orlando figes the story of russia review

the sacralisation of the tsar’s authority”. This historical primer has only traces of the original thinking that Figes’s other important works on Russia have displayed, but it does effectively lay out with important clarity the “structural continuities” of power, how the state and the ruler, be that a tsar or Stalin, “are united in the body of a single being. The Ukrainian horror is the post-imperial catastrophe of a Russia struggling to accept what happened with the collapse of the Soviet Union But just years before that, the Black Sea coast had been part of the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth. Empress Catherine, a German, may have founded Odessa (Figes interestingly uses Russian spellings for Ukrainian cities) to capture the world’s grain trade in 1794.

Flip through any historical atlas of the past 1,000 years and states appear, disappear and move around with astonishing but telling regularity. As Figes makes clear, anyone with the most elementary grasp of the shape of Europe, from Berlin to the Urals, would know that borders are determined by raw power, not some mystical racial bond. Reaching back into the mists of myth, he sees the idea of Ukraine as a Trojan horse, an “anti-Russian project” since the 17th century and that the present state is on “historically Russian lands”. In July 2021, Vladimir Putin published his own story of Russia, a 5,000-word essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, which can now be read as his justification for the invasion he launched seven months later to bring his brother “little Russians” back into the arms of big brother Rus. From Ivan to Peter, Catherine to Nicholas, Russia’s rulers have reforged these myths to suit their own purposes, sometimes as a defensive standard for the people to rally round, sometimes as a badge of celestial honour to cement Moscow’s place as the saviour of the west. Yet according to President Putin, unveiling a monstrous statue to him in 2016, he “gathered and defended Russia’s lands… by founding a strong, united and centralised state”.Īs Orlando Figes’s new history methodically lays bare, this is both myth-making of the first order and of profound importance to understanding Russia today. In truth, Vladimir (or Volodymyr to the Ukrainians) is a classic founding figure, now a saint, about whom almost nothing is known. For Russia, it has long been Grand Prince Vladimir, who had 800 concubines and wives before choosing Christ over Muhammad at the end of the first millennium for the very Russian reason that Islam did not permit alcohol.

Think Alfred and the cakes or Robert the Bruce and his study of spiders.

E very nation has its founding myths and narratives, usually starring historical figures we know almost nothing about absurd stories even to the schoolchildren to whom they are usually peddled.

Orlando figes the story of russia review