In Russia's present travail, many analogies have been made with past predicaments. Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard will have nothing to do with all this, pointing out at the very beginning that most of their book is not about Russia anyway, or at least not about Russia exclusively, since the story they have to tell could lead not only towards Russia but also towards Ukraina or Belarus. Thus, the introducer of Christianity could be Vladimir or Volodymyr, the city with which he is associated could be Kiev or Kiiv, depending on which language you transliterate.

Here is just one example of the enormous linguistic complexity of the task facing the authors, which is compounded by a scarcity of sources as well as a welter of interpretations. The principal Russian source is the medieval chronicle, normally biased in favour of a particular dynasty and partly destroyed over the centuries by fire. There are also Byzantine, Latin, Arabic and Scandinavian records, but mostly with an axe to grind and rarely providing answers to questions today's historians would like to pose. And then, as Franklin and Shepard tell us, there have been "regional histories, economic histories, urban histories, church histories, social analyses, legal and diplomatic histories, textual reconstructions and deconstructions, theoretical ruminations, cultural interpretations and evaluations, plus enormously productive archaeological excavations". And so their task of synthesis has been daunting in the extreme.

Who are the Russians? And how did they respond to early challenges to their existence? These are just a couple of the questions that have led to long and bitter arguments. Moreover, the subject is almost always on the move. As the greatest of the pre-revolutionary historians of Russia, V. O. Kliuchevskii, observed, the history of his country has been one of continual colonisation, and the same might be said with even more emphasis of Ukraina and Belarus. Even at their early peak of prosperity the vast lands of Rus supported no more than roughly seven-and-a- half million inhabitants in many different and widely scattered settlements. Where to begin?

In the early ninth century, the people known to many of their contemporaries as the Rus were immigrant Scandinavian traders along the rivers in the mostly forested region between the Baltic and the Middle Volga, searching mainly for furs, silver and slaves (the very word is derived from Slavs), and thus recalling some of the later activities of the trappers and other venturers into the North American frontier. There were many other people from the forest to the steppe, ranging from the Finno-Ugrians of the north to the Polovtsians and other Turkic peoples to the south. Nearer the latter, although celebrations of its "1,500th birthday" in 1982 were somewhat premature, a settlement of Slavs identifiable as Kiev was in existence towards the end of the ninth century when, according to the chronicle, they invited the Rus to come and rule over them. Was the "invitation" similar to that accepted by William the Conqueror in 1066? The debate about the ensuing contribution of the Russian "Normans" is compounded by the fact that a significant interchange was already developing with Byzantium, from which Kiev would receive Christianity and much more besides. The greatest contribution of the Rus, however, was their name.

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Kievan society had its own culture, including a rich folklore and a mostly home-grown code of law, as well as a literature consisting mainly of church Slavonic translations from the Greek, and a distinctive architecture heavily influenced by Byzantium. Yet we are reminded that Kievocentrism invites distortion by the book's cover, the church of the Intercession on the River Nerl near Vladimir-on-the-Kliazma to the northeast of what was then a minor settlement called Moscow. And to speak of the decline of Kiev or the rise of Moscow is to misunderstand the nature of Rus, according to Franklin and Shepard. They stop short of using the word "federation" or any other term that implies a fixed system, tentatively suggesting "collegiate cousinhood" as a label for an emerging political culture. They insist that there was no "state", although at the very end they do concede that "perhaps there were the beginnings of a nation".

The overwhelming impression left by this book is of its scholarship, multilingual and discriminating: it is also readable, evocative and witty. The only criticism is the authors' reluctance to give an answer to some of the thorny questions their subject still poses: we can be certain that others will rush in where they have feared to tread. Finally, despite all the authors' warnings, one cannot resist the temptation to wonder how does Rus speak to us today? At the very least, the book should be carefully read by nationalists in Russia, Ukraina and Belarus, offering them a powerful antidote for the xenophobia that sometimes possesses them. Why should they not help to make their membership of the Commonwealth of Independent States into more of a "collegial cousinhood"? If, rent by squabbles, their common forebears about 900 years ago could ask "why do we ruin the land of the Rus, making strife among ourselves?", what should stop them themselves making more of an effort at reconciliation today?

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Paul Dukes is director of the Centre for Russian, East and Central European studies, University of Aberdeen.