Russia

24. Persians paying Russian representatives an indemnity in bullion

25. Barracks for Gulag prisoners cutting the White Sea-Baltic Canal, 1933

26. In celebration of the completion of the Dnieper Dam

27. Completing the furnaces for the Soviet Union’s largest steel plant

28. President Putin brandishing a model of the Molnia spacecraft

The author and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce illustrations: Plate 7, From the Hakluyt Society’s Yerrnark’s Campaign in Siberia, ed. Terence Armstrong, London, 1975, reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates; 16, Add. 5523 fol.7, the British Library; 24, Laurence Kelly; 28, Getty Images, AFP/Maxim Marmur. Plates are also taken from the following publications: 2, S. Vysotskii, Svetskie freski Sofuskogo Sobore v Kieve [Secular Frescos in the St Sophia Cathedral in Kiev], Kiev, 1989; 3, I. Toskaia et al., The State Architectural and Historical Museum of St Sophia Cathedral, 2nd edn, Kiev 1996.

Acknowledgements

This book owes much to many helpers, but I alone am responsible for any errors it contains. I am grateful to former colleagues in three faculties of McGill University for advice in areas in which I lack expertise, and to the Department of History for granting me writing leave in the winter term of 2003. My debts to scholars in both Russia and the West go back many years, and are to some extent acknowledged in the references. I have also benefited from discussions with colleagues in the British Universities’ Association of Slavists’ Study groups on medieval and eighteenth-century Russia, the University of Budapest’s biennial seminar on Russian history, and the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. McGill’s McLennan Library has a rich collection in the Russian area, and when it lacked an item I needed it readily obtained it for me. I am also grateful to the British Library and to the library of the School of Slavonic Studies in University College, London.

I am indebted to Bill Hamilton for the idea, to my conscientious and perceptive editor Gordon Wise, to Catherine Benwell and other members of the helpful John Murray team who saw the book through to its finished form, and, as always, to Ruth for her patience, encouragement and the critical eye which she applied to the entire text.

Philip Longworth

Introduction

MOST EMPIRES RISE, expand and then collapse - and once collapsed do not revive. But Russia’s case is different. Russians have built no fewer than four empires. The first, the medieval commercial colonial empire of Kievan Rus, was destroyed in the 1200s. But some time later a new absolutist imperium, which tried to replicate something of the glory of the later Roman Empire, arose. It was centred on Moscow, the ‘Third Rome’ of legend. In the later sixteenth century, under Ivan the Terrible, it began to expand vigorously towards the Baltic, the Caspian and, across the Urals into Asia. Then, in the early 1600s, the state which was the motor of this empire suddenly seized up; Russia dissolved into confusion, and the neighbouring Poles were able to install their own tsar in the Kremlin. Yet out of the debris of Russia’s imperial collapse a third, more conventional, European dynastic empire soon emerged, rooting itself in the remains of its predecessor.

This Romanov Empire came to serve as the epitome of Russia’s power and aggression. It expanded into Ukraine, extended its hold on Siberia as far as the Pacific and the gates of China, and, having humbled Poland-Lithuania, proceeded to demolish the two great powers which dared to challenge it: Sweden and Napoleonic France. Having established itself as the strongest land power in Europe, it continued its expansion — through the Balkans towards the Mediterranean, across the Caucasus, and, to the consternation of the British, into the heights of Central Asia. It became a sea power to reckon with in the north Pacific, and even came to exert a certain influence in China. The Romanov Empire suffered reverses in the Crimean War and against Japan in 1904, though it lost little territory and influence as a result. Soon afterwards, however, during the First World War, this empire, too, disintegrated.