Abstract
In Part One of Sergei Eisenstein’s film, Ivan the Terrible (1944), the young tsar at his coronation proclaims his policy agenda. His realm, he declares, is a body cut off at the elbows and knees, since the mouths of its rivers – the Volga, the Dvina and the Volkhov – are in foreign hands. Eisenstein thus attributes to Ivan a view of the strategic importance of controlling the outflow of his country’s waterways: a problem which he soon resolves, in the case of the Volga, with the annexation of Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea, in 1556. In this splendid book on the history of the Volga, Janet Hartley clearly demonstrates the significance of the great river not just for the Russian state, but also for all of the peoples who have inhabited its basin over more than a millennium.
Hartley begins her study with a brief account of the earliest states (or proto-states) on the Volga: the still somewhat mysterious Khazaria, with its capital on the delta, and Bolgar, based south of present-day Kazan, on the mid-Volga. By the tenth century the Khazars and the Bolgars were trading with the Rus, who came to the Volga from the west; in the thirteenth century the Tatars of the Golden Horde arrived from the east and established their capital, Sarai, on the lower Volga. (The khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, conquered by Ivan the Terrible in the mid-sixteenth century, were successor states of the Golden Horde.)
Hartley adopts a basically chronological approach to her subject, but there is a surprising hiatus between the death of Ivan the Terrible in 1584 and the revolt of Stenka Razin in 1669–1671. This is particularly surprising because the early seventeenth century, and especially the ‘Time of Troubles’ – the period of civil war and foreign intervention from c.1603 to 1613 – witnessed significant events on the Volga. From 1606 onwards, bands of Cossacks rampaged on the river, committing piracy and accompanied by false ‘tsareviches’ claiming to be long-lost descendants of the old dynasty of Ivan the Terrible. These activities foreshadowed the later Cossack revolts on the Volga: the Razin rebellion and the insurrection of 1773–1775 led by Emelian Pugachev, both of which also involved pretenders. Pugachev claimed to be Peter III, the murdered husband of Catherine II (‘the Great’), and Razin too had pretenders: strangely, although Hartley notes (75) that Stenka was accompanied by a false Patriarch Nikon, she does not mention the false Tsarevich Alexis who also travelled with him. In the concluding stages of the Time of Troubles, the butcher Kozma Minin raised funding for the army based at Nizhnii Novgorod, on the mid-Volga, which liberated Moscow from Polish occupation in 1612. The Volga merchants who financed this army were motivated not so much by ‘patriotism’, as Russian historians like to claim, as by a desire to restore the political stability that was necessary for the continuation of their trade. Thus the Volga played just as important a role in determining the course and outcome of the Time of Troubles as it did of the Civil War of 1918–1921.
Hartley’s account is most detailed for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – the period on which most of her earlier work has focused. She provides a particularly valuable discussion of the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional character of the region, offering useful ethnographic information not only about its Russian inhabitants, but also about the smaller peoples, such as the Mordvins, Udmurts, Mari, Chuvash and Tatars, who are less well known to English readers. The story of these non-Russian peoples is followed through to the present day, with a thoughtful consideration of their cultural and identity politics within the framework of the Russian Federation.
Although Hartley pays some attention, in her discussion of depictions of the Volga in art and literature, to idyllic Romantic images of the riverine scenery, the more general picture that she paints is a dark one. The history of the Volga has been marked by violence, from nomadic raiders in the Middle Ages, Cossack rebels and state repression in the early modern period, to revolution and civil war in the early twentieth century, and the Nazi advance to Stalingrad during the Second World War. In addition, the Volga peoples frequently suffered from the ravages of epidemic disease and famine, and more recently from pollution and other environmental hazards. Overall, this scholarly work provides not just a vivid chronicle of the Volga and its peoples, but an original perspective on the history of Russia as a whole.