Abstract
These two books come from the same publisher. They are of similar length and are similarly priced. They both tackle important themes of Russian history, culture and space, some of which overlap. However, they do so in very different ways and with very different outcomes.
Kees Boterbloem seeks to show ‘how the medieval empire of Kyivan Rus’ metamorphosed into today’s Russian Federation’. The stated intention begs from the outset a definition of the term ‘empire’, one whose applicability to Kyivan Rus’ is highly debatable, albeit clearly central to the book’s conceptual framework and purpose. It is this which Boterbloem strives to offer over the course of 13 chapters. In them, the author outlines the history of Russia from its Ukrainian origins, through the rise of Moscow, Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and up to its current avatar, Putin’s Russian Federation. He suggests that the only ‘true and independent empires’ were Imperial Russia and the USSR, and remains uncertain whether the RF should in fact be so described today, pace ‘panicky Western responses to its moves’. His narrative is accordingly aligned to the context of Russia as empire, in which some useful comparisons are made with Byzantine, Polish-Lithuanian, Mongolian, French, British and Austro-Hungarian variants, particularly as these have impacted on Russia’s own imperial aspirations. It is punctuated, in addition, by brief forays into Russian political, cultural and even literary history, not all of which would appear to be immediately relevant to the theme of empire.
Along the way, Boterbloem aims to debunk some ‘pernicious myths’ about Russia and its empire, including the cliché that ‘Russians like to be ruled by dictators’, which he dismisses sans phrases as ‘meaningless and untrue’. Similarly, he decries the rhetorical trope of Russia as ‘evil empire’, without, however, placing it in the context of President Reagan’s (uncredited) coinage of the term. (He also controversially ventures to dismiss the European Union as a ‘foolhardy scheme’.) The book is a synthesis of a highly select list of publications, hence some surprising omissions, such as David Christian’s important volumes on Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia (1998, 2018), and Donald W. Treadgold’s earlier seminal work on the West in Russia and China (1973). Moreover, they are exclusively in English while no use whatever is made of sources in Russian.
The strongest chapters are those which discuss Russia and the British and Austro-Hungarian empires in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the final chapter on Russia since 1991 – although its focus is on foreign policy rather than Russia as empire, and it underestimates the centrality of Orthodoxy and nationalism under Putin. A brief discussion of the emergence of Russian as the empire’s lingua franca contains no mention of the Cyrillic alphabet nor of its Greek provenance, nor of the crucial role of the Orthodox church in its dissemination, which seems a curious omission, and one not repeated by Robin Milner-Gulland in his nuanced discussion of Russia’s linguistic and ethnic evolution. Conversely, Boterbloem’s book suffers from a number of debatable oversimplifications on topics such as Siberia, Central Asia, the Tilsit treaty, French usage, Official Nationality (though this term is not actually deployed), and Chernobyl (which wants for any mention of its Ukrainian location). The author’s suggestion that Ivan III, ‘the true architect of Muscovy as an empire’, may well be more deserving of his title ‘the Great’ than either Peter I or Catherine II, while novel, would need more advocacy than he offers. After all, it was in fact only under Peter that the Tsardom of Muscovy was finally transformed into the Russian Empire which Catherine would later expand considerably and ultimately achieve for it great power status.
The overall impression, then, is one of an unfortunate superficiality as the author ranges over a millennium of Russian history, leading one to assume that the book is intended to be an introduction to the subject for a general readership. For a fuller study of at least two centuries of history of the same theme, interested readers may therefore wish to consult John P. LeDonne’s prize-winning new book, Forging a Unitary State: Russia’s Management of Eurasian Space, 1650–1850 (Toronto, 2020).
From the outset, Robin Milner-Gulland’s approach to Russia’s extensive continental landmass as the locus for his cultural history of the country is both stimulating and informative. His book opens with a moving tribute to Lindsey Hughes, the author’s acknowledged muse, or ‘benign spirit’. She had been his student at the University of Sussex and went on to produce a magisterial history of Peter the Great’s Russia before succumbing to cancer in 2007, an irreplaceable loss to scholars and scholarship. Both Hughes and Milner-Gulland share a discriminating eye for the significance of art and architecture, their places and spaces, as keys to discovering ‘how Russians fashioned their sense of national identity’.
The first of seven finely crafted chapters sets the scene with the most authoritative account of the development and extent of Russia’s geographical boundaries I have ever read, particularly in relation to Siberia, and in just 42 pages. The author refers in addition to the abstract area of the continent dubbed ‘Kulturia’ by the Chuvash poet Gennadiy Aygi, adding the felicitous comment that ‘some of the best Russian minds have long inhabited that territory’. It is followed by equally imaginative, well-documented, and superbly illustrated discussions of Russia’s distinctive built environment, of the ‘rich and meaningful legacy’ of its art and artists, and includes a detailed exploration of Russia’s ‘Holy’ status (more than just ‘an irritating cliché’) and of the ‘Jerusalem’ tradition by which the imperial regime ‘became fascinated, culturally and politically’. In them we find, among many other insights, a detailed anatomy of the village, the houses in it, and its church; an explanation of the significance of St Basil’s on Moscow’s Red Square, ‘the most extraordinary and ideologically sensitive three-dimensional icon that its country had ever seen’, and ‘the triumph of Orthodox Christianity it represents’; and how there is far more to producing an icon than meets the eye: ‘being an artist in Rus was quite a complicated matter’. The author finds that the importance Russians attach to their artistic heritage is reflected in the large number of Russian provincial capitals which to this day have remarkable art museums.
The penultimate chapter is a thoughtful essay on St Petersburg, whose founding in 1703 was to ‘change the conceptual sphere of Russia for ever’. It contains an absorbing account of how Peter the Great came to situate the city on the inhospitable eastern shores of the Gulf of Finland, and an erudite discussion of the religious significance for Russia of this seminal event. The author’s familiarity with a wide range of sources, in both Russian and English, is demonstrated particularly in the way he shows how the Northern capital is evoked in literature, music and art, including a brilliant explanation of the significance of Tatlin’s unbuilt tower.
The book concludes with a presentation of the ‘Ultimate Russia’, an engrossing (if unexpected) coda devoted to Solovki Island in the White Sea, ‘a cultural space of notable import’, which started in the fifteenth century as a monastic settlement dominated by its great Transfiguration Cathedral, in the sixteenth acquired a fortress ‘more impenetrable than the Moscow Kremlin’, in the twentieth served briefly (though unsurprisingly) as a Soviet outpost of exile, and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site which ‘remains for the national consciousness an ultimate symbol of safety and significance, a whole “ethonoscape” in miniature’.
The book is excellently produced, generously illustrated, and benefits from a densely textured and elegantly written text which is further enhanced by the author’s personal experience of many of the spaces, places and artefacts he so assuredly adduces throughout.