# The Story of Russia

## Metadata
- Author: [[Orlando Figes]]
- Full Title: The Story of Russia
- Category: #books
## Highlights
- (the fact that the term ‘Ukraine’ would not appear in written sources until the end of the twelfth century – and then only in the sense of okraina, an old Slav word for ‘periphery’ or ‘borderland’ – was conveniently overlooked). ([Location 72](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=72))
- What we have in the conflict over Volodymyr/ Vladimir is not a genuine historical dispute, but two incompatible foundation myths. ([Location 79](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=79))
- As late as 2008, he told the US president that Ukraine was ‘not a real country’ but a historic part of greater Russia, a borderland protecting Moscow’s heartlands from the West. By this imperial logic Russia was entitled to defend itself against Western encroachments into Ukraine. ([Location 83](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=83))
- ‘Who controls the past … controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,’ George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four.5 The maxim is more true for Russia than for any other country in the world. In Soviet times, when Communism was its certain destiny and history was adjusted to reflect that end, there was a joke, which perhaps Orwell had in mind: ‘Russia is a country with a certain future; it is only its past that is unpredictable.’ ([Location 91](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=91))
- History in Russia is political. ([Location 97](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=97))
- Today the role of history in such debates is more important than ever. In Putin’s system, where there are no left–right party divisions, no competing ideologies to frame debate, and no publicly agreed meanings for key concepts like ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’, the discourse of politics is defined by ideas of the country’s past. Once the regime lays its meaning on an episode from Russian history, that subject is politicised. This is nothing new. Soviet historians were even more the hostages to changes in the Party Line, particularly under Stalin, when history was falsified to elevate his own significance and discredit his rivals. Some were forced to ‘correct’ their work, while others had their works removed from libraries or were banned from publishing again. ([Location 103](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=103))
- Beyond such controlling narratives, history-writing in Russia, since its beginning in medieval chronicles, has been intertwined in mythical ideas – the myths of ‘Holy Russia’, the ‘holy tsar’, the ‘Russian soul’, Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’ and so on. These myths became fundamental to the Russians’ understanding of their history and national character. They have often guided – and misguided – Western policies and attitudes towards Russia. To understand contemporary Russia we need to unpack these myths, explain their historical development and explore how they informed that country’s actions and identity. ([Location 114](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=114))
- All of which is to explain why this book is called The Story of Russia. It is as much about the ideas, myths and ideologies that have shaped the country’s history, about the ways the Russians have interpreted their past, as it is about the events, institutions, social groups, artists, thinkers and leaders that have made that history. ([Location 130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=130))
- Its underlying argument is simply put: Russia is a country held together by ideas rooted in its distant past, histories continuously reconfigured and repurposed to suit its present needs and reimagine its future. How the Russians came to tell their story – and to reinvent it as they went along – is a vital aspect of their history. It is the underlying framework of this history. ([Location 134](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=134))
- From the rise of Muscovy, or Moscow, the founding core of the Russian state, to Putin’s wars in Ukraine, history shows that Russia tends to advance its security by keeping neighbouring countries weak, and by fighting wars beyond its borders to keep hostile powers at arm’s length. ([Location 174](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=174))
- From the reign of Ivan IV, the tsar and state were seen as one – united in the body of a single being, who, as man and ruler, was an instrument of God. ([Location 184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B09NK8QFYH&location=184))