Sergey Lavrov likes to think of himself as a man of ideas, whose contribution to shaping his country’s foreign policy comes from the ability to place it in a long historical context. That said, Lavrov cares little for history properly understood.
Staunton, June 20 – Drawing on Richard Pipes’ argument that the 1863 Polish revolt was viewed by many Russians as an illegitimate European attack on Russia and led them to conclude that “only the autocracy could preserve the integrity of the country,” Irina Glebova argues that the Ukrainian revolution of 2013-2014 has had “approximately the […]
Staunton, June 8 – European scholars now recognize that no one can understand the present without a thorough understanding of the Middle Ages, and they are beginning to include in that understanding the Golden Horde, as a recent conference in Leyden shows, according to Rafael Khakimov, the vice president of the Tatarstan Academy of Sciences. […]
Staunton, June 3 – Centuries do not always correspond to the period between years ending in 00. Most historians argue that the nineteenth century, for example, lasted from 1815 with the defeat of Napoleon until 1914 when World War I broke out. And now a Moscow historian is arguing that “in Russia, the 20th century […]
Staunton, January 13 – The continuing dominance of an imperial mentality among Russians and their failure to consolidate as a nation reflects the fact that the Russian state became an empire before the Russian people came together as a nation, according to Yevgeny Anisimov, a scholar at the St. Petersburg Institute of History. In a […]
Staunton, December 21 – Putin’s opposition to Europe and the US “is acquiring the aspects of a real holy war, not at the level of metaphor as in the old Soviet song but in the completely literal religious sense,” but except for its core belief in Russian imperial statehood, the new faith on which it […]
Staunton, October 5 – The gold standard of Stalin-era claims that Russians had been responsible for everything positive in the world was that “Popov invented baseball.” But now under Vladimir Putin, some Russian writers, one hesitates to call them scholars, have surpassed that with claims about the role of Russia before it even existed in […]
Staunton, July 25 – Vladimir Putin’s increasing authoritarianism has sparked a new round of suggestions in Russia and elsewhere that “Russians are organically incapable of democracy and European values.” But such views ignore the history of the Novgorod Republic which, until Moscow occupied it, was among the most democratic parts of Europe for four centuries. […]
Staunton, July 18 – Tomsk State University has announced the program for an academic conference to be held in October 2014 on ethnic identity. Eleven speakers are addressing issues about Siberia, and the titles of their talks, a Siberian portal says, permits “speaking about a Siberian nation, a Siberian political elite and the concept of […]
Staunton, June 28 – No more than one in 20 of the graves of Russian soldiers who died in World War I remains undisturbed to this day, the result of a Soviet policy intended to downplay Russia’s role in that conflict and shift losses from it to the deaths arising from the Russian civil war, […]
