Alex Marshall, The Russian General Staff and Asia, 1800-1917 (London: Routlege 2006). xii, 274, ill., index, bibliography. ISBN 0415355613. $120.00.

This work is deceptively titled; the reader will find very little about the Russian general staff (or, more accurately, Main Staff, from Glavnyi shtab), but much on the activities of Russian military Asian experts. Marshall has brought together a staggering wealth of published but mostly obscure primary source material to chart, if incompletely, the military's study, penetration, and annexation of south and east Asian border areas until the World War One. The study, just from the perspective of its source base, will be indispensable to those studying Russia-in-Asia. But its structure ultimately will limit its usefulness for most experts. The author provides no thesis or central proposition to be challenged, instead describing in successive chapters Russia's engagement in East Asia (the "Yellow Peril"), in the Caucasus, and in Central Asia. That final section is particularly successful.
There is neither prosopography of the general staff's Asianists, nor very much discussion of what place they held (vis-à-vis staff officers who managed preparations for mobilization against the Central Powers). The reader does not learn, for instance, much about the inadequate size or organization of the Asiatic Department of the Main Staff until p. 174 -- a page before the conclusion. The biographical notes about some of these officers should have been strengthened by examination of the annual official List of Officers of the General Staff that included the cumulative career assignments of every General Staff-designated officer, from second lieutenant to general.
A more serious weakness is the absence of discussion of the impact that Asiatic "adventures" had on the state's preparations for war with Germany. Unlike the petty khanates of Central Asia or decrepit China, the Central European alliance was a menace that could destroy Russia. Some Asia experts claimed that the best way to strike at the west was to devote state resources in the east. Marshall seems to believe that there might have been widespread military support for such a proposition, that St. Petersburg's support of exploration or annexation of new Asian domains was evidence that the state considered a forward Asiatic policy of equal merit to strategic defense of Russia from European threats. Yet one of the most significant figures of his narrative, General A.N. Kuropatkin, remained deeply skeptical of Russia's prospects in the event of war with the Central Powers, a result of his years of mobilization planning work in St. Petersburg on the Main Staff. And while many of Marshall's comments on activities in Asia are original and well substantiated, his assertions about the evolution of Russian mobilization planning are eccentric and thinly sourced. For instance, he holds the view that Russia's imbroglio in Manchuria with Japan was the result of strategic policy rather than the outcome of reckless and unchecked activity by a coterie of high level Asiatic enthusiasts and adventurers, as David MacLaren McDonald argued. Thus, the deployment of the army to defend Russia against an attack from Austria-Germany was (to Marshall) a "false economy" (p. 101) -- presumably shortsighted for the Main Staff having not heeded the advice of a generation of general staff Asia experts.
Source use is another matter of concern. Although his bibliography suggested his work was based on research in two dozen fondy in the Russian State Military-Historical Archive, Marshall cites only a relative handful of documents. And because the work is primarily narrative (rather than one that proposes any new interpretative position), the author's management of the existing literature is episodic and superficial. In particular, Marshall ignores the indispensible research of William C. Fuller, Jr. on the strategic quandary that faced Imperial Russia, a quandary that was not "Asianists versus Europeanists," but "economy versus military."
In spite of these handicaps, The Russian General Staff and Asia is a rich read, and an important contribution to the study of Russian Imperial military intelligence and the diverse ways in which Russia's military men understood their responsibility to protect and promote Russia's interests.

[SEE: Marshall's vigorous rejoiner in Volume 20 of the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, pp. 781-786] ( )