Bernard Pares was a student of Russia from the date of this first visit to the country in 1898 up to his death in 1949. He was motivated by the lack of knowledge on the part of British officialdom in St. Petersburg to establish the first formal school for Russian studies in Britain at the University of Liverpool in 1907. When World War I broke out he was assigned as an observer with the Russian army and seconded to the British embassy staff in Petrograd. Following the revolution of 1917 and the end of the war Pares was banned by the Bolshevik government from entering Russia until 1935.

Pares first published his histroy of Russia in 1926 with four revised editions issued between 1928 and 1947. My copy is from thre fifth printing (1949) of the Fifth Edition (1947). In retrospect it was unfortunate that Pares continued to issue revised editions after the original 1926 publication. The latter chapters of this book covering the Revolution and its aftermath are cringe inducing to say the least. He does provide a fairly balanced account of the revolution and its immediate aftermath, but the final two chapters, Stalin's Russia and The Second Fatherland War and the Epilogue are frankly embarrassing. Curiously, he does not refer to World War II by that name and dates the "Second Fatherland War" in the chapter title from 1941 to 1947!

Pares pretty much buys hook, line and sinker the allegation that Trotsky, even in exile, amounted to a serious threat to the rule of Stalin in the aftermaths of Trotsky's political defeat and the repression of the Left deviationists (Zinoviev and Kamenev) and the Right deviationists (Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky). He buys into the purges of the 1930s, accepts the testimony of the accused, produced under torture at face value, buys into the justification for the execution of Marshal Tukhachevsky and the resulting purge of the Soviet military command based on conversations with their German counterparts. He excuses the Soviet - German non-aggression pact on the grounds that the Russians were denied an alliance by the French and the Bristish (who despite the lack of an alliance with Russia managed not to enter into a non-aggression pact with Hitler). He has no criticism of Russia's failure to open a second front in the East against Japan and at the conclusion of the war he takes the side of Stalin and Molotov and actually makes the argument that possession is nine tenths of the law, that Russia was entitled to get back all of the land lost to her in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and even criticizes the allied support for anti-communist elements in Greece and Turkey. It's not every day that you encounter a work on this subject that cites Walter Duranty as a source and speaks favorably of U.S. Ambassador Joseph E. Davies author of the notorious Mission to Moscow.

All of that said, Pares did provide a comprehensive political and military history of Russia going back beyond any racial or national consciousness of being Russian. He makes an argument throughout that Russia's destiny is determined by its geography. Northern marsh lands and forests characterized by harsh winters balanced against a southern terrain that enjoys rich, fertile soil that makes it ideal for agriculture.. But the lack of any topographical obstacles makes it an inviting target for invasions from primarily the Mongols coming from the East, the Islamic threat from the south and to a lesser extent invasions from Europe primarily from Poland and Lithuania.

Pares relates the story of the acceptance of Orthodoxy by" the Russian princes, the rise and fall of Kiev, the period of Moscow's ascendancy, rule of Ivan the Terrible who Pares for some reason calls "John the Dread", the Time of Troubles, the rise of the Romanovs, the creation of St. Petersburg under Peter the Great, the turn to West beginning with Peter, climaxing with Catherine the Great's rule and the challenges from the Slavophiles and narodniki movements in the second half of the 19th century. Were it not for the disaster that was World War I, it is likely that Russia might have succeeded in its political and economic development in a liberal direction and entered a period of normalcy and prosperity by Western standards.

In addition to my criticism based on the chapters added to the original edition, this work suffers from a lack of footnotes, no Index though one is supposed to follow page 565 according to the Table of Contents. Unfortunately, the last page of the book is 564 which is the last page of the Bibliography (which is somewhat idiosyncratcially organized). Also, given the emphasis on geography and military history the book was not well served by the lack of maps. Moreover, the maps that were included were based on amateur drawings.

All in all, A History of Russia is a thorough, detailed, knowledgeable work of history that should have left well enough (and Stalin) alone. ( )