Russia. A History

Russia, it is fair to say, does not automatically evoke feelings of empathy and goodwill in the West: the media, politicians, and even many scholars regard Russia with a mixture of condescension, antipathy, and fear. Not that Russia, or at least its rulers, has not done much to deserve the hostility; territorial expansion and brutal violation of human rights—by both the old and new regimes—provide ample fodder for those predisposed to characterize Russia as a threat to Western civilization. But the pervasive antipathy is often dismissive of the favourable dimensions of the Russian experience; a Russophobic tone too often becomes the default, reinforcing ill-informed stereotypes of omnipotent authoritarianism, backwardness, and alcoholism. These stereotypes have deep historic roots, dating back to the sixteenth-century travellers’ accounts, but only came to dominate popular images of Russia in the modern period, which were shaped by anti-Russian diatribes in the mass media of the nineteenth century and, far more profoundly, by the ideological battles of the twentieth century and the Cold War. Historical scholarship on Russia has done, until recently, too little to correct these politicized stereotypes and produce a more balanced, better informed picture. Scholarly studies of Russia, in fact, appeared rather belatedly, most of them after the Second World War, and long bore the taint and distortions of the Cold War.

This volume takes advantage of two major developments in the field—one conceptual, the other empirical. Conceptually, Russian historians have turned from a narrow focus on political history and given, increasingly, more attention to society, economy, and culture. The result is a more sophisticated appreciation for the importance for the other spheres, not merely as ‘reflecting what the state demands’, but in shaping the course of Russian history. This means ascribing more agency to historical actors and appreciating the role of culture, especially religion, in shaping popular culture and political behaviour. Empirically, recent scholarship takes advantage of the ‘archival revolution’ that followed the break-up of the USSR, which enabled unprecedented access to archival sources, especially for the twentieth century. The archival revolution of 1991 was neither sudden (it had antecedents in the previous decade) nor complete (much, in particular the police archives, offers at best nominal access). Nevertheless, serious scholarship on Russian history in the twentieth century has become possible; scholars are no longer forced to rely on party directives, Pravda, and the selective memory in ‘memoirs’. The result has been an extraordinary, ongoing profusion of scholarship, much of it concentrated on the Soviet period, and this new research has significantly enhanced and often recast our understanding of key issues, processes, and outcomes.

But much remains fundamental, with continuities running across the centuries, from earliest times to the present. One is the role of geography: although one must be wary of geographical determinism (the notion that geography predetermined development), it certainly has had an enormous impact on Russia’s historical development. On the one hand, it has blessed the inhabitants of Russia with extraordinary natural resources—rich farmland, especially the black-earth areas to the south, and vast mineral resources (from energy like coal, natural gas, and oil, to a vast range of ferrous and non-ferrous metals). On the other hand, not all was blessed. Most fundamental is Russia’s great northern location; the Russian heartland is in a belt lying between 50 and 60 degrees northern latitude (roughly equal to central Canada); St Petersburg has the same latitude as southern Alaska. All this has meant a harsh climate, not the temperate conditions enjoyed by the United States and Europe; it also means a shorter growing season—several months fewer, giving tillers of the soil far less flexibility in adapting to the vagaries of weather. Rainfall is also fickle; it tends to be heaviest in the north-east (where the soil is less fertile) and less predictable in the south-east (the heartland of black-soil agriculture along the Volga River). And the natural resources, while rich, are dispersed; not until the coming of the railway was it possible to bring together the country’s vast reserves of iron ore and coal in areas like the Don Basin. The first millennium of Russian history, up to the nineteenth century, thus unfolded under conditions of a marginal economy—one continually visited by disaster, constrained by backward agriculture, and separate from the emerging world economy.