Do history books tell us anything much about 'the people'? About their experience of the history that was made and written 'from above' and that we all studied in school? Hardly. We have internalized 'the people' as a silent passive mass, worth noticing only for the odd rebellion here and there. Is oblivion the best we can do for the ancestors of ninety-nine percent of us, and for our sense of where we stand today?Here, Russia takes us into her own 'history from below'. A people's history that conventional 'history from above' cannot handle, it is better conveyed by a multifaceted, non-fictional story of the Russian people. In this volume, three centuries of socio-economic enslavement, of brutal spiritual and cultural suppression, were also three centuries of resistance, patient yet often violent, often heroic, against the drive to dehumanize Russianness. These were three centuries of diffuse or overt civil war between a westernized elite and the Russian people, who would soon be fully active agents of history 'from above' and 'from below' in the Russian revolution(s) and the Soviet century. This book is not for firmly 'Russophobic' readers. It is for those who do not want to remain ignorant and brainwashed. For those who are open to discovering not only the human depth of a demonized people, but also patterns shared with the tribulations of all other peoples - those of the colonized 'global south' over some five centuries, and those of European peoples over some fifteen hundred years.
