Not My First Choice
As my few constant readers know, I tend to pick a topic for my reading selections each year, and my chosen topic for 2022 wasn't "Russia." It was "War and Strategy." However, as my entire book collection was left behind in Kharkiv (and I pray the books are still salvageable; to Hell with the apartment around them), and I arrived in Warsaw with nothing to read, one of my first orders of business was to remedy this. The English language shelf at Empik Bookstore in Zlote Terasy mall didn't offer much that was of interest, but one jumped out at me with a certain laughable irony, given my situation. I will not deny that it was difficult, reading this book so shortly after having my life turned upside down by a Russian invasion, to read it with impartiality and not as a quest for rhetorical stick with which to verbally thrash Путинский Рус (I am already on a mission to shine light on the sins of one country and don't need another), but I did my best.
Putin Got One Thing Right
One of the book's early surprises was that Vladimir Putin was, in fact, right on one point, in perhaps the most side-splittingly ironic way imaginable. Part of the justification for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, hyped up for several years by such Russo-jingoistic rags as geopolitica.ru, is the notion that Ukraine and Russia are "one country." Well, Galeotti's book shows that if you go far enough back, they were in fact one country.
And that one country was Ukraine!
See, fun fact. The country we now call "Russia," was founded in Kyiv, and Galeotti's book does a fine job of explaining this.
I had previously read a bit about Prince Ryurik (the Viking founder of what would later come to be known as "The Rus," whose capital was Kyiv), but Galeotti's book drives home the layers upon layers of historical hysterics that led from this founding in 882 A.D. to the modern Russian Federation. First of all, he shreds the notion that the Slavs "invited" Ryurik in (page 3). An early chapter covers the events from the establishment of the Grand Principality of Kyiv, later known as "Kyivan Rus" or Киевская Русь (page 6), to the chuckle-inducing origin of the name "Rus" (the Slavic mispronunciation of the Finnish name for Sweden, ascribed by the Slavs to their Viking conquerors out of ignorance of their true origins, also on page 6). The book's second section, entitled "For Our Sins There Came an Unknown Tribe," describes the Mongol conquest and the later rise of an insignificant backwater hunting lodge on the Grand Principality of Kyiv's then-far-eastern edge (called Moscow) whose local warlords became the country's ruling class by selling their countrymen out to Mongol invaders (30-31, 35), the author lays out this early, convoluted phase of what we will generously call "Russian" history in a way that makes one thing plain. What were the earliest defining traits of what it meant to be "Russian?" In the beginning, the only answer the whole kingdom had in common was "it means to live in Ukraine."
Perhaps Vladimir Putin's "reunification" has some merit after all, and the Ukrainian government should put an end to Russia's absurd pretensions of independence.
Unflattering Similarities
One thing that struck me about the book is how many times I found myself scribbling comparisons to China in the margins. From the description of rewriting history as not merely a pastime but almost the national sport (introduction xiv) to the paranoid sense of bitterness at Western "containment" (page 14) to the belief that autocracy was the only logical way to rule (pages 47-69) to the way the West has been simultaneously viewed as something to emulate and something to avoid (I won't list page numbers here because this thread runs through about 75% of the book), this look at Russia's history and mindset left me with an uncomfortable feeling that I was re-reading Jin Canrong's China's Wisdom or Luo Guanzhong's Three Kingdoms all over again.
And for those who have read my reviews, my political articles, or my blog of my seven nightmarish years in China, you already know that no comparisons with China, coming from my mouth, are ever a compliment.
Too Much For One Book
The author admits, in the introduction and epilogue both, that the idea of squeezing Russia's long and often bafflingly contradictory history into a single book is a daunting task, and he offers no pretensions of this being an exhaustive history. Essentially, imagine Russian history is the Star Wars saga (hey, it's bloody enough). Now imagine Ryurik of Kyiv, the Mongol Yoke, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Alexander I, Lenin, Stalin and Putin were the nine movies, with not much in between except a page of yellow text crawling into space at the beginning of each one. Next, imagine each "movie" was shortened to a thirty-minute Netflix slot. If you can imagine this, then you have an idea of what Mark Galeotti has done with this book.
Granted I'm not complaining. As I previously knew little about Russia other than what I learned from their tanks and a year-long study on Catherine the Great, this nice and simplified format made the subject approachable and easy to digest, even if it did smack of being "the Sunday School version" in some places. For those who do want to read more about any phase of Russia's history, each chapter includes a section at the end entitled "further reading" that suggests other books on the subject. I took a small amount of pride in the fact that most of the 'further reading' in the 'Catherine the Great' section were books I had already read and reviewed.
Gets the Job Done
What the author sets out to prove, from nearly the first page, is that Russia, or something related to it, has existed for a little over 1100 years (it predates the Norman Conquest by just under 2 centuries) without any one single geographic, ethnic, or even cultural thread to tie together what it does and does not mean to be "Russian." It has no natural borders, no clear ethnic boundaries, and not even really a common set of historical values or ideals to which it can cling. Is it the bastion of Christian conservatism that Vladimir Putin portrays it as? If so, that's an odd tack for a country to take while claiming to be the successor of the atheistic USSR, don't you think? And what of its Muslim population? Is it part of the West, or the East? The West calls Russia "the East" while China refers to Russia as "a Western Power." Is it nothing more than an old-fashioned monument to bear-wrestling machismo? If so, then why was it ruled by female monarchs for more (nearly) consecutive years (1) than any other major power on Earth?
It certainly breaks stereotypes, both positive and negative, about where Russia has been - and indeed, about where it is headed. Better still, it does so in simple and easy to swallow doses. For anyone wanting to read a crash course in Russia's history, this book delivers.
(1) The brief and ill-fated reign of the less-than-inspiring Peter III, spanning a few months in between the reigns of Empress Elizabeth and Catherine the Great, needn't be counted.