Russia is easiest to misunderstand when treated as a single uninterrupted political form. Its history is better read as a sequence of state projects: the rise of Muscovy, imperial expansion under the tsars, revolutionary collapse, Soviet reconstruction, and the post-1991 federation.
The early core of the Russian state formed around the consolidation of Muscovite power. Over time that core expanded across forests, steppe, river systems, and eventually Siberia. Expansion created a country of continental scale, but it also produced a recurring tension: governance was always harder than conquest.
Imperial Russia became a major European power while remaining socially uneven and administratively strained. Serfdom, centralization, aristocratic culture, and military ambition all mattered, but so did infrastructure, literacy, and the constant problem of distance.
The revolutions of 1917 shattered the empire and created a new political order. The Soviet Union industrialized at enormous speed and human cost, built a superpower state, and reshaped everyday life through ideology, planning, bureaucracy, education, war mobilization, and urbanization.
The collapse of the USSR in 1991 did not erase the older layers. Contemporary Russia still carries imperial geography, Soviet institutions, and post-Soviet market and federal structures at the same time. Any serious reading of the country has to hold those layers together rather than pick only one.