orlando figes the story of russia review

The marriage of Prince Vladimir of Kyiv to Anna, daughter of Byzantine emperor Romanos II, was not, however, the unique concession by Byzantium that Braithwaite thinks Konstantine VIII’s daughter Zoë would have married the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III had he not died before she arrived in Italy. Braithwaite does mention that the Cossacks who colonised and conquered Siberia did occasionally ‘exterminate’ indigenous tribes Figes graphically describes the brutal campaigns that were as deadly to the Siberian peoples as the killings in America by Spanish conquistadores or American soldiers.īoth Braithwaite and Figes pay due attention to the influence of Byzantium and, later, of the Mongol ‘yoke’ on Russia’s development. Perhaps this leads Braithwaite to doubt, when the evidence is not quite irrefutable, the criminality of Peter the Great murdering his son, Catherine the Great her husband, or Alexander I conniving at the murder of his father.

Sometimes compression makes Braithwaite enigmatic you would have to know Old Norse to understand why the medieval ethnonym Rus might derive via Finnic from the Swedish ruothkarlar, ‘fellows who row’.īraithwaite admits that he cannot rid his survey of a streak of optimism, despite ending with the horrors of Putin’s attack on the Ukraine: ‘I hang on to the golden image of the Firebird, which flits through the dark forests of Russian folklore to symbolise the hope that Russia will see better days.’ Braithwaite imbibed the atmosphere of Moscow at the end of the 1980s, when perestroika made Russians bolder about expressing their opinions to foreign diplomats and kitchen-table warmth and ravenous intellectual curiosity swept away, for a while, the notorious Muscovite glumness. It is chronological, with brief excursions into subjects such as the arts and rather disorienting comparisons of historical events with contemporary developments (Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great do not help us understand Putin). Following Mark Galeotti’s Shorter History, which appeared in May, we have two apparently similar surveys, one by the former ambassador Rodric Braithwaite (who can be said to love Russia even better than he knows it) and the other by the flamboyant historian Orlando Figes (who can be said to know Russia more than he loves it).īraithwaite provides a readable, if sometimes bland narrative. But in the age of Wikipedia, the small mammals supersede the dinosaurs.

The history of a country with over 1,000 years’ history, occupying at one stage a sixth of the earth’s surface, is harder to write in 250 than in 2,500 pages. The era of large tomes about Russia has given way to shorter overviews, often with a personal narrative bias.

Poster of the ‘Birth of the Soviets and the Different Organs of Soviet Power’, depicting the hierarchical organisation of Soviet Power, c.

Orlando figes the story of russia review