Although I count myself as more of a tourist than a traveller these days, I do like to know something about the countries that I plan to visit, more than I can get from the usual DK Guides.  And so because I’d come across Robert Cole’s excellent and very readable Traveller’s History of Paris, I got hold of a copy of A Traveller’s History of Russia, by Peter Neville in the same series.  But it was a bit of a disappointment.

Of course, it’s much easier to write about a tourist-friendly place like Paris than it is to write about a vast and complex place that has been hostile to western visitors for most of the twentieth century.  In fact, you have to admire any academic or author taking on the Russians as a field to specialise in, because until glasnost the country was difficult to visit without restrictions,  and it was obstructionist to anyone trying to find out what…