The author of 'A Short History of Russia' discusses the writing of history about Russia, when pasts have become political battlefields.
What are the challenges in writing a history of Russia, especially when you have only 200 pages to do it? In the second of two talks, Mark Galeotti, author of A Short History of Russia, discusses both the writing of history about Russia and also its politics, especially at a time when Russian (and Ukrainian) pasts have become narrative battlefields of the present.
As someone who has been captivated by Russia and its story his whole life, and who started visiting it when he was at school and studying it when it was still the Soviet Union, Mark Galeotti was equal parts delighted and intimidated when asked to write A Short History of Russia. How to compress such a country into two hundred short pages?
In his first talk for Pushkin House, on 18th February, Mark tells Russia’s story. In this second one, he reflects on the craft, tough decisions and political complexities behind assembling that story. How does one make the difficult choices on what to cover and what to exclude? What are the most important threads that tie it together, and how does one avoid simply forcing Russia to fit one’s prejudices and preconceptions?
And perhaps most important of all, at a time when Vladimir Putin is seeking to create a new narrative for Russia, one that cherry-picks the elements he wants from tsarist and Soviet times alike, without considering the contradictions that may entail, what does this mean for the historian? Prince Vladimir of Kiev is hailed as the father of the Orthodox Russian state, and a 16-metre-high statue of him now looms outside the Kremlin. Yet as Prince Volodymyr of Kyiv, he can also be presented as founding father of Ukraine. Given the extent to which Russians themselves have over the centuries so assiduously tried to reinvented their futures by reformulating their pasts, is the historian by definition forced to be a collaborator or a subversive?
Dr Mark Galeotti is a mix of writer, scholar, teacher and consultant. He runs the consultancy Mayak Intelligence, is an Honorary Professor at UCL School of Slavonic & East European Studies, and is also a senior associate fellow at both the Royal United Services Institute and the Institute of International Relations Prague. He read history at Robinson College, Cambridge, and took his doctorate in politics at the LSE. Mark has been Head of History at Keele University, Professor of Global Affairs at New York University, a visiting professor at Rutgers-Newark (Newark), Charles University (Prague) and MGIMO (Moscow), and a senior research fellow at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. A prolific author, his The Vory: Russia’s super mafia (Yale, 2018) was a runner-up for the 2019 Pushkin House Book Prize, and he has since written the widely-praised We Need To Talk About Putin (Ebury, 2019) and A Short History of Russia (HarperCollins USA 2020/Ebury, 2021).