## Metadata * Author: [[Orlando Figes]] * ASIN: B09NK8QFYH * ISBN: 1526631741 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09NK8QFYH ## Highlights Ukrainian historians were particularly closely watched because of their presumed sympathy for European principles. They were not allowed to publish in Ukrainian, encourage nationalist feelings for Ukraine, or to promote a sense of grievance against Russia. — location: [111](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=111) ^ref-1275 --- The greater the power of the government, the more extreme was the myth required to justify it and excuse submission to — location: [122](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=122) ^ref-6438 --- The eighteenth-century empress Catherine the Great maintained that a country as big as Russia needed to be governed by autocracy: ‘Only swiftness of decision in matters sent from distant realms can compensate for the slowness caused by these great distances. — location: [164](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=164) ^ref-8755 --- Russia tends to advance its security by keeping neighbouring countries weak, and by fighting wars beyond its borders to keep hostile powers at arm’s length. — location: [175](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=175) ^ref-38413 --- The myth of the holy tsar would also give way to the leader cults of Lenin and Stalin, — location: [195](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=195) ^ref-19509 --- The Rus, he said, were Scandinavians, whose tribal name derived from Ruotsi, a term used by the Finns to describe the Swedes from Roslagen. — location: [237](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=237) ^ref-9619 --- Mikhail Lomonosov, Russia’s first great polymath, led the attack on the German, accusing him of setting out to denigrate the Slavs by depicting them as savages, incapable of organising themselves as a state. The Rus, he insisted, were not Swedes but Baltic Slavs, descendants of the Iranian Roxolani tribe, — location: [242](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=242) ^ref-13617 --- The Rus homeland, they maintained, was in Ukraine and was marked by Slavic river names (Ros, Rosava, Rusna, Rostavtsya and so on). — location: [275](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=275) ^ref-43991 --- Western scholars were coming to the view that ethnic groups were modern intellectual constructions, — location: [287](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=287) ^ref-17424 --- after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalists competed with each other for an ethnic claim of origin from the Kievan legacy. — location: [291](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=291) ^ref-32523 --- It is significant that the word in Russian for a ‘hill’ or ‘mountain’ is the same (gora). This is a country on one horizontal plain. — location: [299](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=299) ^ref-20526 --- Old Ladoga, thought to be the earliest Viking settlement, — location: [338](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=338) ^ref-9512 --- Itil was the capital of the Khazar state, or khaganate, a multi-confessional trading empire, headed by a Turkic warrior elite, — location: [353](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=353) ^ref-13057 --- But in the Hagia Sophia of Constantinople, ‘We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth,’ they reported on the liturgy in the basilica, ‘for surely there is no such splendour or beauty anywhere on earth. We cannot describe it to you. We only know that God dwells there among men. For we cannot forget that beauty.’ — location: [400](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=400) ^ref-61721 --- No other country in the world has made so many saints from its rulers. — location: [468](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=468) ^ref-46807 --- Kiev had a population of 40,000 people, more than London and not much less than Paris, at the start of the thirteenth century. — location: [527](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=527) ^ref-43953 --- So many craftsmen were captured by the Mongols that practically no stone or brick buildings were built in the half-abandoned towns during the next fifty years.5 — location: [596](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=596) ^ref-19347 --- central episode of Alexander Nevsky (1938), Sergei Eisenstein’s great patriotic film, which was seen by millions in the Soviet Union during the war against Hitler. — location: [623](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=623) ^ref-52539 --- That style reached its supreme heights in Andrei Rublev’s icons of the early fifteenth century. No other icon painter could match their poetic qualities – their graceful harmony and sense of movement, their transparency of colour that makes their sacred figures appear illuminated from within. — location: [656](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=656) ^ref-64023 --- Readers may recall the final glorious scene of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Andrei Rublev (1966), in which a group of craftsmen, led by the orphan of a bell maker, cast a giant bell for the town of Vladimir, sacked many times by the Mongols. The first ringing of the bell, watched by a delegation of Italians, along with the grand prince and people of the town, is a moment of pure joy, a symbol of the ways in which the Russians have survived through their spiritual strength and creativity. — location: [662](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=662) ^ref-17493 --- Wanting neither Tver nor Moscow to become too powerful, the khan would always back the weaker of the two. — location: [700](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=700) ^ref-19651 --- other episodes when Russia’s military sacrifice ‘saved’ the West, in 1812–15 (against Napoleon) or 1941–5, for example; each time its sacrifice had been unthanked, unrecognised by its Western allies in these wars. The country’s deep resentment of the West is rooted in this national myth. — location: [751](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=751) ^ref-54193 --- pandemic turned trade routes into plague routes, devastating — location: [761](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=761) ^ref-540 --- Because he lacked the currency to pay his officials’ salaries, the ruling prince allowed them to ‘feed themselves’ by extracting goods and money from the population under their control. — location: [909](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=909) ^ref-8675 --- The kormlenie system was formally abolished in 1556, but the corrupt practice which it legitimised would long be carried on by local officials through other means (taking bribes, extorting money from the population, pocketing state revenues, and so on). — location: [912](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=912) ^ref-42253 --- the only way to become rich is to be a member of the highest ruling circles or enjoy their protection. It — location: [915](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=915) ^ref-61241 --- The dual nature of the Christian ruler – fallible in his humanity but divine in his princely functions – was a common notion in Europe. — location: [957](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=957) ^ref-61155 --- The Russian Church had been moving to the idea of this role since the Council of Florence (1438–9), when the Byzantine emperor and many other leaders of the Eastern Church had pressed for a reunion with Rome to secure the assistance of the Catholic powers against the Muslim infidels. — location: [985](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=985) ^ref-6353 --- The Kremlin was a symbol of Moscow’s power and arrival on the European scene. Its vast complex of palaces and churches was constructed largely by Italians. — location: [1032](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1032) ^ref-16696 --- They employed Dutch engineers to mine under Kazan’s walls, where they managed to position forty-eight barrels of gunpowder, enough to blast a massive hole in the city’s defences — location: [1131](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1131) ^ref-833 --- the word for ‘red’ (krasny) was connected to the word for ‘beautiful’ (krasivyi). — location: [1143](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1143) ^ref-972 --- There was an important lesson to be learned from the Livonian War. Russia could more easily expand in Asia, where it was a European power, than it could in Europe, where its western neighbours were stronger. — location: [1183](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1183) ^ref-1591 --- ‘The tsar is good but his boyars bad,’ the Russian proverb said, — location: [1451](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1451) ^ref-38260 --- The code’s twenty-nine thematic chapters, covering every aspect of society, would remain the fundamental law until 1833. The fact that it survived so long did not ‘testify to its merits’, according to Kliuchevsky, but rather showed ‘how long we Russians can survive without satisfactory law’. — location: [1468](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1468) ^ref-52832 --- Land was plentiful but labour hard to find – a basic fact of life in Russia – which meant that the peasants moved around, looking for the best landlords — location: [1512](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1512) ^ref-24429 --- The Russians were driven east by fur, the ‘soft gold’ that accounted for one-third of the imperial coffers at the height of the fur trade in the 1680s. — location: [1571](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1571) ^ref-61497 --- This violence has been played down in the Russian history books, where the conquest of Siberia is usually presented as a peaceful colonisation, in which the native tribes were ‘civilised’ as they were assimilated into Russian culture and society. — location: [1580](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1580) ^ref-28469 --- the Russians’ image of themselves as benevolent imperialists, ‘naturally’ suited to assume leadership in Asia because of their European character. — location: [1586](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1586) ^ref-63001 --- It took the best part of a year for a messenger to travel from the capital to Yakutsk, the main town in the eastern sector of Siberia, and at least another year to reach Okhotsk, the Russian base on the Pacific, so that an exchange of messages could take four years. — location: [1588](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1588) ^ref-29485 --- The treaty is regarded by Ukrainians as the founding of an independent ‘hetman state’, which many of them see as the basis of their modern nationhood. — location: [1620](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1620) ^ref-46148 --- When Peter the Great came to the throne, in 1682, no more than three books of a non-religious nature had been published by the Moscow press since its establishment in the 1560s. — location: [1652](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1652) ^ref-49617 --- St Petersburg was more than a city. It was Russia’s European school, a civilising project of cultural engineering to reconstruct the Russian as a European citizen. — location: [1894](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1894) ^ref-28331 --- Again, the problem was a lack of Russian words for the sort of thoughts and feelings that made up salon conversation: ‘gesture’, ‘sympathy’, ‘privacy’, ‘impulsion’ and ‘imagination’ – none could be expressed without the use of French. — location: [1905](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1905) ^ref-62509 --- The most famous of these lubok prints, The Mice Are Burying the Cat, appeared in numerous editions and circulated widely throughout Russia in the eighteenth century. — location: [1916](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1916) ^ref-34235 --- We forgot the old before mastering the new, and while losing our identity, we did not become what we wished to be. — location: [1925](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1925) ^ref-52003 --- importing its materialist culture could be achieved only at the expense of national character, — location: [1934](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=1934) ^ref-10362 --- It is better to endure the tyranny of one man than the insanity of the multitude.’ — location: [2165](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=2165) ^ref-38596 --- ‘In Russia the government is autocracy tempered by assassination,’ — location: [2195](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=2195) ^ref-61577 --- Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality’.9 This trinity of national principles – Uvarov’s answer to ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ – would, he claimed, save Russia from the ‘crisis’ of the West, by which he meant the democratic challenge to monarchical authority and the erosion of Christian values by secular ideas. — location: [2353](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=2353) ^ref-35585 --- public looked to writers for moral leadership against the autocracy, — location: [2411](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=2411) ^ref-38091 --- you failed to realise that Russia sees her salvation not in mysticism or asceticism or pietism, but in the successes of civilisation, enlightenment and humanity. What she needs is not sermons (she has heard enough of them!) or prayers (she has repeated them too often!), but the awakening in the people of a sense of their human dignity lost for so many centuries amid dirt and refuse; — location: [2416](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=2416) ^ref-4736 --- The House of the Dead (1862), a fictionalised memoir of his prison years. — location: [2474](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=2474) ^ref-20286 --- [a reference to the Don Pacifico affair]: — location: [2538](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=2538) ^ref-38364 --- agreed to dismantle their Black Sea Fleet, a humiliation for Russia. No compulsory disarmament had ever been imposed on a defeated great power. — location: [2561](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=2561) ^ref-28085 --- It was not Marxism that made Lenin a revolutionary but Lenin who made Marxism revolutionary. — location: [2855](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=2855) ^ref-40406 --- All in all, the Soviet Republic lost 34 per cent of its population (55 million people), 32 per cent of its agricultural land, 54 per cent of its industrial capacity and 89 per cent of its coalmines (peat and wood now became its biggest source of fuel). — location: [3371](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=3371) ^ref-16523 --- Dictatorship of the Bureaucracy. — location: [3432](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=3432) ^ref-5460 --- Lenin was depicted as a Christlike figure, ready to die for the people’s cause, and, because he had survived, blessed with miraculous powers. — location: [3458](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=3458) ^ref-9492 --- the harder life becomes, the more the Russians seek hope and salvation in myths transcending everyday realities. — location: [3783](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=3783) ^ref-45044 --- The cult of sacrifice was a more important factor than terror. It was the Soviet system’s main advantage over Western liberal societies where the loss of human life was given greater weight in the reckonings of the command. — location: [4040](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=4040) ^ref-41306 --- Only 3 per cent of the eighteen-year-olds mobilised in 1941 would still be alive in 1945. — location: [4055](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=4055) ^ref-64609 --- He might have been saved if medical assistance had been called in time. But in the panic of the Doctors’ Plot none of Stalin’s inner circle dared take the initiative. He became the final victim of his system of terror. — location: [4211](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=4211) ^ref-12039 --- The Brezhnev government lifted the restrictions on the size of these private allotments to get more food to consumers. By the end of the 1970s, they took up 4 per cent of the country’s agricultural land, but produced 40 per cent of its pork and poultry, 42 per cent of its fruit and over half its potatoes.31 The prices in the peasant markets were too high for most people to afford, except on special occasions. — location: [4328](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=4328) ^ref-52325 --- Contemporary Russian politics are too often analysed without sufficient knowledge of Russian history. Yet an understanding of the country’s past is essential to make sense of the developments in Russia during the last thirty years. — location: [4493](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=4493) ^ref-19573 --- By 1994, only 7 per cent of the Russian people thought that the downfall of the Soviet regime was a democratic victory, — location: [4508](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=4508) ^ref-53418 --- The KGB renamed itself the Federal Counter-Intelligence Service (later changed to the Federal Security Service, or FSB) without changes in its personnel. — location: [4512](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=4512) ^ref-47560 --- The harder life in Russia is, the more its people hold on to beliefs that give them faith in salvation. — location: [4572](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=4572) ^ref-56648 --- the resentment long and deeply held by the Russians based on the idea spread by Soviet propagandists since the Cold War era that the Western allies had never adequately acknowledged the Soviet contribution to the victory (a resentment strengthened by the Western myth of the Second World War in which the British and Americans are seen as the heroes who defeated Germany, while the Soviet role is minimised). — location: [4700](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=4700) ^ref-15923 --- Putin’s version of their history enabled them to feel good as Russians once again. — location: [4733](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=4733) ^ref-13863 --- According to a 2020 poll by the Levada Centre, three-quarters of Russians believe that the Soviet era was the ‘greatest period’ in their country’s history. — location: [4737](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=4737) ^ref-19101 --- Even with a knowledge of the millions who were killed, the Russians, it appears, continue to accept the Bolshevik idea that mass state violence can be justified. — location: [4752](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=4752) ^ref-13595 --- In the early 2010s, millions of Russians watched the TV show The Court of Time (Sud vremeni), in which figures and episodes from Russian history were judged in a mock — location: [4754](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=4754) ^ref-61924 --- The US and its North Atlantic allies acted as if the Cold War had been ‘won’ by them, and that Russia, the ‘defeated’ power, need not be consulted on the consequences of the Soviet collapse — location: [4775](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=4775) ^ref-32731 --- NATO’s eastward expansion poisoned its relations with Russia. — location: [4800](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=4800) ^ref-37964 --- His decision surprised even senior Kremlin officials. It must be explained by Putin’s isolation from reality. Terrified of Covid, he had spent the past two years in lockdown on his own in the Kremlin, seldom meeting anybody in person — location: [4986](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=4986) ^ref-60682 --- Putin had denied that Ukraine was a nation, but his war against it had created one far more united than before. — location: [4998](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=4998) ^ref-31252 --- The second possible scenario is a stalemate, a permanently frozen conflict in Ukraine, with Russian troops in the Donbass and the east but neither side prepared to stop the fighting, — location: [5062](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=5062) ^ref-55689 --- For even if they gave up lands for peace, what assurance could they have that Russia would not use these as a forward base to prepare a new attack? — location: [5064](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=5064) ^ref-26959 --- Nothing Putin says can be trusted. — location: [5065](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=5065) ^ref-64709 --- The Russia that emerges from the war will be poorer, more unpredictable and more isolated in the world. — location: [5093](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=5093) ^ref-38133 --- Peasants of a northern Russian village, 1890s. Note the lack of shoes and the uniformity of their clothing and their houses. This was the ‘communal harmony’ imagined by the Slavophiles and Populists. — location: [5171](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=5171) ^ref-27220 ---