Orlando Figes - The Story of Russia

this imperial logic Russia was entitled to defend itself against Western encroachments into Ukraine. Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, the start of a long war against Ukraine, derived from this dubious reading of the country’s history. The invasion was Russia’s response to the ‘putsch’ in Kiev, as the Kremlin called the Maidan uprising, which had begun as a popular revolt against the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovich after it had stalled negotiations with the European Union for an Association Agreement promising to bring Ukraine into the Western sphere. Poroshenko meanwhile used the myth of Ukraine’s ‘European choice’ to legitimise the revolution, which had brought him into power, and his later signing of that EU agreement. The people of Ukraine had made their ‘European choice’ in the Maidan uprising.

‘Who controls the past … controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,’ George Orwell wrote in Nineteen EightyFour.5 The maxim is more true for Russia than for any other country in the world. In Soviet times, when Communism was its certain destiny and history was adjusted to reflect that end, there was a joke, which perhaps Orwell had in mind: ‘Russia is a country with a certain future; it is only its past that is unpredictable.’

No other country has reimagined its own past so frequently; none has a history so subjected to the vicissitudes of ruling ideologies. History in Russia is political. Drawing lessons from the country’s past has always been the most effective way to win an argument about future directions and policies. All the great debates about the country’s character and destiny have been framed by questions about history. The controversy between the Westernisers and the Slavophiles, which dominated Russia’s intellectual life in the nineteenth century, came down to a conflict over history. For those who looked to the West for their inspiration, Russia had been strengthened by the Westernising reforms introduced by Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century; but according to the Slavophiles, Russia’s native culture and traditions, its national cohesion, had been undermined by Peter’s imposition of alien Western ways on the Russians.

Today the role of history in such debates is more important than ever. In Putin’s system, where there are no left–right party divisions, no competing ideologies to frame debate, and no publicly agreed meanings for key concepts like ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’, the discourse of politics is defined by ideas of the country’s past. Once the regime lays its meaning on an episode from Russian history, that subject is politicised. This is nothing new. Soviet historians were even more the hostages to changes in the Party Line, particularly under Stalin, when history was falsified to elevate his own significance and discredit his rivals. Some were forced to ‘correct’ their work, while others had their works removed from libraries or were banned from publishing again.

Even before 1917, history was carefully censored. It was a question not just of preventing the publication of ideas and facts that could be politically dangerous (anything that portrayed the autocracy unfavourably) but of making sure that the official story of the country’s past was not undermined in a way that challenged current policies. Ukrainian historians were particularly closely watched because of their presumed sympathy for European principles. They were not allowed to publish in Ukrainian, encourage nationalist feelings for Ukraine, or to promote a sense of grievance against Russia.6

Beyond such controlling narratives, history-writing in Russia, since its beginning in medieval chronicles, has been intertwined in mythical ideas – the myths of ‘Holy Russia’, the ‘holy tsar’, the ‘Russian soul’, Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’ and so on. These myths became fundamental to the Russians’ understanding of their history and national character. They have often guided – and misguided – Western policies and attitudes towards Russia. To understand contemporary Russia we need to unpack these myths, explain their historical development and explore how they informed that country’s actions and identity.

The great cultural historian of Russian myths, Michael Cherniavsky, proffered a persuasive explanation for their extraordinary power and resilience over many centuries:

It has been observed by many that myths, rather than approximating reality, tend to be in direct contradiction to it. And Russian reality was ‘unholy’ enough to have produced the ‘holiest’ myths of them all. The greater the power of the government, the more extreme was the myth required to justify it and excuse submission to it; the greater the misery of the Russian people, the more extreme was the eschatological jump the myth had to provide so as to justify the misery and transcend it.7

Many writers have observed the Russian people’s need for transcendental myths promising a better version of Russia. In Dostoevsky’s novels, where suffering and salvation are such frequent themes, it appears as the essence of the Russian character. The endurance of these myths explains much in Russia’s history: the lasting force of Orthodox beliefs; the people’s search for a holy tsar, the embodiment of their ideals, to deliver them from injustice; their dreams of building heaven on this earth, a revolutionary utopia, even when this dream turned out to be the nightmare of the Stalinist regime.

All of which is to explain why this book is called The Story of Russia. It is as much about the ideas, myths and ideologies that have shaped the country’s history, about the ways the Russians have interpreted their past, as it is about the events, institutions, social groups, artists, thinkers and leaders that have made that history.

The book begins in the first millennium, when Russia’s lands were settled by the Slavs, and ends with Putin, in the third, examining the myths of Russian history which he has used to bolster his authoritarian regime. Its underlying argument is simply put: Russia is a country held together by ideas rooted in its distant past, histories continuously reconfigured and repurposed to suit its present needs and reimagine its future. How the Russians came to tell their story – and to reinvent it as they went along – is a vital aspect of their history. It is the underlying framework of this history.

The cult of the grand prince Vladimir, ‘Equal of the Apostles’, as he’s called, is an illustration of this reinvention of the past. Almost nothing about him is known. There are no contemporary documents, only later chronicles by monks, hagiographic legends of his conversion, which served as a sacred myth legitimising his descendants, the rulers of Kievan Rus. Vladimir was one of many princes to be made a saint in the medieval period. But it was only later, from the sixteenth century, that his cult assumed a more important status, when Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) promoted it as the basis of his bogus claim, as Moscow’s tsar, to be the sole legitimate successor to the Kievan rulers and the emperors of Byzantium. The myth was used as part of Russia’s struggle against Poland and Lithuania, which possessed parts of what had once been Kievan Rus. From Ivan’s reign, Vladimir was hailed as ‘the first Russian tsar’, the holy ‘gatherer of the Russian lands’, in a legendary narrative whose purpose was to trace the roots of Moscow’s growing empire to Kievan Rus and Byzantium as its sacred foundations.8

This foundation myth was fundamental to the Romanovs, who had no descendance from the Kievan princes on which to base their fragile

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