Slavonic and East European Review

134 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 200g theRusso-Japanese War in 1904-05, which caused Kuropatkin to formulate the doctrine of the 'Yellow Peril' as the greatest strategic threat to Russia (pp. 95-96), this increasing paranoia clouded the judgement of theGeneral Staff. In his conclusion Marshall shows (pp. 183-88) how in theperiod leading up to the FirstWorld War 'The Myopic Guard' was distracted from the more serious threat in Europe by their concerns over pan-Islamism and the modernization of the Japanese and Chinese armed forces, not to mention growing tensions with the British over Afghanistan which (asJennifer Siegel has shown in her Endgame, London and New York, 2002) were not resolved by theAnglo-Russian agreement of 1907.He concludes with some observa tions on the continuities of attitudes and personnel amongst military oriental ists into the early Soviet period, embodied most clearly in thefigure ofAndrei Evgenievich Snesarev, the tsaristGeneral Staffs leading expert on Afghani stan and British India, who would become the rector of the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow from 1921until his arrest in 1930 (p. 190). There are the usual problems with Routledge books: the copy-editing is somewhat slipshod, and in many cases entirely new errors seem to have been added. The volume is also horrendously overpriced at ?75.00. However, the book will be of interestnot only toRussianists but also to historians working on other European colonial empires. It should be essential reading not just for military historians, but for anyone who wants to further their understanding of that elusive concept, the 'official mind' in tsaristRussia. School of History Alexander Morrison UniversityofLiverpool Norris, Stephen M. A War ofImages:Russian Popular Prints,Wartime Culture,and National Identityi8i2-ig4j. Northern IllinoisUniversity Press, DeKalb, IL, 2006. xiii + 277 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $40.00. Stephen Norris seeks to demonstrate 'the visual nature of Russian nation hood before and after 1917', a subject, he suggests, that has hitherto 'been litde studied' (p. 3). 'Nationhood' is his preferred term for themore widely accepted 'national identity' and 'national consciousness' and he limits the visual side of his investigation solely to the lubok,although not to the lubokin general (which he calls a genre), but to thewar lubok (which he also confus ingly calls a genre [p. 5], when it is, ifanything, a sub-genre or theme). This initial confusion is compounded by the book's title,which mentions neither nationhood nor lubki as such, but does denote the self-recommending symmetry of the book's historical parameters, from the Patriotic War to the Great Patriotic War. Following the introductory chapter, six of the next seven chapters are devoted to the wars that were the stimulus for the mass production of lubki, beginning with 1812and proceeding via theCrimean War, theRusso-Turkish War of 1877-78, and theRusso-Japanese War, to theGreat War. The excep tion is chapter three,which traces the attitude of the government and its censors towards the lubok,principally during the last decades ofNicholas Fs REVIEWS 135 reign. Chapter eight pursues the story into the first years of the Soviet regime, when the attemptwas made initially to obliterate the lubok, beforeMaiakovskii andMoor demonstrated itspropaganda value through poster works produced as so-called ROSTA (Russian Telegraph Agency) Windows, which during World War Two were reprised as TASS Windows. An understanding of thenature and limitsof the lubokisobviously of crucial importance. The term itself was firstintroduced by Ivan Snegirev in an essay he published in 1822, entitled 'Russkaia narodnaia gallereia iii lubochnye kartinki', but proved unacceptable tomembers of the Society of theLovers of Russian Literature inwhose Trudyhe published a furtheressay in 1824 entitled 'O prostonarodnykh izobrazheniiakh vMoskovskom mire'. When he eventu ally published his book-length study in 1861, he did not hesitate to call it Lubochnye kartinki russkogonaroda v moskovskom mire. Dmitrii Rovinskii, who, togetherwith Snegirev, is the authority forNorris and for all researchers into the history of the lubok,opted for 'popular pictures' (narodnye kartinki)in his monumental four-volume study of 1881. 'Popular' prints or pictures is the most widely accepted term, certainly beyond the boundaries of Russia, but, as Anthony Griffiths noted in his Preface to Sheila O'Connell's The Popular Print inEngland 1550...