The seventeenth century appears some lost time, when a country was trampled down in place, but in history of the Russian state this segment occupies the quite special place, where pressed and "minutes rock", and whole decades of unhurried development. The most tight knot of this epoch is Strife. This in truth frightful and keen spectacle - a comparable on a scale crisis in Russia will recur only three hundred years after, in beginning of the XX century. There, in the seventeenth century, it is needed to search the roots of some sharp problems that remain unsolved and until now.A book "Between Europe and Asia" is sanctified to history of the third on an account Russian state arising up as a result of Strife and lasting меньше century - up to new modification.