Impressive and deeply immersive ... His method is to synthesize sources, mostly secondary ones. The book’s outstanding feature is its brevity, and I mean this as praise ... Draws lightly on culture, but I especially enjoyed its forays into film as myth-manipulating propaganda ... Figes speaks on every page in the crisp, sober manner of a newsreader, while observing the action unfold with an eagle’s eye.
Orlando Figes provides valuable lessons about the importance of mythologizing the country’s past in his sweeping new survey of Russian history ... Figes aims in this primer to explain how central narratives used to justify the current leadership have been shaped and exploited over centuries ... Figes makes a key point about how the challenges of geography and climate have reinforced a long-held perception about the need for collective responsibility and strong autocratic leadership ... It is testament to the pervasiveness of Russian myths that Figes perpetuates some of them ... developments from the mid-19th century on are treated increasingly superficially, presented as all but inevitable consequences of earlier history. In fact, the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 was the result of not only bungling by the reactionary Czar Nicholas II but also dumb luck and German support — the ensuing civil war could have gone either way. Even more nuance is missing from later Soviet history, including the paradoxical figure of the reformer Nikita Khrushchev ... There are some mischaracterizations here ... But the author’s glossing over the Westernizing 1990s is perhaps most disappointing. They are characterized as essentially doomed to failure ... But if and when Putinism collapses, we would do well to learn from the past and not treat the country simply as a blank canvas on which to project Western-style democracy. Read Figes.
Inevitably in a survey of more than 1,000 years of history, much has had to be skirted over or omitted. But this book’s purpose is not to fill in all the blanks. It is to examine the recurring themes and myths that drive Vladimir Putin’s conviction that war with Ukraine and with western Europe is part of Russia’s historical destiny. For those unfamiliar with the past, this is an indispensable manual for making sense of Russia’s present ... This, as the title tells us, is one country’s story about itself ... Meticulous ... Figes attempts to answer this in his final chapter: how does the story of Russia end, and how far will its future continue to be shaped by its past? In the midst of the current uncertainty and turbulence, this is no easy task. What Figes does note – correctly in my view – is that Putin’s approach to history is somewhat 'pick-and-mix', a postmodern selection of what fits his current purpose, shape-shifting along with his policies to adapt to changed circumstances.
Methodical ... As Figes makes clear, anyone with the most elementary grasp of the shape of Europe, from Berlin to the Urals, would know that borders are determined by raw power, not some mystical racial bond ... This historical primer has only traces of the original thinking that Figes’s other important works on Russia have displayed, but it does effectively lay out with important clarity the 'structural continuities' of power ... Reading The Story of Russia you would be betting against history to suggest that Putin and his present boyars are not reflecting something deep in the Russian story.
... detailed, astute and compelling ... wears its learning lightly and weaves a well-crafted history together with an insightful examination of the narratives that have become 'fundamental to the Russians’ understanding of their history and national character'.
... a useful, compact survey ... particularly strong in its sense of the continuities between past and present ... [Figes] is also instructive on the czarist conquest of the Buryat and other peoples across Siberia, a 200-year process beginning around 1580, pointing out that Russian history books have always portrayed it—wrongly—as less brutal and genocidal than the conquest of the American West.
An expert on Russia delivers a crucially relevant study ... The author argues convincingly that to understand Putin’s aggressive behavior toward Ukraine and other neighboring nations, it is essential to grasp how Russia has come to see itself within the global order ... A lucid, astute text that unpacks the myths of Russian history to help explain present-day motivations and actions.
