A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data
Bushkovitch, Paul.
A concise history of Russia / Paul Bushkovitch.
p. cm. – (Cambridge concise histories)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-521-83562-6 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-521-54323-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Russia – History. 2. Soviet Union – History. 3. Russia (Federation) – History. I. Title.
DK37.B86 2011
947–dc23 2011026272
ISBN 978-0-521-83562-6 Hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-54323-1 Paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of Figures
Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1. Russia before russia
2. Moscow, novgorod, lithuania, and the mongols
3. The emergence of russia
4. Consolidation and revolt
5. Peter the great
6. Two empresses
7. Catherine the great
8. Russia in the age of revolution
9. The pinnacle of autocracy
10. Culture and autocracy
11. The era of the great reforms
12. From serfdom to nascent capitalism
13. The golden age of russian culture
14. Russia as an empire
15. Autocracy in decline
16. War and revolution
17. Compromise and preparation
18. Revolutions in russian culture
19. Building utopia
20. War
21. Growth, consolidation, and stagnation
22. Soviet culture
23. The cold war
Epilogue: The End of the USSR
Further Reading
Index
List of Figures
1. Vladimir Cathedral of the Dormition (Twelfth Century)
2. Birchbark Document 210
3. Kirillov Monastery (15–16 centuries)
4. “Kremlenagrad”
5. Peter the Great
6. Bashkirs
7. Catherine the Great
8. St. Petersburg c. 1800
9. Village Council
10. Alexander II
11. Russian Peasant Girls
12. Ilya Muromets
13. Tchaikovsky
14. Repin/Tolstoy
15. Nomadic Kirghiz
16. Witte
17. Nicholas II
18. Lenin and Colleagues
19. Stalin and Others at Gorky’s funeral
20. Ilyushin II
Abbreviations
BRBML
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library LOC
Library of Congress LOC PG
Library of Congress, Prokudin-Gorsky Collection NASM
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum NYPL
New York Public Library YCBA
Yale Center for British Art
Acknowledgments
The first chapters of this book were written at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, during a semester of residence with the support of the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. Without the Carnegie Trust and Aberdeen University the beginning would have been much more difficult. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Paul Dukes, Robert Frost, Karin Friedrich, Jane Ohlmeyer, and Duncan Rice, in their different ways my hosts for an eventful time. Over the years my colleagues have kindly read and commented on many of the chapters, letting me know when I was on the right track and when I was not. For reading as well as discussion and bibliographical help, I thank Nikolaos Chrissidis, Laura Engelstein, Hilary Fink, Daniel Kevles, John MacKay, Edgar Melton, Bruce Menning, and Samuel Ramer. Many years of conversation about Russian culture with Vladimir Alexandrov, Katerina Clark, Nikolai Firtich, Harvey Goldblatt, Vladimir Golshtein, Andrea Graziosi, Charles Halperin, Moshe Lewin, Alexander Schenker, and Elizabeth Valkenier made many chapters much richer than I could have made them alone. Valerie Hansen and Frank Turner provided more help than they ever realized. As ever, Tatjana Lorkovic was invaluable.
I would also like to thank Tom Morehouse of the New England Air Museum, Kate Igoe of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Maria Zapata of the Haas Art Library of Yale University, David Thompson and Maria Singer of the Yale Center for British Art, and Kathryn James and E. C. Schroeder of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. Their courtesy and professionalism were invaluable in the search for suitable images.
Maija Jansson suffered through the long gestation and birth pains of the book, putting up with a distracted and often crabby author. She read the whole manuscript, some of it several times, and kept reminding me that it would come to an end, and so it did. To her I dedicate the result.
Prologue
Russia is not an idea. It is a specific country, with a particular place on the globe, a majority language and culture, and a very concrete history. Yet for most of the twentieth century, outside of its boundaries, it has been an idea, not a place – an idea about socialism. Tremendous debates have raged over its politics, economics, and culture, most of them conducted by and for people who did not know the language, never went there, and knew very little about the country and its history. Even the better informed wrote and spoke starting from presuppositions about the desirability or undesirability of a socialist order. Some were crude propagandists, but even the more conscientious, those who learned the language and tried to understand the country, began by posing questions that came from their assumptions about socialism. The result was a narrow agenda of debate: was a planned economy effective or not? How many political prisoners were there? How could the Soviets put a man in space? Should the system be called socialism, communism, or totalitarianism? Was “communism” a result of Russian history? Did the Russian intelligentsia prepare the way for communism, unintentionally or not? Did the gradual modernization of Russia make 1917 inevitable? In all these debates the history of Russia up to the moment of the revolution was just a preface.
In Russia the collapse of the Soviet Union brought to light a flood of historical publications. These publications include numerous monographs on a great variety of topics, many biographies, and a massive quantity of publications of the various records of the Soviet regime, including the deliberations of its leaders. The aim of these publications was to illuminate the areas previously closed to investigation, and naturally the first post-Soviet writings were devoted to the most controversial or mysterious issues. Books on the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939, collectivization, and famine; publications of Stalin’s private correspondence; and other issues were first on the agenda. Western historians participated in these publications, which gave a whole new understanding of the contentious issues of Soviet history. Yet the result is far from perfect. As the document publications and monographs continue to pour out in Russia and abroad, they pose more and more questions that historians used to the politicized debates of the Cold War era never thought about. Paradoxically, it seems harder rather than easier to understand the story of the Soviet era of Russian history. The present work reflects this difficulty, and the reader will find many questions left unresolved.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, paradoxically, has had as much or more effect on the writing about Russia’s history before 1917. Now the earlier history is not just a preface but a millennium of time that no longer ends in the Soviet experience, however important that may be. The flood of new publications, in this case mainly from historians in Russia, includes virtually every period and aspect of Russian history before 1917. There are now not just biographies of tsars and empresses, but also of major and minor political figures and fairly ordinary people. Local history has come into being, providing the kind of concrete knowledge of the variety of the country’s history that has been routine in other countries for a long time.