Maybe Enough Russian History for a While
So, remember how the theme of my reading for 2022, according to my decision at the end of 2021, was supposed to be War and Strategy? Yeah, that was before the Russian Army came in and started raining bombs all over my neighborhood and the rest of the country, killing thousands of women and children in the process. Ever since then, I've spent a good amount of time reading about the history of Russia and Ukraine (and Jesus, it gets bloody). After this one... well, I think I'm going to switch to something a little more light-hearted.
...Like Macchiavelli or Robert Greene.
But first, let me review what has been called "The King James Version of Russian History:" Russia and the Russians, written by a man who is widely regarded as the pre-eminent Russia scholar of our age, Geoffrey Hosking.
Slightly Unbalanced
For a book that bills itself as an exhaustive history of Russia, I was a bit disappointed to find that almost half the book (from page 353 onward) focuses on the 20th century, leaving the previous 950 years to be crammed into the half before that. This results in a very Soviet-centric feel to the book. It's as if half of Russia's history was the USSR when in truth the Union only lasted a paltry 70 years: roughly the length of two Catherine the Great's. To some degree, this kind of focus may be unavoidable, since the 20th century is the era where Russia first ceased to be such an enigma to the world (and indeed the reality is recent history is always easier to research than ancient), but I would have preferred a bit less "yes, we know. Communism is bad," and a bit more "oh. Wow. The Tsars were bad too."
I was a bit surprised by which eras got more coverage and which got less. For example, Alexander II gets 33 pages to himself (2285 - 318), while Catherine the Great has to compete with her predecessor Elizabeth (1) for mention within a 30 page space (214 - 244) and even that focuses more on the wars with Turkey than on her sort of "maybe, but then again maybe not" approach to liberalization. In fact, I don't recall the "Nakaz" council getting more than half a page, despite the fact that if it had achieved what it was supposed to achieve it would have been Russia's equivalent to the Magna Carta.
With that said, the author wrote the book with a specific purpose in mind and it does achieve that purpose, smashingly.
How Did We Get Here?
Essentially, the book is a 622 page answer to this very question. The book is not an exhaustive Russian history, despite the number of fawning critics who say it is. It focuses on eras of Russian history which played a key role in making Russia the nation it is today: a belligerent and paranoid empire resting on a tripod of Middle-Ages Christian fundamentalism (p. 100), Neo-Mongol visions of being "destined" for global conquest (p. 107), and the nationalism that came as a seemingly incongruous side effect of the post-enlightenment era in so much of Europe (p. 320 - 352).
The fact that Russia spent most of the Renaissance as a slave caste of the Mongolian Empire (even after their Chinese neighbors finally shed that yoke and took the Mongols' place as the oppressors of Eastern and Central Asia) is given attention, and the author shows how this prevented Russia from ever truly developing any of the institutions that could be called "civil society." The fact that the rulers of Post-Mongol Russia (that is, the phase when a backwater town called Moscow somewhat pretentiously laid claim to the legacy of the Kyivan Princes by naming their newly-liberated principality "Rus" while the people, culture and territory that actually formed ancient Rus went on to become what is now Ukraine) used the title "Khan" rather than the Roman-esque title of "Tsar (p. 85) is shown as evidence of Russia's Asiatic (as opposed to European) heritage. And of course, the fact that Russia's geographic situation predestines the country to be aggressive due to the "attack or be attacked" nature of a flat and open heartland with no natural frontiers, is so repeatedly shown that by the end of the book the horse is well and truly dead but the author has not put down the stick. Indeed, the author almost seems to be trying to plead on Russia's behalf for the reader's sympathy at some points, implying "they didn't mean to be so expansionistic but they didn't have any choice."
The point is, the book does have a single, very unifying thread, and that is not so much "let me tell you everything there is to know about Russia" as it is "let me explain to you why Russia is Russia." In short, it's Galeotti's Short History, but less for the layman and more for the statesman.
So Who Should Read It?
First and foremost, it should be required reading for anyone in any foreign relations post that deals directly with Russia, though admittedly the rosy, sugary, "Russia can do better if we just have faith in its people" note on which it ends is a bit discordant in the present environment. I wouldn't recommend it as a primer on Russia for someone who hasn't already done some reading on the topic. It's far too intensive and packed for that (I went through 5 highlighters making notes in its margins). But for a reader who has already studied part of Russia's history (such as all the Western Russologists whose study of Russian history begins with the Bolshevik Revolution), this is a great way to fill in the gaps.
What I would also say is that every Western Head of State who is trying to understand Russia's motivations right now, needs to read this. This book (which was written in the early 2000's when Vladimir Putin was barely even on the radar) explains a great deal of Russia's current behavior. It dispels the notion that the current war in Ukraine was "provoked by the West," as well as the fallacy that things will get better after Putin is taken out, by essentially predicting not only the invasion, but the ethnosupremacist rhetoric used to support it by Russian State Media.
It's not a quick, easy or light read, but for anyone seeking to really understand Russia's geopolitical behavior (and the necessity of changing that if Russia intends to survive into the 21st century), this book is a must.
(1) There was actually Tsar in between Elizabeth and Catherine; the short-lived and ill-fated Peter III (Catherine's husband). However, his reign was so brief and inconsequential that it does not seem out of line referring to Elizabeth as Catherine's predecessor.