BOOK REVIEWS 229

Peter J.S. Duncan, Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution,Communism and After, Routledge, London, 2000, xiii + 235 pp.,£50.

I particularly welcome the publication of Peter Duncan’s lucid studyof Russian messianism. Duncan sets out to provide ‘a discussion ofthe phenomenon of Russian messianism in its political and historicalcontext’, focusing primarily on the ideas of “people and move-ments inside Russia, rather than those in the emigration” (p. 3).He takes the reader from the formation of the centrally importantnotion of ‘Moscow as the Third Rome’ right up to the ideas putforward by Gennady Ziuganov during the Russian presidentialelection campaign of 1996. Chapters along the way include ‘Pro-Tsarist forms of Russian messianism: Pan-Slavism, Dostoevsky andSolovyov’, ‘Messianism and revolution: from Herzen to Stalin’, and‘De-Stalinization and the growth of Russian national consciousness:the Khrushchev era’.

Duncan argues for a distinction between ‘state-oriented messi-anism’ and ‘people-oriented messianism’ (p. 3), and in his handsthis is a useful working distinction. He also has much to say on thenature of official, state-sanctioned messianism, on unofficial formsof messianism – both in the Tsarist and Soviet periods – and onthe areas of overlap between these. Throughout, he shows himselfaware of paradoxes and uneasy alliances.

Two full chapters (just over forty pages, in fact) are devotedto the Brezhnev era, with the first of these focusing on officiallysanctioned expressions of messianism and the second chapter onunofficial, ‘dissident’ expressions of it. Duncan handles this plethoraof viewpoints, factions and polemical point-scoring deftly and withextreme confidence and, given all his work on Russian nationalism,democratic and other political movements, he is eminently equippedto do so.

In particular, Duncan is sensitive to the respective positions ofreligious believers and official Church structures, and he rightlypoints up the cultural importance of the Village Prose Writers(the derevenshchiki) for the overall analysis of Russian messianismand, especially, nationalism. Further, the ideas and particular roleof Academician Dmitry Likhachev are considered in some detail,

230 BOOK REVIEWS

a commentator whose definition of ‘cultural ecology’ figures inNicolai Petro’s discussion in The Rebirth of Russian Democracy(Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1995).

Reflecting on the tension between ideology and pragmatism,Duncan makes the point that, when it comes to practical policydecisions, Russian rulers have seldom sacrificed pragmatic consid-erations for the sake of ideology, even when public feeling ranespecially high, as was the case when NATO intervened in Serbiain spring 1999 (p. 139). Duncan notes: “The only occasion whenthe desire to help fellow Orthodox Slavs became a dominant factorin Russian foreign policy was in 1877–1878, when the pressure ofpublic opinion spilt over into the Tsarist bureaucracy” (p. 145).

The presentation and structure of the book are admirable, withconcise introductions and conclusions to each chapter, and helpfulheadings in bold type. Largely, though, the clarity is due to Duncan’sability to ‘make connections’ across the centuries and to highlightcontrasts between different types of messianism.

Given its final published form, I think it highly unlikely that thedoctoral thesis on which this study is based was ‘dusty’, as theauthor suggests in his acknowledgements!

Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies JONATHAN SUTTON

University of LeedsLeeds, LS2 9JT, UK

Stefan Rossbach, Gnostic Wars, Edinburgh University Press,Edinburgh, 1999, 257 pp., $75.00

This book is “an investigation into the spiritual preconditions of theCold War” (p. 1). Rossbach argues that there is a spiritual dimen-sion to international politics that is often undetected by scholars.In regard to the Cold War, he states that the Soviet Union and theUnited States were articulating positions that were in some wayssimilar to the gnostic heresies which challenged Christianity in itsearly centuries.

Rossbach describes the spiritual continuities that can be identi-fied in history as “lines of meaning.” Lines of meaning are built