Autocracy and sacredness of power: Putin is everything in the history of Russia

One of Vladimir Putin’s gestures most charged with symbolic meaning was the inauguration, in 2016, of the statue dedicated to Vladimir, Grand Prince of Kiev, ruler of Kievan Rus’ at the end of the 10th century, which Putin called the “first Russian state”. A statue one meter taller than the similar one that the Ukrainians had dedicated in the 19th century to Volodymir (as they call him), whom they consider instead the founder of the Ukrainian state. Starting from this event, Orlando Figes in his History of Russia (Mondadori, 382 pp., 26 euros) traces the events of the great country from its medieval origins to the present dayalways careful to highlight the constants that have accompanied Russian history throughout its journey and still today determine its mentality and politics.

A first, fundamental constant in Russian history is the sacredness of power, the myth of the prince who dies as a martyr for the “holy Russian land”. A myth that would have generated the image of the Tsar-Batyushka, the “little father” Tsar, good defender of his people against the threats of the Antichrist, in turn identified with the enemy of the moment, from the Tatars to the Catholic Poles, and which would have charged with apocalyptic significance all internal struggles for power, from the revolts of the “time of troubles” at the end of the sixteenth century to the rebellion of the “Old Believers” in the following century. And it would have continued even in the most atheist of regimes, Soviet communism, which “sanctified” Lenin with all the attributes of religious tradition.

A second constant, direct daughter of the first, is the autocracy: the idea that the power of the tsar, which comes directly from God, is therefore absolute, will never be scratched, and the attempts of westernizing circles between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to introduce elements of liberal democracy into Russia will always be frustrated. On the contrary, the direct dependence of the privileged circles on the benevolence of power will remain firm. Starting from the government of Ivan the Terrible in the mid-sixteenth century, in fact, the possession of land by the boyars was linked to military obligation, and those who refused to fight under the orders of the tsar could be expropriated; at the time of communism, the career or the misfortune of the members of the nomenklatura depended directly on the favor or not of the secretary of the party on duty; and the dependence of today’s oligarchs on Putin is but the latest form of that ancient principle.

Equally ancient is the cornerstone of foreign policy: given that Russia has no natural borders, the only way to guarantee its defense is to widen the borders more and more, to remove as much as possible the threats, real or imagined, from the heart of the empire; and of course the conflict with Ukraine is rooted in centuries-old feuds. In short, it is the lesson of Figes, if the West wants to relate adequately with Putin’s Russia, it cannot fail to deal with all the characteristics that over time have stratified and in some way petrified in the “Russian soul”.