Tsars, an empress,and a mad monk.

Russia is a country that has never quite solved the problem of what happens when one man holds everything. Ivan invents the office of tsar and then demonstrates, at length, what an unchecked one can do to his own nobility and his own city. Catherine takes the same absolute power two centuries later, applies it with genuine intelligence, expands the empire enormously, and still cannot touch the thing underneath it, which is serfdom. Rasputin shows how a court that answers to nobody can be captured by one persuasive outsider. Nicholas inherits all of it and drops it.

So the sequence is chronological, and it is also a slow demolition. Each book widens the crack in the same wall. You can read any of them cold, and the Rasputin book in particular works fine as a standalone curiosity, but the last two are far better read together: Rasputin is the symptom and Nicholas is the patient, and the diagnosis arrives in 1917.

Four books, an hour each, roughly four hours for four hundred years. Some of this is grim without relief, particularly the fate of the last imperial family, and it is told plainly rather than dramatically. If you want the Soviet century, it is not here yet.