Figes

Orlando Figes is a historian and the author of 10 books on Russian and European history, including the multi-award-winning A People’s Tragedy, about the Russian Revolution – named one of the “100 most influential books since the war” by the TLS. Born in London in 1959, Figes studied and lectured at Cambridge and later became professor of history at Birkbeck – a position from which he recently retired. His latest book is The Story of Russia, which condenses 1,000 years of history into a tightly written, illuminating…

Anyone who has wandered through Russia’s national museums, leafed through books of Russian art or watched some of Eisenstein’s cinematic masterpieces will know that prominent among the country’s iconography are arresting portraits of its princes and tsars.There is the imagined baptism of Grand Prince Vladimir, whose conversion to Christianity in the 10th century was – in Russian eyes – the foundation stone of Russian Orthodoxy and the birth of the Russian state. There is the warrior prince, Alexander Nevsky, who fought…

Every nation has its founding myths and narratives, usually starring historical figures we know almost nothing about; absurd stories even to the schoolchildren to whom they are usually peddled. Think Alfred and the cakes or Robert the Bruce and his study of spiders. For Russia, it has long been Grand Prince Vladimir, who had 800 concubines and wives before choosing Christ over Muhammad at the end of the first millennium for the very Russian reason that Islam did not permit alcohol. In truth, Vladimir (or Volodymyr to the…