Russia is the most thickly forested country in the world. It is also rich in fairy tales that feature wood spirits, river maidens or rusalki, the terrifying Baba Yaga (a child-eating hag who lives in a hut with chicken’s legs) and the leshii, spiritual guardian of the woods. Was it the leshii who warned the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky to flee his woodland refuge, just before it was obliterated by the fall of a mighty larch? Marina Tarkovsky refuted the idea after her brother’s death, but Tarkovsky repaid the debt in any case when he peopled the great church murals painted by the medieval artist Andrei Rublev (subject of his 1966 film) not with saints, but with the trees of a lost Eden.

Tarkovsky and his nephew Mikhail, a passionate defender of the Siberian taiga (the woods or, literally, ‘land of little sticks’), both feature in The Oak and the Larch, Sophie Pinkham’s rich and absorbing history of Russia’s several empires. Pinkham’s prism is the vast forest that Russia has alternately cherished and devastated, and she opens her narrative in the 13th century with the Mongol empire and Chinggis Khan galloping across the frozen steppe with his horse-mounted Golden Horde.

That first unified empire had fragmented by the time of Rublev in the 15th century, but the Mongol raids continued. Tarkovsky’s laughing horsemen are a filmmaker’s flourish. Their love of conquest was real. Before they were brought down by the first tsars with the help of forests defended by man-made