Book Review: Mussolini’s Nature: An Environmental History of Italian Fascism by Marco Armiero, Roberta Basillo and Wilko Graf von Hardenberg

Abstract

sponsored economic growth’ (251). Two silent revolutions lay behind the economic boom of the 1880s and 1890s: the abolition of the soul tax (291), which allowed the peasantry to save, purchase and invest; and the stabilization of the banking system (298). The result was that the Russian Empire ‘lost its archaic and pyramidal structure’, but failed to replace it with new political institutions and therefore suffered from ‘microcephaly’, making it hard to find an application for its new economic strength because its small head was ‘full of contradictory thoughts, both wonderful as well as destructive’ (357). Nonetheless, Alexander III became the beneficiary of White émigré nostalgia amidst the revolutions and civil war of the early twentieth century. ‘By contrast, the times of Alexander III and the emperor himself were drawn in their heads in an idyllic light’ (227). While ‘autocratic politics gained a decisive victory’ under Alexander III, ‘the ideology of autocracy experienced a decisive defeat’ (366). Unfortunately, Akunin concludes his volume, Nicholas II would fail to correct the system and instead ‘swung wildly from the course of his father and grandfather, repeating the mistakes of both’ (380). Akunin does not quote many historians, but the one whose name appears most often is Richard Pipes, which is not surprising since the leitmotif of Akunin’s history is the ‘Horde-like [ordynskoe] government’ of Russia, the Mongol legacy that Russia never exorcised from its political culture. Beautifully written, this volume offers remarkably insightful flashes when Akunin rises above the trap of binarist judgements.