The history of Russia is a story written by distance. This history documentary covers Russian history from the Vikings and Kyivan Rus to the Mongol invasion, the tsars, the Soviet Union, the war in Ukraine and today.

Look at Russia on a map and the first thing you notice is that it does not end. It covers more than a tenth of all the land on Earth and runs across 11 time zones. It borders Norway and North Korea. And almost nobody lives in it. A country this big should be untouchable. Instead, it has been invaded again and again, and almost every time it came back bigger.

This documentary follows the full story of ancient Russia and modern Russia: the North European Plain, the Vikings and Rurik, Kyivan Rus and the choice of Orthodox Christianity, the Mongol invasion and Batu Khan, the rise of Moscow, Ivan the Third and the Third Rome, Ivan the Terrible, Yermak and the conquest of Siberia, the Time of Troubles and the Polish occupation of the Kremlin, the Romanov dynasty, serfdom, Peter the Great and Saint Petersburg, Catherine the Great and Crimea, the sale of Alaska, Napoleon's invasion of 1812, the emancipation of the serfs, the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Russian Revolution and Lenin, Stalin, the famine and the Gulag, Operation Barbarossa, the siege of Leningrad and Stalingrad, the Cold War, Sputnik and Gagarin, Chernobyl, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Yeltsin and Putin, Crimea in 2014, the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and Russia's population crisis in 2026.

For five centuries, Russia answered every fear the same way: more land. But land was never its problem. Today the oldest problem in Russian history is back, and it is not an army. It is a number.

This documentary is based on archaeological discoveries, peer-reviewed research, and primary historical sources. We help bring history to life while remaining faithful to the historical record.

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