Lecture synopsis: History has a particular weight in Russia, from the Second World War vintage anti-tank guns in school playgrounds to politicians' regular and detailed invocation of events such as the thirteenth-century conquest of the country by the Mongols or the Great Moscow Synod in the seventeenth. Vladimir Putin himself clearly reckons himself a historian of sorts and has assembled a selected and often misunderstood version of the country's past to justify his policies. As an historian by both bent and training, this especially pains Mark Galeotti, who will give a personal sense of quite why he feels history seems still so alive in Russia, how Putin misrepresents the country's past, and why that backstory, so often assumed to be a tale of unrelieved oppression, war and misery, may also contain grounds for optimism about its future.
Robinson College Lecture: Prisoner of History: How Far Russia's present and future are still hostages of its past
Date: Wednesday, 5 February
Time: 6pm
Location: the Umney Theatre, Robinson College
Bookings open to members of Robinson College: book here
Please note this event will be filmed.
Mark Galeotti is one of the world’s leading experts on Russian politics, crime and security (which are often one and the same), which may explain why Moscow banned him in 2022. He read history at Robinson College and then took his doctorate in politics at the LSE, and has travelled extensively across Russia and the post-Soviet states.

He has been head of History at Keele University, chair of the Center for Global Affairs at New York University, a Senior Research Fellow at the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, head of the Centre for European Security at the Institute of International Relations Prague and a visiting professor at Rutgers-Newark (USA), MGIMO (Moscow), Charles University (Czech Republic) and the European University Institute (Italy). He now heads the Russia-focused consultancy Mayak Intelligence and is an honorary professor at University College London as well as a senior fellow with RUSI and the Council on Geostrategy in London, the University of Kent and the Institute of International Relations Prague. He has briefed widely, from prime ministers and CEOs to generals and intelligence chiefs. A prolific author, his more than 30 books include Forged in War: A Military History of Russia from its beginnings to today (2024) Downfall: Prigozhin, Putin and the new fight for the future of Russia with Anna Arutunyan (2024), Putin’s Wars (2022), We Need to Talk about Putin (2019) and The Vory: Russia’s super mafia (2017).
Latest books:
Downfall. Prigozhin, Putin and the new fight for the future of Russia (Ebury/Penguin, June 2024)
Forged in war. A military history of Russia from its beginnings to today (Osprey/Bloomsbury, November 2024)