to bring them back. Ungern traveled from Persia to the Baikal region in 1917, ‘at precisely the moment when this interconnected space was beginning to break apart’ (p. 149). He began his fight to reconstitute the Russian empire. Doing so, Sunderland writes, ‘ran against the grain of centuries of political life’, for Ungern aimed to use the periphery as a power base in order to reconstitute the center (p. 154). For nearly two years Ungern oversaw a system of violence, detention, and execution. He invaded Mongolia, attacked and took Urga, gained the title of khan, and launched a pogrom against the local Jews. He did so, as his letters from the time indicate, to create ‘a central Mongolian state’ that would stretch over the region from Manchuria to the Caspian Sea (p. 180). The attempt did not last long. He attacked Bolshevik forces at Kiakhta for three months, failed, and was captured. In the 25 days between his capture and his execution in September 1920, he was taken nearly 1500 miles into Siberia, where his trial took place in Novonikolaevsk. In recounting it, Sunderland writes that Ungern and the Bolsheviks had ‘the difference of siblings’ (p. 221). Ungern and the Bolsheviks ‘both assumed that there was something self-evident about combining peoples and territories within larger conglomerations’ (p. 222). Both, in short, were products of the same empire. In the end, Sunderland writes that one of his goals was to use Ungern's life ‘to offer a tableau of the Russian Empire’ (p. 229). What we can see is a picture of the ‘staggering proposition the Russian Empire was,’ a place that ‘had to hold together Estland and the Trans-Baikal, St. Petersburg and the Amur, a German border and a Mongolian one’ (p. 230). The Baron's Cloak conjures it in brilliant detail. Stephen M. Norris Miami University of Ohio, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.05.013
Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2014, 870 pages, US$30 paperback. This is an extraordinary and seminal book, containing nothing less than a global account of the social crises of the seventeenth
century. Harnessing an enormously impressive range of sources from across the planet, this macro-study of the period has to be recognized as a tremendous achievement, simply by virtue of its scope. But there's more. Not only does Parker manage to integrate events from across the planet into a successful account, he also incorporates into the synthesis an assessment of the impact of a sharp global cooling and a succession of extreme weather events on the various social structures. Really, to do justice to the importance of a book that is original and thought-provoking, I would spend the whole review extolling its many virtues (virtues that bring the reader to a mountaintop from which the strivings of humankind in the face of adversity can be seen in their entirety). But this is a short review and instead, unfairly perhaps, I am going to focus on the issues that to my reading, introduce imperfections in the book. Firstly, there is a strong Malthusian streak underpinning the analyses of the arguments concerning the question of why some regions experienced economic and demographic growth, while others witnessed the death of hundreds of thousands of people. Invariably, the top of the list of the factors for why a region coped, or failed to cope, with the stresses of the ‘Little Ice Age’ is an assessment about whether it was coming into the period in an underpopulated or overpopulated condition. The problem with this approach is of course that such terms are relative: relative to the economy and social organization of the times. Since human beings are potentially capable of creating more than they consume, the real test of a society is whether it can adapt its economy and make changes to its social structure in order to realize that potential. Parker does acknowledge this to some extent in his final conclusion, where he points to the adoption of new technologies and new sources of energy as being potential coping strategies. If a monarch is surrounded by a strong noble class, deeply resistant to paying any tax or to surrendering any of their customary sources of income, then it will be extremely hard for that monarch to take decisive measures to improve economic efficiency by, for example, abolishing all local tolls and impediments to internal trade. Nor are peasants and merchants likely to be encouraged to adopt innovative practices by regimes that cut the ears off their spokesmen, or imprison or kill them. In other words, the question of whether a particular realm could support a certain population size was really a question of whether, in the face of climatetriggered crisis, it could witness the alteration of the social relations that were preventing the implementation of more productive techniques. Those realms that could not experienced revolution, or appalling mortalities, or both. Secondly, there is a focus in the narrative on the deeds of rulers and on contingent events, such as unfortunate decisions, untimely deaths and ‘accidents’ (for example, the moment where a samurai plotter against the Tokugawa regime caught a fever and inadvertently gave away the conspiracy). Yes, Parker does make the point that some monarchies were sooner or later likely to provoke resistance and rebellion but this is not a conclusion that is obvious from his narratives. Without wanting to get side-tracked into the debate about the role of the individual in history, or ‘butterfly effects’ in human affairs, I would say that the impression made by the narrative accounts in this book is that some regions of the planet made progress despite the harsh conditions because their rulers successfully imposed coping strategies on their populations, while other regions experienced disaster because of the failures of their rulers. This kind of history from above is unsatisfactory. What I believe was the real difference in societal resilience at this time was the difference in the ability of the masses to extract food and wealth from