nderstanding Russian history ‘and how Russians see it is crucial to shaping any western response’ to Putin's aggression, wrote Gideon Rachman in the . In Rodric Braithwaite's (Profile, 288pp, £16.99), ‘the author quotes the of 1782, which described Russia as ‘very large… governed by a complete despotism and inhabited by vicious and drunken savages’. Readers seeking a more nuanced view will find Braithwaite's brisk and readable account very valuable. The book covers more than 1,000 years of history, culminating in what Putin termed the “geopolitical catastrophe” of
