The history of Moscow helps explain Russia’s pathologies: Invasion marked the city’s rise from medieval backwater to imperial metropolis

The Economist ^ | 06/07/2026

[SeekAndFind]

A Kingdom and a Village. By Simon Morrison. Knopf; 528 pages;

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“Do you love Moscow?” Not long after this reviewer moved there in 2004, he was asked that question by his grizzled landlord. A bit early to know, was his cautious response. “Good,” replied the landlord. “Foreigners who say they love it here soon run back to the airport—with no luggage.” Simon Morrison of Princeton University, a devotee of the carnivorous city since the last days of the Soviet Union, is less equivocal. “Moscow is hard to love,” he acknowledges, “but I love it.”

His is a love without illusions, however. Today it is “a showcase capital”, its downtown beautified as a sop to disenfranchised citizens. But as Mr Morrison shows in his technicolour chronicle of the city, beneath the petro-funded sheen, Moscow is a domain of purges, paranoia and ravenous power. History has shaped its character; equally, as much as that of any metropolis, Moscow’s character has shaped history, both Russia’s and the world’s.

The first half of this book traces the origins and evolution of the Russian state, from Moscow’s first recorded mention in 1147 to the 17th century. Like the history of other states, only more so, it is a saga of dynastic struggle, vicious intrigue, autocracy and wanton cruelty. To live in Moscow, it helps to have a bleak sense of humour—and the same goes for reading about it.

In a typical anecdote, a 14th-century prince cuts out a rival’s heart. Later the prince “would himself be murdered, and then his murderer would be murdered”. Ivan the Terrible killed a jester by pouring scalding soup on his head. “To hell with him!” Ivan scowled. “He made no attempt to recover!”

Ivan wasn’t all bad, notes Mr Morrison. He introduced a few useful reforms in the 16th century, as well as boiling and roasting people. “Such, at times, has been Russia’s tragedy,” the author laments: “barbarism in the service of civilisation”. Under Ivan and his grandfather, Ivan III, Moscow consolidated its hold over the region and developed a bureaucracy. After them came the macabre “time of troubles”, a bout of mayhem that ended with the Romanovs’ accession in 1613. The legacies of that traumatic era include lasting convictions that brutal rule is preferable to chaos, and that bloodshed can be redemptive.

In these murky centuries, some motifs recur. One is invasion—both of Moscow and by it. Local strongmen were better at slaughtering each other and fighting other Slavic cities than at repelling outsiders. Moscow was repeatedly sacked by the Mongols. Meanwhile, “to thwart invasion, Moscow invaded, again and again”, seeking a buffer zone for its buffer zone, as, alas, it still does now. Another theme is fire, which periodically razed it.

Sometimes, as with Napoleon’s campaign of 1812, the scourges came together. Given these threats, and the risk of state expropriation, property has often been insecure: “Nothing was permanent or meant to last.”

Two other cities shadowed Moscow’s rise from “a fort on a hill along a river” to an imperial metropolis. First Kyiv, to which it was linked by dynastic and cultural ties, but compared with which it was for centuries a philistine, obscurantist backwater. Moscow had no theatres until the 1670s; visiting diplomats boggled at its drunkenness. Second, St Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great and Russia’s capital from 1712 (Lenin switched it back to Moscow in the havoc of the Bolshevik revolution). Peter disliked Moscow, where, as a boy, he saw a mob impale some of his relatives.

With its Italianate architecture and access to the Baltic Sea, St Petersburg embodied an openness to Enlightenment ideals and westward integration. (In theory: in practice it had its share of dolts and bigots.) Conversely, Moscow “resisted Europe—and still does”. The contrast between the cities captures Russia’s alternating engagement and enragement with the West. To ride the train between them, once a tourist treat, is to trace an axis of history.

The second half of this study, at once scholarly and impressionistic, takes urban features and individuals as emblems of later trends. Among them is the ornate Metro, the construction of which cost an unknown number of workers’ lives; some overseers perished in the purges. Here the Metro stands for Stalin’s breakneck transformation of his capital—it became “a map of his obsessions”—and its experience of the second world war, when stations doubled as shelters. Stalin threw up monumental buildings, redrew streets and tore down landmarks as brusquely as he deported entire national groups across his realm.

Then there is the cathedral built to commemorate the expulsion of Napoleon. It was dynamited in 1931 to make room for a grandiose “Palace of Soviets”. Instead the site became a giant swimming pool, with a VIP zone that hosted prostitution and black marketeering, before, in the 1990s, the cathedral was rebuilt. The farrago illustrates the corrupt nexus of church and state in Russia, and the vandalism, venality and incompetence of the city’s overlords.

“Power looks after itself,” Mr Morrison observes. “Power exists for itself,” an attitude cultivated in hunkering Moscow and projected by its crabbed rulers across an empire and beyond. The city, he writes, is “completely unfree”. It is a place stalked by armed men in uniform, where life can be a tightrope-walk for people without connections. At weekends droves of Muscovites escape to their dachas, where the air is cleaner and they can breathe more freely.

At the same time, the author says, Moscow “seems anarchically unbridled”, crackling with the urgency of life on the edge. After the Soviet Union fell, this electric mood—the sense that “Anything can happen”—attracted curious Westerners, from sleazy carpetbaggers to cultural explorers like Mr Morrison. (Moscow also drew in countless workers from ex-Soviet republics, for whom it remains the imperial hub.) When the city spat them out, many wound up pining for it in their tamer homelands.

Now, during its latest imperialist spasm, Russia is a pariah in the West. Moscow is in effect off-limits for many foreigners; the Kremlin is squeezing Muscovites’ remaining freedoms.

Still, that tale of “a church, which became a public pool, which became a church again” suggests another lesson of Moscow’s history. Nothing—no tyrant, regime or ideology—lasts forever. Mr Morrison offers an apt variant of this moral: “Everything was forever, until it was no more, until it was again forever.” ■

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TOPICS: Books/Literature; History; Society
KEYWORDS: citystate; history; moscow; nationofserfs; putinthewarpig; russia; russiankeywordtroll; russiansuicide; throwback; vladtheimploder

[Cronos]

“Russia is the largest country on Earth. They have no need or desire for Ukraine. “

“Russia” is based on a certain national mythology (well, all nations are) — theirs as it started off was “to gather all the Rus”
- so they had to conquer the different former Rus principalities - this was easy as they were the tax collectors for the Great Khan of the Mongols

- then they took on the “Khanate competition” - they competed with the other Khanates like Astrakhan, Kazan, Sibr, Crimea to recreate the Golden Horde. Then they expanded east further and finally in the late 1800s conquered Mongolia itself

- then they took on the “gather the Orthodox and reconquer constantinople” - in parallel to the above. They pushed south to grab land back from the Ottomans and Safavid Iranians

- then, in parallel in the post 1840s they took on the “gather the Slavs” and wanted to lead the Slavic world.

Russia still has these 3 concepts in their head.

keeping this in mind - for the Muscowite mythos:
1. Crimea is the baptism place of the first Christian Rus prince - it is key for both the gathering of the Rus and the gathering of the Orthodox
2. it was also the late Golden horde sub-khanate that Moscow conquered - so key for the gathering of the Mongol Khaganate.

That is why the muscowites desire Ukraine.

the silliest part is - and I’ve been in Poland since 2010 - prior to 2014, Russia was already SOFT-winning in Ukraine. The Russian language had movies, tv, books etc. that was going to obliterate Ukrainians even without political pressure - like English in Ireland or Scotland.

[Cronos]

“The bankrupt EU, however, needs to divide Ukraine up and redistribute it’s agricultural and natural resource bounty among themselves. “

The Eurocrats have no idea how to manage that even if they got it - they don’t NEED to get it either.

the EU cares about what’s happening in Ukraine because it threatens the eastern flank — muscowy will NOT be satisfied just with Ukraine.

[Cronos]

Sorry, you consider Moscow to be “the victim”??

[Cronos]

The basic thing is that they still have an imperialistic mindset — think of this as Germany between the wars.

The German armies in 1919 were all outside the German borders, so the ordinary people didn’t realize they had lost.

But in 1945 they KNEW

the same for Russians after the collapse of the USSR

[blitz128]

At what human cost did Moscow and St. Petersburg become “spectacular”?

I hear that NK capital is quite nice as well, Great Wall of China is “spectacular” 😎

[blitz128]

How many bodies are buried under Moscow subway, how many folks fall out of windows in Moscow, how many Russian bodies are fertilizers for sun flowers?😎

[blitz128]

It’s not a lie if you believe it😂

[blitz128]

К чему вы клоните?

[Jan_Sobieski]

Interesting posts on your experience in Russia. I spent time in Ukraine. I can vouch for what you’re saying.

[BroJoeK]

quoting Steely Tom: "So they compensate for these pathologies by invading their neighboring countries."

E. Pluribus Unum: "Russia is the largest country on Earth.
They have no need or desire for Ukraine."

"Russia does not need or desire Ukraine" 2022:

Really? That is very curious wording -- "need or desire".
So, why then why does:

1. Russia still lose about 1,000 casualties per day trying to take a country it doesn't "need or desire"?

2. Russia spend ~40% of its Federal budget and consume most of its prewar "national wealth fund", supporting its invasions of a country it doesn't "need or desire"?

3. Russia suffer economic and diplomatic sanctions rather than give up its goals in a country it doesn't "need or desire"?

4. Russia daily threaten the world with nuclear war if Russia can't get what it doesn't "need or desire" in Ukraine?

So, you've obviously been drinking the Russian propaganda Kool-Aid, and why would any sane person do that?

E. Pluribus Unum: "The bankrupt EU, however, needs to divide Ukraine up and redistribute it's agricultural and natural resource bounty among themselves."

What a crock o'crap that is!
At some point, the EU will make Ukraine a member state, recognizing its 2013 borders.
At some point later, so will NATO.

Ukraine is and will be a European country, whether Russians like that or not.

[ichabod1]

False. Ukraine is a hinterland. They speak ‘hinterlandese’. Soon they will be a province of the Russian Federation and the western part will revert to the countries they were stolen from.

[dfwgator]

There are some who theorize that Northern Europeans and Russians may be descendants of the tribe of Dan

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Did they use their steely knives?

[Windcatcher]

Yes, but they just couldn’t kill the beast.

[Sirius Lee]

They went on to conquer most of Aja.

[Grzegorz 246]

“how many rapes of white women by non white men does moscow have?”

Definitely in thousands.

[Rockingham]

I have my complaints with the piece (which I will get to) but it rests on solid assumptions. Russia and Russians really are different due to their relative isolation and geographic, economic, cultural, historic, and religious distinctions from the rest of Europe. The Russian language even has a different alphabet and Russia is half in Asia rather than Europe.

The result is that Russian nationalism and concepts of state power and citizenship commonly look to Russian examples alone rather than to the broader civilizational context that Americans and Europeans are familiar with as the sources of state and national norms of behavior.

In Russia, the principles of democratic accountability and that leaders must follow the law are but thinly rooted and essentially foreign concepts. Above all, a decisively large proportion of Russians today have a premodern belief in the state and its leaders as having innate legitimacy in spite of corruption and appalling misbehavior and errors.

This is best understood as arising from a combination of Russian history and natural resource extraction. The Russian state and identity arose as an expansionist imperial enterprise by the Duchy of Moscow. Over time, they incorporated nearby lands and compatible peoples like those of the Kievan Rus.

Other territories and peoples were also gradually subjugated, with Russian control extending into the Caucasus and across the Urals to the Far East. This immense and multi-century process required determined leadership with a vision and planning that extended for decades. The last thing that one wants in such a society is a disruptive change in leadership that endanger such an enterprise or unsettle the internal political order.

In addition, the Russian economy and state finances were and are based primarily on resource extraction and the state providing the transportation and security needed for manufactured goods and agricultural products. As with the Mideast's petrostates, this "natural resources trap" leads toward a corrupt, autocratic state and society.

My complaint is that the article refers to Russia's pathologies and then offers historical examples. As this post indicates, my preference is more toward offering an analytical framework for understanding (but not excusing) Russia and the behavior of its leaders.

[Jonty30]

Very good.