MYTHS OF THE MOTHERLAND
According to celebrated Russia scholar Orlando Figes, Westerners tend to assess Russian domestic and foreign policy without understanding the country’s distinctive history. Even those who know it underestimate the importance of Russia’s national mythology. Figes’s new book is called The Story of Russia, he writes, because it “is as much about the ideas, myths and ideologies that have shaped the country’s history, about the ways Russians have interpreted their past, as it is about the events” themselves. Completed as the present war in Ukraine rages, Figes’s engagingly written study emphasizes how Russian self-understanding has shaped the way Putin and his followers see the world.
When Winston Churchill observed that “Russia is
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