Orlando Figes - The Story of Russia

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