Combining the talents and expert knowledge of an early modern
historian of Russia and of a Soviet specialist, Russia's Empires is
the first major study of the entire sweep of Russian history from
its earliest formations to the rule of Vladimir Putin. Looking
through the lens of empire, which the authors conceptualize as a
state based on institutionalized differentiation, inequitable
hierarchy, and bonds of reciprocity between ruler and ruled,
Kivelson and Suny displace the centrality of nation and nationalism
in the Russian and Soviet story. Yet their work demonstrates how
imperial polities were key to the creation of national
identifications and processes that both hindered and fostered what
would become nations and nation-states. Using the concept of
empire, they look at the ways that ordinary people imagined their
position within a non-democratic polity - whether the Muscovite
tsardom or the Soviet Union - and what concessions the rulers had
to make, or appear to make, in order to establish their authority
and preserve their rule. While other works in the existing
historical literature have applied the concept of empire to the
study of Russian history, the story told here is in several ways
unique. First, the book tackles the long stretch of the history of
the region, from the murkiest beginnings to its most recent
yesterday, and follows the vicissitudes of empire, the absence, the
coalescence, the setbacks of imperial aspirations, across the
centuries. The authors do not impose the category, but find it a
productive lens for tracking developments over time. Second, the
framework of empire allows them to address pressing questions of
how various forms of non-democratic governance managed to succeed
and survive, or, alternatively, what caused them to collapse and
disappear. Studying Russia's long history in an imperial guise
encourages the reader to attend to forms of inclusion, displays of
reciprocity, and manifestations of ideology that might otherwise go
unnoted, overlooked under the bleak record of coercion and
oppression that so often characterizes ideas about Russia. Russia's
Empires follows imperial patterns of rule through distinction,
inclusion through reciprocity, and structures for legitimacy in
order to trace the experiences of empire by both rulers and ruled.
The book traces the coalescence and development of imperial
relationships across more than a thousand years. This book brings
histories of the peripheries and of the growth and rule of empire
into central narratives based in Moscow and Leningrad or
Petersburg, in order to understand all the pieces as part of an
interrelated whole. The book brings together stories of despots and
dictators at the center with those of people of all classes,
conditions, and nationalities who jointly made the Russian Empire.
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