Quotes from Orlando Figes

Whereas in Western countries the constitution merely had to guarantee the rights of a per-existing civil society and culture, in Russia it also had to create these. It had to educate society - and the state itself - into the values and ideas of liberal constitutionalism.

The currents of modern civilization had somehow passed it by, and as he returned to it now, fresh from the sides of England and France, Sergei Semenov saw only familiar signs of backwardness and decay.

Everybody cursed the Bolsheviks but nobody was prepared to do anything about them.

The word 'soviet' means 'council' in Russian (there was nothing particularly Communist about it until after 1917).

Lenin's Personal life was extraordinarily dull. He dressed and lived like a middle-aged provincial clerk, with precisely fixed hours for meals, sleep, work and leisure. He liked everything to be neat and orderly.

Pavlik denounced his father's crimes, and when Trofim shouted out, 'It's me, your father,' the boy told the judge: 'Yes, he used to be my father, but I no longer consider him my father. I am not acting as a son, but as a Pioneer.

Gorky called for the building of a monument to the young martyr, who, the writer said, had 'understood that a relative by blood may also be an enemy of the spirit, and that such a person is not to be spared'.69

Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855)

The ancient bond between the tsarist state and Russian nationalism could be used to create powerful emotions when the enemy came from the heathen east. The Mongol invasion had left a powerful mark on the Russian psyche. It was expressed in a deep anxiety about the mixed Eurasian roots of the people and it's culture, which made it easy for an educated liberal to convince themselves that this war was nothing less than a defense of Russia's European identity against the Asian hordes.

Whereas land reform was the first act of the Bolsheviks, it was the last act of the Whites: that, in a peasant country, says it all.

I have always had this fear, the fear that love is not enough. One must be able to love yet also to live together and to live in this world, which will probably always remain cruel.

This was one of the most revealing scenes of the whole revolution – one of those rare episodes when the hidden relations of power are illuminated on the surface of events and the broader course of history becomes clear.

As in 1917, the drift towards authoritarian government under Putin was enabled by the weakness of the middle classes and public institutions in post-Soviet Russia. Subjected

According to a poll of 2005, 42 per cent of the Russian people, and 60 per cent of those over 60 years of age, wanted the return of a 'leader like Stalin'.

For over three hundred years, the period of the Renaissance in the West, Russia was cut off from European civilization. The country which emerged from the Mongol period was far more inward-looking than it had been at the start of the thirteenth century, when Kievan Rus', the loose confederation of principalities which constituted the first Russian state, had been intimately linked with Byzantium.

Little travelled or exposed to Europeans, who were forced to settle in a special suburb in Moscow, the nobleman mistrusted new or foreign ways. His life was regulated by the archaic rituals of the Church – its calendar arranged to count the years from the notional creation of the world (with the birth of Adam) in 5509 BC.*

The overarching subject of all these works was Russia – its character, its history, its customs and conventions, its spiritual essence and its destiny. In a way that was extraordinary, if not unique to Russia, the country's artistic energy was almost wholly given to the quest to grasp the idea of its nationality.

Natasha's dance is one such opening. At its heart is an encounter between two entirely different worlds: the European culture of the upper classes and the Russian culture of the peasantry.

My aim is to explore Russian culture in the same way Tolstoy presents Natasha's dance: as a series of encounters or creative social acts which were performed and understood in many different ways.

Natasha's dance is an emblem of the view to be taken in this book: there is no quintessential national culture, only mythic images of it, like Natasha's version of the peasant dance.

The richest dynasties of the aristocracy had all stood near the summit of the Tsarist state during its great territorial expansion between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries and had consequently been rewarded with lavish endowments of fertile land in the south of Russia and Ukraine. These were the Sheremetevs and the Stroganovs, the Demidovs and Davydovs, the Vorontsovs and Yusupovs.

Here, then, were the roots of the monarchy's collapse, not in peasant discontent or the labour movement, so long the preoccupation of Marxist and social historians, nor in the breakaway of nationalist movements on the empire's periphery, but in the growing conflict between a dynamic public culture and a fossilized autocracy that would not concede or even understand its political demands.

the Sheremetevs acquired the beautiful estate of Ostankino on the outskirts of Moscow. With the immense fortune that was spent on it in the second half of the eighteenth century by their son Nikolai Petrovich, the first great impresario of the Russian theatre, Ostankino became the jewel in the Sheremetev crown.

Extravagant spending was a peculiar weakness of the Russian aristocracy. It derived in part from foolishness, and in part from the habits of a class whose riches had arrived through little effort and at fantastic speed. Much of this wealth was in the form of Imperial grants designed to create a superb court that would compare with Versailles or Potsdam.