From the pages of the book are the invasion of the Mongols and the Golden Horde, Ivan the Terrible, the founder of the modern Russian state, who killed his son in a fit of anger, the Time of Troubles and the Romanov dynasty, which ruled until 1917, the expansion of Russia (Peter the Great), reforms (Catherine the Great), the October Revolution , the rise and fall of the USSR, the Cold War, the financial crisis of 1998 and the wars in Chechnya, the rise and rise of Putin and the question of whether his fourth term as president will end in 2024.

The West, according to the historian, never fell out of sight of the Russian people and the world. Sometimes as an example and a measure of comparison, and sometimes as an ideological opponent or an eternal, manipulative enemy. Over time, the author notes, Russians began to wonder less about their place in the world and more about how the world treats them, which underlies the evolution of the Russian president “from a relatively open-minded pragmatist to a nationalist military leader.” who annexed Crimea and invaded Ukraine.

Each of the book’s eight chapters begins with a chronology of the period in question and ends with a bibliography for more specialized reading. The book was completed in March 2022, and in the epilogue readers will find the author’s assessment of the course of the war and his critique of Putin’s instrumental approach to history. He notes that the main Russian propaganda argument that Ukraine is not a real country could well be reversed, and Ukrainians could argue that today’s Russia is an offshoot of their own people. For a historian, Putin is not a new Peter the Great, but a copy of Brezhnev and the Great Stagnation era.