The Russian Century brings to life a hundred years of Russian history. It takes us from a costume ball in old St Petersburg to the 1917 revolution; from Stalin's atrocities to the Cold War; from glasnost to the Second Revolution in 1993, and to the chaotic state of contemporary Russia. Surprising and intimate portraits of artists, writers and politicians - Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and Shostakovitch, Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky - are set alongside the faces of unknown peasants, workers and soliders; the dramatic moments of history in the making alongside the details of ordinary life.