Welcome to the Quillett Podcast. I'm your host Jonathan Kay, a senior editor at Quillett.

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articles and early access to Colette social events. And in this week's

episode we're going to be talking about the roots of Russian despotism and hegemony, but not just in Ukraine

and not just under Vladimir Putin.

No, we're going to go way back to a time before communism, before the Romanovs, even before Ivan the terrible.

That's because, according to my guest today,

famed Russian historian Orlando Fagus,

the roots of Russian political dysfunction go all the way back to the Mongol

invasions of the 13th century and to the Orthodox Christian religious

identity that started taking root among the region's Slav population even

before that. In his new book,

the story of Russia, Fagus argues that Russia's vast geography, its brutal

Mongol inheritance, and its apocalyptic sense of religious mission have all contributed to create a culture of despotism.

Whether in the form of medieval vassal states, czarist feudalism, totalitarian communism, or now under Putin, corrupt strongman

autocracy. So I'm going to start off with a big idea and a big question. In your book you talk about the

sacralization of the Tsar's authority as a legacy of Byzantium. And until I read your book, I really had no understanding of how much

Orthodox theology had sort of mixed with, call it, Slav, ethnic populism, to create this kind of theocratic and maybe even

apocalyptic vision of the Russian Empire is the third Rome. Can you explain what that means?

Because you use that phrase several times in the book, the third Rome.

...