PBS News Hour - Full Show - How Moscow's turbulent past shapes Putin's vision for Russia

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

Moscow started as a fort on a hill and has survived invasion, revolution, civil war and Soviet collapse to transform into a formidable world power. But with the limits of Russia's power tested in Ukraine, is history doomed to repeat itself? Nick Schifrin discusses how Moscow's complex past helps us understand the present with Simon Morrison, author of "A Kingdom and a Village." PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Moscow, from village to vanquisher. The Russian capital started as a fort on a hill and survived invasion, revolution, civil war, and Soviet collapse to transform into a formidable world power. But with the limits of that power being tested on the front lines of Ukraine, can Russian president of Vladimir Putin's imperial ambitions

be reigned in? And in Moscow, is history doomed to repeat itself? Coming up on Compass Points. Hello and welcome to Compass Points. For Americans today, Russia and its capital of Moscow is presented as a place of peril. The State Department has advised Americans not to travel there after high-profile arrests, including basketball star Brittany Greiner and Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Grischovic. But Moscow has not always been this hostile, and it is one of the

world's great cities. First documented in 1147, transformed repeatedly by fire, war, revolution, and even architecture that always reflected the politics of the day. It is a city with a Trinity, orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. That phrase comes from Princeton Professor Simon Morrison's new book, A Kingdom and a Village, a Thousand-Year History of Moscow, that teaches us how Moscow's complex past helps us understand the president. And Simon joins me here. Thank you very much. Thank you for being here.

Thank you. It's an honor. Let me begin with the very first sentence in the book. And you write this. Russia, Russia, has never been called Russia, not officially. It's been Holy Rus, the Tsardom of Russia, Imperial Russia, Soviet Russia, and the Russian Federation, but never just Russia. That place doesn't exist, except in the imagination, in a dreamscape of crime and punishment, war and peace, terror, and utopia, Uncle Vanya, Chekhov play, and Dr. Zhivaga. Why? For many reasons, one is that the borders of Russia are very porous.

and one of the things that Russia historically has dealt was the fact that there's always been this external threat perceived. And so one way to actually stop people from coming in is to push the borders outward. And so that instability is actually something that means that the landmass itself is very vaguely defined. If you look on a map and try and find a border of where Siberia begins, you will not find one.

The other thing that I wanted, I set off the book by actually making that point was that Moscow is not Russia. Moscow existed before Russia and Kiev existed before Moscow, which is obviously an important sort of geopolitical point. Moscow is a vast concentration of wealth.

I would say about 80% of the wealth of what's called now, the Russian Federation is concentrated in Moscow, and then you'd say another 15% in St. Petersburg, that doesn't leave a lot for the rest of the place. The other reason I opened with that is that if you actually look at or try and do a history of Moscow.

Moscow, in a way, did not want its history to be written. And so part of the reason I wrote it was, A, I was going to write a book about why Moscow does not want. Because Moscow, or certainly the older centuries in the city's history, the people were actually segregated. They were kept away from foreigners. And so when you have accounts of foreigners who visited and wanted to write the story of what these people were like,

they were not given access. They lived differently. They thought about existence differently. They thought about, if you want to use the cliche, the meaning of life very differently. And they were faith-based and ritual-based, and they had a different perception of time. They had no rights.

Russia did not go in through an Enlightenment period. And one of the means that was early on in a habit of enforcing control over the population was actually for the rulers, whatever prince or czar or dictators in charge, would say, no, you don't have access to these people. And that stymied those people telling their stories. And that obviously prevented people from outside,

from Sweden or Germany or wherever, from actually finding out how these people lived. And I was really fascinated about what it is about this place that actually constructs itself as other, as different, a kind of civilizing otherness. And what were those people's lives like? and why were they kept away from it? One of the through lines that I think you've pointed out, you've discovered,

is that in Russia and Moscow history repeats itself again and again. As you put it to my colleague, Russian's conceptions of time is circular. Yeah. Why is that? And what does that mean for the rest of us who are watching Moscow and Russia and having to deal with their foreign policy?

Well, the geopolitical side of it is fascinating and very fraught because if I were to say to one of my Moscow friends or Russian friends. You know, the Russian conception of time is circular. They say, well, we would like to break out of the circle and actually be sort of linear. Somewhere else. But that's ingrained habit to do is, you know, the idea of ancient Slavophile custom, it's ritual based, it's about the cycle of seasons, it's about the cycle of communities, and that the ideas you are part of a sort of collective belonging, and that the past is the future. What was, will be again. And you see in the historical narratives that I had to deal with,

a lot of this circularity and the idea that, yeah, the Napoleonic thing was recapitulated with the Hitler thing. So meaning 1812, Napoleon invades, right? Hitler invades in the 1930s, early 1940s. You get history repeating itself and you get the same lessons learned or the same responses from Russian leaders. Absolutely, and that cultural products,

which are to some degree historical products, there was this anecdote about Gorbachev and Yeltsin went to the opera right at the time when the Soviet Union was collapsing and they saw Boris Gudinov and it's about an imposter czar and a pretender to the throne and they looked at this opera they're like, my God, it's us. And at what point do these historical narratives not keep getting re-inscribed and repeated in different ways?

At least they can acknowledge it. This is a sort of crap that actually is part of why Russia acts the way it does now. I think our audience might be surprised that you are a professor of music at Princeton. So why a thousand-year history of mind? Well, I work on Russian music primarily. It's my job to advocate for music and to explain that music actually is part of all of these other disciplines.

And the one thing that I learned in trying to write this history and all of its complexities is that a lot of archives are closed, the presidential archive and the Kremlin's the Holy Grail, no one gets in there. I mean, even if the archivist told you what was in there, that person would be in, you know, a world of her. Permanently classified. But I did find, though, that cultural archives, including a lot of musical documents, have a great deal of historical information in them. And so one way to get at the political history is through the cultural archives, which are more or less open. So for me, as a music person, and seeing that it's odd that this city I visit so many times that there's

no comprehensive history of, even the travel guides, they're sort of parkmarked. you know, why not, again, explore the idea of why the resistance to the history and then use the cultural archives to get at the broader picture. So let's go through some of the themes and the through lines, I would say, in history and the book. And let's start with power. As you put it to my colleague, power operates differently in Russia. And it brings us to Ukraine, I think, and some of Russia's imperial thinking. But we're going to go back and we're going to remark that the Romanov's, of course, ruled Russia for 300 years until the 1970s. revolution. And before Mikhail Romanov took power in 1613, that's him, or at least virgins of him, the assemblage. You write that lawlessness of what's known as the time of troubles

in the decades before that, quote, lie beneath Russia's response to the Napoleonic invasion of 1812, the Second World War, the end of communism, and even NATO's incursions into Eastern Europe some four centuries later. So you are drawing a giant through line of history. Why does something that happened 425 years ago, if my math is right, help us understand the present. The greatest fear in Russian cultural consciousness is chaos. And the times when the city burnt down, the times when it was marauded. The odd thing about Moscow history in particular, as opposed to the rest of Rus, is that that city was overrun over centuries by Tatar Mongols and other forces.

If you think of Slavic civilization as being like a person, that civilization had a very abused childhood. And that mentality of under threat, fortress mentality, is deeply ingrained. And Mr. Putin uses that all the time to actually say, if it weren't for me, the finger in the dike kind of thing, you're looking at time of troubles redux.

And also when I was able to go there many years ago, I would interview older Russians who would say exactly that. well, you guys may talk about corruption or Ukraine or whatever, but I remember the 90s. I remember how bad it got, and this is better than that. Yeah, I remember the 90s. Yeah. You know, I spent a good chunk of my life in the 90s there, and it was frankly terrifying. Yeah.

Despite the, you know, the ability of people to withstand it, it was that kind of chaos anarchy is not something anyone who wants to revisit. So then another through line and attached to that, of course, is the idea of how to defend Russia by expansion, right? And you say that after Napoleon's 1812 invasion, we've mentioned this, during which actually he sees Moscow as part of Russian strategy, but ultimately had to flee, Russia survived and continued to expand through avarice and resentment with the goal of growing so big it would be impossible ever again for any enemy to invade and not be swallowed up. So is that the birth or is that the core of the expanse ofish Russia that even we see through Putin today? I think it's the beginning and I think it's the motivation right now.

The beginning was Moscow only became a capital quite by chance. I mean, there were other cities that probably should have been and would have been more, I think, democratic, no of court, for example, the D. Emir. But through acts of extreme violence and conquest, two actually shore up defenses. This people is a stronghold for enemies will go in there and on and on and on and it spread outward.

And then you had periods of incredible expansion to do threats from the west, threats from the south, threats from the east, under Catherine the Great, for example. And essentially, what Putin is trying to recapitulate and probably not as effective a way as it happened in the past was, was, yeah, a reassertion in the face of collapse and weakness, what happened in the 90s of imperial greatness and expansion. And I think the, obviously the problem with that is that there are terrifying forces marshaled against Russia these days. But the question of Ukraine, which I imagine is something that it does lurk in the pages of this book, the idea of losing Ukraine is primal for Russians and certainly for. for the political leadership right now.

And it certainly helps explain why Russia has, by Putin, has bet the farm, so to speak, being willing to have a million people leave the country and Ukraine and Kiev, as you mentioned before, is such a key part of Russian history and the Rus. The through lines continue, that are connected to Ukraine, I think, and that's the police state, right? And we see this in Putin before.

So today we think of Putin's Russia, before and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. You got footage from 2019 there. co-opting, silencing independent media, killing or exiling opposition figures, and arresting dissenters. But you say that this actually goes back to Ivan the Terrible. Absolutely. In 1564, who was so brutal, just that was how he was depicted. I mean, look at that.

He was so brutal, and that is perhaps the most famous moment for Ivan Terrible. He killed his own son, as famously documented in that painting. How is Putin's crackdown there for a reflection? of history. Well, Ivan the Terrible had a traumatic upbringing and he faced tremendous resistance from these feudal lords, clansmen known as the Boyars. And they were out to depose him, in his thinking, at least. And what he did was he established the first police state in Moscow on a piece of land where the Lennon Library currently stands or the National Library

called basically the Widows Land, the Apricenina. And he created for himself there a sort of compound, a cordon sanitaire. And he established a police force. And that police force was responsible for quelling, suppressing the boyars who were against him,

also going into other places. It only dissolved when it failed, when there was an invasion from a vestige of the sort of Khan, the empire, that moved into Moscow and, you know, destroyed a lot of the place. And then he dissolved it and then went back to his regular police force. But the lore surrounding Ivan the Terrible was that he needed to do this to preserve the state

because Ivan the Terrible was the first ruler crowned as Tsar. And in order to preserve the state, he needed this police force because of these external threats which were varied and diverse. And what you get then is the idea that this is a Russian ruler, he needs to defend Russia. And then later on, when you see, What follows him is the Boris Goodenoff reign where he's considered to be an impostor-Zar

for various hereditary reasons. And then there's a famine, and the place falls apart. And then there's an invader from somewhere else, takes over. And Russian history thinks this was terrible, this invader taking part, right? This pretender. But if you actually look at sort of revisionist histories,

that pretender came in and he actually ruled pretty well. He was a pretty good guy. But no, no, no, we have to reassert the bloodline. And so this idea of legitimizing the police state for the defense of the nation, recurs over and over again, it recurred through Stalin, and then it recurs, obviously, through Putin. And the theme also, the through line that Ivan the Terrible gives us is what we would call the combination, what Americans would call the combination of church and state.

Today, religion, of course, is intertwined with politics. You see Putin there with Kirill, who, of course, is the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. He has blessed Putin's decisions, including Ukraine. But again, this goes back to the Ivan Terrible, and you write this, the Orthodox Church and the security services were conjoined from that moment. You're talking about 1564 to the present day. How so? This comes back to the issue of power.

Power in Russia is a floating signifier. To use that term. Basically, it's like we think of power as attached to human agency. People accrue power in different ways, economic, etc. Their power is something that is rooted in the land. and also rooted in the divine. And so these rulers basically, they said, I have the divine privilege to lord over you.

And so you must submit. And sometimes power doesn't like the ruler, which is weird to think about it. It's like power didn't like Boris Goodenoff. Power didn't like Medvedev, you know, and so on. Former Prime Minister, term president. Right. And so these people are considered weak

and bad things happen under their rule and so forth. Power did like certain rulers. Whether or not power likes Putin is, I think, up to the first. future to decide. But this idea of, yeah, like power floats around and what Ivan did very effectively was in order to fund the church, support the church, bring the church into power, basically said, all right, I will have this divine mantle and my rule will be re-reated in the land and the divine, it's up there, it's out there, and that's me. So I'm beyond the human. And this idea recurs over it. The Soviets, of course, mostly, mostly severed that church-state relationship.

how and why has Putin brought it back? The Soviets severed it because of, you know, Marxism. But during World War II for patriotic national reasons, they rehabilitated the church, brought that in, and Putin is actually, who traffics in a lot of World War II nostalgia because that was a great moment in Russian history. Despite terrible sacrifice, they did win that war. They saved the world.

They saved the world. They saved the world. And that idea of actually faith. essence of the land, that this is the true faith, the Orthodox Church, that this is the universal church in terms of its history, its lineage, this is the conjoining, and this city is, you know, the sort of, you know, the newest version of Rome. And Putin traffics in all of that and has absorbed that narrative into his own rule. Absolutely. And he has used that narrative as a way to say, look at how I am continuing the best parts of Russia, the best parts of Russian history, and including

imperial ambition. Yeah, and one thing I would say is that he put up a statue of his namesake right outside the Kremlin, and this was the person who brought the faith to Russia and Kiev. Another true line that I think that is important for us to engage with and not just dismiss is suffering, the idea that Russians are able and willing to suffer, which is a bit of a cliche, but still, very important. And you describe St. George. You describe the torture and resilience of St. George, you see version of him there, whom Moscow claims as a patron saint, as a metaphor for the suffering of the Russian people with this fundamental message. There is no amount of hardship. There is no amount of hardship that cannot be endured. Why is suffering so fundamental

for us to understand Russia? Well, a lot of the history of the people of Russia is that of humiliation and living in a pitchable state. A lot of what allowed them to bear existence was the idea that they were part of a broader or bigger purpose, whether that's ethnic nationalist or something to do with faith. That's ingrained. And I think one of the things that's really important and to bear in mind about Russia and Russians, and it's something I try and bear in mind now

in my dotage with my students is that, you know, people have never had rights there, but they've always had duties. And so it's navigating or dealing with that civilization in terms of the everyday person is actually one of actually said, do not ask me about my rights, what my privileges are. Ask me what my duties are and what service I should provide.

So this idea of this sort of communal collective good, which obviously the Soviets privileged, but actually is ancient. And that's actually something, yeah, it's not an individualistic society. And, you know, I heard one of my former landlady actually said that, you know, together we're brilliant. Individually we're idiots.

Americans are the reverse, you know, So individually, you're quite brilliant, but collectively not so much. You know, and so that's deeply ingrained as well. Some of the suffering, of course, and something that you do very well is chart the art, the architecture, the theater as a reflection of the day. And some of the suffering, of course, especially during the Soviets, were artists. You point out at one point art during Stalin's brutal dictatorship. the only people resisting were Russia's artists at terrible risk until they could resist no more.

What does that say about how key art and your understanding of Moscow is through art and architecture and theater? Yeah, this is a really important point because when Russia invaded Ukraine, there was a lot of efforts to cancel Russian artists. And the point I made in various contexts was that actually it's a strange thing to do

given the fact that what we consider to be the great artists in those three or four blocks of Moscow and St. Petersburg, that those people generally resisted. They were censored. They were living hard scrabble existence. They spoke truth to power. All of those things, some of them are cliché, actually pertained to the experiences of Pushkin or Dostoevsky and so forth.

And it's also really important to bear in mind that those artists actually saw Russia in its weakness, in its deplorable aspects. And they created works that actually commented and critiqued the history. And the history is manufactured by the regime. And so canceling them seemed to be a kind of contradictory exercise. And the other thing I think is really important to that these people are kind of the legislators of humankind.

These artists, that's how they viewed themselves. And what I really admire about the great artists of Russia, which were basically the idea that they tried very hard not to be Russian. They tried to actually speak to everyday profundities of everyday people. And so those great books that are part of the Russian canon, the great musical works, you know, you listen to them, you read those books, and they communicate back to you, to all of us. Yeah. Finally, let us end with this idea of history and seeing it circularly, but also confronting it, or not confronting it.

And you said something important to my colleague this week as we were preparing for this, is that Russia never truly reckoned with a very specific part. of its history, and that is Stalin's crimes, Stalin's repression before World War II in the 30s, millions across Ukraine, especially were killed across Russia. Why is that reckoning or lack thereof so important? This is probably the most important aspect of this book and thinking, and I think the geopolitical situation right now, is that there has never been, and accounting for the 1930s, for the Stalinist repressions. Obviously, that revolution, which a lot of people supported, a lot of great artists supported,

it went terribly wrong. They started building prison camps, right? So the revolution is over when you're starting to do that. And then something completely irrational and monstrous happened, where the people that were arresting people on these arrests, started arresting one another, right? And this spun into some apocalyptic dimension. And, you know, one of the things that I heard and I remembered was to understand sort of the Russian, you know, perspective on itself and why it acts the way it does in part is, you know, Hitler didn't win, but Stalin won.

And so imagine if Hitler had won. That happened in Russia. And dealing with that has not been something that anybody can't. or is able to take on. It is repressed. And so there is a deep level of shame, I think, and grief, based on that silencing. And it's concealed and covered up with a lot of ravado. But what happened there, you know, there's been no reckoning on the likes of what happened in East Germany with the opening of the Astasi files. And that really does need to happen. And it's still a challenge to actually find out, you know, what happened to Ma or Grandma or there, so forth, because then you don't want to know it to some degree. You don't want to know that your relatives were actually part of these repressions. Fascinating. The book is A Kingdom

and a Village, a Thousand Year History of Moscow. Simon Morrison, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure. And that's all the time we have for now. Thank you for joining us. I'm Nick Schiffran. We'll see you here again next week on Compass Points.