I read this book called called "Russka" when I was a junior in high school by this incredibly bizarre writer named Edward Rutherfurd. His whole schtick is 700+ page novels set in a particular city that trace a series of families in that city over, like, 5,000 years of storyline. So, Russka is set in this small town in Russia and the story starts in nigh-prehistoric times with the rivalries and inter-marriages and stuff of around a half-dozen different families. The families names change with different linguistic shifts that Mr. Rutherfurd has painstakingly written into his storylines, but continue to basically sound the same through the entire multi-millenia narrative. The stories with the families are interwoven with different big, real-life historical events, so every chapter is like it's own "Titanic" or something.

Rutherfurd wrote a few of these. The first one was called "Sarum" after Salisbury in England and I think it clocked a full one thousand pages. Russka was better, though. The sections on Ivan the Terrible are pretty wild, if I recall. There's also a few on Ireland.

I have no idea if he's still writing, and I'm afraid to revisit the books because I'm afraid they won't hold up. His whole move is really sort of ridiculous though if he's still alive and working he should team up with 23andMe for some horrifyingly addictive synthesis that they could just stream directly into white boomer History Channel dads' brains. Folks who are into genealogy would be tickled with these dumb books. But in addition to it being possible that they were actually good (gotta be okay to hold a HS kid's attention, right?) they were incredibly instrumental in encouraging me to study history, and specifically religious history. That may not have paid off in any sort of career success or even a stable position that I can rely on from semester to semester, but it's the life I chose and I really like teaching so it kind of feels like I owe him something.

Uh, in any case. If you like big, sweeping historical fiction and want to learn more about Russia with a kind of impressive (if a big on-the-nose) attention to historical detail, then I can assure you that there is a book that combines those two things and it... definitely exists.