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The Story of Russia
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Format: Paperback / softback
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The Story of Russia
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?
This book is ideal for readers interested in deep historical insight into Russia, its culture, and politics, fitting scholars, history enthusiasts, and anyone seeking to understand the roots of contemporary Russian society and its global stance.
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Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and
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Description
Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews
"This is the essential backstory, the history book that you need if you want to understand modern Russia and its wars with Ukraine, with its neighbours, with America, and with the West." --Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Democracy and Red Famine
From "the great storyteller of Russian history" (Financial Times), a brilliant account of the national mythologies and imperial ideologies that have shaped Russia's past and politics—essential reading for understanding the country today.
The Story of Russia is a fresh approach to the thousand years of Russia's history, concerned as much with the ideas that have shaped how Russians think about their past as it is with the events and personalities comprising it. No other country has reimagined its own story so often, in a perpetual effort to stay in step with the shifts of ruling ideologies.
From the founding of Kievan Rus in the first millennium to Putin's war against Ukraine, Orlando Figes explores the ideas that have guided Russia's actions throughout its long and troubled existence. Whether he's describing the crowning of Ivan the Terrible in a candlelit cathedral or the dramatic upheaval of the peasant revolution, he reveals the impulses, often unappreciated or misunderstood by foreigners, that have driven Russian history: the medieval myth of Mother Russia's holy mission to the world; the imperial tendency toward autocratic rule; the popular belief in a paternal tsar dispensing truth and justice; the cult of sacrifice rooted in the idea of the "Russian soul"; and always, the nationalist myth of Russia's unjust treatment by the West.
How the Russians came to tell their story and to revise it so often as they went along is not only a vital aspect of their history; it is also our best means of understanding how the country thinks and acts today. Based on a lifetime of scholarship and enthrallingly written, The Story of Russia is quintessential Figes: sweeping, revelatory, and masterful.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781250871398
Publisher: St Martin's Press
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 05 September 2023
Country: United States
Imprint: St Martin's Press
Illustration: Illustrations
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 28.0mm
Width: 135.0mm
Height: 208.0mm
Weight: 340g
Pages: 368
About the Author
Orlando Figes is the author of many acclaimed books on Russian history, including A People's Tragedy, Natasha's Dance, The Whisperers, The Crimean War, Revolutionary Russia, and The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture. He is a Wolfson History Prize winner, and his books have been translated into over thirty languages. He is a professor of history at Birkbeck College, London University.
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