The Story of Russia

For Stephanie.

Again. Always.

By the same author

Peasant Russia, Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution, 1917–21

A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924

Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (with Boris Kolonitskii)

Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia

Crimea: The Last Crusade

Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag

Revolutionary Russia, 1891–1991

The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture

Contents

Introduction

1 Origins

2 The Mongol Impact

3 Tsar and God

4 Times of Trouble

5 Russia Faces West

6 The Shadow of Napoleon

7 An Empire in Crisis

8 Revolutionary Russia

9 The War on Old Russia

10 Motherland

11 Ends

Notes

Picture Credits

Index

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Author

Plate Images

Introduction

On a cold and grey November morning, in 2016, a small crowd gathered on a snow-cleared square in front of the Kremlin in Moscow. They were there to witness the unveiling of a monument to Grand Prince Vladimir, the ruler of Kievan Rus, ‘the first Russian state’, between 980 and 1015. According to legend, Vladimir was baptised in the Crimea, then part of the Byzantine Empire, in 988, thus beginning the conversion of his people to the Eastern Orthodox Church. Russia’s main religious leaders – the patriarch of Moscow and All-Russia, the Catholic ordinariate, the grand mufti, the chief rabbi and the head of the Buddhist Sangha – were all in attendance in their multicoloured robes.

The bronze figure, bearing cross and sword, stood at over twenty metres tall. It was the latest in a long series of elephantine shrines to Vladimir, all erected since the fall of Communism in the same kitsch ‘Russian’ national style developed in the nineteenth century. Other Russian towns – Belgorod, Vladimir, Astrakhan, Bataisk and Smolensk – had built monuments to the grand prince with funding from the state and public subscriptions. The Moscow statue was financed by the Ministry of Culture, a military history society and a motorcycle club.1

Another Vladimir, President Putin, gave the opening address. Even as he spoke he managed to look bored. He seemed to want the ceremony to be done as soon as possible – perhaps the reason why it started earlier than planned, when the film director Fedor Bondarchuk, who had vocally supported the recent Russian annexation of Ukrainian Crimea, invited Vladimir Vladimirovich to the microphone. Reading in a flat tone from his script, Putin noted the symbolism of the date for this unveiling, 4 November, Russia’s Day of National Unity. The grand prince, he proclaimed, had ‘gathered and defended Russia’s lands’ by ‘founding a strong, united and centralised state, incorporating diverse peoples, languages, cultures and religions into one enormous family’. The three modern countries that could trace their origins to Kievan Rus – Russia, Belarus and Ukraine – were all members of this family, Putin continued. They were a single people, or nation, sharing the same Christian principles, the same culture and language, which, he suggested, formed the Slavic bedrock of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. His point was echoed by the patriarch Kirill, who spoke next. If Vladimir had chosen to remain a pagan, or had converted only for himself, ‘there would be no Russia, no great Russian Empire, no contemporary Russia’.

Natalia Solzhenitsyn, the writer’s widow, gave the third and final speech, short and different in tone. The traumatic history of Russia’s twentieth century had, she said, divided the country, and ‘of all our disagreements, none is more divisive than our past’. She ended with a call to ‘respect our history’, which meant not just taking pride in it but ‘honestly and bravely judging evil, not justifying it or sweeping it under the carpet to hide it from view’.2 Putin looked uncomfortable.

The Ukrainians were furious. They had their own statue of the grand prince, Volodymyr as they call him. It was built in 1853, when Ukraine had been part of the Russian Empire, high up on the right bank of the Dnieper River overlooking Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the statue had became a symbol of the country’s independence from Russia. Within minutes of the ceremony’s closing in Moscow, Ukraine’s official Twitter account posted a picture of the Kiev monument with a tweet in English: ‘Don’t forget what [the] real Prince Volodymyr monument looks like.’ The Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, elected in the wake of the 2014 Maidan revolution, accused the Kremlin of appropriating Ukraine’s history, comparing its ‘imperial’ behaviour to the Russian annexation of the Crimea, part of sovereign Ukraine, just before his election.3

Kiev and Moscow had been fighting over Volodymyr/Vladimir for several years. The monument in Moscow had been made a metre taller than the one in Kiev, as if to assert the primacy of Russia’s claim to the grand prince. While Putin had enlisted Vladimir as the founder of the modern Russian state, the Ukrainians claimed Volodymyr as their own, the ‘creator of the medieval European state of Rus-Ukraine’, as he had been described by Poroshenko in a 2015 decree on the millennium of the grand prince’s death in 1015 (the fact that the term ‘Ukraine’ would not appear in written sources until the end of the twelfth century – and then only in the sense of okraina, an old Slav word for ‘periphery’ or ‘borderland’ – was conveniently overlooked). A few months later, Poroshenko added that Volodymyr’s decision to baptise Kievan Rus had been ‘not only a cultural or political decision, but a European choice’ by which Kiev had joined the Christian civilisation of Byzantium.4 The message was clear: Ukraine wanted to be part of Europe, not a Russian colony.

Both sides were calling on the history of Kievan Rus – a history they share – to reimagine narratives of national identity they could use for their own nationalist purposes. Historically, of course, it makes little sense to talk of either ‘Russia’ or ‘Ukraine’ as a nation or a state in the tenth century (or indeed at any time during the medieval period). What we have in the conflict over Volodymyr/Vladimir is not a genuine historical dispute, but two incompatible foundation myths.

The Kremlin’s version – that the Russians, the Ukrainians and the Belarusians were all originally one nation – was invoked to validate its claim to a ‘natural’ sphere of interest (by which it meant a right of interference) in Ukraine and Belarus. Like many Russians of his generation, schooled in Soviet views of history, Putin never really recognised the independence of Ukraine. As late as 2008, he told the US president that Ukraine was ‘not a real country’ but a historic part of greater Russia, a borderland protecting Moscow’s heartlands from the West. By 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