Greg Afinogenov

‘Early on, I learned from the Russian intelligentsia that the only meaning of life is conscious participation in the making of history.’ In this line from the memoirs of Victor Serge – revolutionary, exile, implacable opponent of capitalism, critic and sometimes accomplice of Bolshevik terror – there is an entire worldview that is now as foreign to Serge’s...

It’s​ a crowded field, but the most unsubtle of all 19th-century Russian paintings might be Vasily Vereshchagin’s 1871 canvas The Apotheosis of War. In an arid landscape, a towering pyramid of human skulls is being picked over by crows, with ruined Islamicate architecture in the background. This heavy-metal album cover avant la lettre was dedicated ‘to all great conquerors,...

In summer​ 1876, Peter Kropotkin was given a pocket watch by a visiting relative. He was 33 years old, bore one of the Russian Empire’s oldest princely titles and had been a page de chambre to Tsar Alexander II. He was already famous in Russia for his scientific work on zoology and glaciation. Two years earlier, however, he had been arrested and imprisoned as a member of a...

In​ the winter of 1926 the frozen corpse of a dishevelled 77-year-old man was found on a park bench in Berlin’s Tiergarten. He had been one of the dozen or so people whose choices had been decisive in the outbreak of the Great War. His name was Vladimir Sukhomlinov, and he was the former war minister of the Russian Empire. During his tenure, which began in the wake of the disastrous...

Ivan the Terrible was Europe’s first Russian celebrity. Between the late 16th and the mid-17th century, a great rush of books was published about him and his domain. Many of these accounts, like Albert Schlichting’s Brief Narrative of the Character and Brutal Rule of [Ivan] Vasil’evich, Tyrant of Muscovy of 1571, featured lurid anecdotes about the tsar’s behaviour:...