Suny's volume covers the Russian twentieth century both chronologically and thematically, setting rival interpretations alongside each other so that readers can weigh the controversies themselves. It is not a history of ethnic Russians alone: the subject is two multinational states, tsarist and Soviet, together with the post-Soviet republics, on the conviction that the story is incomplete without the empire's non-Russian peoples.

The introduction doubles as a history of the field. The totalitarian model that governed early Cold War scholarship gave way in the 1960s and 1970s, when archives opened and social historians recast October as something other than a conspiracy and questioned how completely the Stalinist state controlled society. Work of the detente years read the system through modernization and expected liberalization; Gorbachev's failure brought more fatalistic readings back.

Its recurring themes are the strain between nation and empire, the alternation of reform and revolution, state-building and state collapse, and modernity.