Searching for a saviour

The central themes of Russian history have remained constant for over a millennium.  Russia’s vast spaces and lack of any natural borders have always made her inhabitants terrified of invasion. And to protect the country against invaders, and to preserve its unity, Russia’s rulers seem always to have felt it necessary to assert their authority with great brutality. All this is at least hinted at in the very first introduction to Russian history. The Primary Chronicle, compiled in Kiev around 1113, tells us that

there was no law among [the Slavs], but tribe rose against tribe…  Accordingly they …  said to the people of Rus [who were probably Scandinavians]: ‘Our whole land is great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us.’

So began the Rurik dynasty, rulers of the state of Kiev Rus until the Mongol invasion.

Geoffrey Hosking’s beautifully written volume is less than a fifth of the length of Bushkovitch’s. Hosking, however, has an unerring sense of what truly matters, and it is he, not Bushkovitch, who quotes this crucial passage in full. It is the same with regard to art, music and literature; where Bushkovitch merely provides lists of events, Hosking gives us significant details and real insights.

It is Hosking who devotes most space to one of the most crucial works of 20th-century Russian art, Malevich’s ‘Black Square’, painted in 1915. Hosking helps the reader to grasp the extent of Malevich’s metaphysical ambitions by captioning the reproduction: ‘The vacant icon’. And he quotes Malevich at his most grandiose: ‘The white free chasm, infinity is before us!’ Bushkovitch’s account of ‘Black Square’ is, by contrast, absurdly understated: ‘Kazimir Malevich began to turn towards full abstractionism.’

Similarly timid understatements vitiate much of Bushkovitch’s book.