Angry Planet - The Entire History of Russia in One Hour

Episode Date: July 29, 2020

If there’s one thing that’s always changing, it’s history. And no, we’re not talking about the Confederacy today. We’re back to one of our favorite subjects: Russia.Under the Soviet regime, history was malleable. Events appeared or disappeared like characters in a play. Stalin was a savior, he was a devil. It was all in the telling. But that urge to rewrite history goes way back in Russia, and he who controls the past controls the future, as they say.Joining us today is friend of the show Mark Galeotti. His new book, A Short History of Russia, from Pagans to Putin has got it all covered. Galeotti is an expert on the Russian military, politics, and underworld, the author of many fine books, an honorary professor at University College London and a Senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.Recorded 7/17/20Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. But of course, it is a bit easier to be determined when the alternative is that Stalin's secret police put a bullet in the back of your head. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you. the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Oh, and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Golt. If there's one thing that's always changing, it's history. And no, we're not talking about the Confederacy here in the United States today. We're talking about one of our favorite subjects, Russia. Under the Soviet regime, history was malleable. Events appeared or disappeared

like characters in a play. Stalin was a savior. He was a devil. He was a devil. He was all in the telling. But that urge to rewrite history goes way back in Russia, and he who controls the past controls the future, as they say. Joining us today, his friend of the show, Mark Galiati, his new book, A Short History of of Russia from Pagans to Putin, has got it all covered. Galiadi is an expert on the Russian military, politics, and underworld, the author of many fine books and an honorary professor at University College London and a senior associate fellow

at the Royal United Services Institute, which means he's very busy. So thank you very much for joining us. Oh, my great pleasure. Can we start at the very beginning, which is, what is a Russian? Gosh, well, I mean, it's nice to know that the first question will actually fill the entire podcast. Because that and it's is a contested issue and how do you talk about them? And particularly now, the interesting thing is, and I know I'm wandering into a sideline, I promise I will go back to your question, but that given that in many ways the cradle of Russia is in what we now call Ukraine, and that as far as Putin is concerned, Vladimir the Great, they're sort of the first Christian monarch, shall we say,

of Russia. Well, frankly, Kiev can claim him as our Prince Valodim. So again, this even nationality becomes a thoroughly contested issue. But broadly speaking, and as I said, I would come back to your question. Broadly speaking, I mean, the Russians are, I mean, a compound people like all peoples are, but primarily essentially they are what happened when sort of a conquering class of, well, we call them Vikings, Variegis, the Varangians, decided. to take over lands that were occupied by scattered Slavic peoples. And over time, these two together formed a compound, then got overlaid with Mongol, Tartas, and all kinds of others. But that's

really where Russians started. And that's really where we can sort of place the answer to the question, who is a Russian. It's interesting because so much of the book is about Russia's, how Russia defines itself in its relationship with Europe. And is it European? Is it not at European? Is it his own thing? And to, like, I would say that one of the founding, like, one of the ways that you know you're European is that way back in, in, in, the, you know, the Middle Ages or I guess pre-Middle ages, Vikings invaded your land and intermingled, right? Yeah. But the thing about, I mean, again, Again, one of the reasons why the Russians sort of emphasize this, and let's be honest, you know, Vikings may be one of the great European legacies, but the other one I could think about is Romans, and the Romans never made it to Russia. But the interesting thing is

precisely because Russia is in the location it is, it is at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. it's always had this issue of having to ask and also push for an identity question, who are we? Are we Europeans? Are we Asians? Are we some kind of compound urations? And often what's happened is actually in Asia, the Russians are regarded as Europeans. And in Europe, they're considered to be Asians. And so I think this is why, I mean, you know, if you are an Italian or if you're French or if you're a Swede, you don't really have to ask the question whether you're European or not. It doesn't loom as large because you don't have to fight for your answer. So when did the Russian identity start to develop, whether it's Asian or? And now they consider themselves Slavic, Slavic people too. I mean, you know, helping out fellow Slavs and what used to be Yugoslavia, Serbia. So, but when did it start to develop an actual Russian identity?

Well, I mean, really, if we go back, ninth century is when we started getting the conquest of the Slavic lands by these princes who came from the north. And the interesting thing is even that is overlaid with myth. It's become this myth that basically the peoples of these scattered Slavic lands decided, well, you know, Our land is rich, but we have no order. Let us seek a prince who may rule over us. They said, do, do come on in, which of course actually is nonsense. It was basically Viking adventurers who thought, ah, nice country here, we'll have it.

So, you know, from that point, it's already, you might say, acquired what we might think of as a sort of a European ruling class doesn't really sort of fit. But perhaps what I would say really important is in the year 988. because that is where Vladimir or Volodymy of Kiev actually decides to adopt Christianity, particularly in the Eastern Orthodox mould, and basically baptises his own people at Spearpoint. In many ways, this was a political decision.

But that, I think, is what really links and locks the Russian people into Europe. It's that decision to shed their earlier pagan belief system. become Eastern Orthodox. And then as the Rome's fell to barbarians, is obviously the first Rome fell. And then Byzantium, the second Rome, in due course, would fall to the Ottomans, to Muslims. Then they were able to think,

oh, we are the third Rome. We are the true cradle of proper, genuine Christendom. So I think from this point, really from the very end of the 10th century, That's when I think one would really start to say that Russians were European because they were looking towards European intellectual, spiritual, and even cultural, Wells Springs. You lighted on something I want to talk about. So a word that I kept reading or hearing because I listened to the audiobook, which was wonderful, by the way. Thank you. I kept hearing the word autocrat.

over and over again kind of reverberated throughout all the airs of this book. Why, in many ways, the story that you tell of Russia here is a story of its different leaders. And they're very specific kind. You call them autocrats. Why was this concept important? How has it changed and been changed by Russia? Yeah, I use that term autocrat to mean just a single ruler. in part because one looking for something that isn't quite as value-laden as dictator or tyrant,

even though clearly a lot of the autocrats were dictators and tyrants, I think it also reflects the fact that if one looks at the historical trajectory of how Europe moved from a feudal and in a way autocratic era through into eventually bit by bit heading towards democracy. In many ways, and this is one of the guilty secrets of history. It's all about farming. But most of us are not interested in farming, so we try to gloss over that. But in some ways, it's because you had an agrarian revolution in Europe. That meant that they could grow more crops.

And that, in turn, supported the rise of cities, of merchants, of new classes, of new professions, and slowly power and wealth move to them. Russia never had that, in part because of climate, in part because of soils, particularly this very sort of thick, rich, but nonetheless sort of intransigent black earth regions and such like, in part because of minor details like, you know, Mongols rolling over them and burning their main cities and such, right. But for all those reasons, Russia never had that true agrarian revolution.

And therefore, you actually constantly had a situation in which a regime was sitting atop a country that was basically of peasants. Small crust of aristocrats above an essentially peasant country. And in that, they never really managed to find ways of creating mediating institutions. So basically, there just had to be this just one guy at the top and everyone else obeys him. Now, some people say, oh, well, that was a Mongol-style system. I don't really buy that. I think it's actually when it comes down to it about how economics shapes society and how society shapes politics.

And the interesting thing is that it's really with the late 19th, 20th century, that we actually do begin to get real and rapid change in Russian and Soviet economy, society and politics. And that's why, although one could say that Putin is an autocrat today, which he obviously is, he's the final decider and so forth. But he's an autocrat over an incredibly more complex society. He's not like an old czar. We use the term czar. It's a handy shorthand for him. But nonetheless, this is not like the old era.

And so it's amazing after what we can almost think of as a millennia of autocracy in Russia. We now have a different kind of Russia at last. Can we talk about the forces that shaped Russia to become the way it was before Vladimir took over? I love how I call him Vladimir because, yes, exactly. Right. I call him Vladimir because he and I are so close. But, no, I mean, you mentioned the Mongols. The Mongols had a huge impact, right?

I mean, they basically took care of Kiev and left an opening. Can you talk about them a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. And again, I think this reflects the way that so much of Russia, this is something that obviously today's Russian leaders don't really like to acknowledge, but so much of Russian history has been shaped from the outside. And yeah, so you start with the invasions by Vikings, and then later on the major impact is the invasian. by the Mongols, Yenghis Khan's massive, seemingly irresistible and surprisingly well-organized nomad horde rolling towards Europe because blue sky Tengri, their great god had basically

told them, yeah, as far as they're concerned, told them the world was theirs for the conquering. And what happened was the scattered peoples of the Rus, the Russians, were at this point basically a collection of principalities of city-states who spent most of their time in classic aristocratic style, basically, align with betraying and warring with each other. So, of course, divided, they were in no position to resist the nomads. And what happened was Kiev tried to resist and was roundly destroyed for its pains. a papal emissary passed in a few years later, you know, described that the ghastly nightmare scape around it

was just scattered in the bones of those who've been killed. Novgorod, the second most significant city of the Rus, which was a northern city, but above all, it was a trading city, a cosmopolitan city, and actually a lot more savvy, realized what was going on and immediately sort of happily surrendered. and because this was an era in which the Mongols considered themselves to be conquerors but not administrators,

they were not like the Romans. The Romans would take over and they would build roads and they would bring laws and they would bring in governors and they would actually expect to sort of shape the environment. No, no, the Mongols were conquerors. They were about taking control, winning battles and rolling further. So they were happy to rule through local princes. what happened is this is how Moscow rose. Moscow, which had been really scarcely more than a village around an aristocratic hunting

lodge, when the Mongols first arrived, still got burnt down, but nonetheless, there it was, would rise to become the preeminent city precisely because the princes of Moscow turned out to be the most able, the most ruthless and the most cynical opportunists around. They were happy to be the Mongols' main quizlings, their main proxies. And over the years of Mongol rule, Moscow would rise precisely because whenever the Mongols needed another city given a good kicking to remind it whose boss, whenever the Mongols needed a census taking so they could work out exactly how much silver to extort, or whatever, the Muscovites were amongst the thirst to volunteer, and in the process, enrich themselves dramatically. and bit by bit they were able to assert their control

until the point when they decided, well, actually, Mongol rule is declining. We have probably got the most we can out of this sort of arrangement. And then it was a Mongol prince, Dmitri, who became known as Dimitri Donskoy, who actually made the first major sort of challenge against the Mongols a battle at Kulikovar, which he and his allies won, which didn't really end Mongol rule. That would happen only a century later, but allowed the Muscovites to reinvent themselves.

From having been the Mongols' number one proxies, suddenly they could present themselves as the number one patriots of Russia and continue this process of unifying it. So it's not actually that the Mongols brought with them, I mean, yes, obviously there's a certain amount of language and culture and stuff. of rule which was adopted. But first and foremost, I would say that the influence of the Mongol era was in allowing, well, it was in destroying Kiev and so ensuring that Kiev was no longer the dominant city, was in taming Novgorod, which is a shame because Novgorod actually was amongst the most democratic and entrepreneurial, if we want to use in those terms of Russian cities. And Novgorod dominated Russia would have been a fascinatingly different place.

But instead, it was the quisling city, Moscow, that God. to rise and become dominant. What a noble history. That's fascinating. Well, everyone's history is noble. That's a very good point. But I guess, so what story do Russians tell themselves about Moscow? What does Moscow tell itself?

Oh, I'm sure it would amaze you to know that it's a rather different history. One of the best ways of describing it is there is there is this, um, Well, the first one was in Moscow, and then they kind of rolled out sort of equivalence elsewhere. There's a kind of museum exhibit at Wedenha, which is the kind of sort of was the old exhibition of economic achievements. A pavilion, which is called Rassia, my history, Russia, my history. And it's really well done, all very glitzy, multimedia and so forth, a big trajectory of Russia's history. And if you look at the early stages, it's all very sort of glitzy on screens, and very much it makes this point of atomized. This is one big map that shows the pre-Mongol Russia atomized, which is all divided into the city states.

And that's why it was weak. And the whole point, what they say is not, hey, the Muscovites were the number one quislings. They say, look, this is the point. Whenever Russia is divided, Russia is weak. and whoever is the imperial power of the age will wipe its boots on us. Moscow was the city that united, it was called the gathering of the lands, they gathered the Russians together under one rule

and made us strong enough to in due course be able to push out the Mongols and acquire this status as a great nation. So they kind of happily allied over the early bits. And instead, what they do is, emphasize that however it was done, and obviously they didn't talk about exactly how it was done, but however it was done, because Moscow united Russia, that is what not only created the Russian state, but brought security to Russia. And whenever Moscow's birthright, the state, has been divided since then, it has been vulnerable and its many, many enemies all around it,

will prey on it. So this kind of idea of rewriting history, I think, is another one of the central themes, or maybe kind of the opener and closer of the book. Can you walk us through your palimpsest metaphor that you kind of use and why it's important here and kind of how it structures everything that you discuss? Sure. I mean, a palimpsest is a piece of parchment or a similar document, which has been written on, and then that writing has been erased. or scratched away, but not quite

to the point of invisibility and people have written on it again, because obviously once upon a time, one didn't just sort of pull out another piece of paper from the packet photocopy stuff. You know, actually this each, whether it was wax tablet or a piece of parchment,

was valuable. And so the thing I, the reason I use this metaphor of the palimpsest, where one sees layer after layer after layer of progressively more and more faint writing. But nonetheless, you can get that sense of what was discussed before them. It's precisely that is Russia, that actually one can see all these geological layers of history that is still visible.

Frankly, you walk through the streets of Moscow today. And you can see things that actually will be reminiscent of the Mongols. I mean, if I think of where I lived there at one point, close to me was a street, Bolshei Ardinka, the Great Horde Street. That was the road that you took heading towards Sarai that was the capital of the Golden Horde, Mongols. I mean, it's still there engraven in the street names. And one can see all these other signs all around. So I think this is a country where its history is still very, very visible in day-to-day. And that's why I call it the Palimpsest Nation.

And I think rewriting history is just one aspect of this point that I make. And, look, obviously, when you're trying to take a thousand years of this extraordinarily sort of fascinating, but also I think it's fair to say, rather busy country, and squeeze it into 200 or pages, and at the same time, you know, have space for the fun stories and everything else. You need to have some kind of organising principle. And so when I was sitting down, they're thinking, well, okay, what is the organizing principle?

It was actually the extent to which Russians are so assiduous in, in a sense. fact, telling themselves stories about themselves. And I don't just simply mean that they sit around lying about their exploits. I mean, more generally, that they are constantly needing to define themselves, because this is a country which doesn't have natural borders. It doesn't have a single ethnicity. It's a multi-ethnic country sprawling all across the continent, 11 time zones in total. Where does Russia end? Where does it be? where does it fit? You know, all of these are challenges that Russians try to address through their own mythology about themselves. So I think this is why it's not just a kind of George Orwell

1984 way of political control, though clearly that is part of it. It's also genuinely how Russians are trying to come to terms with just who the hell they are. We're going to pause there just for a minute, war college. We are on with Mark Galiati talking about his new book, A Short History of Russia. All right, welcome back War College listeners. We are on with Mark Goliati talking about his new book, A Short History of Russia. So you mentioned specifically that, you know, Russia has sometimes defined itself in opposition to other groups and including the West. I mean, do you think that that's important as the way, you know, Russian see themselves now? Very much so, because I think this is one of the interesting things that,

You know, sometimes Russia's rulers are desperately trying to ape the West. Classic example is Peter the Great, the first Tsar who actually travelled in the West, but who decreed that, you know, the big, bushy beards that will previously assign of the Russian aristocracy, well, those all had to go or else you had to pay a special beard tax. And instead, people had to be clean-shaven the way Europeans are. and they had to get rid of their old caftans and wear the sort of clothes that Europeans wear and so forth. So, you know, some of it was very much about we need to be European. And that inevitably sometimes created a backlash.

People say, no, no, we are not going to become Europeans light. We have our own distinctive character and culture. And we're going to cleave to that. But this is the interesting thing. Whether you're saying we need to be more European or whether you're saying, we need to be more European, or whether you're saying we don't want to become Europeans, you're still basically defining yourself by Europe. We don't find the same sort of discussion about China

or any of the other sort of great powers that at different times they've boarded on, the Ottomans or whatever. It's always Europe that they're looking to. And whether they're actually saying, oh, we want to be like you. Or no, no, no, no, not. It's always that which is the sort of benchmark by which they assesses. themselves. It's interesting being in Moscow, and you noted this far more than I do, the mixture

of architectural styles, too. It's encoded in the landscape, in the built environment, whether it's motifs that are clearly Byzantine. I mean, even the double-headed eagle that is now the symbol of the Russian state, that was a Byzantine empire symbol, that they just thought, oh, we like that, we'll have that. and adopted just or try and give the sense that we are the new Byzantine Empire. You see exactly, you see Eastern motifs and sometimes, you know, obviously much, much more sort of striking than elsewhere. You see clear attempts to sort of ape, classical, heavy 19th century European architecture that says, no, we are a solid imperial nation.

And now you've got Moscow City, this very kind of glitzy, shiny, new, financial center of skyscrapers and such like. It's actually, I mean, I think rather impressive. But again, you know what they were trying to do. They were in some ways trying to outglitz Western business centers. It was very interested, intrigued by the Fall of the Zars portion of this book. So I think in the West, when we tell that story, the thing that we like to obsess about and talk about is respute. Putin, right?

Who's mentioned once and then kind of moved aside from. Again, you're focusing on the autocrats, the leaders. Can you, that was very, the way you portray him is very interesting. Can you kind of tell us why he was, this is Zard Nicholas, I'm sorry, the exact wrong person at the exact wrong time? Yeah, it's interesting that there's such a drive at the moment to try and make him into something he's not. you know, you have the church that is sort of basically sanctifying him and so forth. He really wasn't. In this respect, I mean, sometimes Russia was tremendously lucky in who actually managed to gravitate to power, the right person at the right time.

But by God, the karma they collected was paid back in this case. You had, anyway, look, a Russia that was increasingly under pressure. there had been attempts at reform each time the attempts at reform particularly the emancipation of the serfs freeing up of effectively the land slaves brought with it instability and chaos change does that change is scary change is difficult change always puts great pressure on the state's capacity to hold on to its power and a series of czars who either had no real answer or just simply relying on the old answers of, you know, a crackdown, trying to sort of basically reverse changes that, frankly, were long since overdue. And then along comes Nicholas. And this was a time when precisely you needed someone who would be able to be a competent navigator through what were going to be very, very rough waters. And you have someone who would have been so much happier, so much luckier and probably lived so much longer, if he'd actually

been a watchmaker. And that's what he loved to do. His misfortune was to be born as the divine right autocrat of one of the last great global empires. And the thing is, he was this worst combination of essentially not at all bright, but dutiful. If he had been, dumb but lazy, then probably power would have been in the hands of other, you know, sharp-toothed, but quite possibly more competent agent. People like his short-lived Prime Minister, Peter Stolipin. No, this is it. Nicholas felt, I mean, he was a dutiful and devout man who felt, because this is a divine

right monarchy, that he was czar because God said so. And so clearly he needed to do the best. And he really didn't have a clue. He was isolated from his own country in a way that, frankly, most autocrats are. He had no sense of, in a way, how to respond to the challenges of the age. The world is, well, the West is coming into the industrial age at this point. You know, Russia is tragically behind. And even as it does industrialize, all that does is create a new, an urban working class who are thinking,

well, hang on, we want change, we want votes, whatever. And, you know, you mentioned Rasputin, this kind of rather dissolute sort of mad monk figure, who, you know, let's face it, is the dream character, everyone filming a documentary or docudrama around the end of czarism. The reason I don't really talk about it much, apart from the fact that, again, to compress a book into one book of this length or this history, it was at once exhilarating, but also truly, heartbreaking all the great stories I just couldn't include. But in many ways, I think the thing about Rasputin is he was a symptom, not a cause. You know, he was an example. He was this guy who seemed to promise literally magical answers. He would be able to cure Nicholas's son, who basically had had a blood disorder. He offered a degree of sort of spiritual sucker. And, and and possibly he offered Nicholas's wife something more.

But the main thing was, look, at a time when the world was so complex and so scary, here was a man who was offering simple answers and reassurance. And that's what Nicholas went for. And I think therefore this is all these kind of potentials, there were other people who Nicholas could have listened to. I mentioned this man, Peter Stalipin, who became his prime minister right after a series of risings, 1904-5, sometimes called a revolution, that was really a collection of risings. I mean, Stalipin was on the one hand a deeply brutal man.

I mean, he crushed the risings, exceedingly efficiently but violently, so much so that still to this day, the hangman's noose is known as a Stalipin necktie. But on the other hand, it's a guy who realized that Russia needed to change, and that that had to be a managed process of change. And he started doing it with rural reform. Nicholas didn't like it. it meant change. It meant people were unhappy. And frankly, when there was a plot to assassinate Stalipin, Nicholas quite possibly knew about it and did nothing to stop it.

And Stalipin died and so it was. So I think, in a way, the thing about Nicholas is the fact that he was so incapable, in some ways meant that the czarism lost its last chance. But frankly, I think by that point the regime was dead. I sometimes think of it as like one of these kind of dinosaurs, tiny little brain at the end of a long, long neck. a massive body that in some ways could basically die and it takes a while for the brain to realize it. Well, like I think this is a regime which anyway had pretty much died.

Maybe if Nicholas II had been a much more able character, maybe he would have been able to squeeze a little bit more life out of it. If he hadn't been determined to bring Russia into World War I, if he hadn't then been determined to make himself commander-in-chief, a job for which he was manifestly incapable, then things might have been different, but they might have been different for a few years or maybe even a few decades. But when it comes down to it, this was a system which was dead. Well, in history, it was against them.

I mean, you know, empires were dying or dead all around the world, too. Absolutely. Yeah, this is it. I mean, this was a different era. And empires that were going to survive were ones that were going to be ruthless, pragmatic, and change. I mean, you know, one can look at the British Empire, which obviously didn't survive, but hung around for long. and was able to kind of transform itself into the Commonwealth. Because, let's be perfectly odd, if there's anything that we, Brits, excel out,

it's being ruthlessly pragmatic, even while pretending to be nice and polite. But Russia didn't have that. It didn't have that, you know, it didn't have leaders who were able and willing to make that kind of change. The only one who in some ways had had that capacity, Nicholas I, who had been around in the middle of the 19th century. I mean, he was ruthless and efficient and energetic, but ultimately he had not had the courage to really try and take on reform. He might have been able to do it.

If he'd been willing to do that, he might have had the characteristics to push it through. But that's what you need. You need to have a very sharp toothed reformer at the head of the system to even have a chance at managing this kind of process. Nicholas, the second, was not that. When you're writing a book like this,

you're sorting through, I assume you read, and you've got kind of recommendations built into the book, but you're sorting through a lot of different histories. And as you've kind of said, Russia is a place where history is constantly being rewritten and the story that Russians are telling themselves is constantly changing. How do you kind of sort through, like,

what is accepted history, what's myth, what's rumor, you know, as you're writing a book like this? I mean, that's a really interesting question. And in some ways, I was lucky that I have been teaching Russia in different periods. I mean, obviously, although I'm primarily a modernist, I would say fortunately, academics can often not be too narrow in their teaching. So, I mean, I, if I even have to go back to when I was teaching at Keill University in the British Midlands in the 1990s, you know, I taught courses that went back to the 8th century and so forth. And above all, did it with colleagues, which is, again, was really interesting because they will come with their own different perspectives and skill sets. So in some ways, I had been grappling this for some time. And also I had quite recently written a book specifically on this Battle of Kulikovo when Dmitri Dmitri Donskoi took on the Mongols for Osprey. And that was a really fascinating and salutary experience in realizing that once you actually start digging into the original sources, you realize that the received wisdom is based on nothing much except wishful thinking and stories cobbled together by church chronicians. as 100 years later.

So I think this is, the answer is that actually you go back to the original source as much as you can. Need to read the secondary materials and the biographies and things to get a sense of the shape and, you know, just to be exposed to a whole variety of different perspectives. And I find this particularly, I mean, Catherine the Great, Catherine the Great, I'd never really kind of fully felt I'd got a grip of. So I had to read rather more in terms of biographies and assessments of her. But then once you've got that sense, you need to test that with the primary material.

And, you know, they say, oh, well, at this point Catherine was saying X. Well, you go and look at her letters and say, okay, yeah, well, kind of. But actually, she was saying X with a little bit of Y. So that's the way it works. And again, in that respect, it was actually quite, I would say, quite liberating to have an excuse to go back to reading, you know, whether it's in terms of the Novgorod Chronicle or whether it's in terms of Catherine's letters or whether it's in terms of particularly fascinating the travel memoirs of foreigners passing through Russia

just to get a sense of what they saw, how they experienced it. It does seem like an impossible task, though. I mean, history is my favorite subject. And, you know, when I think about the fact that let's just take a legal case, that you could have four eyewitnesses and at least three different stories must make your job very difficult. Well, I mean, if that was a true cynic, actually, I would say it makes my job a lot easier because I just get to pick the fun perspective and no one can prove me wrong. That is perhaps a little too cynical. No, I mean, yeah, it's always the case that, first of all, you have to lean also on the perspectives of the specialists. The people, you know, again, let's say, well, let's move on from Catherine.

Say, you know, Peter the Great, there are people who have spent their careers being marinated in all the detail, all the sources and so forth. And, you know, you have to think very carefully before you go against their perspective. But you have to accept also that sometimes, you know, history perspectives does move on. But yeah, but there is also, I will be honest, an extent to which there were times when you came across, well, I would come across a story, but it was a nice story, a story that I wanted in the book. And I think I can't absolutely say that this definitely happened. but as long as I could pretty confidently say, I can't prove that it didn't. If it was a good story, I'd put it in. Can you give us an example of one of those?

I mean, again, obviously, this tends to be sort of when one goes sort of further back. You know, because obviously when you're talking about kind of church chronicles and such like these have a tendency to, well, they often are literally. palimpsest, written over one another, but they're also often kind of what one could think of as narrative palimpsest, that what they do is they take someone else's story. And I think one of the things is like Novgorod. Again, I have a soft spot for Novgorod. I really want to actually go back and spend some more time looking at Novgorod. Because as I said, it does represent one of these extraordinary potential what-if stories about Russia is if it had dominated rather than Moscow. But the point is the Novgorod Chronicle gives you this brilliant sense of a people who,

even in the era of autocrats, they didn't know it was an era of autocrats. And you have the Vietje, which is the sort of general assembly of the people of Novgorod, often being really quite balzy. They regarded the princes as basically their employees. And so you have these cases like there was one particular point, you know, where sort of a prince was really deemed to have not done his job. And so what happens is actually that, you know, the princes of, sorry, the people of Novgorod sort of get together and basically say, right, that's it. Get out. Or else we will come after you. And by God, we will do bad things to you.

And the guy leaves. Now, we don't know the detail of that, but because I quite like the idea of telling this story of Novgorod as having a very different style of rule than the rest of Russia, there comes a point where I think that'll do. Even you, the objective arbiter. Well, I mean, look, a book like this, you're trying to be the objective arbiter, but you've also got to be a storyteller. I mean, if you want the really detailed, intricate explorations of the sort of the minutiae of each era, you're not going to read a short history of Russia a thousand years in 200 and something words. The purpose of, I mean, the purpose of this I felt was to do several things. I mean, one was just simply to tell a damned good story. And in a way, to treat Russia as the protagonist of its own story, as in some ways a person.

But secondly, it was actually that there is a kind of a serious geopolitical point, is that these days, and for understandable reasons, generally speaking in the West, I think there are some tremendously two-dimensional portrayals of Russia. And especially in the United States, where, again, for entirely understandable reasons, much of the time when people are talking about Russia is just a lot of the time. an idiom for talking about the current White House. And I suppose what I wanted to do was actually give a portrayal of just to sketch out some of the complexities of this country and the extent to which, yes, Russia is different. Yes, Russia is distinctive. But actually, if we're honest, I mean, this is my view. Russia is a European country that often loses its way, but it never quite lost it totally.

And actually, I think it's slowly coming back to Europe and with it the West. And I think that's a point that I think is worth making at this particular sort of juncture. In that way, it's kind of a companion piece to another book that you've come onto the show and talk about, which is another short, brief book. We need to talk about Putin, right? Yeah, again, I think, and I mean, this sounds tremendously arrogant. oh, no one else understands Russia. Oh, no one else understands Putin.

Of course, lots of people do and understand both Russia and lots of people have very, very deep insights into Putin. But I think, in a way, the purpose of these particular short books is exactly to try and challenge some of the myths and the lazy assumptions, whether it's of Putin the three-dimensional geopolitical chess player who is always ahead of the West and basically the architect of all our misfortunes, or whether it's this idea that Russia is this land of beaten land slaves who simply want to be told what to do by a semi-godlike monarch, or conversely, purely a country of authoritarianism, despotism, and violence,

without also noting that actually this is a country which also has a history, not just of extraordinary cultural and other glories, but also of people fighting back against their autocrats, that Russians are not nature's victims, that Russians may often have been put in a very tough spot for reasons of geography, culture, economy, and so forth, but actually they have often pushed back against that just as they are now. That's interesting because you're right,

Well, I mean, forget saying that you're right. But it does seem like the American view, and I can't speak to the Western view, but the American view of Russians is even in World War II that they had guns at their back as well as guns in front of them, right? I mean, that the soldiers and everybody, they, sure, they fought bravely, but it wasn't least because they were going to be shot. if they didn't. It just makes for an interesting view of Russia, I think. Yeah, and to be honest, there's more than a little bit of truth about that. I really don't want to take away from the genuine heroism and endurance that the Soviet soldiers

and need Soviet population demonstrated during World War II, and it's understandable really why they call it, to this day, the Great Patriotic War. But of course, it is a bit easier to be determined when the alternative is that Stalin's secret police put a bullet in the back of your head. And I think that's, again, one of the complexities. Even while I try and simplify Russian history for the sake of being able to fit it into this slim book, I'm also trying to at least sketch out actually the complexities about it. And I think one of the interesting things is that, you know, we have an often quite simplistic sense of the Russians. But the official line that Putin is currently putting out is also, I would say, ridiculously simplistic.

You know, it does try to exclude all these kind of complexities, all the moral but also political ones that say, well, actually, yes, you know, the Soviets did do X and Y. but at the same time that was in part because, you know, Stalin was forcing to do that. And the more that Putin tries to essentially create an official history, which again, it's a very Soviet thing to do, I mean, he actually, he demanded, at the time when they were looking at creating a sort of common history textbook for schools, that the official story of the country ought to be free of internal contradictions and double interpretations. well look the history of no country is going to be free of internal contradictions

and double interpretations that's the essence of humanity that is the essence of history so yeah absolutely one can one can see heroism as well as that kind of deep dark cynical leadership

so in that respect the American perspective is right and it's let's be honest it's one of the reasons why I'm a Russianist you know for me history is all about the stories, and I think the Russia has the most extraordinary stories in which the heroism

is especially bright, but also the miseries are especially bloody and dark. As perfect in ending as that is, I need to ruin it by asking one more question. Of course. So there's a, there's

one character, if we can call him a character, that kind of looms over this whole book, and I feel like it doesn't come in until the very end. And I feel like there was one really telling line as you're wrapping up the book where you say that you're making an attempt to put Vladimir Putin in his historical place and kind of compare him and contrast him to all these other autocrats that have come down the line. Where do you see Vladimir Putin's place in Russia's story? Well, I'll answer that in two ways. I'll actually

three. If this is the last question, I'll milk it for all it's worth. I think Putin himself is clearly actively trying to shape his own history. This is a man who he has all the all the palaces,

all the expensive track suits, whatever else that he could possibly want. You know, he had all of Russia is his piggy bank. I think he's moved It's almost like kind of autocrats Maslow's pyramid of needs. You know, so as you go up and more and more rarefied. And at the top, he's basically, I think, thinking about his historical legacy. As the man who, in coin a phrase, made Russia great again, there's an interesting point where he talked about Russia has been lifted up off its knees.

And it's interesting, it's not Russia has got up off its knees, but it has been lifted. The implication is clearly he is the one doing the lifting. So, I mean, he is trying to build himself, this historical position as the sort of the one who reconstituted the state. You know, his first two presidential terms were reconstituting the state after the chaos of the 1990s. And his, I was going to say last two, but we'll have to wait and see, let's say, second to two terms as president are about instead putting Russia back where it deserves to be in international relations, establishing it is a great power. So I think that's his vision of himself, very, very heroic, very much in the mold of figures like Peter the Great and in a different way like Stalin, who absolutely shaped their era. Secondly, though, I think also one can see certain aspects of Putinism really kind of reflecting, echoing, shall we say, trends that we've seen earlier in Russia, that exactly the sort of the there is a pendulum swing you often see between an era in which the biggest risk seems to be not to reform.

If you don't reform at home, you're going to become technologically backward and foreign countries are going to be invading you and such like. So you try a bit of reform. That becomes chaotic and you come to think, no, no, no, actually the biggest risk is in reform. We actually need to sort of consolidate our grip on the country, otherwise the mob will tear us apart. So it's, you know, is the threat from without or within? And I think Putin very much has, anyway, ridden this pendulum from being one who saw the real threat is coming from within, and therefore the need to reconstitute the state and fight the Chechens and such like, to one who actually feels that the big risk is from outside. And we'll have to see now actually as he comes under more pressure, whether in some ways the pendulum will swing back. So in that respect, Putin is just a very kind of classic Russian figure.

The final thing is I think history will treat Putin quite severely. I think he will be considered to be a transitional figure, not a defining figure. He is the kind of last of the Homo-Sovieticus generation. The generation who didn't just, weren't just born or educated in Soviet times, but had their first early career experiences. Anyway, they were already grown-ups by the time the Soviet Union collapsed. They'd already kind of had their patterns for how the world is and everything else. And they had to deal with this traumatic shock when literally overnight they went from being citizen with one of the two global superpowers, being citizen of this ramshackle country that no one really knew what was about,

and everyone regarded as a geopolitical basket case and so forth. And I think so much of what explains Putin is really emotional. It's not about careful, cunning, complex, intellectual thinking. it's actually about what happened and who took it from us and we want it back. Very visceral, very unrealistic, but very strongly felt. And we're already seeing, I think, that there is a new generation of leaders arising, who I'm not saying they're any better. I mean, a lot of them, frankly, are kleptocrats, they're corrupt,

but they don't have quite the same sense of we want it back the way it was. Not Soviet, we don't care about communism, but that sense of greatness. And so I think this is it. I think Putin will be seen as a transitional figure, from Soviet era to the next political generation, which will follow him, which will be the first truly post-Soviet era. And that's why, I mean, I had no hesitation about consigning him just to a couple of sections of one chapter in the book. There's a temptation, obviously, to give him a whole chapter and and whatever else because he looms so large to us today. But when you look at the often quite astonishing characters,

I mean, sometimes astonishingly horrible, but nonetheless quite astonishing characters who have shaped Russia over the centuries, Putin really is not in their league. Well, Mark Galiati, author of the new book, A Short History of Russia from Pagans to Putin, thank you so much for joining us. This week, War College listeners,

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