“The country that we call Ancient Russia was so different from Russia of the post-Mongol era that through the thickness of the past centuries it seems to us some kind of lost, legendary Atlantis... Was there really Rurik? Did the Slavs invite the Varangians? Did Oleg nail a shield to the gates of Constantinople?” Boris Akunin addresses his history of the fatherland to a wide readership: people who are interested in knowing (or enthusiastically calculating together with the author) how it really was. And try to understand what is so and what is wrong (and why) in our thousand-year-old state.