American Academy of Political and Social Science

Review: [untitled]
Author(s): Jesse D. Clarkson
Reviewed work(s):
The Russian Anarchists by Paul Avrich
Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 375, Women
around the World (Jan., 1968), pp. 209-210
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of Political and Social
Science
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1037920
Accessed: 07/10/2010 15:32

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 BOOK DEPARTMENT
chosen topics to present much solid mate-
rial within a commendably brief compass.
Most of the contributors succeed in raising
new questions about old subjects. A few
of them offer suggestions that possibly point
the way to new insights and a better under-
standing of the form and meaning of the
frontier experience. Taken as a whole, the
collection will repay reading by anyone
seriously interested in the history of the
American West. In particular, lecturers,
textbook writers, and directors of research
in the field will do well to avail themselves
of this book.
The "phases" of frontier history that the
individual investigators take up include cer-
tain aspects of the Turner thesis, interna-
tional relations on the southwest border,
transportation and travel, religion, docu-
mentary art, cartography, territorial rec-
ords, the fur trade, and literary treatments
of the frontier. The reviewer found the
following papers noteworthy for new inter-
pretations and approaches, as well as for
the useful factual material that they supply.
Herman R. Friis's "The Image of the
American West at Mid-Century (1840-
60)" points out the potential of the so far
little-used information about physical and
cultural landscapes to be found in the carto-
graphic and graphic records of the National
Archives. Unfortunately, the illustrations
of the maps that Friis discusses are printed
so poorly as to be of little value. Ralph
E. Morrow's "The Great Revival, the
West, and the Crisis of the Church" devel-
ops the thesis that the religious organiza-
tions were too deeply involved in internal
and external adjustments after the Revolu-
tion to take up the challenge of the frontier,
with consequences for the history of life in
the American West that deserve to be more
closely studied than they have been.
John C. Ewers's "Fact and Fiction in
the Documentary Art of the American
West" illustrates with sixteen plates the
use of pictures as sources and emphasizes
the necessity of critical analysis in the
selection and interpretation of such mate-
rial. One of the most valuable papers in
the book is Oliver W. Holmes's "Territorial
Government and the Records of Its Admin-
istration," in which the author opens up a
grand view of a major, but much neglected,
209
aspect of western American history.
Holmes's knowledge of the character of the
sources is unsurpassed, and he convincingly
indicates how much of the early history of
the western states must be rewritten, once
historians become acquainted with the pri-
mary sources in the National Archives in
this field. He offers an impressive list of
topics within the over-all territorial process
that await study and development.
Jules Zanger's "The Frontierman in Pop-
ular Fiction, 1820-60" presents an interest-
ing analysis of the emerging image of the
frontierman in the trinity personified by
Boone, Crockett, and Leatherstocking, and
shows why Crockett won out. Joe B.
Frantz's "Cowboy Philosophy: A Cold
Spoor" tells of a futile search for a state-
ment of the cowboy's philosophy in the
cowboy's own words and concludes that the
philosophy of the cowboy must remain
"what he was, not what he said." Frantz's
failure to find what he sought makes one
wonder if the gulf between cowboy reality
and cowboy myth might not apply as well
to other aspects of that inflated subject.
W. N. DAVIS, JR.
Chief of Archives
California State Archives
EUROPEAN GOVERNMENT
AND HISTORY
PAUL AVRICH. The Russian Anarchists.
Pp. x, 303. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1967. $7.50.
At first glance, an account of a movement
that "never became a creed of the mass of
peasants and industrial workers"-though
this remark could also be made about the
Bolsheviks-while its surviving participants
were "rejected, reviled, and, finally,
stamped out or driven into exile," might
seem a work of supererogation. Yet this
study is, in fact, so conceived and so
executed that it richly deserves the atten-
tion of all those interested in the Russian
Revolution and its aftermath.
Dr. Avrich has given due attention to
the thinking of Bakunin and Kropotkin as
the intellectual forebears of Russian an-
archism, but happily has devoted most of
210 THE ANNALS OF THE
his book to the activities and significance
of the anarchist movement in Russia itself.
He finds it first becoming significant in the
early years of the twentieth century, chiefly
among young Jewish workingmen in the
Pale, who, though never numerous, were
distinguished for their reckless terrorism.
A second stream, almost wholly gentile and
mostly students, was also youthful and, in
the main, also terrorist. Less numerous
than these Anarchist-Communists, who
were inspired by the Paris Commune, were
the Anarcho-Syndicalists, who accepted
large-scale economic organization, and a
scattering of Anarchist-Individualists, with
hardly any practical significance.
The author traces clearly the persistence
of the two main currents, the romantic
Anarchist-Communists and the antiterrorist
Anarcho-Syndicalists, both internally di-
vided and mutually hostile, and emphasizes
the by no means insignificant role that
the two played in the Revolution. He
gives an excellent account and analysis of
their ambivalent relations with the Bolshe-
viks, whom the anarchists feared but with
whom they felt constrained to co-operate,
with considerable stress on the anarchists'
share-for which the Bolsheviks were to
show no gratitude-in "October."
The progressively vigorous persecution
of anarchist intellectuals, who became the
most trenchant critics of what they re-
garded as Bolshevik betrayal of the Revolu-
tion, is presented in appropriate detail, as
are Makhno's heroic efforts to establish a
genuinely libertarian regime among his fel-
low peasants in the Ukraine and the sup-
pression of his "banditry"by the Bolsheviks
as soon as, with his co-operation, the Red
Army had cleared the area of White forces.
The essentially anarchist character of the
Kronstadt revolt in 1921 is also made clear.
The volume concludes with an account
of the round-up of most anarchists in the
early years of the New Economic Policy
(NEP), a description of the fate of Rus-
sian anarchists in emigration, and an excel-
lent summary and evaluation of the move-
ment as a whole.
The volume is well organized, clearly
written, and equipped with a useful chronol-
ogy, a comprehensive bibliography, pictures
of leading figures, and a thoroughly work-
AMERICAN ACADEMY
able index. Notwithstanding a few quite
minor weaknesses, this work may well serve
as a model of how individualized studies
may be made to shed valuable light on
broader topics and genuinely to illuminate
corners of Russian history that have pre-
viously not been given their proper share
of attention.
JESSE D. CLARKSON
Professor of History
Brooklyn College of the City
University of New York
STUART RAMSAY TOMPKINS. The Triumph
of Bolshevism: Revolution or Reaction?
Pp. xi, 331. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1967. $5.95.
It is primarily as a student of Russian
thought and culture that Professor Tomp-
kins addresses himself to the emergence and
eventual triumph of bolshevism, and he, in-
deed, speaks mainly in cultural rather than
in political terms. The Russians' indiffer-
ence to the "facts," and their predilection
for indirect argument, as against the West-
ern "passion for clarity" (p. 17), serve ap-
propriately as his starting point for a sur-
vey of the intellectual traditions from
which he traces the political outlook of
Lenin and the other, less steeped, members
of the Marxist revolutionary movement in
Russia. From this source, Lenin was im-
bued with the weapons of powerful invec-
tive, a highly developed sense of the
importance of "nomenclature," especially
the labeling of enemies, and at the same
time an ability to concentrate with unflag-
ging attention on the minutiae of his
private organization. Professor Tompkins
reveals the essential conflict between the
interests of the workers, who wanted a
labor movement, and the intentions of the
Russian socialists, who wanted to make a
revolution based on an army of socialist-led
workers. He is especially concerned,
rightly, to show the common intellectual
origins of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks,
though he does not suggest that they repre-
sented a Scylla and Charibdis for the labor
movement. The question arises here
whether they were sole alternatives.
Professor Tompkins suggests that all
Lenin's "agitation" and unceasing conflict