Russia seems more than a country, even more than a continent. It is certainly the biggest country in the world – twice the size of China or the USA. A journey from the city of St Petersburg in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east takes in eleven time zones. For all that geographical heft, it is home to just around 145 million people – a population dwarfed by the 450 million of the EU. Much of its mass is made up of the wastes of Siberia, rich in mineral wealth but an exceptionally hard place in which to survive, far less thrive. Russia’s vastness is, anyway, about more than numbers. Like the ice and taiga of Siberia, the very idea of Russia feels impenetrable. In some ways Russia.. Russian… seems more like a state of mind.
When more people were familiar with the many words of Winston Churchill, before and during the Second World War, his line about Russia was among the best known, and often quoted thereafter. During a radio broadcast on 1 October 1939, he said, ‘I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma …’ Those words are less well known now, but even when they were routinely quoted by this commentator or that, the second half of the line was usually left out: “… but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.’
Keeping something the size of Russia together is like herding cats. If you had a mind to, you might round up a territorial vastness stretching for thousands of miles in every direction and populated by all manner of peoples, European and Asian and every creed and colour. You could give that vastness a unifying name. But holding all those souls and entities in place when what they often seem to want to do is spin off into space requires a massive centre of gravity.
The roots of the Russia of now go all the way down to those Rus’ of Kiev, ‘the men who row’, a relatively tiny clump of cells held in place first of all by Rurik, the Swedish Viking. In the Church of St Sophia in Constantinople they had found the Christian God most beguiling of all.
Those newly Christian Rus’ made Russia but it was a small thing still, and vulnerable to invasion. That sense of vulnerability was always there – that threat from beyond the horizon – and has never left them. By the thirteenth century, tormented by Mongols, the Russians made a new capital for themselves at Moscow. Now they were the Grand Principality of Muscovy, but the vulnerability remained.
Ivan Vasilyevich was born on 22 January 1440 – Grand Prince of Moscow and Grand Prince of All Rus’ – and ascended his father’s throne in 1462. In 1472 he married Sophia Palaiologina, younger sister of Constantine XI, last emperor of Constantinople. From their union came the double-headed eagle of the Russian coat of arms. That Ivan was Ivan the Great, and under his rule the country tripled in size. He saw his demesne as successor to the Roman empire, and said Moscow was the new Rome. He was the first of his kind to style himself tsar – a corruption of
‘Caesar’ – and Sophia was his tsarina.
The moment of note in the story of Russia, and therefore of the story of the world, was the naming of his grandson, also Ivan, as the first Isar of All Rus’ in 1547 at the age of sixteen. He would come to be known as Ivan the Terrible – a translation of the Russian grozny, which has more to do with being powerful than evil, so to speak. He could be evil too, though, and no mistake. In 1570 he would sense treason in the city of Novgorod and sent soldiers of his bodyguard, the oprichnina, to torture and slaughter tens of thousands of citizens – men, women and children.
The Massacre of Novgorod is only the most notorious product of the paranoia and cruelty that characterized much of his behaviour in the later years of his reign.
Under that Ivan, Russia began its great spread – east into the Ural Mountains, south to the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea and north into the Arctic. The spread would be inexorable, and within a hundred years Russia had swallowed Siberia all the way to the Pacific. He paved the way for other legendary figures – Peter the Great, Catherine the Great. By the end of the Second World War Russia stretched west to east from Berlin to the Pacific, and north to south from the Arctic to Afghanistan.
Always the successful control of Russia, of the USSR, has been about ruthless strength at the centre – the gravitational pull of a black hole from which nothing, not even light, should escape. The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Iron Curtain after 1989 would see a lessening, but the Russian state of mind – which is the state of mind of the strong man, and a tendency to submit to such – prevails. There are always those who prefer order, even cruel order, to the possible chaos of dissolution lying in wait.
In his speech of 1939 Churchill also quoted British Liberal John Bright, speaking at the end of the American Civil War: ‘At last after the smoke of the battlefield had cleared away, the horrid shape which had cast its shadow over the whole continent had vanished and was gone for ever.’ Since the time of Ivan the Terrible the shadow cast by the strong men of Russia has never gone away.
Source ~ “The Story of The World in 100 Moments” by Neil Oliver
