Russian history—past, present, and future—is being discussed a lot right now, and in completely different terms. I’m also interested in how exactly we all ended up at the point we’re at now. Boris Akunin wrote an entire series about the history of the Russian state from ancient times all the way up to 1917. Alexander Yanov tried to make sense of the history of the ‘Russian Idea‘. And the blogger and politician Maxim Katz constantly discusses current events, projecting them into the future, while still keeping historical realities in mind.
You can feel differently about Maxim Katz, but he’s definitely a pretty interesting storyteller. I respect his opinion, even though he’s often overly wordy, suffers from heavy self-repetition in his blog, but at the very least he tries to be objective and not lean too hard into emotions (which, for example, I’m very far from always managing).
Recently, Maxim released a book, The History of the New Russia, in which he laid out his view of how the Russian Federation developed starting from the late Soviet Union.
Maxim’s book can’t really be called a proper work of history. It’s a fairly brief tour through Russia’s history starting from the perestroika years. No analysis of causes, no evaluations or possible paths forward, no questions (except that Maxim notes that, for some reason, after the coup attempt Gorbachev didn’t talk to the people and went on vacation instead). Just very compressed facts. Interesting, but very superficial. Even good school textbooks still give more facts and try to assess causes and consequences.
What the book also has in common with a school textbook is the sheer amount of visual material. Though the way it’s presented is, in my view, a huge drawback. It’s like the authors couldn’t decide what they were making—a photo album or a history book. In the end, it doesn’t come out well as either. The left-hand full-page spreads are given over to big, colorful posters about nothing, while the right-hand spread has text that’s way too small for a book of that size, plus tiny photos just two centimeters wide. There are supposedly lots of photos, but you can barely make out anything in them. So half the book is huge collages, and the other half is text with very uninformative photos (because of the size).
No—the book is interesting. But even here there are way too many repetitions, the same thing Katz suffers from on his YouTube channel. Every page feels like a new short one-page piece rather than the next chapter of a single book. Like a bunch of short sketches collected together, written at different times. And that’s why you end up chewing over the same facts three or four times—facts you’ve already read, almost in the same words, literally twenty pages earlier, or even on the previous page.
Plus the format itself—one page per one interesting historical fact—makes the narrative very constrained and choppy. Because you can’t do any deep analysis with limits like that (and there isn’t any in the book, like I said). And in most cases the author doesn’t even try to analyze things, unfortunately.
Also, there’s very little attention paid to the broader context. From the moment Putin appears, the book basically turns into a book about Putin. Yes, he did—and still does—play the central role, but there’s nothing about opponents, or really about anyone else in politics at all. Nothing about Navalny, nothing about Nemtsov, not even about a character as singular as Zhirinovsky. As if nobody existed in Russia besides Putin.
There’s also nothing about the country’s foreign policy, even though that’s an inseparable part of history. You can’t treat merely mentioning the war with Georgia as the entirety of foreign policy. The flirting with Belarus around the Union State, the creation of the CIS and its complicated existence—there isn’t a word about any of that. Even the Second Chechen War isn’t really covered properly. It’s like: “and then they started fighting, and they fought better than in the first one…” and that’s it. Not a word about how that war ended, either. And the transformation of Chechnya into an insanely expensive, subsidy-dependent region with, essentially, its own local laws and the right to do whatever it wants—silence.
And this whole story ends in 2012, with the ‘rokirovka’ (a castling-style swap). And it’s been 11 years since then (well, make it 9 by the time the book was written). As if those years just didn’t happen. It’s very strange that the author basically decided, “and after that it’s full autocracy and nothing interesting.” Okay, back then nobody knew about the current war with Ukraine yet. But Katz doesn’t even mention Crimea and the takeover of the DPR/LPR, or the downed Malaysian Boeing.
And even though it was interesting to read, you can’t call this book a “history.” It’s just a set of facts arranged in chronological order—but with huge gaps, and without any attempt to evaluate what’s happening. And how can you evaluate it, if so many facts were left off-screen?
I don’t regret reading it, but you shouldn’t expect too much from the book. In Maxim’s blog, by the way, he often has much more thoroughly worked-out material. So he can do it. But in the case of this book—he didn’t want to.
My rating: 3.5/5
