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Reviews 215to initiate total social engineering. In telling the story of this aspect of Lenin's earlylife, Pipes also reveals the roots of his dislike for Lenin as a person—a dislike thatwill become the loathing that colors his picture of the Russian Revolution.In our century, the intellectual has come to play an influential role in the formationof public opinion and in this manner has had, and still has, an impact on politicaldecisions made by both government and society. Reading Max Weber's analysisand conclusions about the 1905 Revolution and its "constitutional" aftermath, Pipes,in the piece "Max Weber and Russia," endeavors to discover and describe the ambiguousrelationship between social science methods, political morality, and existentialand emotional engagement with nationalism. In my opinion, this is the most subtleand illuminating article in the volume and does not bear summarizing. Suffice itto say here that Pipes reaches the conclusion that Max Weber's ultimately falsediagnosis of the events in Russia was largely due to an unresolved tension betweenhis objective sociological analysis and his emotional parti-pris for German nationalism.A correct understanding of the past does not necessarily guarantee a reliableprediction of the future, as the last three essays unintentionally illustrate. They dealwith the crucial problem of the nationalities in the Soviet Union, more specifically ofits Central Asiatic and Muslim context. The articles on Bashkiria ("The First Experimentin Soviet National Policy: The Bashkir Republic, 1917-1920") and theMuslims of Central Asia ("Muslims of Central Asia: Trends and Prospects") arevery informative and provide interesting historiographie insights. Written as theywere, however, long before glasnosf and before even limited access to the SovietUnion and its libraries, they suffer from a limited documentary basis of publishedsources and personal interviews with exiles. The reconstruction of events is verywell done and in the process not a few clichés and false claims of the Soviet propagandamachine and disinformation are put to rest. But any extrapolation to today'ssituation will prove quite hazardous, as shown in the last essay, "'Solving' theNationality Problem"—the only one that is publicistic rather than scholarly.The historian, while fully aware of change in the past, cannot extrapolate into thefuture without assuming some permanences or "laws" in history—something thatPipes, quite wisely, refuses to do. Under the circumstances, Karamzin's approachmay be a better guide than the lures of social science in Max Weber's tradition. Itshould be said, though, that Professor Pipes has the courage to accept the lessonsand the unexpectedness of history, while loyally adhering to his moral and politicalconvictions. The younger generation of historians will read these essays to greatprofit and will obtain valuable insight into their discipline by observing a mastercraftsman at his workbench.Marc RaeffColumbia University