Russian History: A Very Short Introduction

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© Geoffrey Hosking 2012

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First published 2012

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ISBN: 978–0–19–958098–9

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Contents

Preface

List of illustrations

Introduction

1 Kievan Rus and the Mongols

2 The formation of the Muscovite state

3 The Russian Empire and Europe

4 The responsibilities and dangers of the empire

5 Reform and revolution

6 The Soviet Union’s turbulent rise

7 The Soviet Union: triumph, decline, and fall

Conclusion

Further reading

Chronology

Glossary

Index

Preface

I am grateful to the students and colleagues who have helped me develop and clarify my thoughts during forty years of teaching Russian history, and especially to Roger Bartlett, John Gooding, and Martin Sixsmith, who commented on an earlier version of this text. Mistakes and misconceptions remain, of course, my own.

List of illustrations

1 The Caves Monastery, Kiev

© De Agostini Picture Library/akg-images

2 Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity

State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

© RIA Novosti/akg-images

3 An iconostasis in the Moscow Kremlin

© RIA Novosti/akg-images

4 Old Believers in Nizhny Novgorod

Nizhny Novgorod State Audiovisual Documents Archive

5 Peter the Great

State Historical Museum, Moscow.

© Electa/akg-images

6 Catherine the Great

Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

© akg-images

7 Napoleon’s winter retreat from Moscow

© North Wind Picture Archives/akg-images

8 The vacant icon: Malevich’s Black Square

Russian State Museum, St Petersburgh.

© akg-images

9 Patriarch Alexii sanctifies the monument to Tsar Alexander II

© RIA Novosti/akg-images

10 Lenin leaving an educational conference, 1918

© akg-images

11 Portrait of Stalin by Isaak Brodskii, 1928

State Historical Museum, Moscow.

© akg-images

12 A contrast in architectural styles: (a) the constructivist Kharkov Palace of Industry; (b) the neo-Baroque Kievskaia Metro station

(a) © RIA Novosti/akg-images;

(b) © Jon Arnold/JAI/Corbis

13 Yeltsin interrupts Gorbachev at the podium, August 1991

© AFP/Getty Images

Introduction

In Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, which is a kind of panorama of pre-First World War European civilization, there are, appropriately enough, quite a number of Russian characters. They sit at two separate tables: the Good Russian table and the Bad Russian table. Our thinking about Russia today has not advanced much beyond these facile labels. At one table, we seat Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Repin and Sakharov; at the other, most of the Tsars, Stalin, and nowadays often Putin. We seem unable to approach Russia without a strong moral and emotional input, positive or negative. It is in many ways a European country, yet it is too large, too close to us, and too strange to fit into any comfortable pigeonholes.

In fact, the Good Russia and the Bad Russia are indissolubly linked by the arduous and challenging task of building a coherent polity on the flat open plains of northern Eurasia, then defending it against all comers, including the more developed states of Europe lying immediately to the west. Of all the great gunpowder empires of Eurasia, Russia proved the most durable. It has been a remarkable success story, yet one which had its own weaknesses programmed into it. It rested on a tacit compact between ruler, elites, and communities of ordinary people, renewed after periods of upheaval and crisis, yet never wholly harmonious, always subject to internal strains.