Anyone who has wandered by way of Russia’s nationwide museums, leafed by way of books of Russian artwork or watched a few of Eisenstein’s cinematic masterpieces will know that distinguished among the many nation’s iconography are arresting portraits of its princes and tsars.
There may be the imagined baptism of Grand Prince Vladimir, whose conversion to Christianity within the tenth century was – in Russian eyes – the muse stone of Russian Orthodoxy and the delivery of the Russian state. There may be the warrior prince, Alexander Nevsky, who fought off the Swedes and the Teutonic knights. There are contrasting portraits of Ivan the Horrible, one proud and mistrustful, the opposite of a deranged monarch cradling the son he killed. And there are the grand 18th-century sovereigns Peter the Nice and Empress Catherine.
Whether or not meant to raise the topics to hero standing or castigate them as merciless tyrants, these photos kind a part of Russia’s collective reminiscence. They're etched into the nation’s psyche, every capturing a second in Russia’s story about itself.
And that is the start line of Orlando Figes’s The Story of Russia: “Russia is a rustic held collectively by concepts rooted in its distant previous,” he tells us within the introduction. “Histories repeatedly reconfigured and repurposed to swimsuit its current wants and reimagine its future.”
Inevitably in a survey of greater than 1,000 years of historical past, a lot has needed to be skirted over or omitted. However this e-book’s function is to not fill in all of the blanks. It's to look at the recurring themes and myths that drive Vladimir Putin’s conviction that battle with Ukraine and with western Europe is a part of Russia’s historic future. For these unfamiliar with the previous, that is an indispensable handbook for making sense of Russia’s current.
And that is very a lot Russia’s story. Figes makes no apology for referring to Kiev not Kyiv, or Prince Vladimir nor Volodymyr, because the Ukrainians would have it. He isn't all for how the Tatars in Kazan see the sacking of their metropolis by Ivan the Horrible, or what the Chechens or Georgians make of the Russian tales of battle within the Caucasus. All that is likely to be the topic of one other e-book. However this, because the title tells us, is one nation’s story about itself.
Elementary to this, naturally, is its founding legend. And even this origin story, it seems, has lengthy been the topic of controversy: was it Slavic peoples who first settled what turned identified in Russia as Kievan Rus? Or was it Scandinavian, Baltic and even Germanic tribes who offered the primary rulers? Was historic Russia, in different phrases, created by Russians or foreigners? The historic details are, inevitably, extra complicated nonetheless. Figes concludes: “It's absurd to assert that Kievan Rus was the birthplace of the trendy Russian state or nation.” He likens it to the place Anglo-Saxon Wessex has in English historical past – one component, however not the entire story.
One other strand, exploited by way of the centuries by successive rulers to reinforce their authority, is the thought of religious exceptionalism. It was Ivan the Horrible, no much less, who tailored Byzantine rituals to create an imperial delusion – that the tsar was anointed by church and god, and that Moscow was the Third Rome, the rightful successor and true capital of Christendom after the autumn of Rome and Constantinople.
Quick ahead to the twentieth century and word Stalin’s use of faith on the eve of the second world battle, changing Bolshevik slogans with spiritual iconography and enlisting the help of the Orthodox church to rally help for the motherland towards the Nazis. We see the identical echoes once more at present in Putin’s “holy battle” towards Ukraine.
However the concept Russia has a sacred religious future sits uneasily with its sense of the place it matches into the world. As Figes meticulously charts, all through its historical past there was a working debate about how the nation pertains to foreigners and, above all, to Europeans. Did Russia actually languish underneath the Tatar yoke after the Mongol invasion, held again by lack of entry to the European Renaissance, because the “Westernisers” would have it? Or did isolation from Europe enable Russia to protect its jap Byzantine inheritance, untainted by western secularism and individualism, as their opponents, the so-called “Slavophiles” declare? No surprise Peter the Nice, the tsar who pressured his nobles to shave off their beards and abandon their kaftans for European garb, was a polarising determine.
So the place does Putin stand in all this? We all know he's obsessive about Russian historical past – hardly shocking, provided that he grew up in what was as soon as the imperial capital, St Petersburg. As Figes reminds us, it's a metropolis redolent with symbolism. Constructed by Peter the Nice out of the marshes, it turned Russia’s gaze westward. Till 1917, it was the nucleus of the Russian tsarist empire. And with the siege of Leningrad within the second world battle, it turned a searing emblem of Russia’s capability for heroism and sacrifice.
How might the younger Putin, strolling by way of his dwelling metropolis, not be struck by the distinction between its monuments to Russia’s previous and the deprivations of his personal Soviet period? How might he not ponder the which means of the majestic statue of the Bronze Horseman (the topic of Pushkin’s masterful poem of the identical identify) – a tsar mounted on a rearing horse, surveying the threats Kremlin leaders have at all times feared: invasion from overseas or an rebellion by the restive plenty?
Absolutely these visions should have formed Putin’s pondering. Way back to 2001, he revealed in a BBC interview that he was studying biographies of Peter the Nice and Empress Catherine, the 2 most profitable rulers of the Russian empire within the 18th century – and essentially the most pro-European. He has delved deeper into historical past, drawing on different examples to lecture the world on the lengthy historical past of Russia’s fractious relations with the west and with the land that sits in between – Ukraine.
So has Putin turned his again on Peter and embraced a Slavophile imaginative and prescient, believing Russia’s future lies away from Europe, with the battle in Ukraine the pivotal second wherein the rift is cemented? Or does he assume Russia will in the future return to the higher European household if, in some mind-boggling approach, he can flip the Ukraine invasion to his benefit?
Figes makes an attempt to reply this in his closing chapter: how does the story of Russia finish, and the way far will its future proceed to be formed by its previous? Within the midst of the present uncertainty and turbulence, that is no simple job. What Figes does word – accurately in my opinion – is that Putin’s method to historical past is considerably “pick-and-mix”, a postmodern choice of what matches his present function, shape-shifting alongside together with his insurance policies to adapt to modified circumstances. The query we're left with is whether or not Putin continues to be in a position to management the narrative, or if he has change into a sufferer of his personal myths in regards to the “Russian world”.
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