Nation building

JANET HARTLEY finds much to admire in a new history of Russia, while wanting more that might help explain the "one nation" belief that led to the recent invasion of Ukraine

- JANET HARTLEY

The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes Bloomsbury, 368 pages, £25

Vladimir (Volodymyr in Ukrainian), the Grand Prince of Kyiv and ruler of the Kievan Rus from AD 980 to 1015, had “gathered and defended Russia’s lands” by “founding a strong, unified and centralised state”. That state included as one “family or nation” present-day Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, joined in shared Christian principles, culture and language. That’s the gist of the words spoken by Vladimir Putin at the unveiling of a statue to his namesake outside the Kremlin in 2016. It was 4 November, Russia’s National Unity Day, which commemorates the popular uprising that expelled Polish-Lithuanian forces from Moscow in 1612.

The Ukrainians were furious at the statue and Putin’s speech, which went on to call on all Russians to unite against external threats – at what they saw as an appropriation of their history and a challenge to their separate identity. It is this vivid and controversial incident that opens Orlando Figes’s readable and thoughtful history of Russia.