Winston Churchill famously des-cribed Soviet Russia as ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’. At the start of A Kingdom and a Village, Simon Morrison, who treats the story of Moscow as inseparable from the history of Russia, repudiates the Churchillian cliché. ‘The city projects an inscrutable aura,’ he admits, ‘but in fact knows itself all too well.’ 

There have been many attempts to understand Moscow, from the early accounts of Western travellers, by turns mesmerised and hostile, to Caroline Brooke’s illuminating Moscow: A Cultural History (2006). There is also a substantial body of writing in Russian, ranging from Vladimir Gilyarovsky’s portrait of pre-revolutionary Moscow (Moscow and Muscovites, 1926) to the more recent outpourings by local historians. But after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, all this has come to seem inadequate. The question that Morrison identifies in Russian intellectual culture, and tries to answer, is the one of recurrence: for both city and state, ‘is time a loop, are the old stories the same as the new ones?’

The history of Moscow begins before Russia. Contra Putin and his sentimentalising speeches, Rus was not experienced by all Slavs as a shared Fatherland. For centuries, Moscow ‘had no influence, no role in affairs beyond its own wooden walls’. Too often, Rus served as a battlefield, contested by Scandinavians and