Start with the map. What we call ‘Russia’ is a geographically vast territory: one set of borders looks to an unambiguously Western world, the world of (often militant) Latin Christianity; another towards the self-contained cultural world of China. South-westwards lie the Balkans and what was once the ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’, as Dimitri Obolensky called the cluster of states and peoples sharing a broadly Greek Christian heritage; south-eastwards, the tribal cultures and Turkic languages of Central Asia. Russian identity has been moulded in response to – sometimes violent reaction to – all these environments, and its complexities reflect the way in which these diverse contacts and conflicts have impressed themselves on Russia’s sense of itself and its destiny.