A Kingdom and a Village

The city of Moscow stands at the centre of a nation comprising eleven percent of the globe’s landmass, 11 time zones and nearly 150 million people, some 13 million of whom live in the capital. In A Kingdom and a Village, acclaimed historian Simon Morrison offers a vividly rendered history of Russia’s heart and soul, tracing its transformation from a “big village”—the demeaning nickname the St. Peterburg nobility gave to its provincialneighbour—into a spectacular metropolis of vast geopolitical import. That arc is the stuff of dramatic, violent, stranger-than-fiction historical narrative: the last century alone has featured invasions and costly battles, the destruction (and reconstruction) of sacred cultural and religious landmarks, and the collapse of the Soviet republic—not to mention the rise of an authoritarian leader who is a keen student of Russian history. Morrison reaches back further still, to the founding of the place we now know as Moscow as a fortress on a river nearly a millennium ago. In the centuries that followed, any number ofexternal forces—from Tatar Mongols and Swedes to Napoleon and Hitler—set their sights on Moscow, reinforcing its self-conception as both a glittering prize and a site of perpetual defence and resurrection. Drawing on a rich array of archival materials, from the birchbark scrawls that record the oldest layer of Russian civilization to the articles in European newspapers heralding the opening of the magnificent Bolshoi theatre, Morrison brings to life the bloody power struggles, cultural marvels, excruciating famines, droughts, storms, and fires that have shaped and re-shaped the city and reinforced its essential character. Having first visited Moscow in 1990 and made some thirty trips since, he excavates the city’s truths from its fictions—while celebrating both—in a style that’s at once deeply learned and deeply personal. With A Kingdom and a Village, Morrison makes a persuasive, even impassioned case that to understand Moscow is not only to unlock the spellbinding mysteries of Russia’s past but also, critically, to grasp the grim logic of its present. It is a magisterial biography of a place—and an essential guide to a people and a country that, for many readers, might have remained impenetrable.