Welsh Journals

private correspondence of several of their editors. And he provides a comprehensive list of Haldane's most raucous assailants. Although Leo Maxse seems to have 'provided a sense of co-ordination', Dr. Koss concludes that the anti-Haldane campaign was 'that rare phenomenon, a chorus composed exclusively of prima donnas'. There are some well-chosen cartoons illustrating the text of the book. General Tom Bridges appears as Tom Bridles on page 175; and the author quotes what appears to be a posthumous letter by Sir Evelyn Wood on page 120. G. C. L. HAZLEHURST. The Queen's College, Oxford. RUSSIA UNDER THE LAST TSAR. Edited by Theofanis George Stavrou. Minnesota University Press: Oxford University Press, London, 1969. Pp. viii, 265. 72s. ( £ 3-60) boards, 20s. ( £ 1-00) paper back. There has of late years been no lack of symposia on various aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia; the present volume is by no means the least useful among them. In his introductory remarks, the editor defines the subject as being the controversy between the 'optimists' and 'pessimists', that is to say, those who hold that the progress achieved in the Russia of Nicholas II would, but for the Great War, have enabled her to move on into a period of democracy, more or less on the lines envisaged by the Russian liberals of the day, and those who consider that the tensions caused within Russian society by the very efforts made to modernize it were so great that, war or no war, a violent upheaval was inevitable. This is, indeed, the theme to which, in his paper 'On interpreting the fate of Imperial Russia', Professor Arthur Mendel addresses himself, only to conclude, however, that he is 'uncertain about the "objective" validity' of either school of thought, though he adds that he inclines toward the former view. Mr. Mendel takes on as his chief adversary Professor Theodore Von Laue, the distinguished biographer of Witte, who here contributes a paper on 'Problems of Industrialization' and who adopts an uncompromisingly 'pessimistic' stance. He mourns over 'poor Russia, having to solve the basic problems from scratch during the critical transition from the European to the global state system, and the problems of rapid industrialization to boot'. Yet in one way Mr. Von Laue is not so far removed from Mr. Mendel, for he admits that 'the pessimistic theory cannot claim to be more accurate than optimistic theories in the field'. On the other hand, his approach leads him to one conclusion which, as Mr. Mendel points out, has frightening implications for the underdeveloped countries of today: