quire unjustified self-sufficiency and importance. In the process the relationship existing between party events and the broader backdrop against which they took place gets total- ly lost. Nor are the general socio-political developments and cultural trends in Russia at the time judged in their historical context, but rather in terms of their ultimate effect on party circumstances or on the events of "1917 and all that." Paradoxically, Mr. Hilder- meier is being too historicist in that he makes his own the skewed vision and partisan perspective of his "heroes," while at the same time passing unhistorical judgments in terms of what happened in 1917. Thus he speaks of "illegal" acts and coup d'etat on the part of the tsarist government and yet translates arkhichernosotennyi by archifaschistisch! (p. 176). In his introduction Mr. Hildermeier faults Radkey for writing the history of the PSR in 1917-21 from the perspective of its leading personalities and the accidents of individ- ual actions. But he himself falls into the same trap, for, perforce, he has to concentrate on the leadership (i.e., the intelligentsia), so that the events he deals with acquire also a similar character of chance and unpredictability. He condemns the PSR for failing to understand the underlying dynamics of Russia's modernization and for tackling it in er- roneous manner (i.e., ineffectually from the perspective of 1917). But he admits that these underlying dynamics may be still a matter of debate. Furthermore, such a perspec- tive cannot, by definition, provide the explanation of what are, by his own admission, the actions and thoughts of a dedicated revolutionary intelligentsia bound by its own self- defined mental framework and barely in touch with reality, Mr. Hildermeier's treatment brings out-against his intentions, I would think-that the events before 1914 cannot be linked organically and logically with what happened in 1917 and after. Something entirely new and unforeseen by contemporaries took place from late 1916 on and determined the course of the revolution. In his little book, Com- prendre la revolution russe (Paris, 1980), Martin Malia has persuasively argued that the events of 1917 were the result of the sudden and total disintegration of the structures of pre-1914 Russian society and had not been prepared by any specific antecedant events. This disintegration is perhaps explicable by some structural features of imperial Russia, but in "negative terms," by what failed to develop and not by what did happen. I begin to wonder whether the strenuous efforts of many historians to discover the elements of 1917 in pre-1914 Russian circumstances are not somewhat irrelevant. It would seem to me that these researches' findings lead one to conclude in favor of a complete break, razryv, between what had been going on before 1914 and the collapse of all structured life in the course of the war and the first months of the revolution. In this perspective a history of the PSR before 1914 can hardly help us to understand the Russian revolution; but put into its proper historical context it can shed much interesting light on what was going on in Russia in the first decade and a half of the present century. Mr. Hildermeier's careful and informative monograph nous laisse sur notre faim in this respect. Marc Raeff Columbia University Johann H. Hartl. Die Interessenvertretungen der Industriellen in Russland, 1905-1914 (Wiener Archiv für Geschichte des Slawentums und Osteuropas, 10). Wien: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf., 1978. 135 pp. A new field in Russian studies is slowly coming into being: business history. In con- trast to the sophisticated Western scholarship on entrepreneurship and the development of business firms, Soviet studies of Russian capitalism have done little more than cloak Lenin's abstract pronouncements with new facts. As a result, impartial analysis has yet to be done on such basic topics as profit levels, the relationship of industrial wages to la- bor productivity, and the net effect of high tariffs; and hundreds of Russian manufactur- ers, scores of major companies, and dozens of business organizations await the most rudi- mentary empirical examination. To Johann Hartl, trained at Gottingen and Vienna, belongs the distinction of produc- ing the first book on Russian business groups since those of Lur'e and Ermaskii on the eve of World War I, and one of the first in Russian business history, with those of John P. McKay and Robert Tolf, ever published in the West. His bibliography lists much of the prerevolutionary and Soviet scholarship, plus pioneering doctoral dissertations recently written in the United States by Carl Goldberg, Gregory Guroff, Louis Menashe, and Ruth Roosa. The book's primary value lies in its case studies of four major organizations of Rus- sian industry and commerce, selected from the two hundred that existed in 1914. Roosa's concise English title-the Association of Industry and Trade or AIT-for the Sovet s"ez- dov predstavitelei promyshlennosti i torgovli leads me to propose the following transla- tions for the other three: the Trade and Agriculture Association or TAA for Sovet s"ez- dov predstavitelei birzhevoi torgovli i sel'skogo khoziaistva; the South Russian Coal and Iron Association or SRCIA for Sovet s"ezda gornopromyshlennikov Iuga Rossii; and the Moscow Society of Manufacturers or MSM for Obshchestvo zavodchikov i fabrikantov Moskovskogo promyshlennogo raiona. Despite the similarities among their names, these four organizations performed quite different functions. AIT, founded in 1906, represented big industry, especially in Peters- burg, while TAA, also formed in that year, spoke for the stock exchanges and internal commerce, especially the grain trade. Hartl shows that these national associations lacked internal unity and worked at cross purposes, at least until the formation of a joint coor- dinating council in 1911. SRCIA, founded in 1874, receives an extended treatment (27 pages) that constitutes the core of the book. Its leaders, the coal and iron men N. S. Avdakov, A. A. Auerbakh, and N. F. fon-Ditmar, struggled to develop heavy industry despite insufficient railroad capacity, inadequate waterways and harbors, the shortage of skilled labor, disproportion- ately high zemstvo taxes, and, toward the end, massive strikes. Although the government listened to SRCIA's numerous pleas for relief and relied on its annual statistical reports, the association failed to block passage of onerous legislation in the Duma and State Council. Hartl's fourth case study, of MSM (formed in 1907), shows how a regional "em- ployers' union". organized collective action against the labor movement, but had little success when it complained to Petersburg about high coal and iron prices and the paucity of industrial credit. It is therefore surprising that Hartl, when discussing the crucial question of these or- ganizations' influence on governmental policy, sometimes forgets his own admonition that the information he examined yields no definitive answer. Instead, he repeatedly and uncritically cites the works of the Mensheviks Ermanskii and Berlin, who, on the basis of fragmentary evidence, emphasized the accommodations reached between businessmen and the state. Because such a categorical view is perhaps inevitable whenever observers at one political extreme attempt to analyze actors at the other, it might have been better to treat this Menshevik notion as a working hypothesis rather than accept it asa demonstrat- ed truth. Hartl also accuses the commercial-industrial leaders of blundering into the revolution: ■> "they were totally incapable of interpreting the signs of the time" (P. 112). In fact, A. A. Vol'skii accurately warned of an immense peasant revolution unless the government implemented fundamental reforms; and in any case it is not clear what new policies the manufacturers could have implemented in their own factories to forestall labor unrest, given high costs of production, low labor productivity, competition from imported Eur- opean goods, and bureaucratic apathy and interference. , .