Art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon's thrilling TV series for the BBC, "The Art Of Russia" is the story of a nation's destiny - revolution and human conflict on a scale unparalleled in any other European country's history of art. Emerging from the most conservative of cultures into the most radical, Russian art triumphed against the odds.

Andrew Graham-Dixon admits it's been an extraordinary journey for him. "Previous series like The Art Of Spain and The Art Of Italy were simple compared to this. There, history divides into accepted terms like Renaissance and Romanticism. "My journey through Russian history has been unexpected, challenging, surprising - and it's all the excitement of writing a history that really hasn't been set in stone like other nations' art histories. "It's also a story of high human cost - because so many artists had to take risks just to get their message across."

Episode one celebrates the great age of the icon, when Russia was at its most intense and inward looking. Travelling to the northern wastes, Andrew discovers the country's most moving icons, the little known folk "Lubock" art, antique Russia of the countryside, and Peter The Great's artistic revolution.

Episode two moves into the city and relives the glory days of the Russian high baroque and assesses the influence of "the Wanderers" - an extraordinary group of artists comparable to the Impressionists.

The final episode spans the tumultuous period of 20th century Russia, from the Revolution of 1917 to the present day with the tension between the new Russian investment in art and the strict doctrine of the Putin years.

Andrew visits the image of Jesus Christ painted by IIya Repin (1844-1930) inside the church of the Savior at the Abramtsevo estate.

Episode one, "Out of the Forest", starts in Kiev, the capital of modem Ukraine, where in the tenth century its ruler Prince Vladimir sought to unite the Kievan Rus' under the banner of Christianity. Artists were sent from Constantinople to decorate the cathedral of Santa Sofia in Byzantium style. For Prince Vladimir didn't just adopt a religion, he imported "an entire culture already at the peak of its sophistication", Graham- Dixon tells us. The "blaze of mosaic glory" caught in this film gives us some idea of the religious exhilaration felt by early converts.

Later we move to the Trinity cathedral of Sergiev Posad where Father Dolmans, deacon in the modem order of St Sergiev, speaks of the 15th- century heyday of Russian icon painting practiced by the monk and artist Andrei Rublev. "One has to live the same life as the saints that he depicts," Fr Dolmans says, "and the person experiencing Rublev's icons should do so in a heightened spiritual atmosphere, during an actual mass." Mingling with the congregation, Graham-Dixon is struck by the richness of the old gold, the direct Realism, as Stalin intended it simplicity of Rublev's storytelling and the tangible relationship the worshippers have with the sacred paintings. Visibly moved, he is barely able to put into words how powerfully visceral the experience has been.

The episode concludes with the westernization of Russian art under Peter the Great and Graham-Dixon leaves us in suspense as to the consequences of this sudden change of orientation. "When Russia opened its doors to Europe, it didn't just let in art and architecture. It let in a host of even more dangerous ideas, ideas that would lead to bloodshed and eventually revolution ... art went from being the servant of the state to the agent of its destruction."

The second episode, "Roads to Revolution", reminds us that although Peter the Great founded St Petersburg, it was his underestimated daughter Elizabeth with her Italian architect Rastrelli who determined what the city "would look like", applying at Peterhof a Baroque style even more grandiose than Versailles. Graham-Dixon visits Elizabeth's chapel during the final touches to its restoration after Nazi bombing, and talks to Nadia Emeyalanova, engaged in applying some of the 200 pounds in weight of gold leaf to the interior. Didn't she think it was "just a little bit over the top"? "No. I'm afraid not," she replies. For Graham-Dixon it's "the bling of Baroque ... fantastically excessive."

Catherine the Great continued the extravagance but by the 1840s, there was "a grand hunger" for change and for images reflecting the real Russia, "Russia in the here and now," Graham-Dixon tells us. The trickle of discontent grew under Repin, the most brilliant representative of the so-called Wanderers. Repin felt that the nation could only be saved by reconnecting with ancient traditions using paintings such as his poignant "Barge haulers on the Volga "to address the great issues of the day". With remarkable artists like Mikhail Vrubel struggling to achieve a modem idiom, Gontcharova, Kandinsky and finally Malevich, Russian art was pushed "to its outer limits", and flowered into "some kind of spiritual revolution", Graham-Dixon believes. With this, his narrative prepares us for the ensuing cauldron of experimentation and confusion.

The third episode, "Smashing the Mold",opens spectacularly with Graham-Dixon's visit to Lot 36, an industrial estate on the outskirts of Moscow. There, restorers are reassembling the sculpture made by aeronautical engineers for the Russian pavilion at the 1937 World Fair: two steel- plated workers, a man and woman, holding aloft the hammer and sickle. "A Soviet shout ofdefiance aimed at the capitalist west," as Graham- Dixon puts it.

One of the thrills of this series is the opportunity to explore little-known archives and to share the spontaneous buzz, which Graham-Dixon gets from handling precious originals in the bowels of the Mayakovsky Museum. Posters for bread, for communist biscuits with smiling or scowling faces, political photomontages. To communism, this was more worthwhile than say Cezanne "because", he believes, "it was art for everybody".

The result of Stalin's drive for modernity was to snuff out the innovation countenanced by Lenin and represented by artists such as Mayakovsky and Rodchenko. "Russia was depicted as a healthy .. .idyll" in the new state-approved style known as socialist realism. Graham-Dixon takes us down into the underground to see "the most powerful examples" of the new decoration. In Mayakovskaya Station, now one of the glories of the Moscow metro, Alexander Deneika designed a mosaic sequence of Soviet skies filled with planes. Among them a heroic parachutist, fresh-faced and exultant, is caught in dramatic foreshortening at the moment he pulls his ripcord. For Graham-Dixon, it's "a genuine masterpieces of art" produced under Stalin's tyranny.

More surprising perhaps we meet a 90-year old artist who stills believes communism could work. Nikolai Nikogosian, sculptor of heroic figures, has a studio full of models for unbuilt monuments. Graham-Dixon asks him if he'd ever had any qualms about working for the regime. "I very much like the ideology ... a country made up of workers and peasants with an intelligentsia. It's a great idea!. .. But they spoiled it themselves," he shouts, enraged. "And now what's the idea? Wealth, millions. They rob you .. .So has it got better now? No! It's got worse."

Communism may have gone, but the old structures remain in place. If an artist wants to be part of the system he has to toe the party line. One of the most successful is Zurab Tsereteli, president of the Russian Academy of Arts, whose work fills an entire wing of the academy. A life-size bronze statue of a glowing Putin is just one example of his work, a commission secured by his friend the mayor of Moscow. Its title: Healthy Spirit in Healthy Body. "It's as if the only thing this art believes is in power itself," Graham-Dixon comments.

Finally, we come to the confusion and chaos of Russia today and how it is producing some of the world's strangest art - from heroic sculptures of Russian leader Vladimir Putin to the insides of a giant erotic apple; from the recreation of the Imperial royal family facing the firing squad to sculpture in liquid oil; from Russia's embrace of the commercial art market to a return to Socialist Realism. Russia seems to stand on another brink of revolution.