The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. By Serhii Plokhy. Basic Books; 395 pages; $29.99. Allen Lane; £25.

ROWS over inheritances are bitter—within families and between countries. At the heart of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is the contested legacy of a long-forgotten superpower: Kievan Rus. Both Vladimir Putin’s Russia and post-Soviet Ukraine lay claim to the mantle of Vladimir the Great, a prince who just over 1,000 years ago accepted Christian baptism for his unruly tribes of Slavs and Vikings. To patriotic Russians, that was the founding action of their statehood. For Ukrainians, the story is the other way round: their country, so often wiped off the map by its neighbours, is the true descendant.

That dispute underlies today’s smouldering war. Many Russians find it hard to accept that Ukraine is really a state; moreover, Ukrainians (especially if they speak Russian as a first language) are essentially Russians. The territory they inhabit is therefore part of Moscow’s patrimony.

Ukraine’s identity and its enemies over the past ten centuries are the central threads of Serhii Plokhy’s admirable new history. He eschews polemic—almost to a fault, given the horrors he describes. The subject material could seem dauntingly dense: few readers will be familiar with the twists and turns of the history, and unfamiliar names and places abound. But Mr Plokhy—a Harvard historian whose previous book, “The Last Empire”, was a notable account of the Soviet Union’s downfall—treads a careful path.

The story is not just of high politics, gruesome and enthralling though that is. Even when Ukraine did not exist as a state, he writes, “language, folklore, literature and, last but not least, history became building blocks of a modern national identity”. He pays particular attention to the linguistic complexities. Ukrainians may speak Russian yet also identify profoundly with the Ukrainian state. The real linguistic divide is with Polish: western Ukraine was for many decades under Polish rule. Memories of massacres and oppression are recent and vivid, making the reconciliation between those two countries all the more remarkable.

The epilogue to “The Gates of Europe” rightly describes the Ukraine crisis as central to Russia and Europe as a whole. It is widely known that the Ukrainian national anthem begins: “Ukraine has not yet perished”. Mr Plokhy points out that the Polish one begins in similarly mordant style. The question for Ukrainians—and for Europe—is whether the country can summon up the determination that Poland has shown to tread the hard road which history has set before it.

The stakes are high: a successful, stable Ukraine would be a strong candidate to join and strengthen the European Union. It would also be a devastating refutation of the Putin regime’s contention that bellicose autocracy is the best way of running a large ex-Soviet Slavic country.

But the odds are uncomfortably long. Ukraine returned to statehood in 1991 shorn of its elites, thanks to famine, repression and Russification. The creeps and cronies who have so signally misruled the country since then have acquired great riches, and put down deep roots. Two democratic upheavals—the Orange revolution that began in late 2004 and the Maidan protests of 2013—have failed to dislodge this parasitic ruling class.

Yet belief in Ukraine’s history of tolerance and legality, rooted in European Christian civilisation, keeps hope alive. In his elegant and careful exposition of Ukraine’s past, Mr Plokhy has also provided some signposts to the future.