Russia and the Russians: a history Geoffrey Hosking Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 736pp, £25 ISBN 0713995149

I first met the sculptor Lev Kerbel in 1986. A few weeks earlier, his marble and granite statue of Lenin, the Soviet Union's largest, had been unveiled in Moscow's October Square by the man who was then the city's mayor, Boris Yeltsin. Kerbel's studio was adorned with casts of communist leaders, cosmonauts and collective farm workers. In his small kitchen, he had a graffiti wall where he asked all visitors to sign their names with an old-fashioned Soviet felt pen. I scribbled mine, next to Yeltsin's.

I next saw Kerbel late in the evening of Christmas Day, 1991. Mikhail Gorbachev had just bowed to the inevitable. We sat drinking vodka, watching a repeat of the president's resignation speech on TV, and ruminating on what might have been. The Soviet Union was no more. The hammer and sickle had been lowered over the Kremlin, and the Russian tricolour had been raised.

Kerbel was distraught. This much-decorated sculptor, born on Revolution Day 1917, had lost his bearings. He has still to recover them, as has his country. I was pondering Kerbel's fate as I read Geoffrey Hosking's exhaustive history, from Kievan Rus to the consumerist nation that is modern Russia. His thesis, to simplify, is that Russia's perennial identity crisis is a consequence of its size, of its uncertain borders, of its multi-ethnicity and the contradiction between its external ambitions and inability to develop a civil society of its own. All of which is indisputable, as one would expect from a historian of such academic rigour and personal knowledge. (Hosking does not fall into the category of cold war Sovietologists who opined about the country from the comfort of their western ivory towers.)

He resists the temptation for amateur psychology that afflicts Russia-watchers of lesser renown. Instead, Hosking accepts Russia for what it is, a country that never has and, arguably, never will, fall into a neat geo-strategic category.

And yet often this is an arid account that talks of society as an abstract concept, eschewing opportunities to enliven the narrative with human examples of how the monolithic structures of tsarism and communism affected individual lives.

The pre-revolutionary chapters (the main chunk of the book) provide the most telling insights, especially for those acquainted with Russia. And, arguably, the strongest section of all is the account of Peter the Great's westernisation of Russian diplomacy, and his attempts to bring the Russian Orthodox Church to heel.

There is a thorough analysis of the stagnation under Brezhnev and the effect this had on reformers such as Mikhail Gorbachev. And yet, curiously lacking is the sheer drama of the period of glasnost and perestroika, and the extent to which nobody (not least Gorbachev) had any idea of where it would lead. Well before the coup, the political structures had become untenable. The idea that the USSR, led by Gorbachev, could coexist with a Russian Federation, with almost exact parallel structures and led by Yeltsin, was a matter of Gogolian farce. I remember asking a member of the Supreme Soviet, in the autumn of 1991, which country he was living in. He had no idea.

In Vladimir Putin, Russia now has a leader more in keeping with its past. He concluded from an early stage that control was the key, hence his reviving of the KGB. He has imposed his will on the "centre", and from there, beyond. But the size of the country has always made that task difficult. It took Putin months to be rid of the leader of the region that encompasses Vladivostok in the far east, even though its inhabitants had had to go without heating through a long, cold winter.

And yet, amid all the turmoil, all the social dislocation of the past 15 years, life in many places (I naturally exclude Chechnya and other areas of conflict) has continued with more than a semblance of normality. The institutions function; democracy is being seriously challenged under Putin but continues after a fashion; and the nightmare of the "loose nukes" that we all feared after Chernobyl has yet to be realised. Most important of all, families and friends still help each other out.

For all the sense of frustrated envy of the west, of ambitions unfulfilled, Russia is not the basket case portrayed by so many. It still produces brilliant scientists, musicians, artists, mathematicians. Which brings me back to Lev Kerbel. The commissions for sculptures of Lenin dried up in the early 1990s; he tried individual commissions for the new rich - statues of wives of dodgy bankers - but many of them never paid up. I went back to see him earlier this year. My signature had faded from view, as had Yeltsin's. And yet Kerbel's order book is picking up again, thanks to Moscow city council. He's doing a new line in . . . Peter the Greats.

John Kampfner was Moscow bureau chief for the Daily Telegraph

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