INTRODUCTION - Russia: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 2

in size between the two. None of the other European monarchs made as
extensive claims to autocratic powers and for as long as the Russian czars. While
cultural and class differences between rulers and ruled were common to all Euro-
pean states, nowhere did the gap appear as vast as it did in Russia, especially
after the reign of Peter the Great. None of the many 20th-century dictatorships
that appeared on the European political scene was as ruthless and remained in
place for as long as the communist dictatorship ushered in by the Russian Rev-
olution of 1917. Seen under this light, Russia is but a magnified extension of
Europe, a view that is more in line with the true nature of the ambiguous geo-
graphical boundary that divides Europe from Asia. And yet after centuries of
close interaction, one is hard-pressed to find clear dividing lines between Rus-
sia and Europe.
Just as one cannot think of Russia without Europe, it is untenable to think
of Europe without Russia. What is European literature without the contribu-
tions of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Chekhov, and what is Western music
without the contributions of Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, or Shostakovich? And
even though Russia has been and continues to be portrayed as a threat to the
West, in the case of Napoleon and Hitler it has also twice helped to save Europe
from threats created by its own body politic.
The attempt to assess Russia's place in European and world history continues
to this day, a decade or so after the end of the Soviet Union, as shown by two
recent English-language interpretive works. Working within the paradigm that
divides Russia from Europe, Marshall Poe argues that for the past five centuries
up to the abrupt end of Soviet communism in 1991, Russian political and intel-
lectual elites have created a “Russian moment in world history,” distinguished
by their ability to advance a modernizing agenda in non-European ways. Work-
ing with less broad brushstrokes, Steven Marks also begins with the Russian
elites' search for alternatives to European or Western models of modernity. He
then seeks to elucidate, in a book of the same title, how Russia shaped the mod-
ern world through political and cultural contributions ranging from the refining
of terrorism as a revolutionary weapon and the development of mass-based dic-
tatorships to the introduction of new forms of intellectual and cultural creativ-
ity in literature, ballet, and the arts.
The present volume seeks to introduce a general audience to the richness of
the Russian historical tradition, with its villains and saints, militaries victories
and defeats, as well as the improbable heights and absolute depths in human
relationships that are evident throughout its history. In this volume's historical
dictionary, readers will indeed learn about art, anti-Semitism, ballet, and Bol-
shevism (to borrow a page from the subtitle of Marks's stimulating book), well-
known components—for better or for worse—of Russian history. From Yalta to
Yashin and zapovedniks to Zubatov, they will also learn about smaller but equally
important and fascinating Russian contributions to international diplomacy,
world soccer, environmentalism, and methods of police surveillance.
—Mauricio Borrero
St. John's University, New York