Nothing is certain in Russia, where the past is constantly rewritten

Enforced brevity focuses the mind wonderfully. And when the minds in question are two of the West’s most interesting historians of Russia, the result is a distillation of insight that’s vitally timely. Sir Rodric Braithwaite was Britain’s ambassador to Moscow from 1988-92 during the collapse of the USSR (where he was the boss of Christopher Steele, of Trump dossier fame), then chaired the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee. He went on to write the brilliant Afgantsy, a history of the USSR’s disastrous Afghan war and its impact on the Soviet Union’s collapse, and Moscow 1941, a people’s history of the heroic Soviet fight against Nazism. Sheila Fitzpatrick is an Australian historian who has been writing about Soviet education, culture and politics since the 1970s. Both have now produced brief and highly readable histories of, respectively, Russia and the USSR that channel the pithy, punchy spirit of the great Norman Stone’s short histories of Turkey and Hungary.

Fitzpatrick’s book, covering 70 years rather than more than a millennium, is inevitably the more detailed. One of the great virtues of such short histories is that they emphasise what specialists may regard as the bleeding obvious – but it is the obvious truths often buried in detail that bear restating. For instance, there is the paradox that the Bolshevik revolution was led in large part by members of national minorities – from Jews to Georgians to Latvians and Poles – who had suffered under the Russian empire yet ultimately recreated it. And there is the often forgotten fact that despite the bloodshed and political repressions of the USSR, the Soviet century saw life expectancy double and university education quintuple. ‘For many Russians, whose birth state [the USSR] was, the narrative was different’ from the West’s view of Soviet history, she writes:

Coming out of backwardness, Russia had miraculously won its 20th-century place in the sun, first leading the world towards socialism and later becoming a superpower – and then all that was suddenly snatched away for no apparent reason, along with the respect of the world and the empire inherited from the Tsars.