These deep structural continuities will become apparent in my narrative, but it is worth making one or two clear right from the start. The first is the most obvious: Russia’s vast size and geography. Why did Russia grow so big? How was it able to expand so far across Eurasia and incorporate so many different nationalities (194 were recognised by the first Soviet census in 1926)? What was the impact of Russia’s size on the evolution of the Russian state? The eighteenth-century empress Catherine the Great maintained that a country as big as Russia needed to be governed by autocracy: ‘Only swiftness of decision in matters sent from distant realms can compensate for the slowness caused by these great distances. Any other form of government would be not merely harmful, but utterly ruinous for Russia.’10 But did this have to be the case? Were there not other forms of representative or local government that might have taken the place of an autocratic state?
Russia developed on a flat and open territory without natural boundaries. Its position made it vulnerable to foreign invasion but also open to the influence of the surrounding powers – Khazars, Mongols, Byzantines, Europeans and Ottomans – with which its relations were defined by trade. As the Russian state grew stronger, a process we should date from the sixteenth century, its main focus was the defence of its frontiers. This priority involved certain patterns of development that have shaped the country’s history.
It entailed the subordination of society to the state and its military needs. Social classes were created and legally defined to benefit the state as taxpayers and military servitors. It also meant a policy of territorial aggrandisement to secure Russia’s frontiers. 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. Does this mean that Russia is expansionist in character, as so many of its critics in the modern age have said? Or should its tendency to push outwards and colonise the spaces around it be viewed rather as a defensive reaction, stemming from its perceived need for buffer states to protect it on the open steppe?
The nature of state power is the other theme worth mentioning here. Catherine the Great was in the habit of comparing Russia to the European absolutist states. But the Russian state was not like them. It had evolved as a patrimonial or personal autocracy, in which the concept of the state (gosudarstvo) was embodied in the person of the tsar (gosudar) as the sovereign lord or owner of the Russian lands. In medieval Europe the legal separation of the ‘king’s two bodies’ – his mortal person and the sacred office of the monarchy – allowed for the development of an abstract and impersonal conception of the state.11 But that did not happen in Russia. 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.
The sacralisation of the tsar’s authority, a legacy of Byzantium, was both a strength and a weakness of the Russian state. The myth of the tsar as a sacred agent was, on the one hand, essential to the cult of the holy tsar that underpinned the monarchy until the twentieth century, when the myth was at last broken by Nicholas II’s repressive measures against popular protests. On the other hand, the same myth could be used by rebel leaders, as it was by the Cossack-led rebellions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to subvert the tsar’s power. In the popular imagination the holy tsar was the deliverer of truth and social justice (pravda) to the people. But if the tsar brought injustice, he could not be the ‘true tsar’ – he was perhaps the Antichrist sent by Satan to destroy God’s work in the ‘Russian holy land’ – and as such should be opposed. By claiming they were fighting to restore the true tsar to the throne, the Cossack rebel leaders were able to attract a mass following in protest movements that shook the state at crisis moments in its modern history.
Similar ideas of truth and justice would underpin the Russian Revolution of 1917. The myth of the holy tsar would also give way to the leader cults of Lenin and Stalin, whose statues would appear on every square. Putin’s regime draws from this monarchical archetype of governance, giving the appearance of stability based on ‘Russian traditions’.
Putin’s cult has not been set in stone. There are no statues of him yet in public squares. But some wits said on the unveiling of the Moscow monument to Prince Vladimir that a statue of his namesake, the Russian president, would soon appear by the Kremlin wall.
1
Origins
All countries have a story of their origin. Some invoke divine or classical mythologies, stories linking them to sacred acts of creation or ancient civilisations, but most, at least in Europe, have foundation myths generally invented in the eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. This was a time when nationalist historians, philologists and archaeologists sought to trace their nations back to a primeval ethnos – homogeneous, immutable, containing all the seeds of the modern national character – which they saw reflected in whatever remnants they could find of the early peoples in their territories. The Celts, the Franks, the Gauls, the Goths, the Huns and the Serbs – all have served as the ur-people of a modern nationhood, although in truth they were complex social groups, formed over centuries of great migrations across the European continent.1
The origins of Russia are a case in point. No other country has been so divided over its own beginnings. None has changed its story so often. The subject is inseparable from myth. The only written account that we have, the Tale of Bygone Years, known as the Primary Chronicle, was compiled by the monk Nestor and other monks in Kiev during the 1110s. It tells us how, in 862, the warring Slavic tribes of north-west Russia agreed jointly to invite the Rus, a branch of the Vikings, to rule over them: ‘Our land is vast and abundant, but there is no order in it. Come and reign as princes and have authority over us!’2 Three princely brothers, the Rus, arrived in longboats with their kin. They were accepted by the Slavs. Two brothers died but the third, Riurik, continued ruling over Novgorod, the most important of the northern trading towns, until his death in 879, when his son Oleg succeeded him. Three years later, Oleg captured Kiev, according to this story, and Kievan Rus, the first ‘Russian’ state, was established.
The Primary Chronicle reads more like a fairy tale than a work of history. It is a typical foundation myth – composed to establish the political legitimacy of the Riurikids, the Kievan ruling dynasty, as God’s chosen agents for the Christianisation of the Rus lands. Much of it is fictional – stories patched together from orally transmitted epic songs and narrative poems (known in Russian as byliny), Norse sagas, Slav folklore, old Byzantine annals and religious texts. Nothing in it can be taken as a fact. We cannot say for sure whether Riurik even existed. He may have been Rörik, the nephew, son or possibly the brother of the Danish monarch Harald Klak, who was alive at the right time. But there is no evidence connecting him to Kiev, so the founder of the dynasty may have been a different Viking warrior, or an allegorical figure.3 The Kievan monks were less concerned with the accuracy of their chronicle than with its religious symbolism and meaning. The timescale of the chronicle is biblical. It charts the history of the Rus from Noah in the Book of Genesis, claiming them to be the descendants of his son Japheth, so that Kievan Rus is understood to have been created as part of the divine plan.4