Ever since a decomposing papier-mache elephant was wheeled onstage at the beginning of Simon Schama's Citizens, popular historians have sought similarly intriguing emblematic images for their opening pages. Professor Figes's choice - which also provides his book's title - has fallen on an episode of Tolstoy's War and Peace in which Natasha Rostov performs a peasant dance.

"Where, how, and when," Tolstoy comments, "had this young countess, educated by an emigreeFrench governess, imbibed from the Russian air she breathed that spirit, and obtained that manner which the pas de ch£le would, one would have supposed, long ago effaced?"

The choice is in some ways odd. As Figes himself sensibly remarks, the scene "cannot be approached as a literal record of experience" (though this does not prevent him using other scenes from Tolstoy's fiction as evidence in his arguments); its primary function in the novel is to tell us something about Natasha, not about Russia; and, finally, Russia's cultural diversity - as the book goes on to show - is so great that this contrast, tied closely to a particular era, is not overwhelmingly significant. But it does provide a good title.

The book takes in the period from Peter the Great to Brezhnev; each of its chapters, with a wealth of illustration, "explores a separate strand of the Russian cultural identity". St Petersburg is the focus of the first, which gives an account of Russia's relationship with the West from Peter to the end of the 18th century; the second takes the campaign of 1812 as its theme. We then move on through the culture of Moscow - the antipode of the younger capital - to that of the Russian peasant ("the long-drawn, lyrical and melismatic song of the Russian peasantry"), consider religion and spirituality, investigate the Asiatic strain in "Descendants of Genghiz Khan", and conclude with chapters on the Soviet era and on emigree culture.

Though the arguments are not novel, there is an immense amount of information here, culled from a multiplicity of sources, and there are some fine passages, particularly in the last chapters - for example, on the siege of Leningrad, on Akhmatova and the Soviet regime, on Tsvetaeva, and on Stravinsky's return to Russia in 1962 - which are both powerful and moving. More often, however, the impression is of a vast, inchoate catalogue, which segues with ear-popping abruptness from one subject to the next, and on which no powerful synthesising intellect has ever wrought.

On occasion, indeed, the detail is so inspissatedly dense that the book becomes nearly impossible to read: it is tempting to abandon the author's argument and resort to dipping at random into the pages for nuggets of information: and, it must be said, one is rarely disappointed.

It's fascinating to discover, for example, that the matrioshka, the Russian nesting doll, is not an ancient Russian toy, but was created by Sergei Maliutin in 1891; or that in the 1950s the conductor Gennady-Rozhdestvensky, rummaging in a Moscow second-hand bookshop, discovered the title page of Debussy's Preludes with the composer's inscription "To entertain my friend Igor Stravinskyî: it had come from Stravinsky's estate at Ustilug in the Ukraine, sacked and looted by the local peasants in 1917.

However one chooses to read the book, it is necessary to proceed with caution, for factual errors and mistaken assertions strew its pages more thickly than autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa. The suspicion that research has been less than academically rigorous begins to creep in at an early stage. Poor Pushkin receives the scurviest of treatments. Barely a statement about the poet is without error; the climax is reached on page 87, where 16 lines of Professor Figes's prose contain eight egregious mistakes.

In undertaking this book, the author set himself a heroic task; in executing it he and his research team have piled up, if occasionally in slipshod fashion, a heroic amount of data. That, in the end, no overall coherent vision should have emerged is, perhaps, more the fault of the subject than of the writer. "Russia cannot be comprehended with the mind," the poet Tiutchev wrote in 1866,

"Nor measured with a common rule:

She is of a special stamp - In Russia one can only believe."