The Guardian: The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes review – Vladimir Putin and the power of myth-making

 The Guardian: The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes review – Vladimir Putin and the power of myth-making

https://www.amazon.com/Story-Russia-Orlando-Figes/dp/125079689X

The historian’s latest work on Russia is a lucid chronological journey that ably illustrates how narratives from the nation’s past have been used to shape its autocratic present

In July 2021, Vladimir Putin published his own story of Russia, a 5,000-word essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians, which can now be read as his justification for the invasion he launched seven months later to bring his brother “little Russians” back into the arms of big brother Rus. Reaching back into the mists of myth, he sees the idea of Ukraine as a Trojan horse, an “anti-Russian project” since the 17th century and that the present state is on “historically Russian lands”

In his brief post-invasion update, Figes points out the significance of the speech given by Patriarch Kirill on the “day of forgiveness”, in which he labelled the war in the Ukraine a crusade for “human salvation”, reminding the people that Moscow and the Orthodox church are the saviours of Christianity, the last bastions of true morality.

The present Ukrainian horror is the post-imperial catastrophe of a Russia that is struggling to accept what happened with the collapse of the Soviet Union and that empire in 1991. As always with Russia, the costs on all sides will be huge. 1812. 1917. 1945. These dates point to the astonishing impact Russia always has, twice claiming the role of saviour of civilisation after being invaded itself, as well as being the lodestar of world revolution for over a generation. Add 2022 to that list, as I suspect we will have to, and the long-term reverberations of Putin’s present destruction of Ukrainian cities and confrontation with the west become clear. Is it any wonder that Russians, both leaders and the people, have struggled to accept a humbler status in the world?

Figes records how in 2021 Putin directly attacked history by closing Memorial, an organisation deliberately set up to collect information about the past. Who knows now what the people truly feel about their new tsar’s attempt to re-establish the empire at such cost not just to Ukrainians but to themselves? Reading The Story of Russia you would be betting against history to suggest that Putin and his present boyars are not reflecting something deep in the Russian story. Yet in Kyiv, Putin is now creating another myth that will not easily be forgotten, for a country he does not believe exists: Ukraine.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/aug/21/the-story-of-russia-by-orlando-figes-review-vladimir-putin-and-the-power-of-myth-making