Figes’s book is an absorbing and enlightening read, a triumph of concision, analysis and insight

Figes’s book is an absorbing and enlightening read, a triumph of concision, analysis and insight

A deeply impressive and deeply immersive book . . . The author sets out to reveal Russia’s history, its people’s perception of their past and the manifold ways in which those in power manipulate both events and legend to shape the present. It is a saga of multi-millennial identity politics

To understand Putin's paranoia, read this book on Russia's history

A lucid chronological journey that ably illustrates how narratives from the nation’s past have been used to shape its autocratic present

If you really want to understand Putin’s Russia today, anchored in its past of myths, then you simply have to read Figes’s superb account in The Story of Russia

Figes’s book is an absorbing and enlightening read, a triumph of concision, analysis and insight

An indispensable survey of more than 1,000 years of history shows how myth and fact mix dangerously in the tales this crucial country tells about itself

A magnificent, magisterial thousand year history of Russia . . . its tsars and tyrants, wars and massacres, ideas and dreams vividly drawn, its analysis of Russian power and empire essential reading today

An expert on Russia delivers a crucially relevant study . . . A lucid, astute text that unpacks the myths of Russian history to help explain present-day motivations and actions

Urgent and revelatory and brilliantly told, it’s all the things you pray a book will be when you first pick it up

Excellent short study

The historian’s latest work on Russia is a lucid chronological journey that ably illustrates how narratives from the nation’s past have been used to shape its autocratic present

Figes skilfully assesses the evolution of the forms of government and society that inhibited the development of controls of the tsar

Accessible and epic . . . A great introduction to an enthralling subject

An impressive account of the ideas, myths and ideologies that have shaped that country and the way its people interpret the past . . . Figes’s book offers a valuable, instructive overview

Anyone who wants to detox from Putin’s mythomanic claims about Russia’s history and what it means for today’s world will find some relief in The Story of Russia . . . Figes presents Russia’s history in a straightforward manner

Valuable book

[An] imaginative sweep and a capacity to encapsulate in a memorable way

Orlando Figes provides valuable lessons about the importance of mythologizing the country’s past in his sweeping new survey of Russian history

Sweeping and concise . . . It is a skilled piece of compression

This is a brilliant condensation – his analysis of Soviet Russia is superb – of a seriously complex tale

The Story of Russia combines profound knowledge and understanding of the longer, deeper structural processes of history with the personal experience of an author seeking to understand what is happening on the ground today

Orlando Figes’s latest book provides fascinating insights into this contemporary conundrum. The Story of Russia is a truly incisive and important dissection of Russia’s troubled past, both real and mythical, but it also provides a crucial context for understanding the present

This book is a timely reminder of the malign uses to which history can be put

A brilliantly concentrated meditation on the power of myth and history, and the ability of both to form and deform and guide and misguide the present. Thoughtful, nuanced and above all persuasive, it shows how we are all trapped in the loops and coils of myth, memory and forgetting, and demonstrates the urgent need for historians to remember, and insist on the truth

Beautifully brief, The Story of Russia shows centuries of regimes that revisit their past to manipulate the future, and eternally start from the wrong place acting in venal self-interest rather than the true national interest

Given the news, Orlando Figes’s short book could hardly be better timed ... His story abounds in strange and memorable characters, from emperors to writers. But it’s the sheer sweep that impresses most, as he turns a potentially grim and overwhelming subject into a delightfully brisk and enjoyable read

To understand Russia’s autocratic present, you must examine its past – although Russia’s perception of that past is ever-shifting. Its founding myths have shaped its history right up to the present. “Russia is a country held together by ideas rooted in its distant past, histories continuously reconfigured and repurposed to suit its present needs

The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes (Bloomsbury, £25) looks 900 years earlier, to the national myths that Putin exploited in his invasion of Ukraine. “The country’s past will be reinvented by the Russian state as its needs change,” Figes observes

Orlando Figes is an award-winning author and historian, who has held teaching posts at Birkbeck College, University of London and Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He was born in London in 1959 and studied History at the University of Cambridge. Figes is the bestselling author of nine books on Russian and European history, including Natasha’s Dance and A People’s Tragedy. His books have been translated into over 30 languages.