The territories in question are Finland, Estonia, Livonia, Courland, Lithuania, White Russia, the right bank Ukraine and the Kingdom of Poland (referred to throughout as ‘Congress Poland’). Of these, the areas which formed part of the ancient Polish Republic are of particular interest to the readers of this journal. Those, however, who are acquainted with Polish history even at the secondary school level will not find a great deąl in this book that they did not know before. The fate of the areas whose eastern portion had, in Halecki’ s phrase, been the ‘borderlands of Western civilization’ is all too familiar: annexation, attempts at integration with the Empire, Russification fiercely resisted by the Poles, repeated insurrections, a recurrent state of crisis marked by the frequent imposition of martial law, economic stagnation (except for the Kingdom) or plain backwardness, undue delay in the emancipation of the peasantry. All this was due to the state of affairs which Polish lethargy, Russian expansionism and international power politics had engendered in the latter part of the 18th century to the subsequent detriment in varying degrees of Russians, White Russians, Lithuanians, Poles and Jews (who receive only a passing mention or two).

Such advantages as may have accrued to sectional interests - the bureaucracy and the official Church for example - are not clearly shown in Professor Thaden's balance sheet. No analysis of the social strata of the various nationalities or of general economic conditions is attempted; the authors’ attention is focused on the peasantry on the one hand and the noble ‘elites’ on the other. The authors appear to assume that the ‘borderlands’ were legitimately acquired and permanent components of the Russian Empire, and seem puzzled by the unwillingness of the Poles in particular to submit to the process of centralization and ‘homogenization’ instituted by the tsarist bureaucracy. They note with regret that religion failed to act as ‘a unifying force'. How could it have done so when one considers the variety of denominations other than Russian Orthodox - Roman Catholic, U niate, Protestant and Jewish - subsumed under that concept?

The ease and empathy with which the authors of this competent piece of administrative history adopt a Russocentric, indeed Petropolitan point of view and enter into the rigid and narrow frame of mind of tsarist officialdom (occasionally guided by liberal or Slavophile opinion) is both astonishing and disturbing.