From Gary Saul Morson’s Review of On The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa.
As Herbert Butterfield famously argued in The Whig Interpretation of History, the closer we get to developments, the less they fit a pattern or reveal some essential story. “The thing that is unhistorical,” Butterfield argues, “is to imagine that we can get the essence apart from the accidents.” Things change “not by a line but by a labyrinthine piece of network,” and so a major development that looks inevitable is in reality “born of strange conjunctures, it represents purposes marred perhaps more than purposes achieved, and it owes more than we can tell to many agencies that had little to do” with a coherent plot. The simple story we trace in retrospect represents what Tolstoy called “the fallacy of retrospection.” Solzhenitsyn was concerned to project “the Russia that might have been,” Hasegawa to create the sense of multiple turning points that could have led elsewhere.
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