Origins -- The Mongol impact -- Tsar and God -- Times of trouble -- Russia faces west -- The shadow of Napoleon -- An empire in crisis -- Revolutionary Russia -- The war on old Russia -- Motherland -- Ends

"The Story of Russia is a fresh approach to the thousand years of Russia's history, concerned as much with the ideas that have shaped how Russians think about their past as it is with the events and personalities comprising it. No other country has reimagined its own story so often, in a perpetual effort to stay in step with the shifts of ruling ideologies"--Dust jacket flap