Your Exclusive Invitation
Join the Cosmopolitan Globalist Book Club!
From Claire—It’s been a busy week. Not that you’d know this, because from your point of view, it seems you just haven’t heard from us. But it’s been busy on our end. We’ve been lining up lots of great stuff. Stay tuned.
“Russia is a country with a certain future; it is only its past that is unpredictable.”
By Rachel Motte
Please join us on Zoom for the inaugural meeting of the Cosmopolitan Globalist Book Club, on Saturday, June 12 at 15:00 GMT. (Here’s a time zone converter.) Our first book will be Mark Galeotti’s A Short History of Russia: How the World’s Largest Country Invented Itself, from the Pagans to Putin.
The first fifteen people to email us at cgbookclub [at] gmail [dot] com before Wednesday, June 9 will receive a link to join us on Zoom. I’ll be leading the discussion, accompanied by other Cosmopolitan Globalists, and I can’t wait to meet you.
Russia’s leaders have manufactured and modified its history time and again depending upon what benefits the desired national self-concept. That is why a book like this is necessary. It divides truth from probable fiction while still explaining why the fiction was originally seen as necessary. It explains (as the book’s subtitle eludes) how Russia invented itself …
Galeotti’s goal, then, is to provide a brief but thorough outline of this history. He begins with the Ryurikids and the Kievan Rus’, then follows the thread through the Mongol invasions, Ivan III, and Ivan IV (aka “the Terrible.”) All of the tsars get anywhere from a glancing mention to an extended chapter, with Peter the Great and Catherine the Great rightfully weighing more heavily in the narrative. But in this short history, Galeotti balances depth with breadth, moving right along to the social movements of the 19th and 20th centuries and evaluating the necessary aspects of the Soviet Union before jumping into post-Soviet Russia and now the Russia of Putin. …
Galeotti, being an expert on Russia both historically and in the modern-day, makes some very insightful connections between Putin’s Russia and the Russia he has laid out throughout the book. It helped me immensely in both understanding the historical content I teach and understanding Russia in the world today. If either of those interest you in the least, I recommend reading A Short History of Russia.
We’ve tentatively scheduled another book by Galeotti: We Need to Talk About Putin: How the West Gets Him Wrong, for July 10.
Would you like to nominate a book? Email us anytime at cgbookclub [at] gmail.
Correction: You must email cgbookgroup [at] gmail [dot] com to get a link to our Zoom meeting. Sorry for the confusion - completely my fault!