Natasha's Dance

Orlando Figes’s enthralling, richly evocative history has been heralded as a literary masterpiece on Russia, the lives of those who have shaped its culture, and the enduring spirit of a people.

‘Awe-inspiring … Natasha’s Dance has all the qualities of an epic tragedy’ 
Frances Welsh, Mail on Sunday

‘A tour de force by the great storyteller of modern Russian historians … Figes mobilizes a cast of serf harems, dynasties, politburos, libertines, filmmakers, novelists, composers, poets, tsars and tyrants … superb, flamboyant and masterful’ 
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Financial Times

‘It is so much fun to read that I hesitate to write too much, for fear of spoiling the pleasures and surprises of the book’ 
Anne Applebaum, Sunday Telegraph

‘Magnificent … Figes is at his exciting best’ 
Robert Service, Guardian

‘Breathtaking … The title of this masterly history comes from War and Peace, when the aristocratic heroine, Natasha Rostova, finds herself intuitively picking up the rhythm of a peasant dance … One of those books that, at times, makes you wonder how you have so far managed to do without it’ 
Robin Buss, Independent on Sunday

‘Thrilling, dizzying … I would defy any reader not to be captivated’ 
Lindsey Hughes, Literary Review

‘Pour yourself a shot of vodka, open this brilliant, ambitious book, read and revel in it’ 
Melissa Murray, Sunday Tribune

On a misty spring morning in 1703 a dozen Russian horsemen rode across the bleak and barren marshlands where the Neva river runs into the Baltic sea. They were looking for a site to build a fort against the Swedes, then at war with Russia, and the owners of these long abandoned swamps. But the vision of the wide and bending river flowing to the sea was full of hope and promise to the Tsar of land-locked Russia, riding at the head of his scouting troops. As they approached the coast he dismounted from his horse. With his bayonet he cut two strips of peat and arranged them in a cross on the marshy ground. Then Peter said: 'Here shall be a town.'

Few places could have been less suitable for the metropolis of Europe's largest state. The network of small islands in the Neva's boggy delta were overgrown with trees. Swept by thick mists from melting snow in spring and overblown by winds that often caused the rivers to rise above the land, it was not a place for human habitation, and even the few fishermen who ventured there in summer did not stay for long. Wolves and bears were its only residents. A thousand years ago the area was underneath the sea. There was a channel flowing from the Baltic sea to lake Ladoga, with islands where the Pulkovo and Pargolovo heights are found today. Even in the reign of Catherine the Great, during the late eighteenth century, Tsarskoe Selo, where she built her Summer Palace on the hills of Pulkovo, was still known by the locals as Sarskoe Selo. The name came from the Finnish word for an island, saari.

When Peter's soldiers dug into the ground they found water a metre or so below. The northern island, where the land was slightly higher, was the only place to lay firm foundations. In four months of furious activity, in which at least half the workforce died, 20,000 conscripts built the Peter and Paul Fortress, digging out the land with their bare hands, dragging logs and stones or carting them by back, and carrying the earth in the folds of their clothes. The sheer scale and tempo of construction was astonishing. Within a few years the estuary became an energetic building site and, once Russia's control of the coast had been secured with victories over Sweden in 1709-10, the city took on a new shape with every passing day. A quarter of a mi