The EconomistJanuary 30th 2021 Books & arts 692 lots of immigrants tend to be rich, peaceful
and free is not enough. People move to
places like Canada and Australia precisely
because they are agreeable. To get round
this, the authors examine all the countries
for which they can find data, noting both
the stock of immigrants (as a share of pop-
ulation) in the 1990s and the inflow over
the next two decades.
Then they look at how those countries
changed over that period on a variety of
measures, such as economic freedom and
corruption. They find no evidence that
higher stocks or flows of immigrants made
host countries less free, more corrupt, or
less trusting. Indeed, they find modest im-
provements on a number of scores.
It is plausible, they argue, that a country
that grows more free or less corrupt might
attract bigger inflows of migrants, but that
effect would not be retroactive; it would
not change the stock of immigrants at the
start of the period in question. They con-
clude that the doomsayers are wrong. Mi-
grants do not undermine the institutions
of the places they move to. Some move be-
cause they are fed up with corruption. Oth-
ers soon assimilate to rich-country norms.
This makes sense. Graft in Congo is seldom
punished and often pays; in Canada, hon-
esty delivers more reliable rewards.
The debate is far from over, the authors
admit. No doubt, if a billion migrants were
to arrive in a single year, rich countries’ in-
stitutions might buckle. But they demolish
a big argument against existing levels of
immigration, and suggest that most rich
countries would benefit from being more
open. Mr Biden and his advisers should de-
vour their book. 7W
ithouttheVolga,therewouldbeno
Russia. The final words of Janet Hart-
ley’s book sound sweeping. But its 400
pages make the case powerfully.
Like much in Russia’s geography and
history, the Volga is on a grand scale. The
river basin is Europe’s largest. It is part of a
grandiose scheme of waterways (built
mostly by slave labour) that link the Baltic
coast with the Arctic, the Black Sea and the
Caspian. It has shaped the Russian (and So-
viet) economy, culture and government. It
was a vital barrier against the Nazis, who
crucially failed to drive the Red Army out of
Stalingrad and across it. Its hydro-electricpower fuelled Stalin’s industrial revolu-
tion. Centuries before, expansion down
the Volga to the shores of the Caspian had
made Muscovy into the Russian empire.
Ms Hartley’s history begins with little-
known states such as Khazaria (which
adopted Judaism for strategic reasons); the
Bolgar Khanate (nothing to do with Bulgar-
ia but a distant predecessor of today’s Ta-
tarstan); and the Rus principalities (which
were not exactly Russian). Readers unfa-miliar with these strands of the European
past may find themselves concentrating
hard and wishing for better maps.
Over the centuries, rulers in Moscow
and St Petersburg took and held the Volga
lands by means of force, bureaucracy, ide-
ology and assimilation. Their rule was
strikingly incompetent and arbitrary; only
the Soviet regime that followed could cast a
rose-tinted light on the cruel, capricious
tsarist era that preceded it. Mass starvation
after the civil war, the agonies of collectiv-
isation, further famine in the 1930s, the
cauldron of the second world war and the
grotesque environmental injuries inflicted
on the river make a depressing catalogue.
Art and literature depicted but also re-
lieved the woes. The Volga—tranquil and
picturesque, yet also magnificent and pow-
erful—was a wellspring of early 19th-cen-
tury Romanticism. It was both a “mother”,
emblematic of Russia itself, and the back-
drop for vivid injustice and suffering. Poets
such as Nikolai Nekrasov, writers such as
Maxim Gorky, and painters including Ilya
Repin all invoked the river. So does the
well-known “Song of the Volga Boatmen”,
with its jolly “heave-ho” refrain—less jolly
for the forced labourers who actually
pulled barges up the vast river, with its
wayward currents and sandbanks.
A retired professor of history at the Lon-
don School of Economics, Ms Hartley is a
distinguished Russianist and author of a
similarly ambitious book about Siberia.
This one is meticulously researched and
sympathetically written, even if her aus-
tere academic prose may leave some read-
ers thirsting for more first-hand reportage.
A graver flaw is that “The Volga”—like
its predecessor—blurs the ethnic, linguis-
tic and religious patchwork underlying
Russian rule of the lands on the river’s
shores. The Chuvash, Udmurt, Mari, Erzya
and Moksha languages, and their speakers,
get rather short shrift. The now-vestigial
Cossacks and long-gone Volga Germans are
afforded more of a look-in than modern Ta-
tarstan’s intellectual and cultural ferment.
The nearly-country of Idel-Ural, which un-
ited the region’s Turkic and Finno-Ugric
peoples for a tantalising few weeks of inde-
pendence in 1918, gets just one brief discus-
sion. The modernising, liberal “Euro-Is-
lam” that inspired it gets none.
Yet Idel-Ural’s leader, Sadri Maqsudi Ar-
sal, escaped the Bolshevik conquest and
became the intellectual inspiration for Ke-
mal Ataturk’s Turkey. During the second
world war a Tatar poet, Musa Calil, joined a
Wehrmacht unit drawn from the Volga na-
tionalities in order to subvert it, and was
posthumously rehabilitated as a hero.
Amid a plethora of lesser details, both are
ignored here. The history and glory of Rus-
sia do not belong only to ethnic Russians,
whatever some of them may say, and what-
ever some foreigners may believe. 7Geography and historyHeave-ho
The Volga.By Janet Hartley. Yale University
Press; 400 pages; $35 and £25Russia’s greatest river divides and defines the country