Russian history

‘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

There lived a certain man in Russia long ago. He was big and strong, in his eyes a flaming glow. You know the rest. Antony Beevor’s telling of the story of Grigory Rasputin will surely be the greatest literary chart hit of the year. That the life and death of one of history’s most extraordinary charlatans is a well-known and often-told morality tale doesn’t matter. Beevor makes no claim to have uncovered any great revelations. Rather, he carefully sifts Okhrana surveillance logs, court diaries, memoirs, the Empress’s correspondence and contemporary press accounts and, with his characteristically sharp eye for telling detail, extracts enough gems to decorate a whole Romanov party

Has a book ever been more bizarrely mis-titled than this one? The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century has nothing whatever to do with the actual Cold War, nor is it for the most part concerned with the 19th century. Rather, Barbara Emerson has written a thorough and often diverting diplomatic history of Anglo-Russian relations from the 16th to the early 20th century. This period encompasses at least 14 wars in which British and Russian troops found themselves embroiled, sometimes on the same side, sometimes on opposite sides. None of these wars was remotely ‘cold’. Nor does Emerson attempt to make any argument that the shifting great

The most impressive banknote I have ever seen is the 500 ruble note produced by the Imperial Bank of Russia between 1905 and 1912. About four times the size of a modern £50 note, it is magnificently emblazoned with a portrait of Peter the Great and a profusion of cupids and classical pillars. It looks as high-denomination money should look – luxuriant, confidence-inspiring and valuable. The ruble (from ‘rubit’, to chop) was originally a chopped-off piece of Viking silver ingot Appearances can, of course, be deceptive. My Russian wife’s great-great-grand-father, the owner of the Volga Bread Bank of Saratov, unwisely chose to keep his considerable savings in the form of

‘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

Enforced brevity focuses the mind wonderfully. And when the minds in question are two of the West’s most interesting historians of Russia, the result is a distillation of insight that’s vitally timely. Sir Rodric Braithwaite was Britain’s ambassador to Moscow from 1988-92 during the collapse of the USSR (where he was the boss of Christopher Steele, of Trump dossier fame), then chaired the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee. He went on to write the brilliant Afgantsy, a history of the USSR’s disastrous Afghan war and its impact on the Soviet Union’s collapse, and Moscow 1941, a people’s history of the heroic Soviet fight against Nazism. Sheila Fitzpatrick is an Australian historian

The link between mass-murdering dictators and the gentle occupation of reading and writing books is a curious one, but it definitely exists. Mao was a much- praised practitioner of traditional Chinese poetry; Hitler was widely if haphazardly read, dictated Mein Kampf and was a fan of Karl May’s Wild West stories; and Stalin, as Geoffrey Roberts shows, took books at least as seriously as the purging of foes, real and imagined. Though we may wonder whether Enver Hoxha and Kim Il-sung really wrote the dense works of Marxist-Leninist theory with which they’re credited, there is no doubt that Stalin found the time while running the Soviet Union and fighting the

Churchill was wrong: Russia is neither a riddle nor an enigma. Russians themselves concoct endless stories to glorify their country’s achievements and minimise its disasters and crimes. But the rest of us do much the same, as we try to explain Britain’s imperial history or the impact slavery still has on America’s revolutionary ideals. Russia is little harder to understand than anywhere else. But you need to separate the facts from the myths, as Mark Galeotti does in A Short History of Russia, an informative, perceptive and exhilarating canter through 1,000 tumultuous years. He starts with two founding events, each a mixture of fact and myth. In the ninth century,

‘Without this river the Russians could not live,’ remarked Robert Bremner in his work, Excursions in the Interior of Russia. The year is 1840. The river in question, the Volga, the 2,000 mile-long meandering waterway stretching from the forests of north-west Russia to the steppes by the Caspian. At the time of Bremner’s survey, half of the Russian empire’s fish was caught in the single stretch of river by Astrakhan, the Volga’s final pit stop before flowing out to sea. Since the earliest days of medieval Rus through to the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, the Volga has not simply fed the mouths of its population but has been crucial to