The Cambridge History of Russia is a distinguished and comprehensive account of its subject from the pre-Mongol period to post-Perestroika. The work under review, with its three volumes and thousands of pages, might not at first sight fill an obvious gap. Even a number of single-volume histories by acclaimed historians like Nicholas Riasanovsky, Gregory Freeze and Geoffrey Hosking cover comparable terrain with great narrative sweep and textbook efficiency. The nearest rival in scope and execution is the multi-volume history brought out by Longman in the 1990s. The particular strength of that account lay in its treatment of medieval Rus', a subject area where historiography has subsequently been dormant. For the later periods, most especially beginning with late imperial history, it is evident that there are far more scholars and publications than there were even in the 1990s. Much fundamental revision and work are being done, and that dynamism is captured in volume iii of this new history. If volumes i and ii repeat a familiar story they score decisively with the clarity of political narrative, and the inclusion of superb chapters on religion, economy, ethnicity, urban history and so on. The bigger picture that emerges is of a Russia as a multi-ethnic internal empire that adjusted to systemic stresses more flexibly and rationally than had often been supposed.

Volume i, in twenty-eight highly informative chapters, covers the time span from the eleventh century to the succession of Peter i in 1689. Earlier accounts found it hard to escape ‘Great Man’ theories of history or providentialism. Although something of a rationalist, and influenced by eighteenth-century philosophical historians such as the abbé Mably, the first court historian Nikolai Karamzin still imbued his epochal History of the Russian state (1811) with religious feeling: the rise of Muscovy and the installation of the Romanov dynasty was a story of divine will. In this he reproduced the teleological (and pro-Muscovite) bias of the medieval chronicles, his primary sources, which justified the aggressive expansion of Muscovy in the fifteenth century at the expense of the surrounding city-states as inevitable. Historians working in the latter half of the nineteenth century also argued that the rise of Muscovy was inevitable, but located the causes in aspects of political economy designed to maximise resources and trading opportunities; to optimise the chances of subsistence against external enemies and competitors; and to counter internal fragmentation caused by the political instability inherent in the feudal economy and appanage system of land-tenure. Outside medieval studies, interest in the early period has often been hijacked by pundits on Soviet Russia who, eager to connect the dots from the totalitarian state of Soviet Russia to autocratic origins in the medieval state, have advocated a grand totalising thesis that proves Russia's exceptionalism – and immunity to western models of governance. The topic is addressed by Maureen Perrie in her excellent introduction, but the complete assembled team of accomplished scholars illuminate the complications that Russian rulers faced in imposing control over a thinly populated vast terrain over centuries that saw the formation of city states and eventually state formation at the supra-city level as undertaken by Ivan iii. More positively than its Longman counterpart, the Cambridge History of Russia demonstrates that a period that has often been viewed as an extended wasteland in the aftermath of the Tatar invasion of the thirteenth century can be seen as a dynamic tableau of political, ideological and church history of variety and complexity. This account is much more aware of entire sets of problems and sets of choices that were not to be solved by divine intervention (the popular refrain of the medieval chroniclers) or by some abstract entity called the ‘State’ (the preferred agency of the Moscow School) but fell to individuals and bodies of people to decide. A prevalent theme here is the question of how Russians coped with the physical realities – what Denis J. B. Shaw calls the ‘friction of space’ in his excellent chapter on Russia's geographical environment – and regulated land tenure through a system of feudal obligation; and how against the odds they maintained trade routes and commerce with the Ottoman empire and western Europe, and internally via river systems from Moscow to Archangel in the north, and eventually south through the Caspian. The sense of the physical environment of Russia, especially its sheer scale, is one of the strong organising themes of this volume. Size posed challenges because of the centripetal concentration of resources in Moscow, seat of the Grand Prince from the fourteenth century and thereafter home to the Tsar (Ivan iv was the first to crown himself Caesar in 1547), at a time when the growth trajectory of the state was centrifugal.

Much of the overt narrative of this volume takes the form of political history, and in that respect echoes the approach adopted in the first three (slimmer) volumes of the Longman history of Russia for which many of the present work's contributors served as authors. Local chronicles repeatedly cast the histories of their states in terms of multiple fratricides, stories that are distilled and elegantly rehearsed here for Kiev by Simon Franklin and for other principalities by Martin Dimnik (chapter v). The exception of Novgorod, famed as a republic, is treated thoroughly by V. L. Ianin (chapter viii). The principle and realities of dynastic politics among the Danilovichi, the branch of Muscovite princes who consolidated power from the fourteenth century, sometimes by wily negotiation with the overlord of the Golden Horde, are given a model treatment by Janet Martin (chapter vii), whose discussion illuminates the growing role of the Church in projecting the doctrine and images of grand princely power. The political story of the medieval period is one of a slow transition from the power of clans to an absolutist monarchy with articulated principles; the crossover happens in the reign of Ivan iv (1533–84) whose transformation of Muscovite political institutions is expertly discussed by Sergei Bogatyrev (chapter x) in a piece that is alert to the incomplete scorecard of Ivan's reign. Other historians argue that his reign was still based on informal power relations within the elite, and that power was much less centralised in practice than in theory (on local government and administration and bureaucratic rationalisation there is a thorough discussion by Brian Davies in chapter xx). Isabel de Madariaga's Ivan the Terrible: first tsar of Russia (New Haven 2005) revived the thesis that Ivan's behaviour in the latter part of his reign can only be explained as the manifestation of madness, but while Bogatyrev allows for signs of suspicion in Ivan's relationship with his servitors, he sees raîson d’état behind most decisions, explaining murky episodes like the oprichnina as the policy decision of the large number of Tatar servitors at the court who may have persuaded Ivan to try new models of governance. No one can deny that personality and personal relations did matter even within a highly hierarchical system at the court, and Marshall Poe's dense prosopographical study of seventeenth-century government uncovers a dynamic patronage system that created opportunity for ‘new men’ pitted against the hereditary elite. It is standard at least in the popular mind to think of Peter the Great's reign as the ‘Big Bang’ in the creation of a rational Russian state and secular culture. Such a study provides yet further evidence that the reign of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (1645–76) significantly anticipated the reforms of that more acclaimed moderniser Peter the Great – ‘like father like son’ is truly the moral of the story.

Given the excellent framework of these chapters, it is regrettable that the Cambridge History of Russia omits to treat in greater detail both the function of writing in the period, and some of the actual writings of the period that remain vital sources on how the princes regarded issues of legitimacy, divine right, the relation of Church and State and popular persuasion. Works by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century figures such as Epifanius the Wise and Ermolai Erazum applied their rhetorical mastery and considerable theological nuance in projecting a national and even Platonic vision of the absolute ruler; or as in the case of the latter, offering an alternative model of kingship based on more egalitarian land tenure and a proximity of ruler and subject. They demonstrate a provocative sense of how writing, even when the readership was limited to the clerical elite, afforced imposing church architecture as a means of projecting the symbolic idea of princely charisma. That said, the chapters by David Miller on popular religion and Michael Flier on imperial ritual treat the visual component of ideology with valuable attention to iconography. Miller details the most important monuments of the sixteenth century ‘building boom’ (the ‘national’ style as a tag seems dated) with some attention to liturgical practice, but the discussion of monastic controversies and persecutions of heresies, while thankfully free of Marxist feudal jargon, has very little by way of explanation to offer, and the single paragraph on the Time of Troubles looks like an afterthought. Such brevity was perhaps unavoidable, but seems a little unfortunate since there has been recent interesting work by Paul Bushkovich, among others, that has been overlooked. Lindsey Hughes's nimble chapter on late medieval or early secular culture, including architecture, literature and intellectual life, strikes an excellent balance between introduction and more advanced essay, and opens up areas where clearly more research is required. One positive feature of the volume throughout is the attentiveness of contributors to legal codes and ideas of justice from the earlier part of the period, extending from the medieval legal compilation Russkaia Pravda (treated in a chapter on legal processes by Richard Hellie) to the 1649 Ulozhenie of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, a watershed in Russian legal history as well as in the formal codification of serfdom. Of an impressive scope, the excellent essay by Nancy Shields Kollmann gives a rounded picture of a judicial system that operated through various means, chancelleries as well as courts and quasi-military units. She shows the limits of the tsar's centralised judicial system, sorely challenged by the extent of an empire that expanded rapidly eastward in huge distances and was in tension with Church and landlord jurisdiction. Her discussion treats the use of land grants to define borders, the rights of landlords in the service tenure system and the complex status of population groups like engineers, postal riders and Cossacks who lacked certain rights but were not enserfed.

The massive subject of imperial history from Peter the Great to the Revolution fills the 765 pages of volume ii, a span that is not too large for doing justice to the whole phenomenon in its broad scope of social, political, cultural, geopolitical and military history. Under Dominic Lieven's authoritative stewardship, volume ii succeeds in integrating a clear narrative and state-of-the-art micro-histories. More than a work of reference, this account exceeds virtually all single-author textbooks for this period by mobilising a top team of specialists able to distil monograph-type subjects such as the banking system. Technical and technocratic explanation in volumes ii and iii add greatly to the mix. Chapters that should now be required reading for all undergraduates would include Dominic Lieven's discussion of elites (chapter xi), and the fine exposition of those hard-to-define social categories (sosloviia) that are grouped under the term raznochintsy by Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter. Without sacrificing attention to regional and local variations, the best discussions articulate longer-term trends, whether political, ideological, cultural or demographic, that give the history of the imperial period such depth. The decision to include two chapters on culture, defended by Lieven in his introduction, is a mixed blessing. Only the late Lindsey Hughes has the eye for trends and command of detail necessary to produce a thoughtful synopsis that avoids simplification. Ideas, however, do not fare very well. Gary M. Hamburg (chapter vi) is in his element in discussing key figures liker Herzen and Bakunin, but the hasty coverage of the Enlightenment, an area where there has been much new work, is under-researched. It is regrettable that a further chapter on universities and print media was not included given how quickly print culture and education snowballed in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Where is the attention to key debates about the Enlightenment that have been launched by Simon Dixon and Gary Marker, among others?

For the most part, however, the skilful commissioning produces sets of chapters that reveal the great textures of the empire by treating subjects vertically (government hierarchies, social structures, elites and workers) and horizontally (metropolitan Russia and periphery, cities and towns, domestic policy and foreign policy). How the state achieved reforms to its institutions and partly created public life is a major theme, with an emphasis on institutions and policies of State and Church as they developed over long periods. Autocrats, the prime movers in an older generation of histories, are now players in more complex systems. The institutional side is told in chapters on central government, the army, state finances and provincial government, while the impact on the lives of individuals is assessed in fine discussions of women and the family, gender and legal order.

Over the course of the volume no grand thesis emerges about the Russian state and the dynamics of Russian history. Such restraint is all to the good, but the well-planned chapter groupings offer thoughtful summaries of the causes behind the well-documented narratives. Clearly ideas did play a part in the historical transformations that occurred over the nineteenth century. Ideology could not always succeed in masking or curing fractures. One essential feature of this volume is its comprehensive approach to the notion of Russia as both a single and multi-ethnic entity. Nicholas i's flagship doctrine of ‘Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nation’ articulated a unitarian ideal. The reality was of a multi-ethnic, multinational conglomeration that expanded exponentially in the course of the period, evolving new administrative and educational structures to cope with new territories, populations and ethnic troops. Volume ii contains three excellent chapters on non-Russian nationalities in the empire, starting with Timothy Snyder's survey of the tumultuous history of Russia's relations with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Ukraine. An excellent guide to the political history of partitions, right-bank and left-bank Ukraine and their respective traditions, and population movements, especially during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Snyder also provides a lively summary of late nineteenth-century intellectual trends like Positivism and the National Democratic movement that shows the close connections between national ideologies and political activism.

The equally fine chapter by Benjamin Nathans on the Jews surveys the questions of their status, location and resettlement over two and half centuries from the pre-partition period to the creation of independent Jewish political movements. His discussion of the Jewish Question and the politicisation of Russian Jewry, less tendentious than Yuri Slezkine's celebrated account, The Jewish century (Princeton 2004), excels at creating a dynamic sense of Jewish life and identity in late Tsarist Russia, showing how permeable the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement had become and explaining why even traditional Jewish communities contained micro-societies such as mutual aid funds and secular schools that were forces for modernisation. Vladimir Bobrovnikov gives a similarly nuanced picture of how the imperial vision of Islam evolved, often in response to highly local situations, as Tsarist Russia managed the diverse peoples of the Islamic lands in the Volga-Ural region, western Siberia, the North Caucasus (highly recalcitrant to administrative control) and Central Asia. In arguing persuasively that the relationship between the state and its subject populations was characterised more by interaction than confrontation, he treats issues of confessional policy, cooperation between elites, academic Orientalism and local responses to methods of imperial government with panache and a refreshing absence of post-colonialist rhetoric. (One asymmetry is the regrettable absence of at least a chapter on Petersburg and Moscow to match the fine urban history of nineteenth-century Nizhnii Novogorod by Catherine Evtuhov.) Revolutionary movements and agencies of state coercion provide a slow burning narrative of how chances to tackle the unsolved problems created by the Great Reforms of the nineteenth century were dashed. The late Reginald Zelnik sets his gripping chapter on works and revolution against a helpful discussion of industrial modernisation, and explores the causes behind workers' unrest and the tactics behind strike actions and the response of the authorities. He takes seriously the contribution of the radical intelligentsia to the revolutionary movement and explores the contribution of ideas to populist activity.

Volume iii, sometimes at a breathless pace, reaps the benefits of the colossal amount of research that has been done on all aspects of Soviet life from its inception to its disintegration. In fact, the subject has been transforming itself at such speed and depth that this account represents an essential act of taking stock and assessment in a growth area of the subject that has capitalised on the vast amount of material that has come on stream and the phenomenal expansion of resources on the internet. Accounts of the late Soviet period are to some degree provisional, although now less provisional than twenty years ago, because the history of the early Soviet state, its culture, mechanisms and ideologies, and its eventual transformation into Stalinist civilisation or one-man rule and terror, depending on one's historiographic persuasion, has been subject to much revisionism over the past twenty years. Ronald Grigor Suny, the volume's distinguished editor, addresses these interpretative shifts in his introductory overview and magisterial first chapter, an essay on western approaches to writing the history of Russia and the Soviet Union that will be of great use to young and seasoned historians working in the field. Six highly accomplished chapters proceed through the revolutionary turmoil and slow collapse of Russia's fin de siècle (Mark D. Steinberg); the consequences of the First World War for Russia (Mark von Hagen); the revolutions of 1917 and 1918 and Bolshevik putsch (Steve Smith), and their aftermath in the civil war and war communism up to 1922 (Donald Raleigh), followed by the grudging concession to capitalism tolerated by NEP as the Bolsheviks strengthened their hold on popular mentality and elite institutions (Alan Ball). Chapter vii, by David R. Shearer, admits that archival material cannot fully explain the scale and cruelty of Stalinist policy – here more attention to literary-cum-anthropological sources like Nadezhda Mandelshtam or Solzhenitsyn would have added a facet of explanation – yet gives a coherent periodisation to the stages of Stalinism as radical revolution and conservative retreat on the path to Socialism, and sets out the rationale behind the techniques of coercion, repression and militarisation that subjugated all levels of the state and population.

James van Geldern may have drawn the short straw in having to shoe-horn all of culture from 1900 to World War II into a single piece (chapter xxi) but the institutional framework for his survey of film, writing and the visual arts from the avant garde to the domination by socialist realism gives his account coherence (as well as an awful inevitability), and Josephine Woll's well-informed account of the ensuing years up to 2000 strike a similar successful balance between individual stories (highly vivid in the case of Solzhenitsyn) and explication of the system and its bureaucratic structures. Woll treats both dissenting subcultures of the 1960s through 1980s and mainstream values with helpful information about the history of the Soviet book in a country distinguished by near universal literacy (as Archie Brown notes in chapter xii). From the Stalinist period no field of endeavour was immune to state control, and David Holloway's account (chapter xx) follows the history of the social and natural sciences from the beginning of the twentieth century, when science had a politically activist dimension, to the political distortions of Stalinist science with its party- controlled R & D effort and the notorious Lysenko affair, to a long period of disenchantment and blight, only minimally alleviated by international distinction in physics. The efforts of the Brezhnev bureaucracy to link technological advance and economic progress were fruitless in a sclerotic system that choked worker initiative (touched on in the fine history of workers and industrialisation by Lewis Siegelbaum in chapter xvi), killed incentive in the farming sector, which had never really recovered from the brutal collectivisation and peasant liquidation of the 1930s (explored in chapter xv), and has proven hard to shake off in the fitful transition to a market economy in which the post-Communist successes of radical reform and part privatisation have been bedevilled by corruption. All these economic visions, and their demographic consequences, are surveyed in chapter xiv by Peter Gatrell. Although by the end of its life the Stalinist state had crumbled under its own inefficiency these chapters show the considerable degree to which the state was able to mobilise its resources and transform the lives of citizens. Just how the politics of decision-making worked is discussed in the essays on Stalin and his circle, the periods of Khrushchev and Brezhnev (when stagnation and modernisation paradoxically coexisted as Stephen Hanson shows) and finally the Gorbachev era, which Archie Brown staunchly regards as a moment of systemic political transformation in which the economy proved impossible to reform. The final chapter, on Communism, should have come much earlier in the volume and looks spurious here, but the cluster of chapters on Soviet foreign policy, Comintern, women in the Soviet state and non-Russian nationals in the Soviet empire provide essential pieces to a colossal utopian and revolutionary experiment.

Cambridge University Press is to be congratulated on its excellent choice of volume editors, and on the high standard of commissioning and accomplishment sustained from start to finish. Each volume contains a number of well-chosen plates, and the standard of printing, paper and proofreading is uniformly high. While the high cost of the volumes is likely to deter almost all individual buyers, this is clearly a fundamental work for every academic reference library. In an age of information barrage even the most encyclopaedic volumes quickly fall short of being definitive, but much permanent knowledge has been presented here, and the ample bibliographies and notes are a great resource. The scope of this new history of Russia, its interdisciplinary mix of history, social sciences, political science and cultural history, make it a permanently valuable summation of the subject and the history of the subject as it stood at the end of the twentieth century. It will long continue to serve as an excellent resource for all students of all periods of Russia's momentous history.