The historian’s latest work on Russia is a lucid chronological journey that ably illustrates how narratives from the nation’s past have been used to shape its autocratic present
seven months later to bring his brother “little Russians” back into the arms of big brother Rus. Reaching back into the mists of myth, he sees the idea of Ukraine as a Trojan horse, an “anti-Russian project” since the 17th century and that the present state is on “historically Russian lands”. As Figes makes clear, anyone with the most elementary grasp of the shape of Europe, from Berlin to the Urals, would know that borders are determined by raw power, not some mystical racial bond.
This historical primer has only traces of the original thinking that Figes’s other important works onhave displayed, but it does effectively lay out with important clarity the “structural continuities” of power, how the state and the ruler, be that a tsar or Stalin, “are united in the body of a single being... the sacralisation of the tsar’s authority”.
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