The Republic of Armenia. Vol. 3. From London to Sèvres, February-August 1920. by RichardG. Hovannisian; The Republic of Armenia, Vol. 4, Between Crescent and Sickle: Partition andSovietization. by Richard G. HovannisianReview by: Norman G. O. PereiraSlavic Review, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 138-139Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2500670 .

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138 Slavic Review

tory, particularly indispensable for anyone who wishes to understand the current religious politics of independent Ukraine. It is recommended to all interested in twentieth-century Ukraine, to students of Soviet religious policy and of the immediate postwar politics of the Soviet Union, as well as to all connoisseurs of careful schol- arship.

JOHN-PAUL HIMKA University of Alberta

The Republic of Armenia. By Richard G. Hovannisian. Vol. 3, From London to Sevres, February-August 1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xii, 496 pp. Bibliography. Index. Plates. Maps. $45.00, hard bound. Vol. 4, Between Crescent and Sickle: Partition and Sovietization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xv, 534 pp. Bibliography. Index. Plates. Maps. $45.00, hard bound.

At the end of World War I, the Paris Peace Conference made several controversial decisions about boundaries for both existing states and emerging ones. Among the latter was the Republic of Armenia. After centuries of foreign domination, the Ar- menian people were finally offered the opportunity of creating their own state, which would include not only the Russian Armenian provinces of the Caucasus but also the contiguous and more fertile provinces of Turkish Armenia. The Treaty of Sevres (August 1920) called for a united, independent Armenian state along these lines, leaving final determination of its precise borders to the U.S. president.

But the opposition of both Turkey and Soviet Russia to a united and independent Armenia, combined with the ambivalence of the Allied Powers in implementing the Treaty of Sevres (especially if it meant deploying additional troops to do so), meant that the Armenians were once again left to their own devices. And again the Turks proved too strong. Thus the Armenian republic's existence was all too brief, ending with a decisive series of military defeats in December 1920. Nevertheless, its brief existence did succeed in establishing the principle of an Armenian national entity on a small part of the historic homeland within the greater Soviet state. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991, Armenia emerged as a fully legitimate successor state.

The two preceding volumes of Richard Hovannisian's work covered the period from 1918 through spring 1920. Volumes 3 and 4 complete the author's definitive, sympathetic, and magisterial enterprise. In great detail, they highlight national, re- gional, and international politics and diplomacy as part of the first comprehensive history of the Republic of Armenia. The third volume stresses the pusillanimous be- havior of the Allied Powers and the ruthless aggressiveness of the Turks. If only by comparison, the Soviets do not come off quite so badly. Their victory in the Russian civil war and in Azerbaijan, however, presented the Armenian government with the choice of realigning in Moscow's camp or facing the Turks alone, since the west was clearly unwilling to become more deeply involved.

Volume 4 recounts the final months of the Armenian republic, as the Turks and the Soviets came to terms on the partition and absorption of the Armenian territories and peoples. Unable to negotiate a satisfactory arrangement with Moscow to simul- taneously preserve the republic's independence and stave off the Turks, the Armenians were crushed by the Turkish forces from September to December 1920. Turkey then took half the republic's territory, leaving the rest to be absorbed by Soviet Russia.

As with the first two, volumes 3 and 4 draw on an extraordinary, indeed exhaus- tive, range of primary sources in Armenian, Russian, Turkish, German, Italian, French, and English. Cumulatively, they provide an immense amount of essential information that is generally reliable but does require more than one reading to comprehend. Henceforth, anyone seriously interested in the history of the region will want to con- sult Hovannisian's volumes before proceeding further. Together with their predeces- sors, these volumes will be especially useful for graduate students and advanced un- dergraduates.

Even major works have their flaws-and often these are the other side of their strengths. In the present instance, the author's attention to diplomatic negotiations is

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Book Reviews 139

at times excessively detailed, thereby interfering with the narrative. Also there is, however understandably, a noticeable pro-Armenian bias that gives a polemical quality to the discussions of Turkish motivations and policies. Finally, a very small point: in Russian historiography the proper name for the party Hovannisian calls Social Revo- lutionaries is Socialist Revolutionaries.

NORMAN G. 0. PEREIRA Dalhousie University

Muscovy and Sweden in the Thirty Years' War, 1630-1635. By B. F. Porshnev. Ed. Paul Dukes. Trans. Brian Pearce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xxi, 256 pp. Index. $54.95, hard bound.

The volume under review translates a segment of B. F. Porshnev's lengthy work, Trid- tsatiletniaia voina i vstuplenie v nee Shvetsii i Moskovkogo gosudarstva, published by Nauka in 1976. (The original title, oddly, does not appear anywhere in the English transla- tion.) In the introduction, Paul Dukes appropriately summarizes and briefly discusses Porshnev's controversial broad theses concerning the origins and developments of the Thirty Years' War. This book, however, translates only five of the original volume's eight chapters, those chapters that are based on intensive archival research. As a result, the reader's attention focuses on one particular part of Porshnev's argument: the role that Muscovy played in the checkerboard of European international relations in the period between 1630 and 1635. As those familiar with the Russian volume will recall, Porshnev argues that Russian subsidies to Sweden from 1628 and agreements between the crowns of Sweden and Muscovy over their relationship with the Polish-Lithuanian state were key factors in permitting Gustavus Adolphus to act when and as he did in going to war in northern Germany. Thus, the sale of Russian grain advantageously exported first by Denmark and then by Sweden from Russia, where prices were low, to Amsterdam, where prices were high and rising under the pressures of war, per- mitted Denmark to continue fighting and Sweden to go to war in northern Germany before the French could supplement the Swedish crown's finances. Negotiations with Muscovy to secure Gustavus Adolphus's eastern front with the Polish-Lithuanian Com- monwealth are linked minutely to the pauses and vagaries of the Swedish army's movement once established in north Germany. The Smolensk War appears as an important element in the carefully negotiated deal between Sweden and Muscovy over their linked aims of dismembering the empire and the commonwealth, respectively. The end of the Smolensk War and the alliance rapidly followed from the deaths, less than a year apart, of its chief advocates in each court, Gustavus Adolphus himself and Filaret. Despite the quite limited space allotted in the Russian original to the analysis of the class antagonisms inside Germany, the selections for translation have had the effect of essentially limiting their discussion to a single chapter.

A number of things might be said about the overemphases in Porshnev's ap- proach, as Paul Dukes judiciously points out in his introduction; in fact, some of them were said after the monograph appeared in Russian. For example, the amount of Russian grain subsidies to Sweden is usually estimated to be considerably lower, and Muscovy (and Filaret, as architect of its policy) was considerably more interested in regaining territory from Poland than in the empire and the Thirty Years' War. Military events, such as the Russians' problems at the siege of Smolensk, often have singularly little impact on events. For reasons that are abundantly clear, Porshnev made rich use of Russian archives but had virtually no access to the archives of other states involved in the war. Except for a brief use of Swedish archives, Porshnev relied heavily on the wartime work of David Norrman.

These comments should not obscure Porshnev's successes in undertaking what he described as "the more complicated and more worthwhile task -to fill in the gulf be- tween the political history of Russia and the rest of Europe" (xix). In the context of an all-encompassing war, early seventeenth-century Muscovy (with other parts of east- ern Europe) was a part of the diplomatic and military fabric of Europe. Both its own

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