Mongols

‘Moscow is hard to love,’ Simon Morrison writes at the beginning of this engaging book, ‘but I love it.’ He deliberately sets out unconstrained by academic pieties, despite holding the post of Professor of Music and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. He says he wrote A Kingdom and a Village ‘out of nostalgia for pre-oligarch decrepitude, when the world looked at Moscow with pity’. The Orthodox Church and the security services have been conjoined from the 16th century to the present The book is tripartite. The first part begins in 1147, when a prince named Yuri built a fort on a hill above a river. (When the authorities

‘It’s too soon,’ said an anti-war Russian friend about the crop of books which have been emerging since late last year on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps he is right. Yet, mindful of Lenin’s maxim that ‘there are weeks when decades happen’, many may feel the period since February last year to have been one of the longest of their lives. Amid the fog of war – an endless news cycle in which events pile up, too enigmatic or episodic for the big picture to emerge – one is grateful to any writer who sets out to give the wider narrative. ‘To look at Russia now, as someone who loves