Simon Morrison

A thousand year history of a city could have been one of those before bedtime reads that put me to sleep. But not A Kingdom and a Village! Instead, I read it in the afternoons, stomach churning, nail biting, turning pages. Instead of soporific, the history is nightmarish. What violence! What brutes! Survival mean ruling with an iron hand, dealing out cruel deaths to enemies and mass destruction.

Sometimes history is stranger than fiction. A bell that peeled at the death of Dmitri, prince of show more Uglich, was punished with the lash and exile to Siberia! (Three hundred years later, the tsar pardoned it and it returned home!)

History reveals how we got to today.

Moscow began as a boggy, backwater trading post visited by Scandinavian boatsmen. Kyiv is older and where the Rus power was situated. Morrison writers that the “ancient connections” between the cities “partly explain Russia’s present-day efforts to prevent Ukraine from existing as an independent, European state.”

You will find more than the princes, tsars, and wars that made Moscow in these pages. Morrison enlightens us on the arts, architecture, the rise of neighborhoods, and the lives of ordinary folk.

A fascinating and entertaining biography of a city and a people.

Thanks to Knopf for a free book. show less

Bit too long and hard work keeping track of all those names - like a Russian novel! But a fair amount of well-researched stories that takes it above the gossip level. What remains? The story of Plisetskaya's elbowing her way to the top, playing the Soviet system note-perfect. And why the modernising, worker-orientated Communists kept those aristo-bourgeois shows in the repertoire but made so few about tractors and Stakhanovites. Seems they could never agree on the correct marxist message: show more new ideas died in the committee rooms. And of course there was hard currency potential in Swan Lake and the like. Nonetheless the ballet discipline remains, and the vicious competition behind the scenes. show less

This was an ok read, but I'm not sure who the target audience is. It goes into way to much historical detail to be interesting to people who enjoy the arts, and if you enjoy history the timespan of the book is too long, glossing over years at a time. It is well written, well researched, and, well, dull.

I won this from a goodreads giveaway

Mostly about how the politics of Russian interfered with the art.