Motherless Russia

If it is widely considered fortunate to know who one’s parents were, it must be doubly so for a nation to know its own history. The thesis of Orlando Figes’s new book is that Russia has always been muddled about where it came from. Objective investigation of the past is not much assisted by the fact that historians deemed to get it “wrong” have been at best banned, and not infrequently dispatched to the gulag.

“No other country has been so divided over its own beginnings,” Figes writes. “History is always political.” In the mid-18th century the German scholar Gerhard Friedrich Müller was publicly disgraced for suggesting that early Russians had been Scandinavian barbarians.