A One-Thousand-Year History of Moscow

A Kingdom and a Village

A Kingdom and a Village is a magisterial account of Moscow that reveals the city’s history and something of its soul through countless interwoven stories and colorful characters. This book is a gripping and enlightening journey filled with war and peace; tyrants and revolutionaries; famine, pestilence and plague; music, literature and theater; Christianity and Communism; death and rebirth. At a time when Russia is once again trying to remake the borders of Europe and the nature of politics in the world, Simon Morrison gives us a new way to understand this vast and ever-changing country through this singularly compelling capital city

A gem of a book, exploring the people, the fables, and the history of Moscow, one of the great cities of the world. With vivid writing, and an astonishing body of research, Simon Morrison creates a mesmerizing tale of how Moscow came to be. Read it slowly, wander through the Russian capital with him, and you will understand when he says: ‘Moscow is hard to love, but I love it.’

A preeminent historian of Russian history and culture, Simon Morrison is the perfect biographer of Moscow, one of the world’s most fascinating and enigmatic cities

Simon Morrison’s riveting biography of Moscow is breathtaking in its span, covering architecture, music, Russian leaders’ decisions and the ordinary people’s response, society, institutions, and much more. It is also Morrison’s beautifully written story of his personal relations with the country that began in 1990 during Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika, when he visited Moscow for the first time. It is a love story that has continued to this day

Nina Khrushcheva, co-author of In Putin's Footsteps

The city of Moscow stands at the centre of a nation comprising eleven percent of the globe’s landmass, 11 time zones and nearly 150 million people, some 13 million of whom live in the capital. In A Kingdom and a Village, acclaimed historian Simon Morrison offers a vividly rendered history of Russia’s heart and soul, tracing its transformation from a “big village”—the demeaning nickname the St. Peterburg nobility gave to its provincial 
neighbour—into a spectacular metropolis of vast geopolitical import. 
 
That arc is the stuff of dramatic, violent, stranger-than-fiction historical narrative: the last century alone has featured invasions and costly battles, the destruction (and reconstruction) of sacred cultural and religious landmarks, and the collapse of the Soviet republic—not to mention the rise of an authoritarian leader who is a keen student of Russian history. Morrison reaches back further still, to the founding of the place we now know as Moscow as a fortress on a river nearly a millennium ago. In the centuries that followed, any number of 
external forces—from Tatar Mongols and Swedes to Napoleon and Hitler—set their sights on Moscow, reinforcing its self-conception as both a glittering prize and a site of perpetual defence and resurrection. 
 
Drawing on a rich array of archival materials, from the birchbark scrawls that record the oldest layer of Russian civilization to the articles in European newspapers heralding the opening of the magnificent Bolshoi theatre, Morrison brings to life the bloody power struggles, cultural marvels, excruciating famines, droughts, storms, and fires that have shaped and re-shaped the city and reinforced its essential character. Having first visited Moscow in 1990 and made some thirty trips since, he excavates the city’s truths from its fictions—while celebrating both—in a style that’s at once deeply learned and deeply personal. 
 
With A Kingdom and a Village, Morrison makes a persuasive, even impassioned case that to understand Moscow is not only to unlock the spellbinding mysteries of Russia’s past but also, critically, to grasp the grim logic of its present. It is a magisterial biography of a place—and an essential guide to a people and a country that, for many readers, might have remained impenetrable.

Simon Morrison

Unforgettable as a testimony of personal devotion

Morrison tells a good story, without excess or indulgence, and with touching empathy for his heroine

Immensely readable and entertaining

Morrison writes excellently... As much a story of personal tragedy and disappointment as it is a compelling study of how art and tyranny interact

Morrison, who had access to the family and significant archival collections, has produced a gripping story of a young woman’s rise into the highest social and musical circles, her marriage to Prokofiev (whose principal affection was for his music, not his family), and their globe-trotting tours and swelling celebrity. But as the Stalin-led Soviet Union commenced its multiple atrocities and outrages, the Prokofievs’ world shrank, their travels were limited and their futures were tightly circumscribed. Research, compassion and outrage combine in a story both riveting and wrenching.

In the hagiographic hall of fame that is the Russian artist’s wife — Sophia Tolstoy, Anna Dostoevsky, Nadezhda Mandelstam, all muses who stood watch while their men created things of genius, and then who jealously guarded the legacy — Lina Prokofiev is odd woman out. Her story almost cannot be believed, until Simon Morrison gained access to the documents (and the family’s trust) in order to tell it. Biography does not get more important than this.

The Story of Lina and Serge Prokofiev

As heard on Radio 4 Book of the Week 
 
Lina Prokofiev was alone in her Moscow apartment one night when the telephone rang. The caller insisted that she come downstairs to collect a parcel, but when she reached the courtyard she was arrested for treason. 
 
First enraptured by the young pianist and rising star, Serge Prokofiev, during a courtship in Brooklyn, then abandoned by him in Moscow, Lina survived one of the darkest periods in Soviet history – enduring eight years in the Gulag after she received that fateful telephone call. 
 
Unfolding with the intrigue of a spy novel, The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev traces the largely untold story of a remarkable woman who gave up her career, her country and her freedom for the brilliant man she married.

Simon Morrison

Praise for The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev

Unforgettable as a testimony of personal devotion

Morrison tells a good story, without excess or indulgence, and with touching empathy for his heroine

Immensely readable and entertaining

Unforgettable as a testimony of personal devotion

Morrison tells a good story, without excess or indulgence, and with touching empathy for his heroine

Immensely readable and entertaining

Unforgettable as a testimony of personal devotion

Morrison tells a good story, without excess or indulgence, and with touching empathy for his heroine

Immensely readable and entertaining

Books by Simon Morrison

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