Best 9 quotes of Norman Davies on MyQuotes

The official ideology [of Poland] is Marxism-Leninism, which no one openly admits to believing. For Marx expressed the German view, and Lenin the Russian one, and the meeting of these particular minds has always spelled Polish ruin.

The Terror-Famine of 1932-33 was a dual-purpose by product of collectivization, designed to suppress Ukrainian nationalism and the most important concentration of prosperous peasants at one throw.

An ambassador’, quipped Sir Henry Wootton, ‘is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.

Discord among the ex-Soviet nationalities was fuelling an ugly brand of Russian nationalism. Voices in Moscow called for the re-conquest of Russia’s ‘near abroad’. For after Abkhazia, there waited several further targets for Russian intervention, including Tatarstan and Chechenia, and other non-Russian lands within the Russian Federation. Sooner or later, Russia would be forced to choose between its new-style democracy and its old-style imperialism.

It is indeed the duty of historians to stress the contrast between the standards of the past and the standards of the present. Some fulfil that duty on purpose, others by accident.

Reconstructing the past is rather like translating poetry. It can be done, but never exactly.

The formula Muscovy + Ukraine = Russia does not feature in the Russians’ own version of their history; but it is fundamental.

The title ‘Lord of All-Rus'’ did not possess much basis either in history or in current reality. It came into the same category as that whereby the kings of England laid claim to France. In the 1490s, two-and-a-half centuries after all traces of a united Kievan Rus' had been destroyed, it had the same degree of credibility that the king of France might have enjoyed if, in his struggle with the German Empire, he had proclaimed himself ‘Lord of all the Franks’. By that time, it conflicted with the separate identity that the ‘Ruthenes’ of Lithuania had assumed from the ‘Russians’ of Moscow. Indeed, it all seemed sufficiently unreal for the Lithuanians to accept it as a small price to pay for Ivan’s good humour. They were not to know it, but they were conceding the ideological cornerstone of territorial ambitions that would be pursued for 500 years.

To make his point, Ivan staged a sensational demonstration. Some time before Christmas he had arrested two Lithuanians employed in the Moscow Kremlin. He charged them with plotting to poison him. The accusations against Jan Lukhomski and Maciej the Pole did not sound very credible; but their guilt or innocence was hardly relevant. They were held in an open cage on the frozen Moskva River for all the world to see; and on the eve of the departure of Ivan’s envoy to Lithuania, they were burned alive in their cage.50 As the ice melted under the fierce heat of the fire and the heavy iron cage sank beneath the water, taking its carbonized occupants down in a great hiss of steam, one could have well imagined that something was being said about Lithuania’s political future.