Remains, I imagine, the final word on the subject.

The invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin led me to do a second reading of James H. Billington's "The Icon and the Axe". This work was first published in 1966 in the aftermath of the palace coup that replaced Nikita Khrushchev with Leonid Brezhnev, a more representative heir of Stalin.

Billington's subtitle is an Interpretive History of Russian Culture and although it is impossible to extract political and military history from a nation's culture, he is faithful to his mission. This is a massive comprehensive study of Russian religion, art, literature, philosophy and music. There is a 21 page bibliography preceded by a six page list of abbreviations of all of the published sources. The footnotes at the end of the text take up 160 pages and are worth your time although many require an ability to read Russian.

I first read this work nearly 50 years ago when I was a graduate student in Political Science and was thoroughly impressed with Billington's scholarship and ability to address both specialists in Russian studies and an audience of general readers without resorting to the obscurantism of academic jargon so common in the product of the modern professoriate in the humanities and social sciences.

The first chapter of the book is entitled "Kiev". The modern day capital of an independent Ukraine was in fact the initial locus of a self-conscious Russian state highlighted by the conversion of a Prince Vladimir to Orthodox Christianity under the influence of the Byzantine civilization headquartered in Constantinople (the Second Rome).

Kiev's dominion was ultimately overthrown by invasion from the East by the Mongols who sacked the city in 1240, launching a rule that lasted from 1240 to 1480 when the Russians ceased paying tribute to their conquerors who adopted Islam as their religion. (I think it is worth noting for our semi-educated post-moderns that colonialism is not a one way street from running from West to East or North to South. Two hundred and forty years is about the same lapse of time as the duration Western colonialism in Asia and Africa and the existence of slavery in the United States.)

The demise of Kiev moved the center of the nascent Russian civilization into the interior to Moscow which established an Orthodox Metropolitan seat in 1326. In the following year one Ivan Kalita, Prince of Moscow was bestowed with the title "Great Prince", ironically by the Tatars. Moscow in turn was superseded by St. Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great in 1703, "where the Neva River disgorges the muddy water of Lake Ladoga out through swamps and islands into the eastern Baltic". Finally (perhaps), the political center of Russia was relocated to Moscow by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1918.

The overriding fact of Russian culture was the adoption by Russia's rulers of Orthodox Christianity. Themes that have dominated Russian religious and political thought have echoed throughout the thousand plus years since the origin of Kievan Russia and the establishment of Orthodoxy. In the realms of art, music, poetry, prose literature, political thought as well as religion, the predominance of Orthodoxy and the challenges to it by Western influences such as Latin Christianity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement have all played major roles in the development of Russia. Reactions against the Western Enlightenment were associated with political reaction under Nicholas I following the suppression of the Decemberist uprising, and the repression launched by Alexander III following the assassination of his father Alexander II, the tsar who liberated the serfs one year before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. On the other hand the Slavophile movement and movements to the peasants advanced by the liberal intelligentsia were likewise inspired in part by a turning away from Western influences.

In his final chapter summing up Billington's thesis he talks about the Irony of Russian History and cites, among other examples, the reign of Catherine the Great "who launched the unending discussion in Russia about the liberation of mankind, probably did more than any of her autocratic predecessors to militarize society and to freeze the peasants in their bondage". Of course Catherine couldn't hold a candle to her Soviet successors most notably Stalin.

There may be other works on Russia's culture that are more comprehensive in scope and exhibit a depth of learning and understanding of subject than Billington's "The Icon and the Axe" but I doubt it. If you are seriously interested in how we have arrived in our present situation and want to understand the possibilities for the future you could not want a more brilliant instructor. ( )

An idiosyncratic and thoughtful history of Russian culture. This intellectual history covers Russian thought and culture from the Great Gate of Kiev until the days of the rule of the Kremlin from Moscow. ( )

Masterpiece. A must-read for anyone interested in Russia. ( )