The collective consciousness field of Russia across roughly eleven centuries — from Kievan Rus’ and the adoption of Orthodox Christianity, through the Mongol yoke, the rise of Muscovite autocracy, the imperial Romanov centuries, the Soviet experiment and its terror, to the present. A younger thread than China or Persia, and a distinctive one: a recurring pattern in which cultural and spiritual depth rises while political freedom stays low — the axes pulling against each other again and again.
This is derived, not measured. Two lines run across the chart. The promise is the era's dominant worldview or professed ideal; the practice is the more binding of its political and economic order — the reality people actually lived under. The band between them is the gap: the distance between what a civilization professed and what it enacted. The Golden Age of Russian letters professed a moral and spiritual vision near 400 — Tolstoy, Dostoevsky — while Tsarist autocracy and serfdom held the enacted order at 200. The Stalinist USSR sits at the opposite pole: promise and practice nearly meet at a brutal, honest floor (175 / 150), the terror never hidden behind a loftier claim. Where promise and practice converge — at a peak or a floor — the civilization was telling the truth about itself. Every input opens on click — argue with the numbers.