Enforced brevity focuses the mind wonderfully. And when the minds in question are two of the West’s most interesting historians of Russia, the result is a distillation of insight that’s vitally timely. Sir Rodric Braithwaite was Britain’s ambassador to Moscow from 1988-92 during the collapse of the USSR (where he was the boss of Christopher Steele, of Trump dossier fame), then chaired the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee. He went on to write the brilliant Afgantsy, a history of the USSR’s disastrous Afghan war and its impact on the Soviet Union’s collapse, and Moscow 1941, a people’s history of the heroic Soviet fight against Nazism. Sheila Fitzpatrick is an Australian historian who has been writing about Soviet education, culture and politics since the 1970s. Both have now produced brief and highly readable histories of, respectively, Russia and the USSR that channel the pithy, punchy spirit of the great Norman Stone’s short histories of Turkey and Hungary.
Fitzpatrick’s book, covering 70 years rather than more than a millennium, is inevitably the more detailed.
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