PERHAPS LIKE INVESTMENT advisers’ caveats that past performance may not be an assured promise of future profits, historians ought to issue a health warning when making predictions about the future, which can be a precariously exposed business. In 2014, just before Russia invaded Crimea and began to occupy chunks of Eastern Ukraine, Orlando Figes — one of the best historians of Russia writing in the English language — published a brilliant little book, Revolutionary Russia.
In it, he declared boldly that as Russia had become weaker since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, it was “no longer the aggressive threat it once was. It does not start foreign wars”.
It’s best, perhaps, to glide over this. Many of us, after all, have been there with these hostages, is the go-to work on the subject (after those of Trotsky and Nikolai Sukhanov, both of whom lived through the events) and his beautifully written brought Russia’s cultural heritage to a larger audience. Interpreting the future, though, may be better left to someone else.
