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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is professor of global history at the University of Oxford
When US President Donald Trump recently called off a proposed meeting with Vladimir Putin in Budapest, he did so because he feared it would be “a waste of time”. Showing his frustration, Trump said that “every time I speak with Vladimir, I have good conversations, and then they don’t go anywhere”.
Trump only needed to think back to his meeting with the Russian leader in August to remember how difficult it is to negotiate with him. As noted in the FT, at the Alaska summit Trump became so annoyed with his counterpart that he “raised his voice several times” and threatened to walk out of the meeting.
What caused this reaction was not so much Putin’s intransigence over a possible settlement, but the “rambling historical discursion spanning medieval princes such as Rurik of Novgorod and Yaroslav the Wise, along with the 17th-century Cossack chieftain Bohdan Khmelnytsky”. Some observers saw this as a deliberate attempt to drag the meeting out, to wear Trump down and to obfuscate by diverting attention from what a peace deal with Ukraine might look like to assessments of the past that are arcane to any but the most committed of historians.
Putin, though, likes to present himself as someone who has thought extensively about the past. It was not just Trump who has been treated to the Russian leader’s analysis of the history of Rus’, the Christianisation of Prince (later St) Vladimir in 988 or the impact of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania on lands to its east in the late Middle Ages.
These were all topics that Putin wrote about at length in “On The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, where among other things, Putin noted how “Voivode Bobrok of Volyn and the sons of Grand Duke of Lithuania Algirdas — Andrey of Polotsk and Dmitry of Bryansk” fought alongside Grand Duke Dmitry Ivanovich of Moscow at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380.
If that sounds arcane, it’s because it is meant to be: Putin sees Russia’s confrontation with Ukraine — and the west — within a thousand-year continuum. Trump isn’t the only one who has been treated to his version of history. When interviewed by Tucker Carlson last year, Putin decided to give a historical perspective. “If you don’t mind”, he said, “I will take only 30 seconds or one minute of your time to give you a brief historical background.” He then proceeded to talk at a bewildered Carlson for half an hour.
At one point, the interviewer stopped him and said: “I beg your pardon, can you tell us what period . . . I am losing track of where in history we are.” It was the 13th century, came the reply. “Now I will tell what happened next and give the dates so that there is no confusion.” In fact, Putin added, “so that you don’t think that I am inventing things . . . I’ll give you these documents”, gesturing off camera for a dossier to be handed to him.
Historians like to understand sources. So inevitably, it is worth asking where Putin gets his material from, to see if it is possible to identify what he has been reading, and to assess how he engages with what he has read. For one thing, the list of individuals he mentions never changes or gets added to, as one might expect from someone who takes history seriously and reads widely.
There might be a reason for that. I have not found the Russian leader citing the work of a modern scholar in the past quarter century. What one can find are the fingerprints of authors like Vladimir Medinsky, former minister of culture and chair of the Russian Military-Historical Society, whose book Myths about Russia has uncanny echoes with Putin’s own commentaries. For all the willingness to show off his knowledge of battles and heroes, he is reluctant to acknowledge intellectual debts. Putin’s history is very much his own — shaped by his own insights.
Curiously, when I widened the lens to see if it was possible to work out what else the Russian leader has read, it was a similar story. Putin often mentions authors such as Pushkin, Tolstoy or Chekhov; he references modern literary giants like Bulgakov or Mayakovsky even less frequently. But he rarely quotes them, and seldom names individual poems, books or plays. He almost never says that he has enjoyed their work. Russian authors, artists and composers exist as a set of national assets that show that Russia is great.
That, of course, is the message Putin is trying to get across to Trump — and exactly why Trump thinks that another meeting is pointless, in much the same way as the US president tossed aside maps of Ukraine in his meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in October.
History does matter, of course. But in times of war, it is the present and future that really count.
