‘Moscow is hard to love,’ Simon Morrison writes at the beginning of this engaging book, ‘but I love it.’ He deliberately sets out unconstrained by academic pieties, despite holding the post of Professor of Music and Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. He says he wrote A Kingdom and a Village ‘out of nostalgia for pre-oligarch decrepitude, when the world looked at Moscow with pity’.

The Orthodox Church and the security services have been conjoined from the 16th century to the present

The Orthodox Church and the security services have been conjoined from the 16th century to the present

The book is tripartite. The first part begins in 1147, when a prince named Yuri built a fort on a hill above a river. (When the authorities unveiled a monument to Yuri in 1954, Morrison reveals, a Muscovite yelled: ‘Doesn’t look like him.’) The story proceeds with Mongol hordes, fire, plague, Ivan III (the first to use the title ‘Tsar’) and Ivan IV, the Terrible. Moscow emerges as ‘the third Rome’, and the section closes as the last Yurik ruler dies.

Many aspects of this early history are contested (how the Cyrillic alphabet took root, for example). When the sources differ, Morrison tells us; he is never hasty to impose a coherent narrative on a bundle of conflicting facts or on gaps in the evidence.

 In Part Two, ‘Second City’, which ushers in the Romanovs, the sources begin to cohere (the book includes 77 pages of notes). The 6ft 7in Peter the Great, grandson of the first Romanov ruler and ‘the most notable of all 18’, relocated the capital to St Petersburg in 1712. Morrison highlights the European foundations of the new city – ‘its architecture belonged to Italy or Spain or France’ – while Moscow ‘clung to Slavophile traditions… inured to........

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