I didn’t care for the flavour Sixsmith added to his take on the far history of Russia, yet here I am reading his sequel, covering the entire Soviet empire, start to finish, and enjoying it. In his first book, Sixsmith wrote from the perspective of “Western” approach = good, “Eastern” approach = bad. Everything bad about Russia was therefore the result of the Mongol occupation and its lasting effects on the Slavic mentality. But there are no Mongols here, and Sixsmith actually lived through the […]