the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of

Interdisciplinary History

Politics and Public Health in Revolutionary Russia, 1890-1918 by John F. Hutchinson; Health
and Society in Revolutionary Russia by Susan Gross Solomon; John F. Hutchinson; Peasant
Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution (1917-1921) by Orlando Figes
Review by: Patricia Herlihy
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Summer, 1991), pp. 131-133
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/204587 .
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REVIEWS

131

questions other cherished assumptions of historians concerned with disamortization, particularly the thesis that it redirected capital away from
industrial development and significantly worsened the economic circumstances of the agricultural population.
These comments cannot do justice to the numerous insights into
Spanish rural society contained in this volume. Superbly researched,
judicious, and comprehensive, it is a study that should be read by
everyone interested in the social and economic history of modern Spain.
William J. Callahan
University of Toronto
The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1815. By Johannes Menne
Postma (New York, Cambridge University Press, I990) 428 pp. $54.50
This detailed analysis of the Dutch slave trade makes available the full
range of data on 370 slaving voyages carried out from 1675 to 1738 by
the Dutch West Indies Company, and on 840 additional voyages by
Dutch free traders from 1730 to 1802. Since the author has been careful
to distinguish data by age and sex, with details on mortality and morbidity, his tables and commentary are of considerable importance. In
addition, through extensive archival work, Postma has analyzed the role
of Curacao in the asientotrade with the Spanish, documented the workings of the Dutch trade in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and shown
the importance of the eighteenth-century Dutch free trade in slaves.
The book provides a thorough overview of the Dutch role in the
slave trade, but the references to the extensive literature published since
1980 are few. Thus, although the Dutch slave trade itself has now been
expertly summarized, the task of setting it in a broader Atlantic context
has yet to be performed.
Patrick Manning
Northeastern University
Politics and Public Health in RevolutionaryRussia, 1890-1918. By John F.
Hutchinson (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) 253 pp.
$42.00

Health and Society in RevolutionaryRussia. Edited by Susan Gross Solomon and John F. Hutchinson (Bloomington, Indiana University Press,
I990) 256 pp. $27.50

Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countrysidein Revolution (19171921). By Orlando Figes (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989) 401 pp.
$64.00.
Political opportunism and political action in times of stress and transition
in Russia summarize the themes of these three books. The first two

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PATRICIA

132

HERLIHY

examine medical politics, both the policies of the government and the
strategies used by medical professionals to affect policy and gain power.
The third concerns agrarian politics, both the policies of the regime and
the strategies adopted by peasants in pursuit of their interests.
In Politics and Public Health, Hutchinson carries forward, as he acknowledges, the pioneering research of Frieden.1 Effectively utilizing
Russian medical periodicals, medical memoirs, and government surveys
on health (and writing very well), Hutchinson subjects to intense examination the medical policies and politics of the late czarist and early
Bolshevik regimes. Initially, the czarist government turned over to community physicians major responsibility for maintaining the health of
Russia's people. Not until I905 did it realize that physicians could turn
into radical reformers. Some doctors emphasized environmental causes
for illnesses (poverty, bad housing, insufficient food, wage exploitation,
and so forth), and held the regime responsible for these social failures.
Bacteriologists and epidemiologists, espousing new approaches to therapy, despaired that the government would ever sponsor the major efforts
needed in laboratory and field to cope with Russia's appalling mortalities. To contain the seething dissidence, medical reformers within the
czarist government tried to centralize medical care. But the traditionalist
community doctors, jealous of their autonomy, resisted, as did the
ministry of internal affairs and the military. With the outbreak of World
War I, Nicholas II appointed Prince Ol'denburg to supervise the medical
aspects of the war effort. Ol'denburg had to appeal for support to the
rural and urban community doctors who had organized themselves in
this period of crisis.
The October Revolution brought centralized medical care. In 1918,
Lenin created the Commissariat of Health Protection, which took over
many of the pre-revolutionary schemes for health reform. Although
most were initially unsympathetic toward the Bolsheviks, many doctors
cooperated with the new regime. To them it "appeared far more ready
than the tsarist government to uphold the importance of modern technology

and professional

expertise"

(203).

Hutchinson is not entirely fair to the czarist health officials. Although Lenin's policy of centralization was allegedly motivated by humanitarian concerns, the czarist officials in their medical policies were
not so much interested in delivering better health care as in buttressing
the czar's authority. Although some interpretations might be questioned,
Hutchinson's highly informative and stimulating work is a major contribution to the history of Russian medical politics.
Health and Society consists of ten, uniformly excellent papers; three
are on the czarist period. Russian administrators and doctors disagreed
vehemently on who should be the prime deliverers of health care in the
central government and its ministers, the zemstvos, local
empire-the
I Nancy Frieden, RussianPhysiciansin an Era of Reformand Revolution, 1856-1905(Princeton, I981).

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REVIEWS

133

administrations, or even factories. They also argued over what should

be the role played by the various medical experts-generalists,
psychiatrists, epidemiologists, fel'dshers (medical assistants), medical police,
sanitary engineers, hygienists, eugenicists, and others. The authors are
in the main historians, but an economist, a political scientist, and two
sociologists also contribute the insights of their disciplines to this exciting volume.
Figes' study of peasants in the Volga region benefits from extensive
archival research in the Soviet Union. He reconstructs in detail the
impact which the two revolutions of 1917 and the civil war had on the
peasants. With the Revolution, the peasants occupied the gentry land
and forced the Stolypin "separators" to rejoin the rural communes. They
organized soviets. Ultimately, however, they resisted reimposition of
central power. Having satisfied their own hunger for land in 1917, they
resented the State requisitions of their grain and feared that the land
would be collectivized. The restoration of central authority was inimical
to their interests. In short, as Figes promises, the book "is the history
of a 'missing revolution"' (3).
Its most original section is the chapter on "The Rural Economy
under War Communism."
Figes there describes the reemergence of
handicraft industry in the villages. The decline of cities and the breakdown of communications stimulated the peasants' own ingenious attempts to create autarky.
Although benefiting from archival sources, the book is marred by
poor writing, repetitions, and the annoying use of jargonistic terms
never properly defined: "high cash rents of the older feudal system,"
"semi-natural economy,"
"semi-capitalist
farming," "over-bureaucracy," and many more (27, 134, 25, I70). Illogical phrases are also
numerous, for example, "the vanguard of the struggle"; and the selfevident is emphasized: "The land is the natural environment of the
peasantry's existence and the primary means of its agricultural production"

(21, Ioi).

Patricia Herlihy
Brown University

The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History. By
Philip D. Curtin (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1990) 220
pp. $39.50 cloth $10.95 paper
The rise and fall of the plantation complex, the "economic and political
order centering on slave plantations in the New World tropics," is a
major theme of modern history (ix). The plantation complex was the
main impetus behind the Atlantic slave trade. It was responsible for the
largest preindustrial global population movements. It accounted for a
major proportion of the overseas trade of the leading maritime nations

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