Russia in its history and in its present is a mix of many different elements. Until the fifteenth century the people called themselves and their land “Rus,” not Russia (“Rossiia”), and it included many territories not now within Russian boundaries. From its inception it contained peoples who were not Russian or even Slavic, but whom Russians understood as integral parts of their society. By 1917 the tsars and millions of Russian settlers in the steppe and Siberia had acquired a territory far beyond the original medieval boundaries, and the Soviet state conserved most of that area. Consequently its history has to extend beyond the boundaries of today’s Russian Federation and incorporate the various incarnations of Russia as well as its diversity.
A society economically backward until the twentieth century, Russia shared many traits with nearly all pre-industrial societies – primitive agriculture, small and few cities, mass illiteracy. Russia’s historical fate was to become the largest contiguous political unit in the world and eventually expand over the whole of northern Asia. It was a realm equally distant from Western Europe and from the Mediterranean world. It covered huge areas but was extremely thinly populated until the end of the seventeenth century. For the first seven hundred years its peripheral status was strengthened by its adherence to Europe’s minority Christian faith, Orthodoxy, rather than any of the Western European churches. Then, with Peter the Great, Russia entered European culture within a single generation and participated in all phases of European cultural life onwards, starting with and including the Enlightenment. Cultural evolution was easier and faster than social and political change, creating a society with a modern culture and an archaic social and political structure. The rapid industrialization of Russia after 1860 in turn created tensions that led to the spread of Western ideas that were not necessarily the dominant ones in the West. Thus for most of the twentieth century Marxism, an ideology born in the Rhineland out of the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel combined with British economics and French utopian socialism, reordered Russian society while remaining marginal in the lands of its birth.
In the West itself, Russia was simply remote. For the English poet John Milton it was “the most northern Region of Europe reputed civil.” Milton’s view reflected the way Europeans perceived Russia from the Renaissance onward, as part of Europe and as “northern” rather than “eastern.” It is only in the nineteenth century that Russia became “eastern” to Europeans, and to many Russians as well. In nineteenth-century Western Europe, “eastern” was not a compliment: it implied that Russia, like the lands the West was then colonizing, was barbaric, despotic, and dirty, and the people probably were inferior in some way. Europeans did not learn Russian, and they did not study the country, and neither did Americans, until the beginning of the Cold War. Even when Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky had become part of the Western pantheon, the country as a whole was still a mystery, as Winston Churchill insisted. The uniqueness of the Soviet order only increased that element of mystery. In contrast, when the French Revolution occurred, it took place in the center of Western Europe among a people whose language had become the principle language of international communication. The Russian Revolution took place in a far country, and few outside Russia knew the language or had any understanding of the country and its history. Even though the Bolsheviks created a new society following a Western ideology, it necessarily remained an enigma in the West.
Had the Russian Revolution found no followers abroad, perhaps Soviet society would have remained a peculiar system studied only by a few devoted scholars. Its impact however, was enormous, and remains so to this day. China, the world’s most populous country is still ruled by a Communist Party that shows no signs of sharing power, whatever its economic policies. Communism was the central issue of world politics for two generations of the twentieth century. The inevitable consequence was that commentators in the West, journalists or scholars, even ordinary tourists looked at an idea, the Soviet version of socialism, not at a specific country with a specific history. With the end of the Soviet Union, Russian history no longer has to be the story of the unfolding of one or another idea. It has become the continuous history of a particular people in a particular place. The present book is an attempt to reflect that change. It seeks above all to tell the story and explain it where possible. In many cases explanations are hard to come by, but it is the hope that the reader will find food for reflection in a history that is nothing if not dramatic.
Map 1. Kievan Rus’ in the Eleventh Century.
Map 2. Russia in the First Half of the Sixteenth Century.
Map 3. Russia at the Time of Peter the Great.
Map 4. Russia in 1796.
Map 5. Russia in 1913.
Map 6. Soviet Union in the Second World War, 1941–5.
1 Russia before Russia
Russian history begins with the polity that scholars have come to call Kiev Rus, the ancestor of modern Russia. Rus was the name that the inhabitants gave to themselves and their land, and Kiev was its capital. In modern terms, it embraced all of Belarus, the northern half of the Ukraine, and the center and northwest of European Russia. The peoples of these three modern states are the Eastern Slavs, who all speak closely related languages derived from the East Slavic language of Kiev Rus. In the west its neighbors were roughly the same as the neighbors of those three states today: Hungary, Poland, the Baltic peoples, and Finland. In the north Kiev Rus stretched toward the Arctic Ocean, with Slavic farmers only beginning to move into the far north.
Beyond the Slavs to the east was Volga Bulgaria, a small Turkic Islamic state that came into being in about AD 950 where modern Tatarstan stands today. Beyond Volga Bulgaria were the Urals and Siberia, vast forests and plains inhabited by small tribes who lived by hunting and gathering food. The core of Kiev Rus was along the route that ran from northern Novgorod south to Kiev along the main rivers. There in the area of richest soil lay the capital, Kiev. Even farther to the south of Kiev began the steppe.
The lands of Kiev Rus lay in the forest zone of the great East European plain. There are no mountains or even large ranges of hills to break this plain between Poland and the Urals. The forest zone is deciduous in the south around Kiev – oak, beech, chestnut, and poplar trees, while farther north the predominant forests were and are composed of the northern coniferous trees: pine, fir, and birch. The best soil, dark and moist, was in the south, where fields opened out among the trees closer to the steppe. In the northern part of the forest zone the soil was sandy and marshes were frequent, thus agriculture was rarer and concentrated around lakes and along the great rivers. The great rivers were the arteries of life. The Dniepr, Western Dvina, Volga, Oka, and the smaller rivers around Novgorod (the Volkhov and others) provided routes to the south and east via Lake Ladoga to the Baltic Sea. Along them princes and warriors, merchants and peasant farmers could move freely, at least in the summer months when the rivers were not frozen.