‘Mother Volga’ has always been Russia’s lifeblood

‘Without this river the Russians could not live,’ remarked Robert Bremner in his work, Excursions in the Interior of Russia. The year is 1840. The river in question, the Volga, the 2,000 mile-long meandering waterway stretching from the forests of north-west Russia to the steppes by the Caspian. At the time of Bremner’s survey, half of the Russian empire’s fish was caught in the single stretch of river by Astrakhan, the Volga’s final pit stop before flowing out to sea. Since the earliest days of medieval Rus through to the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, the Volga has not simply fed the mouths of its population but has been crucial to Russia’s commercial, cultural and imperial development. As a Vesti news report from 2019 simply stated: ‘Without the Volga, there would be no Russia.’

In her concise, lucidly written new book, the historian Janet Hartley takes this uncontroversial premise and excites it with drama. This isn’t a book about the Volga itself, but rather the river’s role — physically and symbolically — in the turbulent making of Russia. For those in search of a topographical survey from source to delta, look elsewhere.

In this 1,000-year marriage — a mere blip on the river’s ancient timeline — the Volga has been both active participant and indifferent bystander to seismic moments in Russia’s history. As the Mongol empire swept westward, the Golden Horde built their cities on its banks; the Cossack revolts led by Razin and Pugachev snaked the river’s lowlands; the Volga was Russia’s line in the sand in the battle of Stalingrad, as Stalin delivered his infamous, fateful order: ‘Not a step back.’

Hartley retells these already familiar stories as miniature dioramas, resisting digressions that take us too far from the water’s edge.