An original and informative look at Russia's thousand-year past, tracing the forces and the myths that have shaped Putin's politics.

Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine has reshaped history. In the decades after the collapse of Soviet communism, the West convinced itself that liberal democracy would henceforth be the dominant, ultimately unique, system of governance. An outburst of Western triumphalism proclaimed a US-led unipolar world entitled to 'impose democracy' on countries that failed to recognise the new order. Politicians foretold the universalisation of Western values as the final, enduring form of human society...