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.
この記事は BBC History UK の October 2022 版に掲載されています。
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