In his work, P. gives a brief description of the economic and political development of Russia throughout its history. The concept ‘culture’ appears in the title pf the book, since P. understood it in the broadest sense, i.e. as everything created by the efforts of man, including the national economy and the state system.
The first part of the work consists of two sections. The first one includes considerations of the economic system from primordial society to modern capitalism. The second section describes the state system and dwells on several aspects: “military-financial organization”, the court, and the structure of the central government.
The second part is related to other aspects of society. The first section focuses on religious beliefs. P. follows the idea of “progressive development”, describing the first primordial beliefs, then medieval Christianity, and so on. “Religious individualism” for him is associated mostly with Protestantism. In the second section, P. dwells on political ideology, highlighting patriarchal Absolutism, bureaucratic and bourgeois monarchy, and democracy.
The author noted the influence of the Hegelian scheme of historical development on historical disciplines; the study of the state became the main object in the works of the nineteenth century. That tendency was characteristic for Russian historical thought as well, though, in his opinion, it had its own logic: everything that was in Russia before the formation of the centralized monarchy of the Romanovs was considered as a preparatory stage for the formation of statehood. Russian society, with all its classes, was created by the state. P. paid tribute to this paradigm, noting, however, that a different one was to replace it, since it was necessary to pay more attention not only to the ‘statehood’, but also to the ‘public’. The author saw the purpose of his essay in writing history within a new approach.
P. examined the history of Russia from the point of view of the Marxist concept of socio-economic formations. The book describes the gradual changes in social forms and shows that socio-economic processes lie at the heart of Russia's historical development.
As a methodological basis for his work, P. used historical materialism, which he defined as an attempt to apply general ‘scientific’ methods to the study of historical phenomena.