The Story of Russia
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- $279.00
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- $279.00
Publisher Description
“This is the essential backstory, the history book that you need if you want to understand modern Russia and its wars with Ukraine, with its neighbors, with America, and with the West.”
—Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Democracy and Red Famine
Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews
From “the great storyteller of Russian history” (Financial Times), a brilliant account of the national mythologies and imperial ideologies that have shaped Russia’s past and politics—essential reading for understanding the country today
The Story of Russia is a fresh approach to the thousand years of Russia’s history, concerned as much with the ideas that have shaped how Russians think about their past as it is with the events and personalities comprising it. No other country has reimagined its own story so often, in a perpetual effort to stay in step with the shifts of ruling ideologies.
From the founding of Kievan Rus in the first millennium to Putin’s war against Ukraine, Orlando Figes explores the ideas that have guided Russia’s actions throughout its long and troubled existence. Whether he's describing the crowning of Ivan the Terrible in a candlelit cathedral or the dramatic upheaval of the peasant revolution, he reveals the impulses, often unappreciated or misunderstood by foreigners, that have driven Russian history: the medieval myth of Mother Russia’s holy mission to the world; the imperial tendency toward autocratic rule; the popular belief in a paternal tsar dispensing truth and justice; the cult of sacrifice rooted in the idea of the “Russian soul”; and always, the nationalist myth of Russia’s unjust treatment by the West.
How the Russians came to tell their story and to revise it so often as they went along is not only a vital aspect of their history; it is also our best means of understanding how the country thinks and acts today. Based on a lifetime of scholarship and enthrallingly written, The Story of Russia is quintessential Figes: sweeping, revelatory, and masterful.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"No other country has reimagined its past so frequently," writes historian Figes (The Europeans) in this rich and immersive look at how Russia's national myths are "continuously reconfigured and repurposed to suit its present needs and reimagine its future." Examining Kievan Rus ruler Grand Prince Vladimir's baptism into the Eastern Orthodox Church in 988 and Moscow's emergence, in Russian Orthodox Church doctrine, as the "last true seat of the Christian faith" after the fall of Constantinople in the 15th century, Figes asserts that Russia's leaders have used these and other legends to rewrite history according to their political agendas. He also details how Catherine the Great supported claims that Russians were descended from Vikings in order to defend autocracy and promote her imperialist ambitions, and traces the mystical notion of the "Russian soul"—"a universal spirit of Christian love and brotherhood innate only in the Russian people, whose providential mission was to save the world from egotism, greed and all the other Western sins"—to Nikolai Gogol's novel Dead Souls. Figes's fluid prose ("Nobles gave up Clicquot and Lafite for kvas and vodka, haute cuisine for cabbage soup," he quips in describing how Russian aristocrats reacted to the French Revolution) keeps the jam-packed narrative from getting bogged down in intricate historical matters. Russophiles will savor this illuminating survey.
