Modern Europe
these activists that made them Jewish revolutionaries
as opposed to revolutionaries of Jewish origin, Haberer has very little to offer. While he has demonstrated that many of these rebels struggled quite
seriously with the fact of their Jewish origins, his
assertion that their approaches were intrinsically Jewish is not sufficiently documented and remains unconvincing.
Haberer has been successful in highlighting the
contributions made to the populist movements of the
late 1860s and 1870s by Jewish activists. He has
demonstrated that these revolutionaries did more than
print articles and smuggle them across international
boundaries. Furthermore, his delineation of the different social and political ideologies advocated by Russian revolutionary groups is lucid and enlightening.
These are important contributions, and Haberer is to
be commended for making them. Unfortunately, his
effort to explain why so many Russian-Jewish young
people became visible in the revolutionary effort is less
satisfying. An approach fully informed by Jewish social
and cultural history could have yielded a more nuanced and meaningful analysis.
ALEXANDER ORBACH
rJ'tziversity of Pittsburgh
V. N. PONOMAREV. Krymskaia voina i russko-amerikanskie otnosheniia [The Crimean War and Russo-American Relations]. Moscow: No publisher. 1993. Pp. 231.
Shared rivalry with Britain created a community of
interest between Russia and the United States for
much of the nineteenth century. If the Union gained
from this diplomatic amity during the Civil War,
Russia profited especially during the Crimean War
when, among the major powers, only Prussia and the
United States held to a strict neutrality. V. N. Ponomarev has produced the first book to focus on the
broad range of Russo-American relations during the
Crimean War, including private American offers of
arms, technology transfer, and naval aid. It is a fine
complement from the Russian side to Frank A. Golder's pioneering article (Golder, "Russian-American
Relations during the Crimean War," American Historical Review [April, 1926], pp. 462-76) on the subject
and Alan Dowty's The Limits of Isolation: The United
States and the Crimean War (1971). Among Ponomarev's major conclusions is that the bilateral Convention
of 10/22 June 1854 affirming the principle that "free
ships make free goods" was no mere diplomatic episode but a major step toward the Maritime Declaration on neutral trading rights that concluded the
Congress of Paris in 1856 (pp. 110-11).
Ponomarev has performed a useful service by subjecting the main aspects of U.S.-Russian relations to a
careful review and shedding new light on them with
material from the Russian press and excellent diplomatic, military, and naval archives. His sources show
that St. Petersburg, eager to limit British power,
looked favorably on American expansion in the Carib-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1583
bean and the Pacific but definitely not in Alaska.
Despite the machinations of Russia's representatives
in Washington and in San Francisco, there is no record
of official Russian authorization to engage in feelers
for a temporary or permanent transfer of Russian
America to the United States or to an American
dummy firm. On the other hand, the Russian foreign
and naval ministries seriously pondered the offers of
would-be privateers (one of whom hoped to seize
British gold shipments from Australia) but eventually
decided against them, chiefly to protect American
neutrality from British leverage. Valuing an unencumbered United States as a de facto strategic partner,
Russia immediately understood and sympathized with
Secretary of State William L. Marcy's attempt to
amend the Declaration of 1856 with a clause protecting all noncontraband trade in wartime, Washington's
condition for outlawing privateers.
Ponomarev also has some interesting things to say
about the Russian embassy in Washington, whose
chiefs during the Crimean War, A. A. Bodisco and E.
A. Stoeckl, had American wives and good connections.
The embassy was cautious in its advice to St. Petersburg concerning privateering, competent in dismissing
President Franklin Pierce's early mediation offer as a
political and diplomatic maneuver, and balanced in
dispatching samples of public opinion that tended to
favor Russia. Ponomarev found no evidence that the
embassy subvented favorable articles, although such
activity would not surprise him. (One slip here: due
apparently to an archivist's mistake, an undated piece
is anachronistically attributed to the Wall Street Journal.)
Post-perestroika economic constraints forced the
Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy
of Sciences to print a mere 300 copies of this book,
using standard typescript. This book deserves better
than that-here, in Russia, and elsewhere.
DAVID M. GOLD FRANK
Georgetown University
REGINALD E. ZELNIK. Law and Disorder on the Narova
River: The Kreenholm Strike of 1872. (A Centennial
Book.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1995. Pp. xiii, 308. $38.00.
This is a master work by a master historian, two books
in one. Part one is a case history of the 1872 strike at
the Kreenholm textile mill, and part two is an analysis
and complete translation of a Russian worker's autobiography. That worker, Vasilii Gerasimov, participated in the 1872 strike, and his account constitutes
one of Reginald E. Zelnik's sources for unraveling the
strike and its meanings. 1872 was the last year in which
labor protest was untouched by the left intelligentsia,
Zelnik writes, and the Kreenholm strike serves as an
example of worker self-organization and demands
unmediated by outside ideologies or ideas. Gerasimov's memoir, written in 1881-1882, is the oldest
DECEMBER 1996