![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He is mistaken when he claims that Lenin established a modus vivendi with the Church after the Communist Party made a dramatic policy change in 1921 with its New Economic Policy. The Story of Russia is for the non-specialist: it may annoy a professional historian or two with its generalisations and comparisons of 21st-century Russia with earlier periods, but it is an excellent introduction, beginning with the origins of Russia as a nation and taking the reader up to today’s Putin regime and Russia’s war against Ukraine.įiges poses and tries to answer why Russia has never developed a democratic system of government: he shows how democratic reform was constantly thwarted - by the French Revolution during the reign of Catherine the Great, by France’s invasion of Russia during the reign of Alexander I, by the murder of Alexander II, which halted the remarkable reforms instituted during that reign, by the elimination of any democratic reform with the domination of the Bolsheviks after the Revolution, and by the autocratic tendencies of the Russian government since the removal of Gorbachev.įiges’s understanding of Russian Orthodoxy is somewhat superficial: he defines it as a branch of Christianity which, unlike other Churches, saw the divine “not confined to the heavens but immanent in worldly existence”, apparently unaware of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. ![]() RUSSIAN history is a fascinating subject, and to have it summarised in 300 pages is a tour de force. ![]()
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