This is a learned, wide-ranging, thought-provoking book, and a very relevant one, too, now that the Soviet Union has largely dissolved back into its components and the immediate future of Russia is a gigantic question-mark for Western diplomacy. That in itself, is not new.
In the mid-19th century, the historian, Mommsen, wrote: "The Russian Empire is a racial dustbin held in by the rusty hoops of Czarism." In turn, it became a racial mix held in by the steel bands of Stalinism. But these, like their predecessors, have rusted away or dissolved, with consequences for the world power balance which hardly need spelling out.
For much of the 19th century, European thinkers were as obsessed with the "Russian soul", as European statesmen and diplomatists were concerned with the power of the czar and his armies. It was in Russia, after all, that Napoleon came to grief, and not with a purely national, French army either, but a Grand Army drawn from most of the European states.
The failure of his 1812 venture was, in effect, a pan-European failure which marked a new epoch in history. The growth of the Russian state under Peter the Great had led inside a few generations, or less, to what we would now call superpower status, and after Napoleon's final defeat in 1815, young Czar Alexander was to a great extent the arbiter of affairs in Europe.
For a time, the whole centre of gravity in politics seemed to be shifting East.
However, this state of affairs did not last for very long. The Crimean War showed that Russian might was not the Colossus that it seemed to be, and that Russian armaments and military organisation lagged well behind those of the West.
That defeat, though not a crushing one, badly shook popular faith at home in the czar and his supposed invincibility, while the unification of Germany in 1871 created a new, powerful, imperial rival on Russian frontiers. The Crimea, in fact, weakened internal stability and damaged, as well as damaging Russia's big-power status internationally; it also cost her some territory and "the right to station warships on the Black Sea, the major artery of its most flourishing international trade".
This downgrading was fully recognised by statesmen inside the czarist empire. Gorchakov, foreign minister from 1856 to 1882, remarked: "We are a great but powerless country." He added: "One can always dress up finely, but one needs to know that one is dressing up."
Russia, in fact, was joining the ranks of those overstretched, outwardly imposing but inwardly weakened empires of which Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey were the chief representatives.
Its defeat in 1904-5 by relatively diminutive Japan was another body-blow, and a milestone to complete defeat and revolution in the first World War. Though the West was shocked by the ease with which the last czar, Nicholas, was dethroned in 1917, the fact was that the people's faith in the Romanov dynasty had been declining steadily for three generations.
Internally, the monolith of monarchy and church was crumbling. In the early chapters, Professor Hoskins traces the original rise of "Muscovy" under Ivan the Terrible and the eventual defeat (and conquest) of the Crimean Tartars, which for generations had terrorised its people.
Peter the Great is given his considerable due, though Hoskins points out that his legacy was in ways an ambivalent one, since his ruthlessly modernising programme actually shored up some of Russia's more archaic institutions while dragging her half-reluctantly into the present.
He points out, too, that the collision with Poland was to a great extent a religious one, when the Counter-Reformation launched by the Jesuits in Central and Eastern Europe grew into a considerable threat to the Orthodox Church, which Russia had inherited from Byzantium.
However, this scarcely justifies the cold-blooded 18th-century partition of Poland between Russia, Prussia and Austria an act which shocked the conscience of Europe at the time, and had fatal consequences.
Handicapped with by rather poor soil and an often intractable climate, Russian peasants had tended for centuries to migrate south or east in search of better land and to escape the tax collectors.
Military conquest mostly came later, and these in turn led to collision with imperial Turkey but also to the acquisition of a considerable colonial empire - now busily engaged in breaking up into allegedly self-contained republics. Stalin, as we know too well, inherited the imperial ambitions of the czars, with messianic Marxism taking the place of messianic Orthodoxy or militant pan-Slavism.
The incompatibility of his ideology with Western social democracy, or even with European-style Marxism, in Professor Hosking's words, "posed a novel problem to European diplomatic arrangements: how to integrate a power which openly aimed to subvert its diplomatic partners and to overthrow their sociopolitical systems, if necessary by force". In retrospect, then, the Cold War was probably inevitable; it was merely postponed for a decade by the more immediate necessity to defeat Hitlerism.
Shrewd, crude, hard-driving Khrushchev is dealt with fairly, both in his achievements and his ultimate blunders which brought him down. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, it seems, "the society Stalin had forged in the heat of upheaval and revolution, had settled down to become an intensely stable, conservative and hierarchical network of patron-client cells".
Gorbachev, essentially himself a product of that system, introduced reforms which were intended to modernise or renovate rather than to overturn it.
His attempt backfired, largely, it seems, because the people themselves were unable to grasp the nettle of liberal-democratic freedom.
Instead, the whole fabric of the Soviet Union began to come apart, forcing Gorbachev eventually to resign in the face of pressure from Yeltsin and others.
This development is even more momentous than it seems to us, since Hosking emphasises that Russia has never really existed outside the framework of empire - there is scarcely a "Russian nation" as such.
The result is a historicoal-political vacuum which, eventually, forces still unguessed by us may fill.
However, there is more to the book than politics, economics and war; Russian culture is also dealt with, especially its golden age in the 19th century, with Pushkin the founder-figure of its literature. The achievements of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Fet, Tyuchev etc. and so on were paralleled, if hardly equalled, by the great musicians, Moussorgsky, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, and by a cluster of fine painters little known in the West.
This creative energy continued well into the 20th century and survived even Stalinism, though at a fearful cost. There may not have been a Russian nation in the usual sense, but there is indubitably a "Russian soul" or at least a Russian sensibility, which is neither European nor Asiatic. For the moment, however, it appears to exist in a socio-political void, a fact which is ominous for the West.