The Story of Russia

Putin has weaponised the memory of the war against foreign powers too. He has defended the Hitler–Stalin Pact, offending Poland and the Baltic states; compared Ukraine’s nationalists to collaborators with the Nazis in the war; and criticised the British and Americans for failing to attend the celebrations in Moscow for the 75th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. His harsh words on their absence (a ‘moral disgrace’ and ‘insult’ were both used in interviews) expressed the resentment long and deeply held by the Russians based on the idea spread by Soviet propagandists since the Cold War era that the Western allies had never adequately acknowledged the Soviet contribution to the victory (a resentment strengthened by the Western myth of the Second World War in which the British and Americans are seen as the heroes who defeated Germany, while the Soviet role is minimised).

The culmination of this state campaign to control the story of Russia came in 2015 with the opening in Moscow of the first of twenty permanent ‘My History’ parks. Spread across the country, the parks are multimedia exhibitions with internet resources widely used by schools. The exhibition halls are crowded with large groups of schoolchildren, college students and cadets from military academies. The Russian Church had first come up with the idea of the parks to promote a patriotic view of Russian history. In 2011 it had organised an exhibition in Moscow, ‘Orthodox Rus’, which became the model for the parks. Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Church, was a firm supporter of the Putin line on history, arguing that Russia need no longer dwell on the sins of the Soviet era, for which, he said, it had atoned. He expressed his hope that a positive assessment of the country’s history in school textbooks would help it overcome the Russian ‘syndrome of historical masochism’ – a sense of guilt and inferiority rooted in the country’s past.17

The main message of ‘My History’ is that Russia thrives when it is united by a strong leader, and when not, in times of civil war, it is vulnerable to invasion by hostile foreign powers, which are afraid of a powerful Russia and want to keep it weak or break it up. The need for a strong state to defend its borders is of paramount significance. The exhibition dwells on every opportunity to remind the Russians that throughout their country’s past – from the Mongols in the thirteenth century to the Poles and Swedes in the Times of Trouble, the British and the French in the nineteenth century, the allied intervention in the Civil War, and the Nazi invasion – its enemies have tried to destroy Russia by invading it.

Every chapter in the country’s story is told in a way to justify the ‘patriotic policies’ of the Putin government. Alexander Nevsky’s victories over the invading Swedes and Teutonic Knights serve as reminders of the ever-present need to ‘repel aggressions from the West’; his collaboration with the Mongols is hailed, in the words of Sergei Lavrov, Putin’s foreign minister, as the ‘foundation of the centuries-old traditions of Russian diplomacy’ to look east (read: to China) for assistance when the country is rejected by the West (read: Western sanctions against Russia).

Russia’s need for a strong leader is illustrated in the exhibits dedicated to Ivan IV, Peter the Great and Nicholas I, the tsar perhaps most favoured by Putin because of his stand against the West in his defence of ‘traditional Russian principles’ during the Crimean War. Modern Russia’s story is a simple one in this telling – a tale of greatness undermined by pro-Western ‘enemies’ within but restored by great leaders. The autocratic power of the Romanovs guaranteed the progress of the country for three centuries, until the ‘liberals’ of 1917, egged on by their Western allies, brought the Russian Empire to ruin. The people were divided, torn apart by civil war, but Stalin reunited them and made Russia strong again. The cycle was repeated in 1991: the state collapse was brought about by liberals, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who were puppets of the West, but a Great Russia was rebuilt under Putin’s leadership.18 Thus ends the ‘My History’ version of the story of Russia.

It is a story many Russians want to hear – the over-fifties, in particular, whose outlook has been shaped by the history they were taught in Soviet schools. They resented the ‘besmirching’ of their country’s history in the glasnost period. They did not want to listen to moralising lectures about how ‘bad’ the Stalin era was. They thought otherwise. What they knew was the story of their parents’ lives, of the sacrifices they had made to build a better life for their children. Putin’s version of their history enabled them to feel good as Russians once again. Their fondness for the Soviet past is perhaps a natural reaction to the loss of welfare provisions and the growth of economic insecurity after 1991. Jobs, pensions, housing and health care were all guaranteed, albeit at a basic level, by the Soviet system. But pride in Soviet achievements is not limited to those who went through Soviet schools. Since Putin came to power, there has been a general rise in nostalgia for the Soviet Union – even among those who were not yet born when it collapsed. According to a 2020 poll by the Levada Centre, three-quarters of Russians believe that the Soviet era was the ‘greatest period’ in their country’s history.19 Over the past twenty years, polls have shown consistently that around half the population think that Stalin was a ‘great leader’.20

Such nostalgia is more broadly linked to the long afterlife of Soviet mentalities, which have been passed down to the young. This was the extraordinary finding of the Levada polling group. From surveys over many years, they discovered that the attitudes which they associated with the ‘Soviet personality’ (low material expectations, social conformism, intolerance of ethnic and sexual minorities, acceptance of authority, and so on) had not declined, as they had expected when they started out in 1991. On the contrary, such attitudes had become more pronounced and widespread in the population as a whole.21 Homo Sovieticus had not died out after the collapse of the Soviet Union: he was reborn in a new form.

We can see his reincarnation in common Russian attitudes to state violence in history. According to a 2007 poll, seven out of ten people thought that Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, had ‘protected public order and civic life’. Only 7 per cent considered him a ‘murderer and executioner’. More disturbing was the survey’s finding that while nearly everyone was well informed about the mass repressions under Stalin – with most acknowledging that ‘between 10 and 30 million victims’ had been repressed unjustly – two-thirds of these same respondents still believed that Stalin had been positive for the country. Even with a knowledge of the millions who were killed, the Russians, it appears, continue to accept the Bolshevik idea that mass state violence can be justified.22

In the early 2010s, millions of Russians watched the TV show The Court of Time (Sud vremeni), in which figures and episodes from Russian history were judged in a mock trial with advocates presenting evidence, witnesses and a jury of the viewers who reached their verdict by voting on the telephone. The judgments which they reached do not hold out much hope for a change in Russian attitudes. Presented with the facts of Stalin’s war against the peasantry and the catastrophic effects of collectivisation, 78 per cent of the viewers still believed that his policies were justified (a ‘terrible necessity’) for Soviet industrialisation; only 22 per cent considered them a ‘crime’ against the peasantry. On other issues the figures were even more emphatic. Nine out of ten viewers thought that Stalin’s programme of industrialisation had saved the country; only one out of ten considered it an ‘unjustified rupture’ from the country’s past. On the Hitler–Stalin Pact, 91 per cent believed the Soviet version, rehabilitated by Putin, that it had been necessary to give the country time to prepare for war against Hitler; only 9 per cent thought it had enabled the Nazis to invade Poland and had thus led to the Second World War. On Gorbachev’s reforms, 93 per cent believed they had been a catastrophe, with more believing that his policy of glasnost had been a Western ‘information war’. As for Homo Sovieticus, it turned out he was deeply missed: 94 per cent of the audience agreed that the ‘Soviet personality’ was a ‘real historical accomplishment’. Only 6 per cent believed it was a myth.23

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During his first term in office, Putin looked to further Russia’s integration with the West. In interviews he spelled out his vision of the country as ‘part of western European culture’, and said that he was open to the possibility of Russia joining NATO and the European Union. Everything depended on how Western institutions would respond, on how NATO, in particular, would act in regions where the Russians had security concerns, historic links and sensitivities, which, if offended or ignored, might provoke an aggressive response from Moscow. ‘We will strive to remain where geography and our spirit have placed us, but if we are pushed out,’ Putin warned, ‘we will be forced to seek other ties to strengthen ourselves.’ It was a recurring pattern running right through Russian history since at least the eighteenth century. Russia wanted to be part of Europe, to be treated with respect. But if it was rejected by the West’s leaders, or if they humiliated it, Russia would rebuild itself and arm itself against the West.

NATO and the EU missed an opportunity to end this historical cycle. Instead of trying to bring Russia into new security arrangements for Europe, NATO kept it isolated. The US and its North Atlantic allies acted as if the Cold War had been ‘won’ by them, and that Russia, the ‘defeated’ power, need not be consulted on the consequences of the Soviet collapse in regions where the Russians had historic interests. The effect of Western actions was to reinforce the Russians’ own resentments of the West. On the back of years of anti-Western propaganda during the Cold War it did not take a lot to persuade them that a hostile West refused to recognise their country as an equal and took advantage of its current weakness to diminish it. This was the basis on which Putin built his anti-Western ideology. Inside Russia it appealed to those who had lost out from the Soviet collapse (public sector employees, low and middle-ranking officials, workers in the old state industries) and who were struggling in the market-based economy imposed, as they saw it, by the West.

In the Kremlin’s version of events, the first Western insult to Russia was NATO’s unilateral intervention, without UN backing, on the side of the Kosovan Albanians in their war for independence against Serbia, Russia’s closest Balkan ally, during 1999. Fifteen hundred Serbians, half of them civilians, were killed by NATO aerial bombardment between March and June. Dismissing NATO’s claims that it had intervened to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Albanians by the Serbian Milošević regime, Moscow accused NATO of a ‘flagrant violation of the UN Charter’ to promote its interests in the Balkans, which Russia saw as its own ‘sphere of influence’. The Kremlin’s anger at this NATO challenge to its status in the Balkans was based on the myth of Russia’s Pan-Slav role, which, as we have seen, had often proved illusory (in the Crimean War, for example). But that myth was a real factor on the Russian side. It shaped the Kremlin’s attitudes and policies. NATO’s failure to recognise that fact was bound to sour its relations with Russia. NATO’s intervention, moreover, set a dangerous precedent. It would be used by Moscow to justify its wars in Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine.

The real rupture with the West came with NATO’s eastward expansion. In the Kremlin’s thinking it was linked to the spread of US-sponsored democratic movements in its sphere of influence that posed a threat to Russia’s ‘sovereign democracy’. In 1999, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were granted NATO membership. Five years later, Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia also joined the alliance. Moscow saw this as a betrayal of a verbal promise made by the Americans on the collapse of the Berlin Wall that NATO would not advance ‘even one inch to the east’. Many on the US side denied giving such a guarantee, or argued that it had been meant for eastern Germany, not for all the Warsaw Pact countries. They argued that the newly independent states of eastern Europe deserved NATO protection from the threat of Russian aggression, even if a promise of some sort had been made by other leaders in the West (in 1991, for example, Douglas Hurd, the British foreign secretary, had assured Moscow that there ‘were no plans in NATO to include the countries of eastern and central Europe in NATO in one form or another’).24 Whatever the reality, NATO’s eastward expansion poisoned its relations with Russia. George Kennan, who had shaped the Cold War policy of Soviet containment in 1946, warned that it would be a ‘tragic mistake’ to encroach on the territories of the former Warsaw Pact. ‘It shows so little understanding of Russian history,’ he told the New York Times in 1998. ‘Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are – but this is just wrong.’25

That indeed is how events turned out. NATO’s incorporation of the former Soviet satellites made it come across as an anti-Russian alliance, reinforcing age-old Russian feelings of resentment of the West. Putin voiced these resentments in a blistering attack on US global domination and its unchecked use of force in international relations at the annual Munich Security Conference on 10 February 2007. NATO’s eastward expansion was ‘a serious provocation’ against Russia, a betrayal of international agreements. He warned that Russia, as a consequence, would no longer play by the old international rules in furthering its interests.26 By provoking Russian aggression, NATO had created the very problem it was meant to counteract. It was as if it needed an aggressive Russia to justify its existence.

Estonia was the first to feel the pushback from Russia two months after Putin’s speech. The Estonian government’s removal of a Soviet war monument in Tallinn prompted Russian hackers (probably connected to the FSB) to launch a cyberwar against the Baltic state. Georgia felt the force of Russia next. Its aspiration to join NATO had been welcomed by the NATO conference in Bucharest in April 2008. But in August of that year it became embroiled in fighting against pro-Russian separatists in the breakaway enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, causing refugees to flee to neighbouring Russia. Moscow sent in planes and tanks to push the Georgian forces back, occupying a large chunk of Georgian territory, before declaring Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states. President Medvedev, Putin’s placeman, justified the intervention by citing the precedent of NATO’s support for independent Kosovo. ‘In international relations you cannot have one rule for some and another rule for others,’ he warned the Americans. Russia’s show of strength put an end to Georgia’s NATO hopes (the alliance would not admit a country under partial occupation by Russian troops). It also showed the weakness of the West, which condemned the invasion but obviously had no intention of opposing it by military means.

Putin returned for a third term as president in 2012. The economy was doing well, boosted by an all-time high in oil and natural gas prices, the country’s main exports. Despite mass protests against election rigging, or perhaps because of them, Putin struck a more assertive foreign policy. He spoke of the need for Russia to restore its influence in what he called the ‘Russian world’ (Russkii mir), a concept he attached to the defence of ‘traditional Russian values’ within the borders of the former Soviet Union. The ‘Russian world’ idea had been advanced by the patriarch of the Orthodox Church to promote its spiritual inheritance from Kievan Rus, a link broken by the break-up of the Soviet Union. It was seized on by Putin, who used it as an arm of his foreign policy from 2012. The ‘Russian world’, he said, was a ‘family’ of Slavs, the Russians, the Ukrainians and the Belarusians, who shared a common history, religion and cultural inheritance from Kievan Rus. This world had been torn apart by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ‘greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century’, as he had described it in a 2005 address. ‘As for the Russian nation,’ he went on, ‘it became a real drama. Tens of millions of our citizens and compatriots found themselves outside the territory of Russia.’27

From the concept of the ‘Russian world’ it was but a short step to the Pan-Slav ideologies of the nineteenth-century Slavophiles, from whom Putin drew increasingly in the formulation of his foreign policies. The Slavophiles had argued that Russia should be seen as a ‘spiritual civilisation’ broader than its territorial boundaries. They had called on Nicholas I to stand up to the West in the defence of the Orthodox in the Balkans and the Holy Lands during the events that led to the Crimean War. It was the sacred duty of the tsar, they said, to promote the interests of the Orthodox abroad. Starting from that principle, Putin argued that it was the mission of the Russian state to defend the ‘tens of millions of our [sic] citizens’ who had been stranded outside Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Where religion had served as the pretext for Nicholas I to interfere in Ottoman affairs, language served as the president’s excuse to intervene in former Soviet countries where Russian-speakers formed a large minority. The fact that they were citizens of foreign sovereign states, and identified themselves as such, did not count in Putin’s view.

Like the Slavophiles, Putin envisaged Russia as a supranational ‘civilisation’, defined by its spiritual values, opposed fundamentally to the secular and liberal influences of the West. His thinking here was possibly derived from Danilevsky’s Russia and Europe, written in the wake of the Crimean War, in which the Pan-Slav thinker had maintained that Russia was a distinctive multi-cultural civilisation, neither understood nor recognised by Europe, which saw it only as an aggressor state and wanted to diminish it. Russia was not part of Europe, Danilevsky argued, and should not seek its approval or measure its own progress by its ‘universal’ principles, which were in fact self-serving, a means for Europe to impose its values on other civilisations. Following the West could only weaken Russia, which should stand against it if it wanted to defend its own conservative and religious traditions.

Other thinkers also shaped his idea of the Russian world. The one most often cited as the ‘key’ to Putin’s ideology is Ivan Ilyin (1883–1954), the White emigré philosopher, monarchist and fascist sympathiser, whose mystical ideas of Russia’s soul and statehood influenced a wide range of Russian nationalists after 1991. More than any other country in the world, Ilyin argued, Russia had a ‘heavy cross to bear’ on account of its harsh climate, its vast land mass to defend and its history of suffering; but it had emerged from these ordeals with a special spiritual strength, a capacity for love and selfless sacrifice, which, if mastered by a ‘national dictator’, would liberate it from the Bolsheviks and lead to its national renewal as a holy empire in Eurasia. Ilyin’s ideas were heavily promoted by the Church as part of its agenda to reconnect the story of post-Soviet Russia to the lost histories of the White and monarchist movements. In 2005 it organised the repatriation of Ilyin’s remains from Switzerland and reburied them, along with bones of the White army general Denikin, in Moscow’s Donskoi Monastery. Ilyin’s mystical ideas were disseminated in a simpler form for Putin’s cause by Alexander Dugin, a professor of philosophy at Moscow University, whose most influential book, The Foundations of Geopolitics (1997), was used as a textbook in the Academy of the Russian army’s General Staff. It mapped out a hybrid warfare strategy (combining political subversion, the weaponisation of Russian gas and oil, cyberwar and military force) to rebuild a Russian Empire in Eurasia, totalitarian in character, which would build alliances based on the rejection of the Western liberal order and US global domination.

Ukraine soon became the battlefield for this ‘clash of civilisations’ between Russia and the West. Although the Putin government had many times declared its recognition of Ukrainian sovereignty, it never really came round to accepting it. In Putin’s view Ukraine had occupied the borderlands of ‘historical’ or ‘greater’ Russia since the times of Kievan Rus. It was an inseparable part of the ‘Russian world’. Too many families, communities, were made up of both Russians and Ukrainians; the economies of the two countries were too integrated to be pulled apart. Russia’s gas was piped to Europe through Ukraine. Its most important naval base was at Sevastopol in the Crimea, a mainly Russian territory assigned to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic by Khrushchev in 1954 to mark the tercentenary of Russia’s union with the Cossack hetmanate. Little significance had been attached to Khrushchev’s gift. There were no national boundaries in the Soviet Union. But after 1991 the loss of the Crimea was sorely felt by the Russians, who had spent their holidays at its resorts and learned at school that it was ‘theirs’. Sevastopol was a Hero City, one of only twelve that had been so honoured because of their wartime role in 1941–5. A quarter of a million Russians died in the Crimean War – another war in defence of the Orthodox against the West. Crimea was the birthplace of Russia’s Christianity, where Prince Vladimir had been baptised, the symbolic home of the ‘Russian soul’ – that, at least, was how it was presented by the propagandists of the ‘Russian world’.

Putin pursued a policy of keeping Ukraine weak, divided and dependent on Russia. He regarded Russia’s domination of Ukraine as a necessary measure to prevent its falling under Western influence. He feared Ukraine as a burgeoning democracy whose freedoms were a threat to his own authoritarian regime (the ‘Orange Revolution’ of 2004–5, in which mass protests had reversed the rigged election of the pro-Russian presidential candidate Yanukovich to secure the victory of Viktor Yushchenko, alarmed the Kremlin in particular). His strategy was reminiscent of tsarist policies towards Russia’s neighbouring states, especially the Ottoman Empire. The tsars had used their military might as a means of armed diplomacy. By threatening the sultan’s Balkan territories, and, if necessary, occupying them, they had forced him to concede to their demands in the Black Sea and the Holy Lands. Putin adopted the same tactics in Ukraine. Instead of the defence of the Orthodox abroad, the pretext used by the tsars to interfere in European Turkey, he invoked the defence of ‘the millions’ of former Russian citizens to justify his interference in Ukrainian affairs.

The Putin regime backed pro-Russian leaders in Ukraine, and made things hard for those who favoured closer integration with Europe. Divisions in Ukraine played into the Kremlin’s hands. There was a historical divide between the western regions, which had been part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and then the Austrian–Hungarian Empire, where Ukrainian was widely spoken, and the eastern regions of Ukraine, where Russian was the dominant language. Because of the Russian presence in the east, no government could take Ukraine too close to Europe without risking civil war; but the European outlook of the western provinces meant that realigning the country with Russia would be just as dangerous.

The delicate balance was upset by two developments. The first was Putin’s long-term plan, which gained momentum from 2012, to include Ukraine in a Eurasian Economic Union with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, among other countries of the former Soviet Union. Putin envisaged the Eurasian Union one day growing into something like the European Union under Russia’s leadership – a Eurasian bloc to counteract the West. The second was the outbreak of mass protests in Kiev and other west Ukrainian cities from the autumn of 2013. Occupying Maidan Square in Kiev, the demonstrators called on the Yanukovich government (elected fair and square in the 2010 elections) to sign an Association Agreement with the EU. Yanukovich had negotiated the agreement, only to suspend preparations for it under pressure from Moscow. Shooting at the crowds by unidentified snipers (probably special forces of the Yanukovich government) turned the protests into a revolution, the Maidan Revolution, watched by TV audiences around the world. By 22 February 2014, the protesters had gained control of Kiev. Yanukovich fled to east Ukraine, and later to Russia, while a caretaker government was formed in the Ukrainian parliament.

The Kremlin saw the revolution as an illegal coup by the opposition parties aided and abetted by the West. Putin later placed it in a long historical continuum of Western powers using Ukraine to attack Russia. The protesters were certainly encouraged by US and EU politicians – enough for the Putin government to make its propaganda claim. The Kremlin’s media outlets consistently referred to the interim Ukrainian government as a ‘junta’, backed by ‘neo-Nazis’ and ‘fascists’, an obvious propaganda tactic to appeal to Russian nationalist feelings rooted in the memory of the war when some Ukrainians had indeed been collaborators with the Germans. They accused the government of threatening ‘genocide’ against the Russians in Ukraine (an alarmist claim based on an ill-judged decision by the parliament in Kiev to repeal a law protecting Russian and other minority languages). The Kremlin’s version of events was readily believed by the mainly Russian-speakers of the Crimea. They staged mass protests against the new authorities in Kiev, many of them calling for a referendum on Crimea’s independence from Ukraine.

Seizing on the questionable parallel with Kosovo, where NATO’s intervention had secured the Albanians’ right to self-determination, the Kremlin launched a new Crimean War to defend what it claimed were the same rights for the Russians of the Crimea.28 At the end of February, Russian special forces occupied the peninsula, installed a pro-Russian government and oversaw a hurried referendum, declared illegal by the UN General Assembly, in which 97 per cent of the people voted for reunion with Russia. Even with a properly conducted plebiscite the same decision would have been reached by a large majority. But Putin did not need to play by international rules. He knew that NATO would not act to defend Ukrainian territory. Russian might had called its bluff.

The annexation of Crimea was broadly welcomed by the population in Russia. There was a sense that an unjust loss of Russian territory – a symbol of the loss of Russia’s empire and great-power status in the world – had been reversed. National pride had been restored.

Putin’s approval ratings reached an 80 per cent peak. This was the high point of the Putin leader cult. He had attained the status of a tsar, the embodiment of state power, above everyone and everything. People placed their trust in him, as they had in the myth of the ‘true’ or ‘holy tsar’, despite the foreign condemnation of the annexation and Western sanctions on Russia. Most believed the regime’s explanation for the economic downturn that followed, which it blamed on the sanctions to rally nationalist feelings for its ‘us against them’ cause against the West.

The sanctions were not strong enough to deter further Russian aggression against Ukraine. Ideas of the ‘Russian world’ had by this point assumed a firm hold on the Kremlin’s military policy, with presidential aides like Sergei Glazyev pushing for it to extend the war in the Donbass, where pro-Russian separatists were already fighting against Kiev, to stop Ukraine from turning into what he called a ‘neo-Nazi’ puppet state used by the Americans against Russia.29 Soon after the Crimean invasion Putin sent in military aid to the separatist fighters in the east, later reinforcing them with unbadged Russian troops (so-called volunteers) in a war that rumbled on for the next eight years, claiming 20,000 Russian and Ukrainian lives. The warring parties failed to reach agreement on the Minsk II Accords, a peace plan brokered by the Germans and the French under which Ukraine would regain its sovereignty in the disputed eastern areas, including its control of the border with Russia, while the Donbass would be given full autonomy in a more decentralised Ukraine.

All this time the West continued buying Russian fossil fuels. In ‘Londongrad’, a safe British haven for the oligarchs, law firms, bankers, tax consultants, art dealers and real estate agents carried on as usual as their money launderers. Four years after its invasion of Ukraine, Russia was allowed to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup, an event that seemed to mark its rehabilitation in the international community. As Putin watched the Russian team progress to the quarter-finals, he must have felt that he had got away with his aggression in Ukraine. The Russian economy had adapted to the sanctions and had largely recovered. Thanks to sales of oil and gas, the country’s foreign currency reserves had grown to $500 billion, the fourth largest in the world. It gave Putin the war chest he would need to go on fighting in Ukraine while maintaining living standards in Russia. He was not afraid of more sanctions. With Donald Trump in the White House, with the EU weakened by Brexit and with the support of right-wing populists in Hungary, France and Italy, he was surely counting on another weak response by the Western powers, should he decide to escalate the war.

That would depend on his assessment of the NATO threat to Russia in Ukraine. At the Bucharest conference in 2008, NATO had declared that, along with Georgia, Ukraine would become a member of the alliance once it met the necessary requirements (among them better measures to combat political corruption and ensure the rule of law). The declaration was opposed by several NATO leaders, especially the German chancellor Angela Merkel, who warned that it would be seen as a dangerous provocation by Russia. But George Bush forced the measure through. In his final months in the White House, he was desperate to leave a legacy of promoting US interests and democracy in the former Soviet Union. He was supported by the east European member states, which were most alarmed by Russia’s growing aggression. They saw Ukraine’s NATO membership as ‘an important historic opportunity to cage the bear’, in the words of Lech Wałęsa, the former Polish president.30

NATO’s involvement in Ukraine set alarm bells ringing in Moscow. After the invasion of the Crimea, the alliance gave $3 billion in military aid to the Ukrainian government, helped it to modernise its weaponry and trained its troops in joint exercises in Ukraine. The war had strengthened Ukraine’s national unity. But it also gave rise to a violent hatred of Russia reflected in the cult of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist leader who had fought on the Nazi side against the Soviet army in 1944–5. Bandera streets and squares were newly named. Statues of the partisan leader were erected in cities such as Lviv and Ternopil. The Bandera cult was a gift for Moscow’s propaganda about the threat of ‘Nazis’ in Ukraine.

Putin saw the role of NATO in Ukraine as a direct military threat. In an hour-long address to the Russian people on 21 February 2022, he claimed that Ukraine would ‘serve as an advanced bridgehead’ for NATO’s forces to attack Russia unless Moscow intervened. Under the guise of its training missions, NATO, he declared, was building bases in Ukrainian cities like Kharkiv, near the Russian border, from which its nuclear missiles could reach Moscow in a few minutes. ‘It is like a knife to our throat,’ he said.31 From a Western point of view this seemed mad and paranoid. NATO, after all, was a defensive alliance and had no reason to attack Russia. But as Putin saw it, it was the conclusion to be drawn from his reading of the history of Russia and Ukraine.

He explained his thinking in a long historical essay, ‘On the Historical Unity of the Ukrainians and the Russians’, published by the Kremlin in July 2021.32 At the time it was dismissed as a strange scholastic article written by a man obsessed with long-dead historical disputes without bearing on the current conflict in Ukraine. The esoteric influence of thinkers such as Dugin could be clearly seen in it. Now the essay can be read as Putin’s historical justification for the invasion, which he launched eight months later, in February 2022. In it Putin argued, yet again, that the Russians and Ukrainians were one nation, that Ukraine was a part of ‘greater Russia’ (an entity at times he equated with the Soviet Union and at times with its inner Slavic core) and, as such, had no real statehood of its own. At many points throughout its history, Putin continued, Ukraine had been used by hostile foreign states – the Swedes, the Poles, the Austrians and the Germans in the First World War, the allied powers in the Civil War – to attack Russia by encouraging the Ukrainians to believe the myth of their own independent nationhood. The West today, he claimed, was doing just the same.

Much of Putin’s anger was directed at the Bolsheviks, who, he claimed, had given the Ukrainians an artificial state when they formed the Soviet Union. The Ukrainian Soviet Republic had been granted New Russia, the Black Sea coastal districts from Odessa to Donetsk which had formed a province of the Russian Empire (Novorossiia) before 1917. Later, as we know, the Crimea was transferred to Ukraine as well. None of this had mattered when the USSR had existed, Putin said. But on the Soviet Union’s collapse (a consequence of Lenin’s ‘mistaken policy’ of granting the republics a right of secession) it meant that ‘historic Russian lands’ had been gained unjustly by Ukraine. In a clear threat to the Ukrainians, Putin claimed that, when it left the Soviet Union, Ukraine should have taken only what it had when it had joined in 1922 – the smaller rump state (without New Russia or the Crimea) claimed by the Ukrainians in 1917. It was an argument that had been made before by Russian nationalists, such as Solzhenitsyn, a major influence on Putin’s thinking after 1991. The loss of Ukraine was a bitter pill for nationalists of Putin’s generation to swallow. His inner circle of siloviki – the ‘men of force’ in charge of the military and state security – had all been in the KGB or the military at the time of the Soviet collapse. Having watched their bosses lose an empire, they were united by their determination to restore the ‘inner empire’ of Ukraine and Belarus. They blamed the Ukrainians for the break-up of the Soviet Union (their vote for independence had certainly delivered the coup de grâce) and resolved to punish them.

The Russians began their military build-up in March 2021. By December, over 100,000 troops were massed on the borders of Ukraine. At this point it appeared that they were meant to serve Putin’s armed diplomacy. The threat of war had exposed political divisions in Ukraine, with growing opposition to Zelensky’s handling of the crisis which Putin wanted to exploit. He demanded a written guarantee that Ukraine would never become part of NATO. He also wanted the alliance to remove the military assets it had deployed in eastern Europe since 1997, when NATO had agreed to station neither nuclear weapons nor military bases in the new member states. His ultimatum was rejected by the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, who came out of a frosty meeting with Lavrov in Geneva, on 21 January 2022, able only to repeat the usual formula that ‘NATO is a defensive alliance and poses no threat to Russia.’ Putin saw it otherwise. A month later, he launched his invasion, claiming it was needed to prevent the threat to Russia posed by NATO in Ukraine.

Few people thought that he would launch a full-scale invasion. An incursion in the east, followed by a round of armed diplomacy, looked like the more reasonable scenario. But Putin by this point had become a victim of his own myths about the ‘Russian world’. He genuinely thought that he could conquer Kiev and ‘liberate’ Ukraine without serious resistance – a dangerous delusion that led him to attack on every front. His decision surprised even senior Kremlin officials. It must be explained by Putin’s isolation from reality. Terrified of Covid, he had spent the past two years in lockdown on his own in the Kremlin, seldom meeting anybody in person (even the President of Kazakhstan was made to spend two weeks in quarantine before Putin would see him). After twenty-two years in power, Putin had become an autocrat. No one dared to question him. He filled his offices with statues of the greatest tsars, with whom he compared himself. Hubris lay behind his reckless decision. He thought that he could score a quick and easy victory. His spies in Kiev had told him that Zelensky’s government would soon collapse: it had ruined the economy and lost the support of the Ukrainians, who would welcome Russia’s troops with open arms. They were too afraid to disillusion him by telling him the truth.

On 24 February, Russian forces moved into Ukraine from Belarus, from Russia in the east and from the Crimea in the south. Putin had expected his troops to be in Kiev within two days. A victory article celebrating the return of Ukraine to the ‘Russian world’ was published by mistake by RIANovosti, the state news agency, on 26 February, before being withdrawn from its site. The Russians failed to enter the Ukrainian capital. They underestimated the Ukrainians (a nation with the fighting spirit of the Cossacks in its blood) and the leadership of their president Zelensky, dressed in khaki, whose daily broadcasts gave his people self-belief and renewed strength in unity. Putin had denied that Ukraine was a nation, but his war against it had created one far more united than before.

Once their Blitzkrieg had been stalled, the Russians had no other plan to capture Kiev. They lacked the logistics to supply their forward units with sufficient ammunition, food, fuel, technical and medical support. The Russian army, it turned out, was not as good as people had thought. It relied on heavy firepower and on its sheer size to overwhelm its better-supplied and more agile opponents – a distinctly Russian way of fighting wars, as we have seen. The low morale of the conscript troops quickly became apparent. Many of those captured claimed they had not known that they would be fighting the Ukrainians; they had been told that they had come to liberate their fellow Slavs from the ‘Nazis’. As the invasion force became bogged down, it resorted to bombarding cities, targeting civilian areas, blocks of flats and even hospitals, tactics developed by the Russians in Chechnya and Syria. Millions of desperate Ukrainians chose to flee by car, by train, by any transport they could find to reach safety; others took to basements to survive as best they could. The Russians carried out a number of atrocities in towns such as Bucha and Irpin where they had been met, not with open arms, but with hatred and defiance from Ukrainian residents.

These war crimes may not amount to genocide, at least in its legal sense, an accusation made by the Ukrainians, whose memory of the Soviet terror-famine, the Holodomor, which has been declared a genocide by the Ukrainian parliament, leads them unsurprisingly to that opinion. The rhetoric denying the Ukrainians their nationhood is certainly a part of the legal concept of a genocide under international law. But the Russian actions on the ground, although set in motion by the Kremlin’s aim to remove that nation from the earth, have more to do with the post-imperial phenomenon, in which fallen empires take revenge on their former colonies. The Russian killings of civilians, their rapes of women and other acts of terror are driven not so much by the genocidal purpose of destroying the Ukrainians as a group than by the hateful urge to punish them, to make them pay in blood for their independence and freedoms, for their determination to be part of Europe, to be Ukrainians, and not subjects of the ‘Russian world’.

Unable to break through the Ukrainian defences around Kiev, in the first weeks of April the Russians withdrew from the north and regrouped their armies in the east, where they prepared for a big offensive on the steppe against the best, most battle-seasoned units of the Ukrainian army, the 40,000 men who stood between them and the central regions of Ukraine. The Russian aim was to encircle the Ukrainians, destroy their army and occupy the whole of the Donbass, thus securing a land bridge between Russia and the Crimea, if not taking all of east Ukraine. Putin, it was said, was hoping to announce a victory at the annual military parade in Moscow on 9 May, Victory Day, but at the time of writing (this book went to print on 20 April) that did not appear likely. The war looked set to last for a long time.

The Putin regime sees this as an ‘existential war’, to quote one of its senior advisers, Sergei Karaganov, who warned that it will go on making war until it is able to claim ‘a kind of a victory’.33 But how long can the Russians bear its costs? How many dead and wounded soldiers will they accept as the necessary sacrifice to achieve this ‘victory’? How many years of economic hardship can they bear? The regime likes to call upon the memory of 1941–5, when the cult of patriotic sacrifice played such an important role in the Soviet war effort, as we have seen. But today the Russians are no longer fighting for their motherland. No foreign power has invaded it. They are being made to fight on foreign soil for Putin’s myth about the ‘Russian world’. Is that worth the sacrifice, they might well ask?

The Kremlin has prepared the public for this war. For the past eight years its TV channels have been churning out the same old narrative about Ukraine as an evil agent of the West, full of Nazis, bent on the destruction of Russia. The message has been passed through schools and military academies, through the print media and through the weekly sermons of Patriarch Kirill, a major force behind this war (in his sermon on 6 March, the Day of Forgiveness in the Russian Orthodox calendar, he likened it to a crusade against the West whose liberal values involved celebrating the ‘sin’ of homosexuality in ‘gay pride parades’).34 Independent polls in early April suggested that three-quarters of the population support the ‘special military operation’, as the Kremlin calls the war. Such polls must be taken with a pinch of salt. People are unlikely to admit their doubts to pollsters when doing so may land them in prison. But the number is believable. A similar percentage of the population, mostly in the older age groups, depends solely on the television for its news. Without access to the internet and independent sources (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the last independent radio and online TV stations were all closed down in the first weeks of the war) the narrative is hard for ordinary people to challenge. Putin’s narrative is all the more effective because it builds on Cold War myths, which for years had told a story of the West’s ‘fifth column’ drawn from the non-Russians in the Soviet Union. Putin is aware of the need to build his Ukraine-Nazi myth on these earlier narratives. On TV he condemns the ‘scum’ and ‘traitors’ who are more at home in Europe than in Russia, and threatens mass repressions against those ‘fifth columnists’, the ‘enemies’ of Russia, who oppose his policies. The impact of his Stalinesque discourse is, on the one hand, to encourage ‘loyal’ and ‘patriotic citizens’ to attack those speaking out against the war (attacks using violence and racist slurs, harassment and denunciations) and, on the other, to create a general atmosphere of mistrust, hate and fear, reminiscent of the Stalin years of terror, which frightens the majority into silence and complicity. This is a pattern of behaviour learned from Soviet history. The Russian people know from their collective memory, passed down through the generations, not to question the authorities, to avoid awkward moral issues, in short to accept what they are told.

How will this war end, and what sort of Russia will emerge from it? None of the possible scenarios bodes well for Russia or Ukraine. A military defeat for Russia is the first and least likely possibility, if a ‘victory’ for Ukraine means, as many of its leaders think it should, the expulsion of Russian troops from all its territories. Even in defeat, the Putin regime would probably survive, albeit in a more repressive form and more isolated from the international community. Putin one day will step down (he is rumoured to have cancer), but unless there is a revolution his system will continue under different leadership. With its domination of the media, its repressive forces and its reserves of foreign currency, the regime is too powerful, even for a mass-based opposition, such as we saw in support of the imprisoned leader Alexei Navalny, who tapped into a growing public mood of anger and frustration with government corruption in the late 2010s as general living standards remained low. As Russia’s story shows, the autocratic state has many times survived long periods of discontent. Society has been too weak, too divided and too disorganised to sustain an opposition movement, let alone a revolution, for long enough to bring about a change in the character of state power. Today the failure of democracy is rooted in the weakness of the public sphere. Thirty years after the collapse of the Communist dictatorship, Russia remains weak in all those institutions – genuine political parties, professional bodies, trade unions, consumer organisations, civic groups and residents’ associations – whose freedom of activity is the underpinning of democracy. The intelligentsia, which once assumed the role of the nation’s conscience, carries little influence today. The war has further weakened it, as tens of thousands of that caste (artists, academics, journalists, scientists and IT specialists) have fled abroad instead of opposing it at home. No doubt they are hoping to return to Russia soon. But that was the hope of the émigrés who left Russia after 1917, and very few of them returned.

The second possible scenario is a stalemate, a permanently frozen conflict in Ukraine, with Russian troops in the Donbass and the east but neither side prepared to stop the fighting, and no real basis for constructive peace talks as long as the Russians occupy these territories. Eight years of war have hardened the Ukrainians’ resolve not to compromise with the Russians. For even if they gave up lands for peace, what assurance could they have that Russia would not use these as a forward base to prepare a new attack? Nothing Putin says can be trusted. The Ukrainians are equally unlikely to give up on their aim of NATO membership, a key demand of the Russians. From 2019 that aim was enshrined in the Ukrainian constitution, so any decision to remove it would need to be approved by a national plebiscite or a vote in parliament, a process that would take ‘at least a year’ in Zelensky’s estimate. Yet with every passing week the likelihood of passing such a resolution will decline, as it becomes ever clearer that NATO membership is the only guarantee of Ukraine’s survival as an independent state (before the Russian invasion, 55 per cent of the population favoured joining NATO, but by the end of March that figure had risen to 72 per cent).35

In the end Ukraine will be forced to reach a compromise with the Kremlin. There is no other way to stop this war. The issue is to do so on terms best for Ukraine with international guarantees of its security. This means that the West must go on arming the Ukrainians until they gain the upper hand, if not complete victory. But how long can the West be counted on? For all its talk of ‘standing with Ukraine’, would it really risk a direct conflict with Russia, or suffer crippling shortages of oil and gas, should the Russians cut sales to the West? Putin will be counting on the weakening of the West’s resolve. He reckons that its people will grow tired of the war and become more concerned by their own problems. He has begun a war whose predictable effects (spiralling inflation, food shortages in the Middle East and North Africa, both reliant on Ukrainian grain, and mass immigration from these regions into Europe) are likely in the long term to destabilise democracies. Failing that, Putin is prepared to escalate the war, using nuclear weapons if needed, because he thinks that NATO will back down to avoid a direct confrontation with Russia. Such are the lengths to which he is prepared to go to force Ukraine back into the ‘Russian world’.

A Russian victory of some kind is the most likely outcome of this war, given the resources at the Kremlin’s disposal. But what sort of victory can be achieved? Even if the Russians settle for the whole of the Donbass as their ‘victory’, they will still be left with the problem of Ukrainian insurgency and civil disobedience, not to mention the huge cost of rebuilding cities which their armies have destroyed. The Russian economy will be further weakened by sanctions. It will be set back fifty years, returning in effect to Soviet-like conditions. Isolated from the West, Russia will be forced to pivot east, a turn accelerated by the war and welcomed by a number of the Kremlin’s ideologists, who believe that Russia’s future lies in a Eurasian bloc, opposed to Western liberal values and US global power, with China as its main ally. With only fossil fuels, precious metals and raw materials to offer the Chinese, Russia would become the junior partner in this new relationship. But with China it would represent a dangerous threat to the West’s interests in those regions of the world, from India to the Middle East, where nationalist movements and dictatorships are able to exploit their country’s grievances against the West. In the Kremlin’s understanding this is a war not just about Ukraine but about the ending of the US-dominated global order and economy by the growing power of Eurasia.

It is an unnecessary war, born from myths and Putin’s twisted readings of his country’s history. Unless it is soon stopped, it will destroy the best of Russia – those parts of its culture and society that have enriched Europe for a thousand years. The Russia that emerges from the war will be poorer, more unpredictable and more isolated in the world. It goes to show how dangerous myths can be when used by dictators to reinvent their country’s past.

Russia’s future is uncertain. But one thing is for sure: its history will never be the same again. The country’s past will be reinvented by the Russian state as its needs change, reimagined by its people as they look to redirect its course. It may seem now as if that story was destined to conclude with Putin’s reinvention of the Russian autocratic tradition. But it did not have to end that way. There were chapters in its history when Russia might have taken a more democratic path. It had strong traditions of self-rule in its medieval city republics, in the peasant commune and the Cossack hetmanates and not least in the zemstvos, which might have laid the basis for a more inclusive form of national government. There were moments when its rulers edged towards a constitutional reform, only for their liberal initiatives to be overturned by the current of events pushing Russia closer to the tragedy of 1917. And in the chaos of the revolution there were moments when the people were able to reshape the state in line with their old utopian dreams of social justice and freedom. The retelling of these stories must surely be a part of changing Russia’s destiny.

Notes

Abbreviations in the Notes

IRL RAN Institute of Russian Literature, Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg

NA National Archive, London

OR RNB Manuscript Division, Russian National Library, St Petersburg

RGASPI Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, Moscow

RGIA Russian State Historical Archive, St Petersburg

Introduction

1P.-A. Bodin, ‘The Monument to Grand Prince Vladimir in Moscow and the Problem of Conservatism’, in M. Suslov and D. Uzlaner (eds), Contemporary Russian Conservatism: Problems, Paradoxes and Perspectives (Leiden, 2019), p. 306.

2 The opening can be viewed in the video embedded here: .

3A. Timofeychev, ‘Moscow Monument to Prince Vladimir provokes ire in Kiev’, Russia Beyond the Headlines, 14 November 2016: .

4.

5G. Orwell, Nineteen EightyFour (London, 2003), p. 40. The words are the Party slogan of Oceania where the ‘mutability of the past’ is one of the ‘sacred principles’ (p. 31).

6S. Velychenko, ‘Tsarist Censorship and Ukrainian Historiography, 1828–1906’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, vol. 23, no. 4 (1989), pp. 385–408.

7M. Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New Haven, 1961), p. 229.

8E. Rostovtsev and D. Sosnitskii, ‘Kniaz Vladimir Velikii kak natsional’nsyi geroi’, Dialog so Vremenem, issue 65 (2018), pp. 150–64.

9On the Ukrainian appropriation of the Vladimir cult in the late nineteenth century: H. Coleman, ‘From Kiev across All Russia: The 900th Anniversary of the Christianization of Rus’ and the Making of a National Saint in the Imperial Borderlands’, Ab Imperio, vol. 19, no. 4 (2018), pp. 95–129.

10S. Solov’ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, 6 vols (St Petersburg, n.d.), vol. 6, p. 339.

11E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, 1957).

1 Origins

1See P. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2002).

2Povest’ vremennykh let, ed. V. P. Adrianova-Peretts and D. S. Likhachev with revisions by M. B. Sverdlov (St Petersburg, 1996), p. 13.

3C. Jarman, River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Road (London, 2021), p. 190. On the identity of Rörik see: S. Coupland, ‘From Poachers to Gamekeepers: Scandinavian Warlords and Carolingian Kings’, Early Medieval Europe, vol. 7, no. 1 (2003), pp. 85–114.

4S. Franklin and J. Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200 (London, 1996), pp. 317–19.

5J. Black, G.-F. Müller and the Imperial Russian Academy (Montreal, 1986), pp. 109–17; V. Fomin, ‘Lomonosov i Miller: uroki polemiki’, Voprosy Istorii, no. 8 (2005), pp. 21–35.

6Z. Harris and N. Ryan, ‘The Inconsistencies of History: Vikings and Rurik’, New Zealand Slavonic Journal, vol. 38 (2004), pp. 1115–16.

7N. Karamzin, Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo, 3 vols (St Petersburg, 1842–3), vol. 1, p. 43.

8See e.g. J. Nielsen, ‘Boris Grekov and the Norman Question’, Scando-Slavica, vol. 27 (1981), pp. 69–92.

9N. Andreyev, ‘Pagan and Christian Elements in Old Russia’, Slavic Review, vol. 21, no. 1 (1962), p. 17.

10T. Noonan, ‘Why the Vikings First Came to Russia’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, New Series, vol. 34, no. 3 (1986), pp. 321–48; Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, pp. 12–16.

11Harris and Ryan, ‘The Inconsistencies of History: Vikings and Rurik’, pp. 120–1.

12G. Jones, A History of the Vikings (Oxford, 2001), p. 164.

13See O. Pritsak, The Origin of Rus’ (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).

14J. Shepard, ‘The Origins of Rus’ (c. 900–1015)’, in M. Perrie (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 1: From Early Rus’ to 1689 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 51. On Khazar influence see: T. Noonan, ‘Khazaria as an Intermediary between Islam and Eastern Europe in the Second Half of the Ninth Century: The Numismatic Perspective’, Archivum Eurasiae Medii Aevi, vol. 5 (1985), pp. 179–204.

15For this view see Pritsak, The Origin of Rus’.

16Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, pp. 99–100, 140 ff., 170 ff.

17The Russian Primary Chronicle, trans. S. Cross and O. Sherbowitz-Wetzor (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 198.

18D. Obolensky, Byzantium and the Slavs (New York, 1994), pp. 61–2.

19See A. Feldman, ‘ The Historiographical and Archaeological Evidence of Autonomy and Rebellion in Chersōn: A Defense of the Revisionist Analysis of Vladimir’s Baptism (987–989)’, MRes. Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2013.

20D. Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500–1453 (London, 1971).

21Obolensky, Byzantium and the Slavs, p. 101.

22S. Averintsev, ‘Visions of the Invisible: The Dual Nature of the Icon’, in R. Grierson (ed.), Gates of Mystery: The Art of Holy Russia (Fort Worth, Tex., 1993), p. 12.

23See R. Milner-Gulland, The Russians (Oxford, 1997), pp. 175–6.

24L. Ouspensky, ‘The Meaning and Language of Icons’, in L. Ouspensky and V. Lossky, The Meaning of Icons (New York, 1982), p. 42.

25See O. Figes and B. Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, 1999), pp. 74–5.

26M. Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New Haven, 1961), p. 6. See further, E. Reisman, ‘The Cult of Boris and Gleb: Remnant of a Varangian Tradition?’, Russian Review, vol. 37, no. 2 (1978), pp. 141–57; F. Sciacca, ‘In Imitation of Christ: Boris and Gleb and the Ritual Consecration of the Russian Land’, Slavic Review, vol. 49, no. 2 (1990), pp. 253–60; C. Halperin, ‘The Concept of the ruskaia zemlia and Medieval National Consciousness’, Nationalities Papers, vol. 8, no. 1 (1980), p. 80.

27O. Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (London, 2002), pp. 320–1.

28I. Stepanova, The Burial Dress of the Rus’ in the Upper Volga Region (Late 10th–13th Centuries) (Leiden, 2017), p. 4.

29N. Kollmann, ‘Collateral Succession in Kievan Rus’ ’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. 14, no. 3/4 (1990), pp. 377–87.

30Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, pp. 367–9.

31D. Miller, ‘The Kievan Principality in the Century before the Mongol Invasion: An Inquiry into Recent Research and Interpretation’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. 10, no. 1/2 (1986), p. 222.

2 The Mongol Impact

1S. Zenkovsky (ed.), Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales (London, 1991), p. 196.

2See also U. Büntgen and N. Di Cosmo, ‘Climatic and Environmental Aspects of the Mongol Withdrawal from Hungary in 1242 CE’, Scientific Reports, vol. 6, no. 1 (2016), which explains the retreat by shortages of resources.

3M. Favereau, The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World (Cambridge, Mass., 2021), p. 51.

4Ibid., p. 202.

5David Miller, ‘Monumental Building as an Indicator of Economic Trends in Northern Rus’ in the Late Kievan and Mongol Periods, 1138–1462,’ American Historical Review, vol. 94, no. 2 (April 1989), pp. 360–90.

6L. Langer, ‘Muscovite Taxation and the Problem of Mongol Rule in Rus’, Russian History, vol. 34, nos. 1–4 (2007), p. 116.

7Ibid., p. 110.

8Zenkovsky, Medieval Russia’s Epics, p. 232; M. Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New Haven, 1961), pp. 18–22.

9J. Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1961), p. 106.

10G. Vernadsky, The Mongols and Russia, vol. 3: A History of Russia (New Haven, 1953), p. 378.

11J. Fennell, The Emergence of Moscow, 1304–1359 (London, 1968), pp. 82–9.

12Ibid., p. 192.

13Vernadsky, The Mongols, p. 260.

14‘The Scythians’ (1918) in A. Blok, Sobranie sochinenii v vos’mi tomakh (Moscow/Leningrad, 1961–3), vol. 3, p. 360.

15Ibid., p. 267.

16D. Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 67.

17N. Karamzin, Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo, 12 vols (St Petersburg, 1851–3), vol. 5, p. 373; D. Likhachev, Russkaya kul’tura (Moscow, 2000), p. 21.

18C. Halperin, The Tatar Yoke: The Image of the Mongols in Medieval Russia (Bloomington, Ind., 2009), p. 193.

19S. Solov’ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneiskikh vremen, 29 vols (Moscow, 1851–79), vol. 4, p. 179.

20See C. Halperin, ‘Kliuchevskii and the Tatar Yoke’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies, vol. 34, no. 4 (2000), pp. 385–408.

21Favereau, The Horde, p. 238.

22Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols, p. 56. See further, N. Baskakov, Russkie familii tiurksogo proiskhozhdeniia (Moscow, 1979).

23N. Trubetskoi, K probleme russkogo samopoznaniia (Paris, 1927), pp. 41–2, 48–51.

24Vernadsky, The Mongols, pp. 13, 391.

25H. Dewey and A. Kleimola, ‘Russian Collective Consciousness: The Kievan Roots’, Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 62, no. 2 (1984), pp. 180–91.

26G. Alef, ‘The Origin and Early Development of the Muscovite Postal Service’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, New Series, vol. 15, no. 1 (1967), p. 1.

27Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols, p. 52.

28M. Cherniavsky, ‘Khan or Basileus: An Aspect of Russian Medieval Political Theory’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 20 (1959), pp. 459–76.

29See D. Ostrowski, ‘The Mongol Origins of Muscovite Political Institutions’, Slavic Review, vol. 49, no. 4 (1990), pp. 525–42.

30Karamzin, Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo, vol. 5, p. 374.

3 Tsar and God

1D. Miller, ‘The Coronation of Ivan IV of Moscow’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, New Series, vol. 15, no. 4 (1967), pp. 559–74.

2D. Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 171–7.

3D. Miller, ‘Creating Legitimacy: Ritual, Ideology, and Power in Sixteenth-Century Russia’, Russian History, vol. 21, no. 3 (1994), pp. 289–315.

4The classic work developing this thesis is E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, 1957).

5G. Alef, ‘The Adoption of the Muscovite Two-Headed Eagle: A Discordant View’, Speculum, vol. 41, no. 1 (1966), pp. 1–21.

6J. Martin, Medieval Russia, 980–1584 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 261.

7The Correspondence between Prince A. M. Kurbsky and Tsar Ivan IV of Russia, 1564–1579, ed. and trans. J. Fennell (Cambridge, 1955), p. 75.

8S. von Herberstein, Notes upon Russia. Being a translation of the earliest account of that country, entitled Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii, trans. and ed. R. H. Major, 2 vols (London, 1851–2), vol. 1, p. 30.

9R. Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime (London, 1974), p. 97.

10T. Hunczak (ed.), Russian Imperialism from Ivan the Great to the Revolution (New Brunswick, 1974), p. ix.

11V. Kliuchevskii, Kurs russkoi istorii, 5 vols (Moscow, 1987), vol. 1, p. 31. The idea of Russia’s internal colonisation was originally advanced by Kliuchevsky’s teacher Soloviev in volume 2 of his Istoriia Rossii s drevneishchikh vremen (1851).

12M. Perrie and A. Pavlov, Ivan the Terrible (London, 2003), pp. 48–50.

13See R. Skrynnikov, ‘Ermak’s Siberian Expedition’, Russian History, vol. 13, no. 1 (1986), pp. 1–40.

14I. de Madariaga, Ivan the Terrible (New Haven, 2005), p. 353.

15C. Halperin, Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish (Pittsburgh, 2019), pp. 182–6.

16Madariaga, Ivan, pp. 257–9.

17Correspondence, p. 41.

18Perrie and Pavlov, Ivan, p. 159.

19See further, P. Hunt, ‘Ivan IV’s Personal Mythology of Kingship’, Slavic Review, vol. 52, no. 4 (1993), pp. 769–809.

20M. Cherniavsky, ‘Ivan the Terrible as Renaissance Prince’, Slavic Review, vol. 27, no. 2 (1968), pp. 195–211. For the comparison with Charlemagne: D. Rowland, ‘Ivan the Terrible as a Carolingian Renaissance Prince’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, vol. 19 (1995), pp. 594–606.

21L. Kozlov, ‘The Artist and the Shadow of Ivan’, in Richard Taylor and D. W. Spring (eds), Stalinism and Soviet Cinema (London, 1993), p. 123.

22Moscow News, no. 32 (1988), p. 8.

4 Times of Trouble

1F. Fletcher, Of the Russe Common Wealth (London, 1591), p. 34.

2M. Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New Haven, 1961), p. 179.

3Ibid., pp. 114–17.

4P. Longworth, ‘The Pretender Phenomenon in Eighteenth-Century Russia’, Past & Present, vol. 66, issue 1 (1975), p. 61.

5M. Perrie, Pretenders and Popular Monarchism in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge, 1995), p. 131.

6C. Dunning, Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty (University Park, Pa., 2001), p. 302.

7The idea of a ‘general crisis’ in seventeenth-century Europe goes back to a 1954 essay by Eric Hobsbawm (‘The General Crisis of the European Economy in the 17th Century’, Past & Present, vol. 5, issue 1 [1954], pp. 33–53). It gave rise to a series of debates on the emergence of capitalism and the problems of the state. The most important essays are collected in G. Parker and L. Smith, The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1978). On the application of the ‘general crisis’ theory to Russia see: P. Brown, ‘Muscovy, Poland, and the Seventeenth Century Crisis’, Polish Review, vol. 27, no. 3/4 (1982), pp. 55–69.

8V. Kivelson, ‘The Devil Stole his Mind: The Tsar and the 1648 Moscow Uprising’, American Historical Review, vol. 98, no. 3 (1993), p. 744.

9V. Kliuchevsky, A Course in Russian History: The Seventeenth Century (New York, 1994), p. 152.

10Ibid., p. 755.

11R. Crummey, Aristocrats and Servitors: The Boyar Elite in Russia, 1613–1689 (Princeton, 1983), p. 36.

12A. Kleimola, ‘The Duty to Denounce in Muscovite Russia’, Slavic Review, vol. 31, no. 4 (1972), p. 773.

13R. Hellie, ‘The Stratification of Muscovite Society: The Townsmen’, Russian History, vol. 5, part 2 (1978), pp. 119–75.

14For the legal evolution of serfdom: R. Smith, The Enserfment of the Russian Peasantry (Cambridge, 1968).

15O. Figes, The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture (London, 2019), p. 74.

16P. Avrich, Russian Rebels, 1600–1800 (New York, 1972), p. 109.

17P. Longworth, ‘The Subversive Legend of Stenka Razin’, in V. Strada (ed.), Russia (Turin, 1975), vol. 2, p. 29.

18S. O’Rourke, The Cossacks (Manchester, 2007), p. 82. On the pogroms of the Civil War, see J. Veitlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust (New York, 2021).

19L. Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (New Haven, 1998), p. 317.

20S. Collins, The Present State of Russia (London, 1671), pp. 64–5.

21Kliuchevsky, A Course, p. 343.

22L. Hughes, Sophia Regent of Russia, 1657–1704 (New Haven, 1990), p. 249.

5 Russia Faces West

1A. Schönle, ‘Calendar Reform under Peter the Great: Absolutist Prerogatives, Plural Temporalities, and Christian Exceptionalism’, Slavic Review, vol. 80, no. 1 (2021), pp. 69–89; L. Hughes, ‘Russian Culture in the Eighteenth Century’, in D. Lieven (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2: Imperial Russia, 1689–1917 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 67.

2N. Riasanovsky, The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought (New York, 1985), p. 5.

3S. Montefiore, The Romanovs (London, 2016), p. 82.

4W. Fuller, ‘The Imperial Army’, in Lieven (ed.), Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2, p. 532.

5Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great, p. 29.

6P. Bushkovitch, ‘Peter the Great and the Northern War’, in Lieven (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2, p. 498. Translation changed for clarity.

7‘Peterburg v 1720 g. Zapiski poliaka-ochevidtsa’, Russkaya Starina, vol. 25 (1879), p. 267.

8S. Soloviev, Istoriia Rossii ot drevneishikh vremen, 29 vols (Moscow, 1864–79), vol. 13, p. 1270.

9On textile manufacturing: W. Daniel, ‘Entrepreneurship and the Russian Textile Industry: From Peter the Great to Catherine the Great’, Russian Review, vol. 54, no. 1 (1995), pp. 1–25.

10Iusnosti chestnoe zertsalo (St Petersburg, 1717), pp. 73–4.

11L. Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. L. and A. Maude (Oxford, 1998), p. 3.

12Riasanovsky, Image, p. 80.

13Ibid., p. 60.

14V. Solov’ev, Sochineniia, 2 vols (Moscow, 1989), vol. 1, p. 287.

15S. Dixon, The Modernisation of Russia (Cambridge, 2012), p. 16.

16See further, B. Meehan-Waters, ‘Catherine the Great and the Problem of Female Rule’, Russian Review, vol. 34, no. 3 (1975), pp. 293–300.

17H. Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 37.

18J. Alexander, Catherine the Great: Life and Legend (Oxford, 1989), pp. 11, 14.

19R. Ovchinnikov, ‘Sledstvie i sud nad E. I. Pugachevym’, Voprosy Istorii, no. 3 (1966), p. 128.

20R. Jones, The Emancipation of the Russian Nobility, 1762–1785 (Princeton, 2019), p. 204.

21P. Dukes (ed.), Russia under Catherine the Great, vol. 2: Catherine the Great’s Instruction (Nakaz) to the Legislative Commission, 1767 (Newtonville, Mass., 1977), p. 3.

22See M. Bassin, ‘Geographies of Imperial Identity’, in Lieven (ed.), Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 2, pp. 45–64.

23M. Bassin, ‘Inventing Siberia: Visions of the Russian East in the Early Nineteenth Century’, American Historical Review, vol. 96, no. 3 (1991), pp. 768–70.

24The number of Jews is hard to estimate with accuracy. It might have been as high as 200,000 or as low as 32,000. See J. Klier, Russia Gathers her Jews: The Origins of the ‘Jewish Question’ in Russia, 1772–1825 (DeKalb, Ill., 1986), p. 56.

25W. Reddaway (ed.), Documents of Catherine the Great (Cambridge, 1931), p. 147; Correspondance artistique de Grimm avec Catherine II, Archives de l’art français, nouvelle période, 17 (Paris, 1932), pp. 61–2.

26See further, O. Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade (London, 2010), pp. 10–17.

27S. Montefiore, Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin (London, 2000), pp. 274–5.

28J. Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1961), p. 441.

29Jones, Emancipation of the Russian Nobility, p. 293.

30Alexander, Catherine, p. 283.

31V. Semennikov (ed.), Materialy dlia istorii russkoi literatury (St Petersburg, 1914), p. 34.

6 The Shadow of Napoleon

1M. Heller, Histoire de la Russie et de son empire (Paris, 1997), p. 616.

2A. Czartoryski, Mémoires et correspondance avec l’empereur Alexandre Ier, 2 vols (Paris, 1887), vol. 1, p. 979.

3See M.-P. Rey, Alexander I: The Tsar Who Defeated Napoleon (De Kalb, Ill., 2012), ch. 7.

4Ibid., Kindle edn, loc. 6079.

5IRL RAN, f. 57, op. 1, n. 63, l. 57 (Sergei Volkonsky).

6A. Ulam, Russia’s Failed Revolutions: From the Decembrists to the Dissidents (New York, 1981), p. 5.

7A. Sergeyev, ‘Graf A. Kh. Benkendorf o Rossii v 1827–30gg. (Yezhegodnyye otchoty tret’yego otdeleniya i korpusa zhandarmov)’, Krasnyi Arkhiv, vol. 37 (1929), pp. 131–74.

8P. Squire, ‘The Metternich–Benckendorff Letters, 1835–1842’, Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 45, no. 105 (July 1967), pp. 368–90.

9N. Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia (Berkeley, 1959), p. 74.

10K. Aksakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 2 vols (St Petersburg, 1861), vol. 2, p. 292.

11N. Gogol, Pis’ma, 4 vols (St Petersburg, n.d.), vol. 2, p. 508.

12P. Annenkov, The Extraordinary Decade: Literary Memoirs (Ann Arbor, 1968).

13V. Belinskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 13 vols (Moscow, 1953–9), vol. 10, p. 212.

14A Presniakov, Emperor Nicholas I of Russia: The Apogee of Autocracy, 1825–1855 (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1974), p. 56.

15S. Monas, The Third Section: Police and Society in Russia under Nicholas I (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), p. 240.

16NA, FO 195/332, Colquhoun to Stratford Canning, 2 July 1849.

17W. Bruce Lincoln, Nicholas I: Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias (De Kalb, Ill., 1989), p. 321; Monas, The Third Section, pp. 142, 194.

18J. and E. Goncourt, Journal: Mémoires de la vie littéraire, ed. Robert Ricatte, 3 vols (Monaco, 1956), vol. 2, p. 499.

19A. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford, 1959), p. 49.

20O. Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade (London, 2010), p. 8.

21A. Zaoinchkovskii, Vostochnaia voina, 1853–1856, 3 vols (St Petersburg, 2002), vol. 2, p. 523.

22Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 702–8.

23Figes, Crimea, p. 442.

24N. Danilevskii, Russia and Europe: The Slavic World’s Political and Cultural Relations with the Germanic-Roman West, trans. S. Woodburn (Bloomington, Ind., 2013), p. 107.

25A. Kelly, Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers between Necessity and Chance (New Haven, 1998), p. 41.

26RGIA, f. 914, op. 1, d. 68, ll. 1–2.

27Materialy dlia istorii uprazdneniia krepostnogo sostoianii pomeshchich’ikh krest’ian v Rossii ν tsarstvovanii Imperatora Aleksandra II, 3 vols (Berlin, 1860–2), vol. 1, p. 114.

7 An Empire in Crisis

1For more on the Bezdna incident: Daniel Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (New York, 1976).

2T. Emmons, ‘The Peasant and the Emancipation’, in W. Vucinich (ed.), The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Stanford, 1968), p. 54.

3See J. Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia: From the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1961), pp. 512–14.

4I discuss the peasant ideology in greater depth in A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London, 1996), pp. 98–102; and Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921 (Oxford, 1989), ch. 3.

5Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 105.

6T. Shanin, The Awkward Class (Oxford, 1972), p. 48.

7A. Anfimov, Zemel’naya arenda v Rossii v nachale XX veka (Moscow, 1961), p. 15.

8D. Saunders, Russia in the Age of Reaction and Reform (London, 1992), p. 213.

9J. Habermas, ‘The Public Sphere’, New German Critique, no. 3 (1974), p. 49.

10Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 46.

11F. Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (New York, 1960), p. xxvi.

12See R. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, Mass., 2009).

13J. Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, 1985), pp. 55–6.

14For an analysis of Russia as a ‘developing society’ at this time see T. Shanin, Russia as a ‘Developing Society’, vol. 1: Roots of Otherness: Russia’s Turn of Century (London, 1985). On similar patterns of rural migration into towns in twentieth-century India see R. Chandavarkar, ‘“The Making of the Working Class”: E. P. Thompson and Indian History’, History Workshop Journal, no. 43 (1997), pp. 185–7.

15T. von Laue, ‘A Secret Memorandum of Sergei Witte on the Industrialization of Imperial Russia’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 26 (1954), p. 71.

16D. Volkogonov, Lenin: Life and Legacy (London, 1991), pp. 8–9.

17L. Fischer, The Life of Lenin (London, 1965), p. 329.

18L. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context (Chicago, 2008), p. 447.

19W. Sablinsky, The Road to Bloody Sunday: Father Gapon and the St Petersburg Massacre of 1905 (Princeton, 1976), p. 344.

20On earlier signs of more hostile peasant attitudes towards the tsar, based on police arrest protocols of peasants denounced for anti-tsarist statements following the assassination of Alexander III in 1881, see D. Beer, ‘“To a Dog, a Dog’s Death!”: Naive Monarchism and Regicide in Imperial Russia, 1878–1884’, Slavic Review, vol. 80, no. 1 (2021), pp. 112–32.

21Voennaya Gazeta, 13 June 1913, p. 2.

22Novoe Vremia, 6 March 1914.

23Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 251.

24P. Gilliard, Thirteen Years at the Russian Court (London, 1921), p. 111.

25A. Brussilov, A Soldier’s Notebook, 1914–1918 (London, 1930), p. 39.

26F. Golder, Documents on Russian History, 1914–1917 (New York, 1927), p. 21.

8 Revolutionary Russia

1A. Brussilov, A Soldier’s Notebook, 1914–1918 (London, 1930), pp. 93–4.

2O. Figes and B. Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven, 1999), p. 24.

3B. Pares (ed.), Letters of the Tsaritsa to the Tsar, 1914–1916 (London, 1923), p. 157.

4O. Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London, 1996), p. 345.

5L. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (London, 1977), p. 193.

6G. Buchanan, My Mission to Russia and Other Diplomatic Memoirs, 2 vols (London, 1923), vol. 2, p. 86.

7OR RNB f. 152, op. 1, d. 98, l. 34.

8St Antony’s College, Oxford, Russian and East European Centre, G. Katkov Papers, ‘Moskovskii sovet rabochikh deputatov (1917–1922)’, p. 10.

9R. Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent (London, 1933), p. 304.

10R. Browder and A. Kerensky (eds), The Russian Provisional Government 1917: Documents, 3 vols (Stanford, 1961), vol. 2, pp. 913–15.

11F. Farmborough, Nurse at the Russian Front (London, 1977), pp. 269–70.

12G. Zinoviev, ‘Lenin i iiul’skie dni’, Proletarskaya Revoliutsiia, no. 8–9 (1929), p. 62.

13V. Lenin, Collected Works, 47 vols (London, 1977), vol. 25, pp. 176–9.

14Ibid., vol. 26, pp. 19, 21.

15The Bolsheviks and the October Revolution: Minutes of the Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), August 1917–February 1918, trans. A. Bone (London, 1974), p. 98.

16Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 489–91.

17M. Gorky, Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture, and the Bolsheviks, 1917–1918, trans. Herman Ermolaev (New Haven, 1995), p. 95.

18V. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 55 vols (Moscow, 1958–65), vol. 35, p. 204.

19RGASPI, f. 17, op. 1, d. 405, l. 1–13.

20J. Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace (New York, 1938), p. 269.

21O. Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–1921 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 150 ff.

22O. Figes, ‘The Village and Volost Soviet Elections of 1919’, Soviet Studies, vol. 40, no. 1 (1988), pp. 21–45.

23Figes and Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution, p. 152.

24O. Figes, ‘The Red Army and Mass Mobilization during the Russian Civil War’, Past & Present, vol. 129, issue 1 (1990), pp. 206–9.

25Kronshtadtski miatezh: sbornik statei, vospominanii i dokumentov (Leningrad, 1931), p. 26.

26See I. Getzler, Kronstadt, 1917–1921: The Fate of a Soviet Democracy (Cambridge, 1983).

27Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 33, pp. 487–502.

9 The War on Old Russia

1N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution, 1917: A Personal Record, ed. J. Carmichael (Oxford, 1955), p. 230.

2S. Kotkin, Stalin, vol. 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (London, 2014), p. 432.

3Ibid., pp. 433–41; B. Bazhanov, Bazhanov and the Damnation of Stalin, trans. D. Doyle (Athens, Oh., 1990), p. 40. See further, N. Rosenfeldt, ‘“The Consistory of the Communist Church”: The Origins and Development of Stalin’s Secret Chancellery’, Russian History 9 (1982), pp. 308–24; J. Harris, ‘Stalin as General Secretary: The Appointments Process and the Nature of Stalin’s Power’, in S. Davis and J. Harris, Stalin: A New History (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 63–82.

4Izvestiia TsK, no. 12 (1989), pp. 193, 198.

5N. Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), pp. 139–49, 160–4; O. Velikanova, Making of an Idol: On Uses of Lenin (Göttingen, 1996), pp. 33–4.

6See R. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (Oxford, 1986), and A. Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (New York, 2017).

7N. Kaminskaya, Final Judgment: My Life as a Soviet Defence Attorney (New York, 1982), pp. 18–21.

8On such statements and their provenance see D. Brandenberger and A. Dubrovsky, ‘“The People Need a Tsar”: The Emergence of National Bolshevism as Stalinist Ideology, 1931–1941’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 50, no. 5 (1998), p. 873.

9O. Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (London, 2007), p. 275.

10J. Haslam, ‘Political Opposition to Stalin and the Origins of the Terror in Russia, 1932–1936’, Historical Journal, vol. 29, no. 2 (1986), p. 396.

11J. Getty and O. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 (New Haven, 1999), pp. 54–7.

12H. Kuromiya, ‘Accounting for the Great Terror’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, New Series, vol. 53, no. 1 (2005), pp. 86–101.

13O. Khlevniuk, Master of the House: Stalin and his Inner Circle (New Haven, 2009), p. 174; Istochnik, no. 3 (1994), p. 80.

10 Motherland

1Izvestiia, 29 November 1938; Kino-Gazeta, 2 December 1938.

2S. Eizenshtein, ‘Patriotizm – moia tema’, in Izbrannye prozvedeniia v shesti tomakh (Moscow, 1964), vol. 1, p. 162.

3D. Brandenberger and A. Dubrovsky, ‘ “The People Need a Tsar”: The Emergence of National Bolshevism as Stalinist Ideology, 1931–1941’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 50, no. 5 (1998), p. 880.

4See T. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY, 2001).

5Cited in S. Plokhy, Lost Kingdom: A History of Russian Nationalism from Ivan the Great to Vladimir Putin (London, 2018), p. 255.

6O. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator, trans. N. Favorov (New Haven, 2015), p. 188.

7T. Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York, 2016), p. 19.

8Pravda, 3 July 1941, p. 1.

9Khlevniuk, Stalin, p. 218.

10Vecherniaya Moskva, 8 November 1941.

11M. Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, trans. M. Petrovich (London, 2014), p. 40.

12Interviews with Rebekka (Rita) Kogan, St Petersburg, June, November 2003. See O. Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (London, 2007), pp. 417–19.

13The figures for military casualties are disputed and difficult to calculate with certainty. The figure given by the Russian Ministry of Defence is 8.7 million but higher figures (up to 14 million) have been calculated from lists of personnel in military archives. I have followed Viktor Zemskov’s calculation based on counting Soviet POWs who died in forced-labour camps in Germany (V. Zemskov, ‘O Masshtabakh liudskikh poter’ SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voine’, Voenno-Istoricheskii Arkhiv, vol. 9 [2012], pp. 59–71).

14R. McNeal, Stalin: Man and Ruler (London, 1988), p. 241.

15G. Hosking, ‘The Second World War and Russian National Consciousness’, Past & Present, vol. 175, issue 1 (2002), p. 177.

16Figes, The Whisperers, pp. 414–15.

17Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, p. 78.

18.

19Djilas, Conversations with Stalin, p. 45.

20Ibid., pp. 80–1.

21M. Ellman and S. Maksudov, ‘Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Note’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 46, no. 4 (1994), p. 671. The estimate of 28 million was made by an expert commission appointed by Gorbachev in 1989.

22No explanation of Stalin’s motives for grossly underestimating the war losses has yet been found in the archival documents. It may be that he had in mind the possibility of a new war against the West and did not want the population to be told how many had already died.

23.

24I. Stalin, Speeches Delivered at Meetings of Voters of the Stalin Electoral District, Moscow (Moscow, 1950), pp. 19–44.

25Pravda, 9 January 1949.

26Pravda, 7 November 1946.

27L. Alexeyeva and P. Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Boston, 1990), p. 4.

28J. Brodsky, ‘Spoils of War’, in On Grief and Reason: Essays (London, 1996), p. 8.

29S. Schattenberg, Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman, trans. J. Heath (London, 2021), p. 186.

30Ibid., p. 217.

31L. Timofeev, Soviet Peasants: Or, the Peasants’ Art of Starving (n.p., 1985).

32The Current Digest of the Soviet Press (Columbus, Oh.), 27 April 1988, pp. 1–6.

11 Ends

1See e.g. A. Ostrovsky, Inventing Russia: The Journey from Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War (London, 2018), p. 115.

2Diane Sawyer of ABC, World News Tonight: .

3See the interview with Aleksandr Mikhailov, the KGB’s press officer: .

4A. Kolesnichenko, ‘Effects of 1991 August Putsch still felt in Russia’, Russia Beyond the Headlines, 23 August 2013: .

5T. Wood, Russia without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War (London, 2018), Kindle edn, loc. 555.

6See D. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (New York, 2001).

7M. Gessen, Man without A Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (New York, 2013).

8S. Corbesero, ‘History, Myth and Memory: A Biography of a Stalin Portrait’, Russian History, vol. 38, no. 1 (2011), p. 77. Many thanks to @cdmoldes for tracking down the image.

9V. Putin, ‘Russia at the Turn of the Millennium’, .

10C. Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West (London, 2020), p. 267.

11L. Aron, ‘The Problematic Pages’, New Republic, 24 September 2008.

12Kommersant-Vlast’, no. 27 (371), 16 July 2007.

13G. Pavlovskii, ‘Plokho s pamiat’iu – plokho s politikoi’, Russkii Zhurnal, December 2008.

14See my account in ‘Putin vs. The Truth’, New York Review of Books, 30 April 2009.

15International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Russia – ‘Crimes against History’, report published 10 June 2021, p. 29: .

16Ibid., p. 10. See further I. Kurilla, ‘The Implications of Russia’s Law against the “Rehabilitation of Nazism”’, PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo, no. 331 (August 2014).

17A. Miller, ‘Adjusting Historical Policy in Russia’, Russia in Global Affairs, no. 4 (2014): . See further, H. Bækken and J. Due Enstad, ‘Identity under Siege: Selective Securitization of History in Putin’s Russia’, Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 98, no. 2 (2020), pp. 321–44.

18E. Klimenko, ‘Building the Nation, Legitimizing the State: Russia – My History and Memory of the Russian Revolutions in Contemporary Russia’, Nationalities Papers, vol. 49, no. 1 (2021), pp. 72–88.

19.

20.

21Iu. Levada, ‘“Chelovek sovetskii”: chetvertaia volna’, Polit.ru, 30 April 2010: . See further M. Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (New York, 2017), which discusses the phenomenon.

22D. Khapaeva and N. Koposov, Pozhaleite, lyudi, palachei: Massovoe istoricheskoe soznanie v postsovetskoi Rossii i Stalinizm (Moscow, 2007).

23For transcripts and recordings of the shows see: .

24Cited in R. Braithwaite, ‘NATO enlargement: Assurances and misunderstandings’, European Council on Foreign Relations, 7 July 2016. On-line edition: .

25T. Friedman, ‘Foreign Affairs; Now a Word from X’, New York Times, 2 May 1998.

26.

27.

28NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia was preceded by three UN Security Council resolutions condemning Belgrade’s policies. No such diplomatic efforts were made by the Russians before their invasion of Ukraine. Ninety-seven UN member states recognised Kosovo’s independence, whereas only five recognised the legality of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

29On Glazyev’s influence see M. Zygar, All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin (New York, 2016), ch. 17.

30M. Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate (New Haven, 2022), p. 184.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35For Zelensky’s comments on the timescale of a constitutional change see his fascinating interview with four Russian independent journalists: . (from 50 minutes in). For Ukrainian polls: and .

Picture Credits

Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill at the Vladimir the Great monument in Moscow. Photo: https://mos.ru/mayor/media/photo/5454057/carousel/2/11/; photographer: Evgeny Samarin

Viktor Vasnetsov (1848–1926), The Invitation of the Varangians… Photo: Wikimedia Commons PD

The Church of St Sophia, Kiev, Ukraine. Photo: Ivan Nesterov/Alamy

Iconostasis inside the Dormition Cathedral, Moscow. Photo: robertharding/Alamy

Birch bark letter from Peter to Volchko, from Nerevsky, Novgorod, c. 1120–1140. ‘Was it you that told Roshnet that two sorochoks are to be collected…’. Photo: www.gramoty.ru ©The National Museums Veliky Novgorod

Andrei Rublev (c. 1370–1430), The Holy Trinity, 1420s. Tempera on wood. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo: Universal History Archive/Getty Images

An aerial view of the Solovetsky Monastery, Arkhangelsk Region. Photo: ITAR-TASS/Alamy

Cathedral square, Kremlin, Moscow. Photo: Ivan Vdovin/Alamy

Anonymous, attributed to Athanasius, The Blessed Host of the Heavenly Tsar (Church Militant), 1552. Tempera on wood. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo: Wikimedia Commons PD

Vasily Surikov (1848–1916), Ermak’s Conquest of Siberia in 1582, c. 1895. Oil on canvas. State Russian Museum, St Petersburg. Photo: Universal History Archive/Getty Images

Ilya Repin (1844–1930), Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan, 16 November 1581, 1885. Oil on canvas. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo: incamerastock/Alamy

Viktor Vasnetsov (1848–1926), Portrait of Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible, 1897. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo: Niday Picture Library/Alamy

Anonymous, Portrait of Tsar Alexei I of Russia, Moscow (1629–1676), c. 1670–1680. Moscow State History Museum. Photo: DeAgostini/Getty Images

Putin at the Minin and Pozharsky Monument, Moscow, 4th November 2017. Photo: ITAR-TASS/Alamy

Valentin Serov (1865–1911), Peter I the Great (1672–1725), 1907. Gouache on card. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo: Painters/Alamy

Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723), Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, 1698. Oil on canvas. Royal Collection Trust. Photo: © Royal Collection/Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2022/Bridgeman Images

Alexey Zubov, The Ceremonial Entry of the Russian Troops to Moscow on December 21, 1709… Engraving. State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo: Wikiart PD

The Mice are Burying the Cat, c. 1760. State Art Museum, Yarosl. Photo: Heritage Images/Getty Images

Vigilius Eriksen (1722–1782), Equestrian Portrait of Catherine II (1729–96) the Great of Russia, 18th century. Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Chartres, France. Photo: Alamy

Monument to Peter the Great. Photo: Dmitry Tonkopi/Alamy

Ilya Repin (1844–1930), 17 October 1905, 1907. Oil on canvas. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo: Bridgeman Images

Peasants in rural village, c. 1890s. Photo: Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Workers at the Ivanovo textile mill, 1905. Photo: Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Nicholas II with Empress Alexandra and their son Alexei at the Moscow Kremlin, 1913. Photo: Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Bronze head of a ruined statue of Alexander III, 1917. Photo: Everett Collection/Alamy

Fyodor Shurpin (1904–72), The Morning of Our Motherland, c. 1948. Oil on canvas. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo: Bridgeman Images

Irakli Toidze (1902–85), Mother Russia Calls, 1941. Soviet poster. Private Collection. Photo: Stefano Bianchetti/Bridgeman Images

United Russia party poster, Moscow, November 5, 2003. Photo: Misha Japaridze/AP/Shutterstock

A panel from the ‘My History’ exhibition. Photo: courtesy Ivan Kurilla

Index

Abkhazia here

Abramov, Fedor here

Adashev, Alexei here

Afghanistan, invasion of (1979) here

Agapetus: Patrologia Graecae here

Ahmed, Khan here

Akhmatova, Anna here

Aksakov, Konstantin here

Alatyr here

Albanians here, here

alcohol consumption here, here, here

Alexander I, Tsar (1777–1825) here, here

Alexander II, Tsar (1818–81) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Alexander III, Tsar (1845–94) here, here equestrian statue (St Petersburg) here

Alexandra Fedorovna, Empress here, here, here, here, here

Alexeeva, Liudmilla here

Alexei, Tsar (1643–76) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich here, here

Alexei Petrovich, Tsarevich here, here

All-Union Party Conference (1988) here

Allilueva, Nadezhda (Stalin’s wife) here, here

Alma Heights, battle of (1854) here

Amur valley here

Anarchists here

Andreeva, Nina here ‘I Cannot Give Up Principles’ here

Andropov, Yuri here

Andrusovo, Treaty of (1667) here

Anna, Empress here, here

Annenkov, Pavel here

Antonov, General Alexei here

Anybei here

apanages here

Arakcheyev, General Alexei here

Arctic zone here, here, here, here

Ardatov here

Ardym here

Armenia/Armenians here, here, here, here Dashnaks here

arts and culture here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here see also icons; literature; music; paintings

Arzamas here

Assemblies of the Land here, here, here, here, here, here

Astrakhan here, here, here, here, here, here monument to Grand Prince Vladimir here

Athos, Mount (Greece) here

August III, of Poland here

Augustus, Emperor here

Aurora (cruiser) here

Austerlitz, battle of (1805) here

Austria/Austrians here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Austrian-Hungarian Empire here, here, here

autocracy here, here, here, here, here and the Mongols here, here, here, here and Ivan IV here patrimonial here, here, here, here, here and Catherine II here Madame de Staël on here and Alexander I here and Nicholas I here, here and the intelligentsia here, here and Alexander II here and Alexander III here; opposed by the Duma here, here and Nicholas II here, here, here and Putin here, here, here, here, here, here

Avvakum, Archpriest here, here

Azov Fortress, capture of (1637) here

Azov Sea here, here

Baghdad, Iraq here

Bakunin, Mikhail here

Balkans, the here, here, here, here, here Slavs here, here, here see also Serbia/Serbs

Baltic Sea here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Baltic states here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; see also Estonia; Latvia; Lithuania

Bandera, Stepan here, here

barshchina (labour service) here

Bashkiria here

Bashkirs, the here

Basil, St here

Basil II, Byzantine emperor here

Basmanov, Alexei here

Bataisk: monument to Grand Prince Vladimir here

Batu Khan here, here, here, here, here

Beccaria, Cesare here

Bekbulatovich, Semen here

Belarus/Belarusians (White Russians) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Belgium: 1830 revolution here, here

Belgorod: monument to Grand Prince Vladimir here

Belinsky, Vissarion here, here ‘Letter to Gogol’ here, here

Belskys, the here, here

Bem, General Jozef here

Benckendorff, Count Alexander here, here

Berezovsky, Boris here, here, here

Beria, Lavrenty here, here

Bering, Vitus: Kamchatka expeditions here

Berlin here, here 1848 revolt here Russian exiles here fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) here, here

Beslan, North Ossetia here

Bezdna here

Biron (Bühren), Ernst-Johann von here

Black Death here

Black Sea here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Black Sea Fleet here, here, here

Blackstone, William here

Blinken, Antony here

Blok, Alexander here

Bolotnikov, Ivan here, here

Bolshevik (journal) here

Bolsheviks: beginnings here reforms inspired by Peter the Great here Jewish members here and October Revolution (1917) here; and the army here, here, see also Red Army; and collapse of Kerensky’s Provisional Government here; open peace talks with Germany here; name change to Communist Party here; and Civil War here, here, here; War Communism here, here; and peasant uprisings here, here, here; taxation here, here; their New Economic Policy here, here, here; and the Comintern here; ‘Internationale’ here; under Stalin here, here, here, here, here, here, here; and the Church here, here; Gorbachev here; dying out here, here; and Putin’s anger over Ukraine here; see also Lenin, Vladimir

Boltin, Ivan here

Bondarchuk, Fedor here

Book of Pedigrees, The here

Boris, St here

Borodino, battle of (1812) here

Bosnia here

‘bourgeoisie’ (burzhooi) here, here, here

boyars here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Boyars’ Councils here, here, here, here

Brest-Litovsk Treaty (1918) here, here

Brezhnev, Leonid/Brezhnev government here, here, here, here, here, here

Britain/the British: and Napoleon’s Continental System here; and Poland here; and Alexander I’s Holy Alliance (1815) here; and Belgian revolution against the Dutch here; factory conditions (1840s) here; and Hungarian Revolution (1848) here; and the Turks here, here; criticised by Pogodin here; Russophobic press here; and the Crimean War here; and the execution of the Romanov imperial family here; state officials (1900) here; Triple Entente with Russia and France (1907) here; in World War I here; relations with Soviet Union (1920s) here; and World War II here; as safe haven for Russian oligarchs here

Brodsky, Joseph here

Brusilov, General Alexei here

Bucha, Ukraine here

Buchanan, George, British ambassador here

Bucharest, Romania: 1848 revolution here; NATO conference (2008) here, here

Budapest, Hungary: 1848 revolution here

Bukharin, Nikolai here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Bulgakov, Mikhail here

Bulgaria/Bulgarians here, here, here, here, here, here

Bulgars, Volga here

bureaucracy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

burial rites, medieval here

Buriats, the here

Bush, George W., President here, here

Buturlin Committee here

Byzantine Empire/Byzantines/Byzantium here; and Russian foundation myths here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; influences on Russia here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; and Slavs here; trade with Russia here, here, here, here; and the Khazar khaganate here, here; and Prince Vladimir’s conversion to Christianity here, here, here; icons here, here; hesychasm here; and Ivan IV’s coronation here, here; Peter the Great’s break with here, here, here, here; see also Constantinople; Eastern Orthodox Church

carbonari here

Caspian Sea here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Catherine I (1684–1727) here, here

Catherine II, the Great (1729–96) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; Nakaz (‘Instruction to the Legislative Commission’) here, here

Caucasian Bureau here

censorship here, here, here, here; of history here, here; of literature and journals here, here, here, here, here

Central Committee here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; 1987 Plenum here

Chaadaev, Petr here

Chancellor, Richard here

Charles XII, of Sweden here

Charles Peter Ulrich of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp here

Chechens/Chechnya here, here, here, here

Cheka (Extraordinary Commission for Struggle against Counter-Revolution and Sabotage) here, here, here, here

Chekhov, Anton here

Chembar here

Chernenko, Konstantin here

Cherniavsky, Michael here, here

Chernigov here, here, here

Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) here

China/Chinese here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Chingiz Khan here, here, here, here, here

Chingizids here

Christianity see Eastern Orthodox Church

Chubais, Anatoly here, here

Chud, Lake: battle (1242) here

Chukchis, the here

Church, the see Eastern Orthodox Church

Chuvash tribesmen here

Civil War here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Cold War here, here, here, here, here, here

collective farms/collectivisation: artels here; and sobornost here; small (TOZ) here, here; large (kolkhozes) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

collective responsibility, system of (krugovaya poruka) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Collins, Samuel here

Comintern (Communist International) here, here, here

commune, the see mir

Communism here, here, here, here, here, here, here; see also War Communism

Communist Party see Bolsheviks

Communist Youth League see Komsomol

Congress of People’s Deputies here

Congress of Vienna (1814) here, here

Constantine IX Monomachos here

Constantinople here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; Hagia Sophia here, here, here

Constituent Assembly here, here, here, here

Contemporary, The (journal) here

cooperatives here

Cossacks: military formation here; and conquest of Siberia here; join army of pretender tsar Dmitry here, here; liberate Moscow from Poles here, here; and raids on Crimean and Turkish territories here; rebellions and election of rebel tsars here, here, here; in Siberia here; a hetmanate here, here, here, here, here, here; and war of liberation against Poland here; sign Treaty of Pereyaslav (1654) here; and Ukraine here, here, here, here; and Old Believers here, here; join Charles XII of Sweden here; lead revolt in Astrakhan here; and Ivan VI’s murder here; the Pugachev revolt (1773–4) here; attack on Napoleon’s forces here; and Kornilov’s attempted coup here; in the Civil War here, here

Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom) here

Courland here, here

Court of Time, The (Sud vremeni) (TV show) here

Covid-19 here

Crimea/Crimeans: Grand Prince Vladimir’s conversion and baptism in here, here, here; as a khanate here, here, here; Tatars here, here, here, here, here, here, here; battles between Russians and Muslims and Turks here, here, here; annexed by Russia (1783) here; War (1853–6) here, here, here, here, here, here, here; claimed by Ukraine (1917) here; the Whites’ last stand (1920) here; assigned to Ukraine by Khrushchev (1954) here, here, here; Gorbachev holidays in (1991) here; annexed by Russia (2014) here, here, here, here, here, here, here; and Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022) here, here

Cromwell, Oliver here

Crusade, Fourth here

Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) here

culture see arts and culture

Cumans see Polovtsians

cyberwar here

Cyril (monk) here, here

Czartoryski, Prince Adam Jerzy here, here

Czartoryski, Prince Adam Kazimierz here, here

Czech Legion here

Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic: Soviet invasion of (1968) here; NATO membership here

Dalmatia here

Daniil Alexandrovich, Prince of Moscow here

Daniilovichi, the here, here, here, here

Danilevsky, Nikolai here; Russia and Europe here, here

Dardanelles, the here

Dashkova, Princess here

Daurians, the here, here

Dazhborg (god) here

Decembrist uprising (1825) here, here, here

democracy/democratic principles here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; Lenin and here, here; Putin and here, here; ‘sovereign’ here, here; see also Kadet Party; Social Democratic Labour Party

Denikin, General Anton here, here, here, here

Denmark here, here, here

Diderot, Denis here, here

Djilas, Milovan here, here, here, here

Dmitriev, Yuri here

Dmitry, Tsar (pretender) here, here

Dmitry Ivanovich, Tsarevich (1552–3) here

Dmitry Ivanovich, Tsarevich (1582–91) here, here

Dmitry Ivanovich Donskoi, Grand Prince of Moscow here, here, here

Dnepropetrovsk Party, Ukraine here

Dnieper, River here, here, here, here, here, here

Doctors’ Plot (1952) here

Don, River here, here, here, here, here, here

Don Cossacks here, here, here, here, here; see also Cossacks

Donbass, the (Ukraine) here, here, here, here, here

Donetsk, Ukraine here

Doroshenko, Petro here

Dorpat (Tartu), Livonia here, here

Dostoevsky, Fedor here, here, here, here, here, here; The House of the Dead here

Dresden, Germany: 1848 revolt here

Dubĉek, Alexander here

Dugin, Alexander here, here; The Foundations of Geopolitics here

Duma, the here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; Progressive Bloc here; Temporary Committee for the Restoration of Order here, here

Durnovo, Petr here, here

Dzerzhinsky, Feliks here, here; statue here

Eastern Orthodox Church/the Church: and Grand Prince Vladimir’s conversion here, here, here; spreads from Byzantine Empire here; and Russian churches here; Russian saints, here, here, here, here, here, here; under Mongol rule here, here, here, here; and Ivan IV’s coronation here, here, here; and the Russian Church here; and conquest of Kazan here, here; and building of St Basil’s here; and myth of tsar’s divine status here; and the Poles here; as cause of lack of development of Russian secular culture here; and influence from Ukraine here; Nikon’s reforms here; and the Old Believers here, here, here, here, here; and Peter the Great here, here; and Catherine II here, here; and war in the Crimea here; and Slavophiles here; and Nicholas I here; and siege of Sevastopol here; defeats Stolypin’s plans for state schools here; and the New Economic Policy here; and embalming of corpses here; attacked by Bolsheviks here, here; and Putin here, here, here, here; see also icons

Economists, the (Marxists) here, here

economy/economic systems: seigneurial here; 12th-13th century here, here; Mongol here; 16th-century here, here, here, here; 17th-century here, here; under Peter the Great here; under Catherine the Great here; and the Crimea here, here; and Alexander II’s reforms here; and the Emancipation Decree here; and the zemstvos here; in World War I here, here; and War Communism here, here; Lenin’s New Economic Policy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; and war against kulaks and collective farms here; and Stalin’s FiveYear Plan here, here; in World War II here, here; postwar here, here, here; and perestroika here; under Yeltsin here; and Putin’s administration here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

education see schools; universities

Ehrenburg, Ilya: The Thaw here

Eisenstein, Sergei: Alexander Nevsky here, here, here, here; Ivan the Terrible here, here

Ekaterinburg here

Ekaterinoslav here

Elena Glinskaya, Princess here

Elias, St here

Elizabeth I, of England here

Elizabeth Petrovna, Empress of Russia here, here, here, here

Emancipation Decree (1861) here

Enlightenment, the here, here, here, here, here, here

Ermak (Cossack) here

estates (sosloviia) here

Estonia/Estonians here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; see also Baltic states

Eternal Peace, Treaty of (1686) here

Eurasian Economic Union here

Eurasianists: Exodus to the East here

European Union (EU) here, here, here, here, here, here

factionalism here, here

factories here, here, here, here, here, here; see also vydvizhentsy

Falconet, Étienne-Maurice: Peter the Great here

famines here, here, here, here; terror-famine (Holodomor) here, here

Federal Counter-Intelligence Service here

Federal Security Service (FSB) here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Fedor I, Tsar (1557–98) here

Fedor III, Tsar (1661–82) here

Fedor, Tsarevich here, here

Ferdinand, Archduke here

FIFA World Cup (2018) here

Filaret, Patriarch here

Filofei (monk) here

Finland/Finns here, here, here, here, here, here, here; Social Democrats here; Winter War here

Finno-Ugric tribes here, here, here, here

Fioravanti, Aristotele: Dormition Cathedral, Moscow here

flag, Russian here

Fletcher, Giles here

Florence, Italy here; Council of (1438–9) here

Foreign Agents Law (2012) here

France/the French: and Peter the Great here, here; and Peter III here; state officials (1900) here; Grande Armée here, here, here; the Republic here; and the Ottomans here; under Napoleon III here, here; and annexation of Algeria here; and the Crimean War here; comparisons with Russia here, here; alliance with Russia (1894) here; and World War I here; brokers Minsk II Accords here; see also French Revolution; Napoleon Bonaparte; Paris

Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria here

Frederick the Great, king of Prussia here, here

Frederick William IV, of Prussia here

Freemasons here, here

French Revolution (1789) here, here, here; Jacobins here, here, here, here, here, here

Friedland, battle of (180) here

FSB see Federal Security Service

Fundamental Laws (1906) here

fur trade here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Gaidar, Yegor here

Galich here, here

Galicia here, here, here, here

Gapon, Father Georgy here

Garamond, Claude here

gas here, here, here, here, here, here

Gazprom here

George V, of Great Britain here

Georgia/Georgians here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; Bolsheviks here; Social Democrats here

Germans/Germany: and Viking influences here; and Prince Vladimir’s conversion here; trade with Russia here, here, here, here; Teutonic knights defeated by Nevsky here; dramas performed in St Petersburg here; Russian fear of here; and Peter the Great here, here, here; tsars born to German parents here; and Empress Anna here; sent to Siberia here; and Peter III here; and Catherine II here, here; historians (1750s) here, here; in Napoleon’s Grande Armée here; and Nicholas I here, here; comparisons with Russia here, here, here; and Baltic provinces here; Triple Entente formed against (1907) here, here; and World War I here, here, here, here, here, here, here; and the Bolsheviks here; Brest-Litovsk peace talks here; and Ukraine here, here, here, here, here; Communist strikes here; and World War II here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; and Hitler–Stalin Pact here, here

glasnost (openness) here, here, here, here

Glazyev, Sergei here

Gleb, St here

Glinka, Mikhail here; A Life for the Tsar here; ‘Patriotic Song’ here

Glinskys, the here

Godunov, Tsar Boris (1552–1605) here, here, here, here

Gogol, Nikolai here, here, here; Dead Souls here; Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends here

Golden Horde, the here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Gorbachev, Mikhail here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Gordon, Patrick here

Gori: school here

Gorky, Maxim here, here

grain here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; Ukrainian here

Great Northern War (1700–21) here

Great Patriotic War see World War, Second

Great Reforms (1860s) here

Great Terror (1937–8) here, here

Greeks here, here, here; Gospels here; icon painters here, here; hesychasm here; Church here, here, here, here

Grimm, Baron Friedrich here, here, here

Gromyko, Andrei here

Gulag (Main Administration of Corrective Labour Camps and Colonies) system here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Gusinsky, Vladimir here, here

Habermas, Jürgen here

Habsburgs, the here, here, here, here, here; army here

Harald Klak, king of Denmark here

Harold, king of England here

Harriman, Averell here

Helsingfors, Finland here

Herberstein, Sigismund von here, here

Hermogen, Patriarch of Moscow here

Herzen, Alexander here

hesychasm here

history, Russian here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; on stage here; and Catherine II here; Soviet views of here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; and Stalin here, here, here, here, here; and ‘The Thaw’ here, here; and Putin here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; and silencing of historians here, here, here; and ‘My History’ parks here; contemporary views here, here, here, here; see also Müller, Gerhard Friedrich; schools

Hitler, Adolf here, here, here, here, here, here, here: Mein Kampf here; ‘Hitler–Stalin Pact’ (1939) here, here, here, here, here

Holland here, here

Holodomor see famines

Holy Alliance (1815) here, here, here

Holy Fools here

Holy Lands here, here, here, here; see also Israel

Holy League (1594) here

Holy Roman Empire here, here

Holy Synod, the here

homosexuality here, here, here

Honourable Mirror of Youth, The (manual of etiquette) here

Hungary here, here, here; revolution (1848) here; NATO membership here; see also Austrian-Hungarian Empire

Hurd, Douglas here

Iaroslav Iaroslavich, Prince of Tver here

Iaroslavichi, the here

Iaroslavl here

Ibn Fadlan, Ahmad here

icons here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Ilmen, Lake here

Ilyin, Ivan here, here

industries/industry here, here; under Peter the Great here, here; and the zemtsvos here; in the 1890s here; and World War I here, here; nationalisation of here; and the Civil War here; and the New Economic Policy here, here, here; under Stalin here, here, here; Ukrainian here; and glasnost here; see also factories

Ingria here

Ingush here

‘intelligentsia’ here, here, here, here, here, here; Populist here

International Women’s Day (1917) here

Iona of Riazan, Metropolitan here

Iosif, Patriarch here

Irpin, Ukraine here

Irtysh, River here

Israel here, here; Yom Kippur (Arab–Israel War) (1973) here

Italy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; see also Florence

Itil here

Ivan I Daniilovich (‘Kalita’), Grand Prince of Moscow here, here, here, here

Ivan III, Tsar (1440–1505) here, here, here, here

Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) (1530–84) here, here, here; childhood here; wives here, here, here; personality here; and the boyars here, here, here, here, here; crowned tsar here, here, here; and cult of Prince Vladimir here; and unification of tsar and state here, here; state-building here; and the army here; and the pomeste system here; and the start of Russia’s growth as an imperial power here; defeats Kazan here, here, here, here, here, and Astrakhan here, here; orders construction of St Basil’s here; is granted confirmation of his title by the patriarch of Constantinople here; and Russian expansionism here; and conquest of Siberia here; sets up the oprichnina here; his violence here; kills his son and heir here, here; and My History park exhibits here

Ivan V, Tsar (1666–96) here, here

Ivan VI, Tsar (1740–64) here, here, here

Ivan, Tsarevich here

Izvestia (newspaper) here

Japan/Japanese here, here, here, here

Japheth here

Jewish Labour Bund here

Jews here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Julius II, Pope here

Just Russia, A (fake party) here

kabala contracts here

Kadet Party (Constitutional Democrats) here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Kalka, River here

Kalmyks here

Kaluga here

Kama River here

Kamenev, Lev here, here, here, here

Kaminskaya, Nina here

Kandinsky, Wassily here

Karaganov, Sergei here

Karakorum, Mongolia here, here

Karamzin, Nikolai here, here; History of the Russian State here, here, here, here; Memorandum on Ancient and Modern Russia here

Karelia here, here

Katyn massacre, Poland (1940) here

Kazakhstan here, here, here, here

Kazan here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; University here

Kennan, George here

Kerch here

Kerensky, Alexander here, here, here, here, here, here

KGB here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Khabarov, Yerofey here

Khabarovsk here

Khachaturian, Aram here

khans here, here, here, here, here, here

Khantys, the here

Kharkiv, Ukraine here

Khazar state/Khazars here, here, here

Kherson, Ukraine here, here

Khmelnytsky, Bohdan here, here

Khodorkovsky Mikhail here, here

Khors (god) here

Khovanksy, Ivan Andreyevich here

Khrushchev, Nikita here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; ‘Secret Speech’ here, here; and ‘the Thaw’ here

Kiev here, here, here, here, here, here; monks here, here; building of St Sophia here; 12th century here; and Mongol conquest here, here, here, here; as part of Kingdom of Poland here; and Treaty of Andrusovo (1667) here; a new type of religious education develops in here; building of the monument to Prince Volodymyr (1853) here, here, here; cholera epidemic (1907) here; and end of monarchy here; parliament declares Ukraine’s independence (1918) here; Maidan revolution (2014) here, here, here; and Russian invasion (2022) here, here, here

Kievan Rus here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Kipchaks see Polovtsians

Kirill, Patriarch here, here, here

Kirov, Sergei here

Klin here

Kliuchevsky, Vasily: History of Russia here, here, here, here, here

Kliueva, Nina here

Kneller, Sir Godfrey: portraits of Peter the Great here

Kogan, Rita here

Kokovtsov, Vladimir here

Kolchak, Admiral Alexander here, here

kolkhozes see collective farms

Kollontai, Alexandra here

Komi people here

Komsomol (Communist Youth league) here, here, here, here, here

Komuch (SR government) here, here

Konstantin, Grand Duke here, here

Korea/Koreans here, here

korenizatsiia (indigenisation) here

Kornilov, General Lavr here, here, here

Kosova here, here, here

Kostroma: Ipatiev Monastery here; Romanov estate here

Kosygin, Alexei here

Kovno, Polish-Lithuania here

Kozlov here

Kravchuk, Leonid here, here, here

Krivda (goddess) here

Kronstadt, Kotlin Island here; naval base rebellions (1917, 1921) here, here

Krüdener, Baroness de here

krugovaya poruka see collective responsibility

Krupskaya, Nadezhda here

Kuchuk Kainarji, Treaty of (1774) here, here, here

Kuibyshev here

Kuibyshev, Valerian here

kulaks here, here, here, here; ‘kulak operation’ here

Kulikovo, battle of (1380) here, here, here

Kuntsevo: Stalin’s house here

Kurbsky, Prince Andrei here, here

Kurbskys, the here

Kursk here, here, here

Kutuzov, Field Marshal Mikhail here, here, here

Kuznetsov, Mikhail here

labour camps see Gulag

Ladoga, Lake here, here

Ladoga, Old here, here

Laharpe, Frédéric here

Latvia/Latvians here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; see also Baltic states

La Valette, Charles, Marquis de here

Lavrov, Sergei here, here

Law Code (Ulozhenie) (1649) here, here, here

Lefort, Franz here

Leibniz, Gottfried here

Leipzig, Germany: battle (1813) here; 1848 revolt here

LendLease Agreement (1941) here

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich (Ulianov): birth and education here; and brother’s execution here; influences here, here; personality here; ideology here; publishes What Is to Be Done? here; and split in the SD Party here; and execution of imperial family here; failure of uprising due to his indecision here; flees to Finland here; calls for armed uprising here; returns to St Petersburg here; his role in the October Revolution here, here; leads Bolshevik government here; concludes peace with Germany here; wounded in assassination attempt here; brings in New Economic Policy here; bans factionalism here, here; and Stalin here, here, here; his Testament here; illness and death here, here, here; personality cult here, here, here, here; see also Leninism

Leningrad see St Petersburg

Leningrad (journal) here

Leninism here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Leontiev, Konstantin here

Levada, Yuri here

Levada Centre: 2020 poll here

Liberal Democrat Party (Russian) here

Lievens, the here

Likhachev, Dmitry: Russian Culture here

literature and writers here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; Byzantine and Arab here; Church Slavonic here, here; French here; Polish here; translations here

Lithuania/Lithuanians here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; see also Baltic states; Polish-Lithuania

Liubech Conference (1097) here

Livonia here, here, here; battle of Lake Chud (1242) here; War (1558–83) here, here, here, here

Livonian Order of Teutonic Knights here

Lockhart, Robert Bruce here

Lomonosov, Mikhail here; Ancient Russian History here

lubok prints here; The Mice Are Burying the Cat here

Lutovinova, Varvara Petrovna here

Lviv, Ukraine here, here

Lvov, Prince Georgy here, here

Lysenko, Timofei here

Mabetex (company) here

Machiavelli, Niccolò: The Prince here

Magnitogorsk here

Maidan revolution (2014) here, here, here

Makary, Metropolitan of Moscow here, here, here, here

Makhno, Nestor, Commander-in-Chief here

Mamai Khan here

Manchuria here, here

Martov, Yuli here, here

Marx, Karl here, here, here, here

Marxism/Marxists here, here, here, here, here, here

Masurian Lakes, battle of the (1914) here

Mateev, Artamon here

Mazepa, Ivan here

media, the here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; see also television stations

Medvedev, Dmitry here, here

‘memory law’ here

Mensheviks here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; Jews here

Menshikov, Prince Alexander here

Merkel, Angela here

mestnichestvo (placement) here, here

Methodius (monk) here, here

Metternich, Count Klemens von here

Mikhail I, Tsar (1596–1645) here, here, here, here

Mikhail, Prince of Tver here

Mikhail Alexandrovich, Grand Duke here, here

Mikhoels, Solomon here

Milan, Italy: 1848 revolt here

Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) here, here

Miliukov, Pavel here, here

Milošević, Slobodan here

Miloslavskaya, Maria here

Minin, Kuzma here, here, here, here; monument to here

Minsk here, here

Minsk II Accords here

mir (peasant commune) here, here, here

Mlynář, Zdeněk here

Modern History of Russia, 1945–2006, The here

Mokosh (goddess) here, here

Moldavia and Wallachia, United Principalities of here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Moldova here, here

Molodaya Gvardiia (Young Guard) (journal) here

Molotov, Vyacheslav here

monasteries here, here, here, here, here, here

Mongolia here, here

Mongols, the: invasion of Kievan Rus here, here, here, here, here, here; and the Golden Horde here, here, here, here; establish indirect rule over Russia here; institute censuses here, and apanage system here; and Moscow here, here, here, here; dealings with Ivan I of Moscow here; fear of Lithuania here; postal system here; defeated by Prince Dmitry of Moscow at Kulikovo (1380) here, here, here; and sack of Moscow here; and weakening of the Golden Horde here; retreat from the Ugra (1480) here; final defeat by Ivan IV here; views on their impact and legacy here, here; influence on Ivan IV here

Monomakh, Cap of here, here

Monomakh, Vladimir here

Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de: The Spirit of the Laws here

Mordvinian tribesmen here

Morozov, Boris here, here

Moscow here, here, here; and Kievan Rus here; first mention in chronicles (1147) here; myths about here, here, here; rivalry with Tver here, here; and the Mongols here, here, here; and the Church here; defeats Mongols at Kulikovo (1380) here, here, here; sacked by them here; defeats them at River Ugra here; and Mongol influences here, here, here; and crowning of Ivan IV here, here, here; expansion and wealth here, here; and conquest of Kazan here, here; burnt to the ground by Crimeans here; and the pretender tsar Dmitry here; boyar clans swear allegiance to Polish king here; liberated from the Poles by Pozharsky here; rebellion over salt tax here; bureaucracy expands here; and foreigners here; musketeers’ revolt here, here; and Peter the Great here; Jews here; and Napoleon here; and Slavophile intellectuals here; general strike (1905) here; celebrations at the end of the monarchy (1917) here; the Bolsheviks here; becomes capital of Russia (1918) here; and Denikin offensive here; strikes here, here; 1930s transformation here; in World War II here; and postwar reconstruction here; bombing of apartment buildings here; Putin’s unveiling of monument to Grand Prince Vladimir (2016) here, here, here, here, here; victory celebrations (2020) here

Archangel Cathedral here, here; Donskoi Monastery here; Dormition Cathedral here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; Dzerzhinsky statue here; Foreign Ministry here; Hall of Columns here; Jewish Theatre here; Kremlin here, here, here; Lenin Mausoleum here; McDonald’s here; Memorial Society here; Metro here, here; ‘My History’ park here; Novodevichy Convent here; Pogonaya Meadow massacre (1570) here; press here, here; Red Square here, here, here, here, here, here, here; St Basil’s Cathedral here, here, here; Tenth Party Congress here, here; Tomb of the Unknown Soldier here; University here, here, here, here; the White House here, here; World Festival of Youth (1957) here

Moscow Herald here

Moscow River here

Moscow Workers’ Soviet here

MRC see Military Revolutionary Committee

Müller, Gerhard Friedrich here, here, here; Description of the Siberian Kingdom here; Origines gentis et nominis Russorum here; Sammlung Russischer Geschichte here

Münchengrätz Agreement (1833) here

Munich Security Conference (2007) here

Münnichs, the here

Muscovy here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

music and opera here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Muslims here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; see also Ottoman Empire; Turks

Mussorgsky, Modest: The Khovanshchina here

MVD here, here, here

‘My History’ parks here

myths: of Russian origins here, here, here, here, here, here; and Kievan Rus here; Ukrainian here, here, here; recurring themes here; of the tsar here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; of Holy Russia, defender of Christian principles here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; nationalist here, here; of Moscow here, here, here; and Ivan IV here; of Minin and Pozharsky here; and conquest of Siberia here; and the foundation of St Petersburg here; and Catherine II here; and ‘official nationality’ here, here; Pan-Slav here, here, here; and the peasantry here, here; and Lenin here; of Susanin here; Russian belief in here; of Russia as liberator of mankind here; legitimising the Soviet regime here, here, here, here; Putin’s use of here, here, here, here, here

Nagaya, Maria here

Nakhimov, Admiral Pavel here

Napoleon Bonaparte here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Napoleon III (Louis Napoleon) here, here

Narva, Estonia here, here

Naryshkina, Natalia here

Naryshkins, the here

national anthem, Russian here

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) here, here, here, here, here, here

Navalny, Alexei here

NEP see New Economic Policy

‘Nepmen’ here

Nerchinsk, Treaty of here

Nestor (monk) here, here

Neva, River here, here, here

Nevsky, Alexander here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

New Economic Policy (NEP) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

New York: Russian exiles here

New York Times here, here

Nicholas I, Tsar (1796–1855) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Nicholas II, Tsar (1868–1918) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Nikitenko, Alexander here

Nikolaev here

Nikolai Nikolaevich, Grand Duke here

Nikon, Patriarch here, here, here, here

Nizhny Novgorod here, here

NKVD here, here, here, here, here

Noah here

Nogais, the here

nomenklatura here

Norilsk Nickel (company) here

Normanist Controversy, the here

Novaya Zhizn (New Life) (newspaper) here

Novgorod here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; veche (town assembly) here, here

Novi, Alevise: Archangel Cathedral here

Novo-Ogarevo talks (1991) here, here

Novocherkassk: workers’ uprising here

Novoe Vremia (New Times) here, here

Novy Mir (New World) (journal) here, here

nuclear warfare here

Nystad, Treaty of (1721) here

Obolensky, Dimitri here, here

October Manifesto (1905) here, here, here

October Revolution (1917) here, here, here, here, here, here; anniversaries here, here

Octobrists here

Odessa, Ukraine here, here

Ögedai, Khan here, here

OGPU here, here, here, here, here, here, here

oil revenues here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Oka, River here

Okhotsk, Siberia here

Oleg, Prince here

Olga, Princess here

oligarchs here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Omsk here

opera see music and opera

Operation Barbarossa (1941) here

oprichniki (Ivan IV’s private army) here, here, here, here, here

oprichnina (confiscated lands) here, here

Ordzhonikidze, Sergo here

Orel here

Orenburg here

Orgburo (Organisational Bureau) here, here

Orlov, Count Grigory here

Orthodox Christianity see Eastern Orthodox Church

Orwell, George: Nineteen EightyFour here

Ossetia: North here; South here

Ostermanns, the here

Otrepov, Grigory here

Ottoman Empire/Ottomans here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; see also Turkey/Turks

paganism/pagans here, here, here, here, here, here

paintings here, here, here, here, here, here, here; see also icons

Paleologues, the here

Palestine here, here

Palmerston, Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount here

Pan-Slavs here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Panin, General P. I. here

Paris here, here; revolutions here, here, here; Commune (1871) here; Russian exiles here

Paris, Treaty of (1856) here, here

Party Congresses: Second (1903) here; Tenth (1917) here; Eleventh (1922) here; Twelfth (1923) here; Thirteenth (1924) here; Seventeenth (1934) here; Twentieth (1956) here, here, here

Paskevich, Field Marshal Ivan here, here

Pasternak, Boris: Doctor Zhivago here

Patriotic War, the (1812–14) here; Great see World War, Second

Patrushev, Nikolai here

Paul I, Tsar (1754–1801) here, here, here, here

Pavlovsky, Gleb here

peasants: Slav here, here; and religion here, here; and boyars here; and the Mongols here, here, here, here, here; communes (mir) here, here; and the Grand Prince here; flee to the ‘wild lands’ of the south here, here; and collective responsibility here; and pomeshchiki here; their movement is restricted here; and kabala contracts here; and Law Code (1649) here; become serfs here, see serfdom/serfs; take flight here; and Razin rebellion (1670) here; under Peter the Great here, here, here; and Pugachev revolt here; as soldiers here, here, here; Slavophile ideas of here; and Tugenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album here; and Emancipation Decree here; and zemstvos here; Populist belief in here, here; under Alexander III here; and nationalists’ movements here; migrate to towns here; agrarian revolution (1905) here, here, here, here, here; and the Duma here, here; in Kovno here; and Peasant Bank here; oppose break-up of communes here; and World War I here, here, here, here, here; revolution (1917) here, here, here, here, here; First All-Peasant Assembly (1917) here; in the Civil War here, here, here, here, here; uprisings here; and the New Economic Policy here, here, here, here; see also collective farms

Penza here

People’s Will, the (Narodnaya Volia) here, here, here

perestroika (structural reform) here, here

Pereyaslav, Ukraine: Treaty (1654) here

Perm here, here, here

Perun (god) here

Pestel, Colonel Pavel here, here; Russian Truth here

Peter the Great, Tsar (1682–1725) here, here; appearance here, here; travels abroad here, here; establishes new navy here; rebuilds the army here; his reforms here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; war against Sweden here, here; and St Petersburg here, here, here, here; adoption of title ‘Imperator’ here; as Tsar here, here; introduces new flag here; announces new Law of Succession here; Falconet’s equestrian statue of here

Peter II, Metropolitan of Kiev and All Rus here

Peter II, Tsar (1715–30) here

Peter III, Tsar (1728–62) here, here, here, here

Petrashevsky, Mikhail here

Petrograd see St Petersburg

Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies here

Petrov, Andrei here

Petrov, Vladimir: Peter the Great here

Piatakov, Georgy here

Piłsudski, Józef here

plague here, here; see also Black Death

Pobedonostsev, Konstantin here, here

Pogodin, Mikhail here

Pokrovsky, Mikhail here; Russian History here, here

Poland/Poles: at war with Russia here; and Mongols here, here, here; trade with Moscow here; backs pretender tsar Dmitry here, here; and a second false Dmitry here; at war with Sweden here; lays siege to Smolensk here; and Moscow boyars here; at war with Muscovites here, here; and Russo-Polish treaty (1618) here; at war with Cossacks here; Russia backs the Cossacks against here; and the Treaty of Andrusovo (1667) here; and Turkish raids on Ukraine here; as a channel to Russia for Western ideas here; and Tsar Alexei here; and Peter the Great here; and Napoleon here; as intermediary between Paris and St Petersburg here; uprising (1830) here, here; punished by Nicholas I here; and the Organic Statute (1832) here; and the French Republic here; and Alexander II’s Russification here; Socialists here; and Brest-Litovsky Treaty (1918) here; and Russian Civil War here; and Stalin’s false reports of invasion of Ukraine here; and the Great Terror here; and the Nazi-Soviet Pact here, here, here; Katyn massacre here; German invasion (1939) here; Red Army invasion here, here; publishes Khrushchev’s speech here; granted NATO membership here

Poland-Lithuania/Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Politburo here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Polotsk here, here

Polovtsians, the here, here, here, here

Poltava here; battle of (1709) here

Poludnitsa (goddess) here

pomeshchiki (military servitors) here, here, here, here

pomeste system (grants of land) here

Poniatowski, Stanisław here

Populism/Populists here, here, here, here

Poroshenko, Petro, President of Ukraine here, here, here

Potanin, Vladimir here

Potemkin (battleship) here

Potemkin, Prince Grigory here

‘power verticals’/‘vertical power’ here, here, here

Pozharsky, Prince Dmitry here, here, here, here; monument to here

Poznań, Poland here

Prague: 1848 revolt here

Pravda (goddess) here

pravda (justice) here, here

Pravda (newspaper) here, here

Primakov, Yevgeny here

Primary Chronicle here, here, here, here, here

Prokofiev, Sergei here, here

Provisional Governments here, here, here, here, here, here

Prus, ruler of Prussia here

Prussia/Prussians here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Pskov here, here, here, here, here

Pudovkin, Vsevolod: Minin and Pozharsky here

Pugachev, Emelian here, here

Pugachev rebellion (1773–4) here, here, here, here

Pugo, Boris here, here, here

Pushkin, Alexander here; The Bronze Horseman here; The History of Pugachev here; ‘Peter the Great’ here

Pustozersk fort, the Arctic here

Putiatina, Princess here

Putin, Vladimir: birth here; early career here; and the FSB here, here; as successor to Yeltsin here; political system here, here; his views and versions of Russian history here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; and isolation by NATO here, here; his ‘Millennium Manifesto’ (1999) here; dominates TV stations and the media here, here, here; his oligarchs here, here; abolishes elections for regional governors here; imposes ‘power vertical’ here; and ‘sovereign democracy’ here; changes history-teaching in schools here; and ‘My History’ here; foreign policy after 2012 here; and the unveiling of Prince Vladimir’s monument (2016) here, here, here, here, here; and the ‘Russian world’ here; policy towards Ukraine here, here, here; and annexation of Crimea (2014) here, here, here, here, here, here, here; publishes ‘On the Historical Unity of the Ukrainians and the Russians’ (2021) here; and invasion of Ukraine (2022) here

Qashliq here

Radek, Karl here

Radishchev, Alexander here; Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow here

Railway Workers’ Union (Vikzhel) here, here

Rasputin, Grigory here, here, here

Rasputin, Valentin here

Razin, Stepan here

Razin rebellion (1670) here, here

Red Army here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Red Guards here, here, here, here, here

reindeer-herders here

Repin, Ilya: Ivan the Terrible and his Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 here; Manifest of 17 October here

requisitioning here, here, here, here, here, here; of grain here, here, here

Revel see Tallinn

Revolution, Russian (1917) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; and the army here, here, here, here, here, here; see also October Revolution

RIANovosti (news agency) here

Riazan here, here, here, here, here, here

Ribbentrop, Joachim von here

Riga, Latvia here, here, here, here

RimskyKorsakov, Nikolai here

Riurik, Prince here, here

Riurikids here, here, here

Riutin, Martemyan here; ‘Stalin and the Crisis of the Proletarian Dictatorship’ (the Riutin Platform) here, here

Romania/Romanians here, here, here, here; see also Bucharest

Romanova, Anastasia here, here, here

Romanovs, the here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Rörik, Prince here

Roskin, Grigory here

Rostov-Suzdal here, here

Rozhanitsa (goddess) here, here

Rublev, Andrei here, here; Trinity here

Ruffo, Marco and Solari, Pietro Antonio: Hall of Facets here

Rus, the here, here, here, here, here

Russification here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Russo-Japanese war (1904–5) here, here

Russo-Polish treaty (1618) here

Russo-Swedish treaty (1617) here

Ruthenians here

Rykov, Alexei here

Ryzhkov, Nikolai here

Şahin Giray, Khan here

St Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad here; founded by Peter the Great here, here, here, here; the use of French in here, here, here; the nobility here, here, here, here; the Decembrists here; Petrashevsky’s ‘plot’ here; assassination of Alexander II (1881) here; workers petition the tsar here; ‘Bloody Sunday’ (1905) here, here; strike (1905) here; renamed Petrograd (1914) here; strike (1916) here; Russian Revolution (1917) here, here, here, here, here; German bombing here; capital transfers to Moscow here; further strikes (1921) here; and Stalin here, here; Lenin’s body displayed here; renamed Leningrad (1924) here; and World War II here, here; siege (1941–4) here; Putin’s birth (1952) here; renamed St Petersburg (1991) here Academy of Sciences here, here, here, here, here; The Bronze Horseman here, here; Coronation Hall here; equestrian statues of Peter the Great here, and Alexander III here; The Hermitage here; Imperial Theatre here; Memorial Society here; New Lessner machine-building plant here; Palace Square here, here; Peter and Paul Fortress here, here; Russian Academy here; Smolny Institute here, here, here, here; Tauride Palace here, here, here, here; University here; Winter Palace here, here, here, here, here, here; Znamenskaya Square here

saints, Russian see Eastern Orthodox Church

Sakharov, Andrei here

salt tax here, here

Saltykov, Sergei here

Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail here

Saltykovs, the here

Samara here, here

Samarkand, Uzbekistan here

samizdat (self-publishing) here

Samoyeds, the here

Sarai here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Saratov here, here, here, here

Sazonov, Sergei here

Schlözer, August Ludwig von here

schools here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; history teaching in here, here, here, here, here, here, here; and Jewish admission here; military here, here; Soviet here, here, here, here

SDs, the see Social Democratic Labour Party

Second International (1916) here

Serafim of Sarov here

Serbia/Serbs here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

serfdom/serfs here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; factory here; household here; women here; army conscripts here, here, here; abolition of here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Sergiev-Posad here; Holy Trinity Church here

Sergius of Radonezh (monk) here, here

Serov, Valentin: Peter I, the Great here

Sevastopol, Ukraine here; siege of (1854–5) here, here, here

Seven Years’ War here, here

Seversk here

Shakespeare, William: Richard III here

Shliapnikov, Alexander here

Shlisselburg (Nöteborg) Fortress here, here

Shostakovich, Dmitri here

Shuisky, Prince Andrei here, here

Shuisky, Prince Vasily see Vasily IV, Tsar

Shuiskys, the here

Shushkevich, Stanislav here

Siberia here, here, here, here, here, here, here; Ermak’s expedition here; conquest of here; banishment to here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; tribes here, here; Müller’s study here; Decembrists here; army here, here, here; Urals–Siberian method here; Gulag labour camps here, here; oilfields here

Sigismund III Vasa, of Poland here

silk roads here, here

siloviki (‘men of force’) here

Silvester (priest) here

Simbirsk here, here

Simonov, Konstantin: ‘Kill Him!’ here

Slavophiles here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Slavs here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; and Christianity here; and Church Slavonic here, here, here, here, here, here; see also Pan-Slavs

Smith, Adam here

Smolensk here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; monument to Grand Prince Vladimir here

Sobchak, Anatoly here

sobornost (spiritual union) here

Social Democratic Labour Party (the SDs) here, here, here, here, here, here

socialism here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Socialist Realist art here

Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; see also Komuch

Solari, Pietro see Ruffo, Marco

Solovetsky Island here

Solovetsky Monastery here

Soloviev, Vladimir here

Solovyov, Sergei: History of Russia from the Earliest Times here

Solvychegodsk here

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander here, here; Gulag Archipelago here; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich here

Solzhenitsyn, Natalia here

Sophia Alexeevna, Regent of Russia here

Sophia Paleologue here

Sovetskaya Rossiia (newspaper) here

Soviet of Workers’ Deputies here

Soviets here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Speransky, Mikhail here, here

SRs, the see Socialist Revolutionary Party

Staël, Madame Germaine de here

Stakhanov, Alexei/Stakhanovites here, here

Stalin, Joseph here, here; education here; appearance here; personality here, here, here, here; joins Georgian Social Democrats here; ‘a grey blur’ here; in the Civil War here, here; appointed general secretary of the Party by Lenin here, here; his growing power here; relies on OGPU here; purges the opposition here; forms triumvirate with Kamenev and Zinoviev to oppose Trotsky here, here; shocks and outrages Lenin here; abuses his wife here; and Lenin’s Testament here; benefits from the Lenin cult here; his ‘Great Oath’ speech here; gives up goal of exporting revolution here; and the economy here; calls for return to requisitioning here; his war against kulaks here, here; brings in collectivisation of farms here; his FiveYear Plans here, here, here, here, here, here, here; and Gulag labour camps here, here, here; completes the White Sea Canal here; and falsification of history here, here, here; and petitions here; believed in by the people here; and the Riutin Platform here; unhinged by wife’s suicide here; growing opposition to his policies here; and Kirov’s murder here; purges here, here, here, here, here, here, here; and the Great Terror and show trials here, here; delighted by Eisenstein’s films here; pact with Hitler (1939) here, here, here, here, here; and World War II here, here, here, here, here, here; and Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible here, here; on rape of German women by the Red Army here; his victory toast here; and Khrushchev here, here, here; death here; Gorbachev and here, here; Putin and here, here, here, here, here, here; and the Russian people today here, here; his cult here, here, here

Stalingrad see Volgograd

State Council here, here, here, here

Stavropol here

Stepashin, Sergei here

Stephen of Perm here

steppes, the here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Stolypin, Petr here, here, here

Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom’s Cabin here

Streletsky, Dmitry here

streltsy (musketeers) here, here

strikes here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Stroganovs, the here

Sukhanov, Nikolai: chronicle of the Russian Revolution here

Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union here, here, here

Surkov, Vladislav here, here

Susanin, Ivan here

Suslov, Mikhail here

Suvorov, General Alexander here, here

Suzdal here, here, here

Sviatoslav, ruler of Kievan Rus here

Sviazhsk here

Sweden/Swedes here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Syria here

Table of Ranks here

taiga, the here

Tale of Bygone Years see Primary Chronicle

Tale of the Destruction of Riazan by Batu, The here

Tale of the Princes of Vladimir, The here

Tallinn (Revel), Estonia here; Soviet war monument here

Tambov here

Tamerlane see Timur

tamizdat (publishing abroad) here

Tannenberg, battle of (1914) here

Tarkovsky, Andrei: Andrei Rublev here

Tarzan films here

Tatars here, here, here, here, here, here, here; army here, here, here, here, here, here, here; and origins of Russian words here, here; names here, here; Crimean here, here, here, here, here

taxation and tax collection: Khazar here, here; Kiev here, here; Novgorod here, here; Mongol here, here, here, here, here, here; Russian under Ivan I of Moscow here; under Ivan IV here, here; under Godunov here; in Nizhny Novgorod here; under Mikhail I here, here; on salt here, here, here; and collective responsibility here, here, here, here; and restriction on movement of peasants here, here; towards army costs here; poll or ‘soul’ (1718) here, here; under Biron here; and peasant communes here, here; and the zemtsvos here; and famine here; under the Bolsheviks and Lenin here, here; and the New Economic Policy here

Tbilisi/Tiflis, Georgia here, here

Tchaikovsky, Petr here

television stations here, here, here, here

Ternopil, Ukraine here

Teterins, the here

Teutons here

theatre(s) here, here, here

Third Department (of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery) here, here, here; Corps of Gendarmes here, here

Third Element here

Third International here, here

Tiflis see Tbilisi

Tilsit, Treaty of (1807) here

Timashuk, Lidiia here

Timur (Tamerlane) here, here

Tito, President Josip Broz here

Tiumen here

Tkachev, Petr here, here

Tobolsk here, here

Tokayev, KassymJomart, President of Kazakhstan here

Tokhtamysh, Khan here

Tolstoy, Leo here, here, here; Sevastopol Sketches here; War and Peace here, here, here

TOZ (collectives) here, here

trade unions here, here, here, here, here, here

Transylvania here, here

Trinity Lavra of St Sergius here

Triple Entente (1907–17) here, here

Trotsky, Leon here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Trubetskoi, Prince Nikolai here

Trudoviks here

Trump, President Donald here

Tsaritsyn here, here

tsars here, here, here, here, here, here, here; ‘littlefather’ (tsar-batiushka) here, here, here, here, here, here, here; petitioning of here, here, here, here; ‘pretender’ here, here, here

Tsarskoe Selo, palace at here, here

Tukhachevsky, Marshal Mikhail here

Tula here

tundra, the here, here

Tungus, the here

Turgenev, Ivan here, here, here, here, here; Sketches from a Hunter’s Album here

Turkey/Turks, the here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Turkic tribes here, here, here, here, here, here

Tushino here; rebellion (1905) here, here

Tvardovsky, Alexander: Vasily Terkin here

Tver here, here, here, here, here

Tyutchev, Fedor here

Uborevich, General Ieronim here

Udmurt here

Ugra, battle of the (1480) here

Ukraine/Ukrainians: as the Rus homeland here; and Mongol invasion here, here; as part of Poland-Lithuania here; and the Treaties of Pereyaslav (1654) and Andrusovo (1667) here; Turkish invasions here; as channel to Russia for Western ideas here; and the Russian Church here; and Russo-Swedish war (1701–21) here; under Russian rule here, here; as minority in Galicia (‘Ruthenians’) here, here; with a thriving culture in Lemberg (Lviv) here; and Russification campaign here; peasant uprisings (1905) here; and cholera epidemic (1907) here; of economic importance to Russia here; signs peace treaty with Germany and declares independence (1918) here; plundered by Austrian and German troops here; and the Russian Civil War here, here; peasant wars here; ‘terror-famine’ (1932–3) here; the Red Army’s war against nationalists here; and ethnic cleansing by NKVD here; postwar Russification by Stalin here; and Yakovlev here; independence movement here; and Gorbachev’s union treaty here, here; votes for independence here; and the collapse of the Soviet Union here, here; Putin’s views on here, here, here, here, here; censorship of historians here; ‘Orange Revolution’ (2004–5) here; Maidan revolution (2014) here, here, here; and Russia’s annexation of the Crimea (2014) here, here, here; Putin’s war against here; and NATO’s offer of membership here, here; and Putin’s unveiling of the monument to Grand Prince Vladimir (2016) here, here, here; Russian invasion (2022) here; see also Crimea, the; Donbass, the; Kiev

Ulianov, Alexander here, here

Union of Liberation here

Union of Unions here

United Nations here, here, here

United Nobility (landowners’ organisation) here

United Russia Party here, here

United States of America here, here, here, here, here; and Native Americans here; Belinsky on here; LendLease Agreement (1941–5) here; and Israel here; Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) here; nuclear arms race here; see also NATO

universities: Russian here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; and Jews here; Kazan here; Polish here, here

Ural mountains here, here, here, here, here, here

Urals-Siberian method here

Ustiug here

Uvarov, Sergei here

Uzbek, Khan here, here

Uzbekistan here

Vasily III, Tsar (1479–1533) here, here, here, here

Vasily IV, Tsar (1552–1612) here, here

Vasnetsov, Viktor: Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible here

Venice, Italy here; 1848 revolt here

Vernadsky, George here; A History of Russia here; The Mongols and Russia here

Viatka here, here

Victory Day (May 9th) here, here

Vienna here, here; battle of (1683) here; Congress (1814) 1814, here; 1848 revolt here

Vikings, the here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Vikshel see Railway Workers’ Union

Vilnius (Vilna), Lithuania here, here

Virgin Lands campaign (1954–63) here

Vitebsk here, here

Vladimir here; destroyed and conquered by Mongols here, here, here, here; grand princes of here, here, here, here; monument to Grand Prince Vladimir here

Vladimir, Grand Prince of Kievan Rus here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; unveiling of monument to (Moscow, 2016) here, here, here, here, here

Vladimir-Volhynia here

Vlasius, St here

Volga, River here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Volgograd (Stalingrad) here, here, here; Mother Russia Calls (statue) here

Volhynia here

Volos (god) here

Voloshin, Max here

Voltaire (Arouet) here, here, here, here

Vor (falso Tsar Dmitry) here

Voronezh here, here

vydvizhentsy (factory workers) here

Wałęsa, Lech here

Wallachia see Moldavia and Wallachia

walrus-hunters here

Warsaw, Poland here, here; 1830 revolution here, here; University students here

Warsaw Pact countries here, here

White (anti-Bolshevik) army here, here, here, here

White Sea Canal (Belomorkanal) here

Wilhelm II, Kaiser here, here

Witte, Count Sergei here, here

Władisław IV Vasa, king of Poland here

Władysław, Prince here

women here, here, here, here; serf here, here

Women’s Battalion of Death here

Workers’ Opposition here, here, here, here

World Wars: First here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here; Second here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Wrangel, General Petr here

Writers’ Union here

Yagoda, Genrikh here, here

Yaik Host here

Yakir, General Iona here

Yakovlev, Alexander here, here, here

Yakuts, the here

Yakutsk, Siberia here

Yaik Cossacks here

Yanaev, Gennady here, here

Yanukovich, Viktor here, here, here

Yaroslav, Prince here

Yeltsin, Boris here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Yezhov, Nikolai here, here

Yudenich, General Nikolai here

Yukos (oil company) here, here

Yuri Vasilievich of Uglich here

Yushchenko, Viktor here

Yusupov, Felix here

Zaporozhian Host, the here, here

Zelensky, Volodymyr, President of Ukraine here, here, here, here

Zemgor (network of public bodies) here

zemstvos (rural councils) here, here, here, here

Zhdanov, Andrei here, here, here

Zhukov, General Georgy here, here

Zinoviev, Grigory here, here, here, here, here

‘Zinoviev Letter’ here

Zoshchenko, Mikhail here

Zosima (monk) here

Zubov, Alexei: The Ceremonial Entry of the Russian Troops to Moscow … after … the Battle of Poltava here

Zvenigorod here

Zvezda (journal) here

Zyuganov, Gennady here

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people: Peter Straus, Melanie Jackson, Stephen Edwards and the rest of the team at RCW; Stella Tillyard and Christopher Wyld, the first readers of my early draft; Alexis Kirschbaum and her team at Bloomsbury – Jasmine Horsey, Stephanie Rathbone, Lauren Whybrow, Jonny Coward, Peter James, the copy-editor, Mike Athanson, the map-maker, Jo Carlill, the picture researcher, Catherine Best and Genista Tate-Alexander; and at Metropolitan my beloved editor, Sara Bershtel and her team – Brian Lax, Carolyn O’Keefe and Christopher Sergio.

A Note on the Author

Orlando Figes is an award-winning author and historian, who has held teaching posts at Birkbeck College, University of London and Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He was born in London in 1959 and studied History at the University of Cambridge. Figes is the bestselling author of nine books on Russian and European history, including Natasha’s Dance and A People’s Tragedy. His books have been translated into over thirty languages.

Plate Images

Putin opens the monument to Grand Prince Vladimir – in his words the ‘founder of the modern Russian state’ – near the Moscow Kremlin on November 4, 2016. It is a metre taller than the nineteenth-century statue of Volodymyr in Kiev where the grand prince is seen as the founder of ‘the European state of Rus-Ukraine’.

Viktor Vasnetsov, The Invitation of the Varangians: Rurik and his Brothers Arrive at Old Ladoga (1912), a fanciful depiction of the Normanist foundation myth in which the Viking leader was invited by the Slavs to establish order in their lands.

The Church of St Sophia, Kiev, built in the reign of Grand Prince Yaroslav (1019–54). It is closely modelled on the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, the source of Russia’s Orthodox Christianity.

The Iconostasis, or wall of icons, separates the altar from the main part of the church – in this case the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral, where Russia’s tsars were crowned. The placement of the icons is symbolically significant. The Mother of God and Christ Pantokrator, the most sacred icons, are on the left and right, respectively, of the ‘royal doors’, a symbol of the gates of Jerusalem, in the middle of the screen.

An example of the birch-bark writing found by archaeologists in Novgorod.

Andrei Rublev’s Trinity (between 1408 and 1425), a supreme example of the Russian icon-painting tradition. Seeing is believing for the Orthodox. Russians pray with their eyes open, their gaze fixed on an icon, which serves as a window onto the divine sphere.

The Solovetsky Monastery. Founded on an island in the White Sea in 1463, the monastery was used as a prison camp after 1917.

Part of the Kremlin complex. The Dormition Cathedral (centre) and the Hall of Facets (left) were built by Italian architects in the late fifteenth century but were later Russified.

The Blessed Host of the Heavenly Tsar was painted in the 1550s to commemorate the conquest of Kazan by Ivan the Terrible. Known as the Church Militant, it is almost four metres in length. The icon shows the mounted figure of Ivan following the Archangel Michael in a procession of Russian troops from the hell-like burning city of Kazan to Moscow, depicted here to resemble Jerusalem, where they are welcomed by the Mother of God with the infant Jesus. It was a statement of Moscow’s mythic status as the Third Rome, the last true seat of Christianity, and of Ivan’s claim of descent from the Byzantine emperors.

Vasily Surikov, Ermak’s Conquest of Siberia (1895). Armed with muskets, Ermak’s Cossacks are too strong for the Tatars with their bows and arrows in this reimagination of the Russian capture of Qashliq, the capital of the Siberian khanate.

Ilya Repin, Ivan the Terrible and his Son Ivan on 16 November 1581 (1885). The remorseful tsar, haunted by his own destructive terror, captured the imagination of many artists from the nineteenth century.

Viktor Vasnetsov, Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible (1897), an iconic image of the ‘Russian tsar’, terrible and fierce with an all-seeing eye.

Tsar Alexei (unknown artist, 1670s), one of the first portraits of a tsar known to bear a likeness to the subject.

Putin at the Minin and Pozharsky monument, a symbol of the people’s sacrifice united by religion and devotion to the motherland.

Valentin Serov, Peter I the Great (1907). Peter was a man in a hurry. Almost seven feet in height, he walked with giant, rapid strides, leaving his advisers far behind.

Godfrey Kneller, Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia (1698), a portrait presented by the tsar to the King of England William III during his Grand Embassy. The European image of the tsar, dressed in armour with a Western crown and cloak and imperial regalia, represents a stark contrast to the portrait of Alexei, Peter’s father, painted only twenty years earlier.

Alexei Zubov, The Ceremonial Entry of the Russian Troops to Moscow on December 21, 1709 after their Victory in the Battle of Poltava (1711). Moscow here is reimagined in the form of ancient Rome. None of the triumphant arches in the illustration existed.

The Mice are Burying the Cat (Lubok print, c.1760), a popular satire on the foreign manners of the deceased Tsar Peter.

Vigilius Eriksen, Equestrian Portrait of Catherine II (1729–96) the Great of Russia (18th century). Catherine’s love of horses gave rise to the absurd myth that she was killed by one in the act of copulation.

The Bronze Horseman, Étienne-Maurice Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great (1782), a source of many myths about St Petersburg and the nature of imperial power in Russia.

Ilya Repin, 17 October 1905 (1907), an idealistic image of the people’s revolutionary unity.

Peasants of a northern Russian village, 1890s. Note the lack of shoes and the uniformity of their clothing and their houses. This was the ‘communal harmony’ imagined by the Slavophiles and Populists.

Ivanovo textile mill, 1905. Women and children were heavily employed in the textile industry.

Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra with their haemophiliac son, the tsarevich Alexei, during the Romanov tercentenary celebrations of 1913 in Moscow. The jubilee cemented the Romanov myth of a mystical union between tsar and people.

That myth collapsed in the revolution of February 1917, when Romanov symbols and statues were destroyed. The head here belonged to a statue of Alexander III in Moscow.

Fedor Shurpin, Morning of our Motherland (1948), a classic example of socialist realist portraiture in the service of the leader cult. Stalin’s gaze is fixed ahead, beyond the frame, to a future only he can see.

Irakli Toidze, Mother Russia Calls (1941). The mother shows a military oath and calls on Russia’s sons to defend her from the enemy.

A United Russia party electoral poster (2003). The map of Russia is filled with portraits of historic Russian figures, including Stalin – the first time he appeared in Putin’s historical mythology.

Part of Alexander Nevsky’s exhibit in the St Petersburg ‘My History’ park. The panels on the left emphasise the role of Nevsky in defending Russia from ‘the aggression of the West’, while those on the right show his statesmanship in forging new alliances with the Mongols and Asia.

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