Book Review: Papal Bull: Print, Politics and Propaganda in Renaissance Rome by Margaret Meserve

Abstract

lution, and what in hindsight seems a mystery: why they did not seek to disengage after the fall of the Tsar in March 1917, as the economy began to unravel. At the time, though, as Malik’s reading of the financiers’ discussions in 1917 shows: ‘Rather than seeing the budget deficits, inflation and plummeting industrial production historians point to, key investors and financial middlemen foresaw opportunity in Russia’ (141). This reveals an interestingly skewed perspective on the bankers’ part – the dire and worsening problems in the real economy were fully covered in the Russian press during 1917. Partly, the bankers were keen to retain their position in order to profit from the anticipated post-war reconstruction – motivated by both commercial and geopolitical rivalry. It is perhaps harder to see why so many banks tried to remain in Russia after the Bolsheviks had taken power in November 1917, although Malik does cite one banker who anticipated a fire sale of ‘bankrupt stock’ (148). The Bolsheviks’ eventual decision to repudiate the debt is presented as rational, and Malik argues that default would probably have been inevitable under any regime. In this he takes issue with historians like Sean McMeekin, who presents the default as primarily the result of deliberate Bolshevik malevolence. Malik’s analysis concludes that the Bolsheviks had little freedom of manoeuvre given the state of the Russian economy by early 1918, even though they presented default as a revolutionary act rather than as an economic necessity. Surveying the whole story from the 1890s onwards, he concludes that ‘the tragedy is that the financiers at first failed to appreciate the political consequences of their actions and then, in the context of the war, began to focus belatedly on the political dimension of their investments – increasingly to the exclusion of financial considerations and analysis’ (212). Although this is a rather technical study, it is lucidly written, meticulously researched and painstakingly edited. It meets its stated aim of usefully filling a gap in the historiography of the Russian revolution.