This week’s Audible book was Russia: A Short History by Abraham Ascher, emeritus professor of history at CUNY Graduate Center. I should say at the outset that I know almost nothing about Russian history and that it doesn’t have much intersection with my own research interests. In fact, one of the reasons why I dropped a history minor as an undergrad was that I felt intimidated by the 400-level Russian history course that I would have had to take to finish the minor. (It was the only 400-level history course available that semester which fit my schedule). From whatI can find, Ascher’s work appears respectable, but I don’t know how he stacks up in historiography of Russia.

Clocking in at just over 10 hours in length, this was a relatively quick listen. Unlike other history books of this length which sometimes fall victim to sweeping generalizations, the narrative sticks to specific examples and never loses sight of the “so what?” factor. The book begins by highlighting a relatively intriguing tension: to what extent Is Russia part of the west (e.g.,, Europe) or its own culture shaped by Asian influences (especially the Mongol Empire of the 13th century)? Ascher offers a nuanced answer to this question that positions Russia as forever navigating between these two tensions without ever quite achieving a full resolution.

Among the things I learned from the book:

• Though Imperial Russia is rightly regarded as a culturally backwards society where feudalism persisted for centuries longer than it did in the rest of Europe, it would be a mistake to think of it as simply an autocracy led by the Czar. The vast majority of the population were peasants/serfs, but a complex social hierarchy existed among the nobility. Though the Czars led this nobility, they did not always control its day-to-day operations.
• Catherine the Great (reigned 1762-1796) gave lip service to enlightenment ideals, even corresponding with Voltaire, and did much to improve Russia’s international standing. But her policies ultimately had little benefit to serfs in Russian society.
• Most Czars after Catherine were not particularly effective leaders. Alexander I (reigned 1801-1825) and Nicholas II (reigned 1894-1917) were particularly incompetent. Much of the nobility during the 19th century recognized the need for political reform but could not agree on how to achieve it. When Alexander II liberated the serfs in 1861, it owed more to pragmatic political needs of the regime than to philosophical principles.
• The Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 were chaotic, and it’s possible to imagine an alternate history in which a liberal constitutional system might have taken hold rather than a communist one if things had played out just a little differently. One can’t help but see a parallel between the Czars and the Czar-like dictators of the Soviet era.
• Joseph Stalin’s brutal dictatorship (1927-1953) cast a shadow over the  Soviet Union for the last 37 years of its existence. Even Nikita Khrushchev (whom I remember being depicted in U.S. history textbooks as mercurial and unstable) held Stalin in low regard and tried to steer a more moderate course in domestic policy. The failure to deal adequately with Stalin’s legacy combined with severe economic challenges led to the Soviet Union’s collapse in the 1980s. Mikhail Gorbachev, though a committed communist, accelerated that process.

The book ends with an intriguing quotation about Russia’s relationship to the west:

“Is Russia part of the west, or does it belong culturally to the east? Lilia Shevtsova, in my view, the leading specialist on Yeltsin’s presidency and on  recent Russian history in general, offered a nuanced answer to the question in a book she published in 1999, before Putin’s assumption of presidential office. I believe her answer accurately reflected the state of affairs at that time and remains valid today. ‘The super-presidency created by [Boris] Yeltsin,’ she argued, ‘followed the country’s historic Byzantine model of governance in which all power is concentrated in the leader, the Czar, General Secretary, President, who becomes the symbol of the nation and its arbiter, as well as its main guarantor of stability. In contrast the western political tradition, in which power is based on rational ideas and institutions, the Byzantine tradition has always invested power with something sacred, irrational, and personal. The ruler was considered to be simultaneously the father of the nation, omnipresent, and not responsible to any other person or institution’.”

In light of political events in the twelve years following the publication of Ascher’s book, I can’t help but see parallels between the political trajectories of Russia and the United States. Though there are vast political and cultural differences, some uncomfortable parallels exist. Alexander II’s liberation of the serfs occurred 22 months before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Both events were driven by pragmatic political calculations more than they were genuine concern for the people they liberal. But the parallels for more recent events are eerily uncanny. Does the presidency of Donald J. Trump and the seeming irrationality of U.S. conservatives reflect a neo-Byzantine influence in U.S. politics? I hope not, but it’s hard to describe Trump as anything other than authoritarian strongman who used populist window dressing to mask his ideas.  Even after Trump’s defeat, it’s hard to see any coherent ideology that underlies the beliefs of Republicans opposed to Covid-19 safety measures other than an irrational belief in the supremacy of the private individual.

If there’s any lesson to be gleaned from the history of Russia, it’s that we must be on-guard against this irrationality, whether it take the form of authoritarians (Trump) or irrational public policy (Republican anti-science policy).