The Bottom Line
Pros
- Well-designed and rich in information.
- Easy to use index.
- Covers the 'ancient' period as well.
Cons
- Feels too devoted to the 20th Century.
- Someone will want it in colour!
Description
- 169 maps and comprehensive index.
- Entirely illustrated.
- Published by Routledge, ISBN: 0415281199.
Guide Review - The Routledge Atlas of Russian History by Martin Gilbert
The third edition of Martin Gilbert's 1972 atlas hasn't changed as dramatically as the second, when fifteen new charts were added tracing the collapse of communism. Instead, the current 169 maps - drawn by Arthur Banks and Tim Apsden - have been revised, tightening up the details and providing more coverage of the last few decades. However, the strength of this volume is still found in Gilbert's original design. The maps have been created to convey facts, figures and quotations of a kind usually found in narrative histories, a process aided by large (and sometimes chronologically numbered) textboxes. Admittedly, many historical atlas' contain maps tracing political and geographic expansion, the movements of armies, the concentration of different populations and the economic production, but in The Routledge Atlas of Russian History you'll find all of those and the text of a postcard from Stalin.Although aesthetes will be disappointed by the grayscale maps, the excellent design is both easy on the eye and easy to follow: you don't need any cartographic training to read these! However, despite variation in the scale and content of the maps, medievalists might also be disappointed. The first chart might concern the Slavs in 800BC, but the subject matter is regularly reaching into the 1900's after the 61st map. This is easy to understand - no country on earth had a busier or more historically important twentieth century than Russia and the Soviet Union - and there is still a rich body of information, but be prepared for a substantial section you'll never use. Of course, readers after Russia in the twentieth century can gorge themselves!
In short, The Routledge Atlas of Russian History is a smart, inexpensive volume providing comprehensive information on Russia, albeit with an undoubted specialism in the post-1900 period.
