Tolstoy famously opened Anna Karenina by writing, “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Something similar can be said about Western-based Russia analysts: They’re almost always wrong, but each is usually wrong in his own way.

To take just the last century: Following a 1919 visit to post-revolutionary Petrograd, Lincoln Steffens wrote, “I have seen the future, and it works.” A decade later, Walter Duranty chose to parrot Soviet propaganda to his readers rather than truthfully report on the Holodomor and other forms of mass persecution and death happening under Stalin. In the first case, the error was one of the ignorant “useful idiot.” In the second, it was a choice to knowingly propagandize for a rotten regime.

Fast-forward to the 1990s. The Soviet Union had dissolved, and too many journalists to name here painted a portrait of Boris Yeltsin as a neoliberal democratic reformer. In doing so, they downplayed or flat-out ignored moves such as his 1993 shelling of the Russian parliament and ramming through of constitutional reforms that stripped the country’s nascent political system of checks and balances while empowering the presidency — changes that paved the way for Vladimir Putin’s more nakedly autocratic rule. Here the error was to assume that Western models could easily be exported to Russia, despite its radically different politics and history.

As Orlando Figes makes clear in his newest book, understanding that history is necessary but not sufficient for understanding Russia. Just as important is to grasp how Russians themselves interpret their history. It’s why he calls the book “The Story of Russia” rather than “The History of Russia.” In making this point, he sets himself a formidable task. In just 300 pages, not only does he have to guide the reader through 1,000-plus years dating back to before Prince Vladimir’s conversion to Christianity in Kievan Rus’ in 988; he also has to pause in key places to help the reader digest the significance of pivotal moments and to show how they will affect Russia’s development decades, sometimes centuries, later. What’s more, he has to do this in a book going to press during Russia’s precarious present, with all the uncertainties its invasion of Ukraine brings. Remarkably, it’s a largely successful effort.

Throughout the book, certain themes in Russian history emerge: its gradual expansion in territory to compensate for its lack of natural geographic defenses; Moscow’s self-conception as the “Third Rome,” inheriting Byzantium’s role as the imperial center of Eastern Orthodoxy; and, perhaps most relevant to today, its penchant for autocracy.

Apologists past and present for Russia’s autocratic government usually point to several reasons for its persistence. Before modern communications, their argument goes, autocratic rule was the only practical way to govern so large a landmass. What’s more, they say, Russia’s historical experience has repeatedly shown the need for a strong state to stave off the threat of collapse.

The “Time of Troubles,” for instance, saw Russia almost fall under Polish-Lithuanian rule in the chaotic wake of Ivan the Terrible’s death. It would take over a decade of war and succession crises before Mikhail Romanov, the first of his family’s dynasty, assumed the throne and restored order. Many see echoes of the Time of Troubles in Russia’s civil war following the October 1917 revolution. Some see it echoed again in the transition from the Soviet collapse into the tumultuous 1990s. Here too, periods of chaos came to an end only when a strongman (Stalin, Putin) asserted order and buttressed the state. But is this pattern really so cut and dried, and has autocracy in Russia always been a foregone conclusion?

Hardly. In reality, Figes shows, autocracy in Russia arose not out of necessity but mostly as an accident of history. There are democratic models organic to Russia going back to its earliest beginnings. In twelfth-century Novgorod, for instance, which had waterways to the Baltic and close European trade ties, a town assembly won the power to elect a city mayor, a post that had previously been appointed by the regional prince. Members of the assembly were also “allowed to speak and vote on civic appointments, domestic laws and taxes, even questions of war and peace.”

These proto-democratic practices continued in the Novgorod city-state for centuries. Had the Mongol horde not perceived Novgorod’s alliance with Lithuania as a threat to their empire and backed Moscow’s successful effort to conquer it in 1478, the Novgorod republican model of governance might have continued and taken root elsewhere in Russia. Unfortunately, this was not to be. In one of the saddest passages of the book, Figes describes how, upon taking the city, Moscow’s forces removed the bell that had been used to summon the Novgorod assembly — a symbolic act signifying its new subjugation. In its silence, the bell tolled for Russia’s lost democratic future, and rang in centuries of despotism.

The book is at its strongest when Figes takes a step back from the greater narrative and gives us a window into how key historical events were understood by some of the most important individuals in later Russian history. In a particularly chilling passage, we learn how Stalin became displeased with director Sergei Eisenstein’s negative portrayal of the paranoia and brutality of Ivan the Terrible in the second part of his famous biographical film on the czar. Stalin lectured the filmmaker about why it was necessary for Ivan to have been so cruel — so much so that the real tragedy of Ivan was that he had not been brutal enough.

If Ivan had embraced killings of political rivals and mass terror even more, Stalin explained, he could have staved off the succession crises that followed his death and ushered in the Time of Troubles. “When Ivan had someone executed, he would spend a long time in repentance and prayer,” Stalin told Eisenstein. “God was a hindrance to him in this respect. He should have been more ruthless.” Given Stalin’s own tendencies to paranoia and mass murder, his argument makes a perverse sort of sense.

No book can capture the totality of Russian history, and anyone who expects Figes’s short book to do so will come away disappointed. Periods as important and varied as the Khrushchev Thaw, the Napoleonic Wars, and even the chaos of the Yeltsin era are passed over fairly quickly, leaving the reader wanting more. Figes also all but ignores the space race and the development of Soviet science and technology. Most noticeable to this reader were the relatively few pages given over to the importance of Russian literature, particularly in the 19th century. (To be fair, Figes has focused more on Russian literature in past books, including his cultural history Natasha’s Dance.) Still, in lively prose, the author keeps the narrative moving and forms a coherent, reliable picture of a land that has long baffled so many to its west. And that is no small feat.

The Story of Russia ends on a historical cliffhanger. As the book was going to press, Russia had already begun its “special military operation” against Ukraine, but the shape the war would take was far from clear. With the recent liberation of Kherson and the continued robust funding and armaments supplied by its Western allies, Ukraine looks to be in a position to fight back for the long haul and hopefully drive Russia fully outside its borders. But only time will tell.

One thing is certain: Whatever future Russia chooses will be based on the story it tells itself about its past. Vladimir Putin has one such story that he tells himself and his subjects — of a Russia perpetually menaced by a conniving and decadent West, a country whose only hope lies in embracing a “power vertical” (Putin’s term for autocracy) and proving its strength as a great power through dangerous escalations such as the Ukraine invasion. But there’s another story of Russia that emerges in Figes’s book: one of peaceful coexistence with Europe and democratic roads not taken but still open, of masterly artists, of unflinching dissidents. It’s a story with a happier ending than the one Putin’s telling.