Hassan Malik has written a useful, judicious volume on the financial history of the last two decades of the Russian Empire and the Bolshevik default of 1918. Drawing from the English-language financial press, the archives of leading British, French, and American banks (HSBC, BNP, Barings, Crédit Lyonnais, J. P. Morgan), and their corresponding financial departments in the Russian and early Bolshevik states, Malik recovers the discussions and judgments of the financiers that made Russia the largest debtor state in the years leading to World War I, which debt then created the largest default in history up to that time—or the largest default in history tout court, the appendix argues. Malik makes the obvious case for the need for such a volume in the continued neglect of financial history in the field, a case he bolsters by gesturing to the centrality of finance in Vladimir Lenin's own thought and revolutionary practice. The historiographical positioning that takes up much of the introduction lays bare some of the limitations of his choice of framework: Malik is interested in contributing to the business history literature of his background, while his contribution to the history of Russia and the Russian Revolution is of the gap-filling variety. Although the prospect of imbricating his financial history with the traditional questions of the field is a missed opportunity, the study is certainly a constructive intervention.

Malik begins by setting his crosshairs on two bits of received wisdom basic to textbooks on Russian history. In the first chapter he tarnishes the somewhat lustrous reputation of Sergei Witte among historians by noting that the late imperial political economy, the success of which is celebrated in the textbooks, did not originate with him, but with his maligned predecessors. Witte emerges from Malik's narrative as a merely competent finance minister whose failure to network with financiers in London and New York created problems down the line. Malik also uses this historical case to make an intervention of interest to political economists by arguing that formal participation in institutions like the gold standard, into which Witte steered Russia—following the policy established prior to his leadership—is not the good seal of financial housekeeping it is often considered to be. Borrowing costs had been dropping for Russia well before its adoption of the gold standard in 1897, and before Witte's appointment to the finance ministry five years earlier, for that matter. Following the episodic narrative based on bank communications he establishes early on, Malik then moves to undo another bit of well-ensconced historical datum, though this time perhaps more equivocally: the 1906 French “loan that saved Russia” was a much more contested, ambivalent affair than is usually given credit for in the textbooks. This second-chapter argument is blunted by the author's emphasis on the “voiceless and ignored” financiers (3). Surely, an assessment of the effect of that loan should follow its socio-political consequences rather than the rhetorical use the regime's opponents made of it; it should be a discussion of what it was the loan was saving. Recovering the critique of the loan made not only by revolutionaries, but also by liberals and the liberal press, however, will pay dividends for Malik later in the text.

Malik continues these critical revisions of the literature as he moves on with his narrative. He finds Russia's economy to be fragile in the immediate years before the war, and counterintuitively argues that the war was a financial boon. The Keynesian effect of the defense buildup shored up the economy when it seemed on the verge of a cyclical downturn, and the war itself brought foreign capital as well as more financial room to maneuver with the end of the gold standard straightjacket. Banks continued pouring good capital after bad through the war and well into 1917, especially after the February Revolution seemed, in the eyes of liberal investors, to be moving Russia to a higher stage of social development. When the default came, Malik convincingly argues that any state, Bolshevik or otherwise, would have done similarly. A potential default, in fact, had also been signaled by some liberal members of the Provisional government the author earlier has on record opposing the 1906 French loan. And so, Malik decouples the default from its usual textbook explication as purely an ideologically motivated statement of anticapitalist purpose.

Keeping with his mission to give voice to the ignored financiers of yesteryear, Malik ends his narrative lamenting the fate of those of his elite protagonists caught up in the revolutionary upheaval. With their voice so sympathetically recovered, it is now time to connect this rarified world to the social concerns of most historiographical debate. If this study is delimited by the concerns and sympathies of the author's chosen framework, his critiques and historiographical revisions will help the field move forward with the integration of finance into the general narrative of Russian history, and hew closer to Lenin's own forebodings about the primacy of finance.