Russia's murderous resentment: An interview with Orlando Figes

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Orlando Figes’s recently published The Story of Russia is an immensely generous book. The author of Natasha’s Dance and Russia: A People’s Tragedy has distilled a lifetime of scholarship into one short history. You can read it in a weekend and feel immeasurably better informed about the deep currents of 1000 years of Russian history.

And none of those currents flow towards a happy outcome today, Figes believes.  I admire him for being a robust as well as a perceptive writer. He does not sway with fashion, and as you can see, is as willing to criticise Ukrainian nationalist myths as Russian nationalist myths.

My interview with Figes, recorded recently at Jewish Book Week, covered much more than the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But we kept coming back to Putin’s greatest crime and, maybe, his most disastrous mistake.

Figes’s theme is the strength of historical myths in the Russian imagination and the ability of the elite to reshape them to retain power. In a society without agreed notions of freedom or democracy, and with no real tradition of property rights or the rule of law, myth unites the leaders and the led.  

In our interview, Figes told me that, “Putin appeals to all the ideas in Russia's past about how dangerous western powers encircled it. These ideas are not just taught in schools, they are part of the culture… The cult of the leader whether tsar or [communist party] general secretary is still powerful, still a part of the Russian willingness to trust someone who is the key to Russia’s destiny, who knows where [Russia] is coming from and where it will go.”

The sacralised nature of power in a country, where orthodox Christianity insists that Russia is where Christ will reappear, reinforces Putin’s strength. Listen to his propagandists and you still messianic echoes of Russian orthodoxy’s insistence that Moscow is the “third Rome”, chosen by God to bring salvation to the world. Or indeed of the Soviet communist insistnce that history had chosen Russia to head the Third International, and given Moscow an equally sacred mission to break the chains of the world’s proletariat.

Under whatever system Tsarist, communist or Putinist, Figes said, “The secular west is materialist. It is just there to exist. Russians live for a goal. Russia has a mission to save the world.”

When I put to him that Russia also had a “stab in the back” myth, Figes flinched from the implied comparison with fascism, however greatly it might appeal to Ukrainians exhuming the torture chambers of Bucha. We were dealing with imperialism, he said, not fascism.

“Russians see Ukraine as theirs but somehow inferior to them. So this is a war of the imperial centre.  Russia is punishing the colony that had the audacity to get away. You almost think that the soldiers carrying out those atrocities are punishing Ukrainians…because they don't want them to have that better life in the West. [Ukrainians] can’t have it because ‘you are ours, you are part of us’.

I asked what Figes thought would happen if Putin dropped dead tomorrow, and he doubted that the leader’s departure would end the war.