Aleksandr I. Filiushkin, Изобретая первую войну России и Европы: Балтийские войны второй половины XVI в. глазами современников и потомков [Inventing the First War Between Russia and Europe: The Baltic Wars of the Second Half of the 16th Century Through the Eyes of Contemporaries and Descendants], Sankt-Peterburg: Dmitrii Bulanin Publisher 2013.

Aleksandr I. Filiushkin has been working as a Professor of History at St. Petersburg State University since 2002. His research focuses on the Muscovy, the Grand Principality of Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Livonian Order in the 15^th–17^th centuries. He earned his Doctor of Historical Sciences degree in 2007 with a dissertation on Andrei Kurbsky and Ivan the Terrible, and won the Makariev Prize in 2015 for the book reviewed here.

Raher than focusing on military events per se, the book examines the perception of the Livonian War (1558–1583) between Muscovy and a coalition of the Livonian Order, Poland-Lithuania, Sweden, and Denmark. Filiushkin analyzes how images of the conflict were formed and reflected in contemporary sources, and how they were reinterpreted in historiography. His study is divided into three large sections: Russian perspectives (Chapters I–IX), European perspectives (Chapters X–XV), and Historiographical discourses (Chapter XVI).

The first section provides a detailed study of Russian sources from the 16^th to the 18^th centuries. Filiushkin analyzes chronicles, hagiographic texts, miracle tales, novels and polemical works, diplomatic correspondence, epistolary evidence, and business records. He then explores the writings of 17^th-century Russian intellectuals, before discussing the shifts in the historical memory during the Petrine era, and in later historiographical interpretations of the war.

This section demonstrates that contemporaries in Russia did not view the conflict as a single, 25-year war, but as a series of campaigns, victories, and setbacks typical of the period, and the chronicles rarely recorded its conclusion. The discourse was centered on ideas of a holy war and the defense of Orthodoxy, even though there were also critical voices accusing the tsar of senseless bloodshed. Later, in the seventeenth century, against the backdrop of the so-called Time of Troubles, the war became the subject of moralizing narratives, while in the Petrine era it remained on the periphery of attention. Only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did it acquire the concept of a “war for access to the Baltic,” which cemented its imperial significance in Russian historiography.

The second section examines how the war was portrayed abroad. Filiushkin studies Livonian chronicles, Polish and Swedish narratives. A special focus is on information campaigns by German and Polish authors that depicted Ivan IV as a threat to Christendom, with special attention to the image of the Polish King Stephen Báthory as the savior of Europe from the “Russian barbarians.” While the war helped shape Polish and Swedish national identities and cemented Russia’s image as “anti-Europe,” interest in it quickly faded in Western Europe later on, and posterior narratives largely repeated 16^th-century discourses. Today, the Livonian War is valued as a source of insight into the politics, culture, and identities in Eastern and Northern Europe in the early modern period, yet its actual history remains understudied.

The third section focuses on the deconstruction of the popular notion that the Livonian War was Russia’s “first major war for access to the Baltic Sea.” Filiushkin traces the emergence of this narrative in the historiography of the 18^th–19^th centuries, and its strengthening in the 20^th century, showing how it reflected contemporary geopolitical thinking rather than Muscovite policy.

The value of this book lies in the fact that it offers a new perspective on the Livonian War. Filiushkin reinterprets this term and effectively rejects it, proposing instead to speak of the Baltic Wars as a series of military conflicts rather than a single event. He also challenges and deconstructs long-standing clichés about the Livonian War being the first major war for Russia’s access to the Baltic Sea. He thus provides a fitting case study of how wars are remembered, narrated, and transformed in historical memory. The book’s strength lies in its extensive use of German, Swedish, Polish, Lithuanian, Danish, and Russian sources. It will be invaluable for historians of Muscovy, Baltic history, and early modern European diplomacy and all the more for military history specialists.