Aldo Ferrari
Ed. Mondadori
pp. 372
In an era of polarized opinions, especially due to the widespread use of social media, the issue of relations between the West and the Russian Federation has taken on the same disturbing and violent contours as the conflict currently being fought in Ukraine, where the warring parties are the plastic materialization of the tension between two different visions of international relations, the unipolar and Euro-Atlantic one led by the US, as opposed to the multipolar one, represented, albeit with vast spaces of ambiguous contradiction, by the BRICS.
This is the context in which the work of Professor Aldo Ferrari, professor of Armenian Language and Literature, History of Russian Culture, the Caucasus and Central Asia at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, hinges.
The book is structured on a broad and detailed analysis of Russian history, rigorously using the historiographical method in a story that proceeds from Kievan Rus' to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, without omitting the prominent figures who created and recreated the Russian political-cultural space over the course of over a thousand years of history. Particular attention is then dedicated to the shift of Russian power centers and to the exogenous influences that progressively led Russia to be an empire of a purely Eurasian matrix.
Numerous and detailed references to Russian and Soviet historiography, as well as the very detailed analyses resulting from a decades-long knowledge of the Russian world by Professor Ferrari, combined with a linear and convincing prose, make the book a scientifically rigorous work and at the same time extremely usable for all those who wish to approach the subject of Russia in a way free from prejudice and sterile partisanship, but looking at a millenary state reality, territorially immense, rich in known and unknown raw materials like very few other countries in the world, but above all culturally and socially always a bridge between East and West.
Professor Aldo Ferrari masterfully navigates the meanders of the previously listed topics, offering the reader notions, concepts and broad food for thought that make this text an original and rigorous reference on the history of Russia, a Eurasian empire, a work that has certainly already entered the reference texts for understanding the Russian world.
AP