The oldest book in Russia does not speak with one voice. It roars and whimpers, mutters and moans, laughs and whispers, prays and brays, in progressively quieter tones. In July 2000, archaeologists excavating one of the oldest quarters of one of the oldest cities in Russia—Novgorod, once known as Lord Novgorod or Novgorod the Great—discovered three wooden boards, coated with wax, that together once were bound together as a book. According to carbon dating and other assessments, they were from somewhere between 988 and 1030 AD. Scratched onto the wax tablets are two psalms. This is a palimpsest, though, a document that has been used and reused, time after time, over decades, and yet on which the earlier writings are still just about visible. Painstaking work by the Russian linguist Andrei Zaliznyak uncovered a bewildering array of different writings once etched into the wax, thousands of them, from the “Spiritual Instruction for the Son from a Father and a Mother” to the beginning of the Apocalypse of John, a list of the Church Slavonic alphabet, even a treatise “On Virginity.”
This is wholly fitting.
Russia is a country with no natural borders, no single tribe or people, no true central identity. Its very scale astounds—it stretches across 11 time zones, from the European fortress-region of Kaliningrad, now cut off from the rest of the Motherland, all the way to the Bering Strait, just 82 kilometers (51 miles) from Alaska. Combined with the inaccessibility of many of its regions and the scattered nature of its population, this helps explain why maintaining central control has been such a challenge, and why losing that grip on the country such a terror for its rulers. I once met a (retired) KGB officer who admitted that “We always thought it was all or nothing: either we held the country in a tight fist, or else it would all fall apart.” I suspect his predecessors, from tsarist officers to early medieval princes, had much the same concerns—and Putin’s officials, even with all the advances of modern communications, certainly do today.
Its position at the crossroads of Europe and Asia also means that Russia is everyone’s perennial “other,” with Europeans considering it Asian and vice versa. Its history has been shaped from without. It has been invaded by outsiders, from Vikings to Mongols, crusading Teutonic orders to the Poles, Napoleon’s French to Hitler’s Germans. Even when not physically beset, it has been shaped by external cultural forces, forever looking beyond its borders for everything from cultural capital to technological innovation. It has also responded to its lack of clear frontiers by a steady process of expansion, bringing new ethnic, cultural and religious identities into the mix.
Russians are thus themselves a palimpsest people, citizens of a patchwork nation that more than most shows these external influences in every aspect of life. Their language is testament to this. A railway station is called a vokzal, for example, after London’s Vauxhall station, the result of an unfortunate translation mishap when an awestruck Russian delegation was visiting nineteenth-century England. At the time, though, the Russian elite spoke French, so they will nonetheless load their bagazh onto their kushet sleeper car. In Odessa, to the south, streets were named in Italian because that was the common trading language of the Black Sea; in Birobidzhan on the Chinese border, by contrast, the local language is still to this day Yiddish, from when Stalin sought to encourage Soviet Jews to resettle there in the 1930s. In the fortified kremlin of Kazan, there is both an Orthodox cathedral and a Muslim mosque, while shamans bless oil pipelines in the far north.
Of course, all peoples are compounds of different faiths, cultures and identities to greater or lesser extent. In an age when the curry is Britain’s favorite dish, when the Académie française continues to fight its losing battle to keep French free of foreign words, and when more than one in eight US citizens are foreign-born, this is surely a given. But three things are striking about Russia’s experience. The first is the sheer depth and variety of this dynamic, magpie appropriation of outside influences. The second is the specific ways in which successive layers have built upon each other to create this particular country and culture. All nations may be compounds, but the ingredients and the ways they mix vary widely. The third is the Russian response to this process.
Conscious—often self-conscious—of this fluid, crossbred identity, the Russians responded by generating a series of national myths to deny or celebrate it. Indeed, the very foundation of what we now call Russia has become shrouded in such a national “Just So” story, as I will discuss in chapter one, with conquest by Viking outsiders rewritten as the conquered themselves inviting the invaders in. Since then there has been a stream of such legends, from the way Moscow became both Christian and the “Third Rome,” cradle of true Christendom (after the first fell to the barbarians and the “Second Rome,” Byzantium, to Islam), to today’s attempts by the Kremlin to present Russia as the bastion of traditional social values and a bulwark against an American-dominated world order.
The Mongols conquered Russia in the thirteenth century and when their power ebbed, their most efficient quisling allies, the princes of Moscow, reinvented themselves as their nation’s greatest champions. Time and again, Russia’s rulers would edit the past in the hope of building the future they wanted, typically by scavenging the cultural or political myths and symbols they needed. The tsars co-opted the symbols of glorious Byzantium but, in this case, the double-headed eagle of empire looked west, as well as south. Over the centuries, Russia’s complex relationship with the West would become increasingly crucial. Sometimes this meant adopting ideas and adapting values to fit, from Tsar Peter the Great ordering Russians to shave their chins in European style (or pay a special “beard tax”) to the Soviets building a whole society on their notion of an ideology that Karl Marx had envisaged applied to Germany and Britain. Sometimes, it meant a self-conscious determination to reject Western influences, even by redefining the past, such as by ignoring all the archaeological evidence that the origins of this land came with Viking invaders. Yet it never meant ignoring the West.
Today, hoping to be able to find a narrative allowing them to pick the aspects of the West they like—iPhones and London penthouses without progressive income tax and the rule of law—a new elite has again begun trying to define themselves and their country as suits their convenience. Not always successfully and not at everyone else’s convenience, though: over time they came to question not so much their place in the world as the way that world was treating them. This is at the heart of the process that led to the rise of Vladimir Putin, and his evolution from an essentially open-minded pragmatist to the nationalist war leader who annexed Crimea in 2014 and stirred up an undeclared conflict in southeastern Ukraine. This has become a country in which reimagining history has become not just a national pastime but an industry. Exhibitions chart the lineages of modern policy back to the medieval era, as if in a single, unbroken evolution. The shelves of bookshops groan with revisionist histories and school textbooks are being rewritten in line with new orthodoxies. Statues of Lenin rub shoulders with those of tsars and saints, as if there are no contradictions in the visions of Russia they embodied.
The basic theme of this book, then, is to explore the history of this fascinating, bizarre, glorious, desperate, exasperating, bloody and heroic country, especially through two, intertwined issues: the way successive influences from beyond its borders have shaped Russia, the palimpsest nation, and the ways Russians came to terms with this through a series of convenient cultural constructions, writing and rewriting their pasts to understand their presents and try to influence their futures. And how, in turn, this came to affect not just their constant nation-building project but also their relations with the world. It is unapologetically written not for the specialist but for anyone who is interested in the backstory of a country that can at once be written off as a shambolic relic of an old empire, and at the same time be painted as an existential threat to the West.
In condensing a thousand years of eventful and often gory history into this short book, I have inevitably painted with a broad brush. At the end of each chapter I provide a guide to further reading that is much more scholarly and which can help restore the balance. Nonetheless, the aim of this book is not to pretend to be a comprehensive treatment of every detail, it is instead to explore the periodic rises and falls of this extraordinary nation, and how the Russians themselves have understood, explained, mythologized and rewritten this story.
Further reading: For the broad sweep of Russia’s thousand years, there are many fine books I could recommend for particular elegance of approach or quirkiness of style, but let me note a few. Geoffrey Hosking’s Russian History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012) is exactly what it claims to be. A journalist’s rather than a scholar’s book, Martin Sixsmith’s Russia: A 1,000-Year Chronicle of the Wild East (BBC, 2012) is a lively and readable overview. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (Penguin, 2003) by Orlando Figes focuses more on the past two centuries, but is nonetheless a tour de force. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a map is worth at least that, and Martin Gilbert’s Routledge Atlas of Russian History (Routledge, 2007) is a very handy compilation. Histories are also written in brick and stone, though, and Catherine Merridale’s brilliant Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia’s History (Penguin, 2014) takes the Moscow Kremlin as itself a character in Russia’s story.
A Note on Language
There are different ways of transliterating from Russian. I have chosen to render words in Russian as best they sound, except when there are forms that by now are too established to be worth challenging: Gorbachev rather than the more phonetically accurate Gorbachov, for example. Language is intrinsically political, as how we talk about something conditions how we think about it, and this has become especially evident in post-Soviet times as states assert their independence from the metropolis, and with it their linguistic autonomy. This is a particular issue for Ukraine: nowadays, its capital is rendered as Kyiv. However, I still use the term Kiev for the pre-1991 city, not in any way to challenge Ukraine’s claim to statehood, but to reflect the extent to which it was once part of a wider Slavic and then Russian political order. I also turn Russian words into plurals by adding -s rather than the correct -y or -i. My apologies to the purists.