This is an important book on an important subject. In all states, the transfer of power from one individual or group to another constitutes a moment of vulnerability to the existing political system regardless of that system's format, as recent events in the United States have shown. This vulnerability is particularly obvious in a monarchical system such as early modern Russia's. I agree with the author's summary that the success of Russian rulers in this matter “contributed as much as the administrative offices or the boyar and aristocratic elite to the stability of the state and to the growing power of Russia” (333). No recent study has addressed this vital but neglected problem as directly and effectively as this remarkable book.
In place of the conventional view that early modern Russian rulers practiced primogeniture (whereby the eldest son of the reigning monarch automatically inherits the kingdom), Bushkovitch proposes a far more flexible, almost improvisatory, arrangement that is hard to provide a good name for. Bushkovitch seems to suggest that, until the era of Peter the Great, “custom,” an inherited (or invented) varied set of tools to ensure a smooth succession, would best serve monarchs and their courts over the roughly two and a half centuries under discussion. Primogeniture seems never to have worked by itself, since its strict operation can almost never be observed. Among these tools were elections, paternal designation, the crowning and/or exhibiting of desired successors to the elite or a broader public by the current ruler, a wide variety of court ceremonies (from coronations to orations to name- and birthday celebrations), loyalty oaths, baptismal records, diplomatic announcements to foreign governments, and even orders to drink to the health of or pray for members of the royal family. The author rightly emphasizes repeatedly that the whole royal family, rather than any one individual within it, was often the focus of these measures, a wise choice given the precariousness of the physical survival of royals at the time. This evidence is usually presented with most useful comparisons to succession practices in other contemporary European states.
The author has chosen to use a narrative format to discuss the evolution of these arrangements over changing and complex political and international environments, a difficult rhetorical task accomplished with verve and grace. In chapters separated by the dominant choice of basic succession tools, the reader is treated to extensive discussions of each succession from one ruler to the next. Of course, most of these “succession crises” have been discussed at length by other historians. To the task of retelling these stories, Bushkovitch brings an impressive array of new sources, often diplomatic, and the linguist skills to use and interpret them. His extensive footnotes testify to his labors not only in the French, German, Russian, Latin, and English, but also in Polish, Greek, Danish, and Swedish, and not only in printed sources but in archives. The result is a fresh and engaging view of these crises, always told with a perceptive eye towards the succession principles or devices involved.
I emphatically agree with Bushkovitch that the basic categories used by early modern Russians to understood what we call politics (and succession) remained firmly religious and moral, down to the second half of the seventeenth century, when new western currents in political thought infiltrated the court. This reader benefitted particularly from the subtle and rich discussions of these new court thinkers, particularly the Ukrainians Simeon Polotskii and Feofan Prokopovich. At the same time, I have a more pessimistic view of the literacy of secular members of the elite before about 1600, and the influence that written sources like chronicles could have had upon them. The book might have benefitted from more discussion of visual evidence like the imagined successions of Rus΄ and Old Testament rulers in the pendentives of the Golden Hall (other parts of these now-destroyed images are examined, (200–201), or in the ancestor portraits in the Archangel Michael Cathedral. If the idea of sovereignty was new to Russia under Peter (323), does it make sense to translate the all-important term gosudar΄ as “sovereign” throughout the book?
These are minor points. Paul Bushkovitch has given us an enormously erudite and gracefully written book on a crucial subject, a gift for which we should all be grateful.
