SIR BERNARD PARES’S History of Russia (Knopf, $5.00) first appeared more than twenty years ago when treatments of the subject in English were relatively rare. Since that time many English histories of Russia have been published, short and long, scholarly and unscholarly. In this welter of books the fact that popular demand is now met by a fifth revised and enlarged edition of Pares’s work must stand as a well-earned tribute to its authoritative nature and enduring qualities. There is also a special fitness in reprinting this standard work in 1947, which happens to mark the author’s eightieth year. For this occasion R. W. Seton-Watson, the eminent Oxford historian, paid him the following tribute:—

Bernard Pares has always seemed a type of Englishman at his most characteristic and best — holding unshakably to deeply rooted beliefs and sentiments . . . tenacious and resourceful, yet capable of making rapid changes of plan and plucking from apparent defeat the promise of ultimate victory; not afraid to call a spade a spade, and brimful of that gift of humor which is the saving grace of all men, but especially of a pioneer in little-travelled ways or of a champion of contentious causes.

More so than any specialist in the field in the English-speaking world, Sir Bernard has lived his Russian history. As a student he first went to Russia in the 1880’s; he witnessed both the 1905 and the 1917 revolutions; and his work brought him into close contact with many of the historical figures whose activities he describes in the latter part of his book. But the personalized history of the observer of stirring events is nearly always tempered and deepened by the careful scholarship of the professor of Russian history, a post which he filled for many years in the Universities of Liverpool and London.

With the exception of a final chapter, “The Second Fatherland War,” and an “Epilogue,” there is no substantial change in this new edition over the preceding ones. However, in recent years a considerable amount of important Soviet scholarship on Russian history has accumulated, especially with reference to historical beginnings and the Kiev Period, and it is unfortunate that the more significant findings of these studies were not taken into account in this latest edition of Sir Bernard’s book.

The new chapter is a condensed, factual survey of Russia’s part in the Second World War, but the Epilogue contains the essence of the author’s wellknown views on the present position of the Soviet Union in the world of international relations today. Sir Bernard’s approach reflects a keen understanding of Soviet policies since 1917, which he interprets against a background of profound knowledge of Russia’s historical past. An absence of this knowledge of the past has led many commentators on the contemporary scene very far astray.

Sir Bernard accepts the theory, which he rightly attributes to Stalin himself, of the possibility of the peaceful coexistence of the Soviet and the democratic worlds. The principal enemy he sees is ignorance. With admirable common sense, he pleads: “Cannot we pay to that immense and to us unknown country the very small compliment of crediting her with a separate and independent life of her own, with a course of development which she alone can determine for herself?”

This approach, perhaps, ignores the strident dynamics of socialistic economics in the world today. But the author’s faith in political and ideological accommodation between contending nations is solidly based on a realistic power structure rather than on the ideals of world federation or endless UN debates. And in a sense, this is what the Soviet Union has been asking for since the end of the war — an agreement between the major powers in which the Soviet’s equality with them will be fully recognized. For Sir Bernard, the Truman Doctrine is rather an incantation than a cure. And any theory of containment, the author would argue, will necessarily play into the tremendous geographical advantage which the Soviet Union naturally possesses.

Implicit throughout this Epilogue is the author’s conviction that, on the basis of a clear understanding of the Soviet’s maximum needs, a sincere effort to meet them would result in a willingness on the part of the Soviet Union to accommodate itself to the justifiable security demands of the West. Anything less, the author feels, may well result in the realization of the ancient fear of the West—an alliance for war between the Soviet Union and a resurgent Germany.