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"Ross Douthat - How Seriously Should We Take Putin’s Nuclear Threat in Ukraine?"
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The Myths That Made, and Still Make, Russia
In a new book, the historian Orlando Figes argues that the war on Ukraine is only the latest instance of a
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The Myths That Made, and Still Make, Russia
In a new book, the historian Orlando Figes argues that the war on Ukraine is only the latest instance of a nation twisting the past to justify its future.
By Gregory Feifer
Sept. 21, 2022
THE STORY OF RUSSIA, by Orlando Figes
When Soviet forensic scientists exhumed the remains of Ivan the Terrible in the early 1960s, they were surprised to find them saturated with mercury. Used as a painkiller in the 16th century, the highly toxic substance was probably administered to relieve symptoms of a debilitating arthritic disease that had fused parts of the czar’s vertebrae. The main significance of the discovery to us now is that most, if not all, stories about Ivan — describing diabolical rages and throwing cats off Kremlin walls — could not have physically been possible. They’re the stuff of myth.
That’s an old story in Russia: Few observers of President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin today question its predilection for passing off total fiction as official truth, as we see in the fantastical propaganda broadcast to justify his mass murder in Ukraine. However, too little is understood about the central role obfuscation has played from the very beginning of his more than two-decade rule, and how the president has deeply tapped into central tropes of Russia’s traditional political culture to pose as his country’s sole savior.
Orlando Figes provides valuable lessons about the importance of mythologizing the country’s past in his sweeping new survey of Russian history. A British historian whose previous books include social and cultural histories of Russia, Figes aims in this primer to explain how central narratives used to justify the current leadership have been shaped and exploited over centuries. The book is largely based on previous work, including a characterization of Russian autocracy as “patrimonial” — the state as the personal domain of the czar — most closely associated with the historian Richard Pipes.
Figes opens with the 2016 unveiling in Moscow of a statue of Grand Prince Vladimir, the ruler of Kievan Rus, a civilization centered on present-day Kyiv that preceded by a couple of centuries the formation of what would later become Russia. Vladimir — Volodymyr in Ukrainian — prompted Rus’s conversion to Orthodox Christianity, imported from Byzantium near the end of the 10th century.
Ukrainians see him as central to their culture and independence from Russian and Soviet rule. Russians, for their part, claim Rus as the birthplace of their own culture, the foundation of a larger Slav civilization with Moscow at its center. “What we have in the conflict over Volodymyr/Vladimir,” Figes writes, “is not a genuine historical dispute, but two incompatible foundation myths.”
Although the book went into production in late April, not long after Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February, the relationship between the neighboring states rightly lies at its center. Russia has relied on its version during the last few centuries to not only legitimize its expansion, especially into parts of today’s Ukraine, but also lay claim to the mantle of truest defender of Christianity. Hence Moscow’s claim to be the “Third Rome,” inheritor of Christian Orthodoxy following the fall of the second Rome, Constantinople. “These myths,” Figes explains, “became fundamental to the Russians’ understanding of their history and national character.”
Such invention has been enabled by the dearth of real historical records, including about Vladimir. “Almost nothing about him is known,” Figes says. “There are no contemporary documents, only later chronicles by monks, hagiographic legends of his conversion, which served as the sacred myth legitimizing his descendants.” So goes much of what we think we know about Russian history.
The West plays a central role. The early rulers of Muscovy — the medieval state that would become Russia — looked to Europe for models for their court culture soon after they began consolidating power in the 15th century. Emulating Western culture and practices would prompt admiration and antagonism; Russians have defined their culture in imitation and opposition ever since.
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Figes makes a key point about how the challenges of geography and climate have reinforced a long-held perception about the need for collective responsibility and strong autocratic leadership. He explains the importance of stability to the burgeoning new Muscovite state, founded on the central role of the czar as arbiter between ruling clans. In an important distinction from Western practice, the boyars — Moscow’s version of nobility — held status and property solely at the czar’s pleasure, with no rights of private ownership. “It was a system of dependency upon the ruler that has lasted to this day,” Figes writes. “Putin’s oligarchs are totally dependent on his will.”
Despite the rise of a meritocratic bureaucracy in the 17th century, and other developments manifested in the Westernizing reforms of Peter the Great, Russia never experienced its own version of European feudalism, or a Renaissance or Enlightenment. As Figes makes clear, the empire’s autocratic rule suppressed the kind of civil society that would be crucial for the development of modern European civilization.
Nevertheless, Peter’s critics accused him of diverting Russia from its Byzantine traditions in what became the country’s central cultural debate, symbolized by the opposition between the so-called Westernizers and Slavophiles in the 19th century. Later intellectuals “twisted earlier Slavophile ideas about Russia’s role as the protector of Christian principles against the materialism of the West to argue that the latter was an existential threat to it,” Figes writes. Sic transit Putin.
It is testament to the pervasiveness of Russian myths that Figes perpetuates some of them. They include his description of Ivan the Terrible, whose rule conventional histories divide between a dynamic first half and descent into madness following the death of his beloved first wife, Anastasia Romanova. That characterization almost certainly came from later mythologizing, partly to legitimize the establishment of the Romanov dynasty.
And developments from the mid-19th century on are treated increasingly superficially, presented as all but inevitable consequences of earlier history. In fact, the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 was the result of not only bungling by the reactionary Czar Nicholas II but also dumb luck and German support — the ensuing civil war could have gone either way. Even more nuance is missing from later Soviet history, including the paradoxical figure of the reformer Nikita Khrushchev.
Figes has previously courted controversy for allegedly embellishing interviews and for anonymously panning rivals’ works on Amazon. There are some mischaracterizations here; it was not so much President Boris Yeltsin’s constitutional reform that prompted a violent standoff with Parliament in 1993, for instance, as a power grab by the Soviet-era legislature (then called the Congress of People’s Deputies, not the later Duma, as Figes has it).
But the author’s glossing over the Westernizing 1990s is perhaps most disappointing. They are characterized as essentially doomed to failure, with little acknowledgment of the importance of a newly free press, democratization and fundamental transformation in governance, including how the center dealt with the country’s regions. Instead of czarist and Soviet administrative coercion, Moscow relied on monetary policy: the flow of appropriations to the provinces and ebb in the form of taxes. Such developments do not fit neatly into Figes’s narrative.
Western countries may have provided too little support for post-Soviet reform, but they hardly isolated Russia, as Figes claims. And blaming NATO’s expansion for creating “the very problem it was meant to counteract” goes against his own case for the importance of invented enemies to Russia’s self-image. Popular disenchantment with the West had more to do with vastly unrealistic expectations, the widespread belief that the communist collapse would bring quick integration with the liberal democratic world and a BMW in every garage, instead of inevitable economic catastrophe.
It’s crucial to identify pervasive patterns in Russian history to understand “what Putin really means for Russia and the broader world,” as Figes rightly says, but he does not fully explain why the return to a traditional political culture has been so effective for maintaining his 22-year kleptocracy. Mythologizing propaganda is a practical mechanism that helps maintain stability by diverting attention from the rules of the game, goals that differ from Western priorities.
The invasion of Ukraine is part of that effort, its violence a simulacrum of World War II. With the U.S.S.R.’s victory celebrated as the signature achievement under Stalin — that most terrible of Russian and Soviet rulers — Putin’s campaign is aimed at underscoring his persona as the country’s redeemer.
In fact, as the war is exposing, his rule is ruinous for most Russians. But if and when Putinism collapses, we would do well to learn from the past and not treat the country simply as a blank canvas on which to project Western-style democracy. Read Figes.
Gregory Feifer is executive director of the Institute of Current World Affairs. The author of “Russians: The People Behind the Power,” he is writing a biography of the Russian politician Boris Nemtsov.
THE STORY OF RUSSIA, by Orlando Figes | 368 pp. | Metropolitan Books | $29.99
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