Greg Afinogenov is a Russian historian at Georgetown.
Across Europe, military leaders are dreaming of war with Russia. Nato’s defence chief, Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, has called for a pre-emptive, ‘defensive’ strike (whatever that means); the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said in the autumn that it might have been ‘the last summer of peace for Europeans’. France’s chief of the defence staff,...
‘Early on, I learned from the Russian intelligentsia that the only meaning of life is conscious participation in the making of history.’ In this line from the memoirs of Victor Serge – revolutionary, exile, implacable opponent of capitalism, critic and sometimes accomplice of Bolshevik terror – there is an entire worldview that is now as foreign to Serge’s...
It’s a crowded field, but the most unsubtle of all 19th-century Russian paintings might be Vasily Vereshchagin’s 1871 canvas The Apotheosis of War. In an arid landscape, a towering pyramid of human skulls is being picked over by crows, with ruined Islamicate architecture in the background. This heavy-metal album cover avant la lettre was dedicated ‘to all great conquerors,...
In late May, the pro-Kremlin political PR hack Konstantin Dolgov published a startling interview with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the commander of the Wagner private military company. Prigozhin said that the entire ‘denazification and demilitarisation’ rationale behind the invasion of Ukraine was a sham; that the war was a failure; that the Ukrainian army was now among the strongest in the world; that the children of the Kremlin elite ‘allow themselves to live a public, fat, worry-free life applying face cream and showing it on the internet while ordinary people’s children are coming back in zinc [coffins]’; and that ‘this divide might end with a revolution, like in 1917, when first the soldiers rise up, then the people close to them’ to ‘stick the elites on pitchforks.’ Last weekend Prigozhin appeared to put his money where his mouth was.
In summer 1876, Peter Kropotkin was given a pocket watch by a visiting relative. He was 33 years old, bore one of the Russian Empire’s oldest princely titles and had been a page de chambre to Tsar Alexander II. He was already famous in Russia for his scientific work on zoology and glaciation. Two years earlier, however, he had been arrested and imprisoned as a member of a...
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