The era of large tomes about Russia has given way to shorter overviews, often with a personal narrative bias. The history of a country with over 1,000 years’ history, occupying at one stage a sixth of the earth’s surface, is harder to write in 250 than in 2,500 pages. But in the age of Wikipedia, the small mammals supersede the dinosaurs. Following Mark Galeotti’s Shorter History, which appeared in May, we have two apparently similar surveys, one by the former ambassador Rodric Braithwaite (who can be said to love Russia even better than he knows it) and the other by the flamboyant historian Orlando Figes (who can be said to know Russia more than he loves it).
Braithwaite provides a readable, if sometimes bland narrative. It is chronological, with brief excursions into subjects such as the arts and rather disorienting comparisons of historical events with contemporary developments (Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great do not help us understand Putin). Sometimes compression makes Braithwaite enigmatic; you would have to know Old Norse to understand why the medieval ethnonym Rus might derive via Finnic from the Swedish ruothkarlar, ‘fellows who row’.
