Geoffrey Hosking

Russia and the Russians runs from the Kievan Rus to the present in one volume, and Hosking's argument across his whole career is that Russia built an empire before it had built a nation, and that the state then consumed the society which should have held it up. He taught in London for decades and gave the Reith Lectures in 1988, while the Soviet Union was opening. He has written specifically on trust and on why civil institutions never took root. He reads the sources in Russian and is unusually fair to the Soviet period without excusing any of it.