History of the Russian State from Gostomysl to Timashev

History of the Russian State from Gostomysl to Timashev (История Государства Российского от Гостомысла до Тимашева) is a parody poem in 83 verses by the Russian poet and dramatist Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, written in 1868. Banned by censors and published for the first time only in 1883 by Russkaya Starina, eight years after the author's death, it became one of the best known examples of political satire in 19th century Russia, popular with Russian intellectuals of many generations.

The poem comes from the time when Aleksey K. Tolstoy was greatly concerned with Russian history and its meaning for the age in which he lived. As W.E.Harkins pointed out, Tolstoy was neither a Slavophile nor a Westernizer, but shared certain views of each camp, admiring both the Western-type constitutional monarchy and the Kievan Rus' period in Russian history, seeing the latter as heroic and progressive. Unlike the Slavophiles, though, he held the Varangian influence in the earliest period of Russian history as beneficial and abhorred the era of Moskovia's rise which led to the centralised Russian state and the Golden Horde yoke which he regarded to be the cause of all Russian woes. Tolstoy was repelled by the whole of the Russia's history down to and including his own times.

The History of the Russian State was written in 1868 and is considered to have been inspired by the two poems published in the anthology Russian Hidden Literature of the XIX Century (1861), compiled by Nikolay Ogarev in London, one being "The Fairytale", another – "As Our Great Novgorod...", the latter by Mikhail Dmitriev. Karamzin's History also served, apparently, as the inspiration. During his lifetime Tolstoy made no attempt to publish the piece. The manuscript circulated privately between 1868, when it was completed, and 1883, when it first appeared in print.