Dan Ford's Bookshelf: good reading

Book of the month

I took a semester of Russian history as an undergraduate, and more recently I've read biographies of Catherine the Great, Stalin, Trotsky, and Putin, and I've even tackled the occasional straitforward Russian history. But never have I encountered anything half so illuminating as Orlando Figes's modestly titled The Story of Russia without a sub-title! Mr Figes was a British historian until recently, when he retired and moved to Germany. This is his seventh book, all of them about Russia.

If you're only interested in Putin's war on Ukraine, sure, you can start reading with Chapter 10, "Motherland," and you'll get a sense of how Stalin used propaganda to claim Russia's long experience of battling the West for himself and the fight against Nazi Germany. The old tsars, from Ivan the Terrible onward, had done "much that was bad.... But they did one good thing -- they put together an enormous state." That was the Russian Empire overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1917 and reconstituted by Stalin as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, which despite its name (and Stalin's own origins as a Georgian) was always Russian. Just as Joseph Stalin did in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Vladimir Putin has been doing for the twenty-six years of his own dictatorship.

But don't take the shortcut. Follow the story all the way through, as first the tsars, then Stalin and his successors, and finally Putin have pushed the borders of Russia ever deeper into Europe and Asia. Russia is so big. Three hundred years ago, letters traveled by messenger, who needed a year to travel from Moscow to Okhotsk on the Pacific coast, so that it would be at least two years before the answer came to the Kremlin. Eleven time zones! 4 p.m. in Moscow means that it's 1 a.m. tomorrow morning on Big Diomede Island in the Bering Strait, the easternmost Russian outpost, two kilometers from the US border.

Mr Figes wrapped up his book in April 2022, two months after Russian tanks set out to capture Kyiv, yet he has a very clear idea that the war was going to drag on. (That's the nature of war, after all.) Blame for the war obviously falls upon the aggressor, Putin. But Mr Figes has blame aplenty for the West in its eagerness to add Russia's former satellites (Poland and the three Baltic states especially) and even its former "republics" (Georgia and especially Ukraine) to the European Union and to NATO. He quotes George Kennan (the architect of the "containment" policy that guided American governments throughout the Cold War) "that it would be a 'tragic mistake' to encroach upon the territories of the former Warsaw Pact." Yes, that was Kennan's late-in-life belief, but I think that by then he was wrongheaded about many things: brilliant in youth but a grouchy old man, as John Gaddis points out in his masterful biography of the man. Sure, we could have left Georgia and Ukraine to Russia's grasp ... and Poland and the Baltics too? No, I don't think so.

But this is the most important book about Ukraine -- and Russia! -- that I have ever read. Grab a copy!

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