Russia's Empires

Valerie A. Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny

Russia's Empires explores the long history of Russia, the Soviet Union, and the present Russian Federation through the lens of empire, analyzing how and why Russia expanded to become the largest country on the globe and how it repeatedly fell under the sway of strong, authoritarian leaders. Authors Valerie A. Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny examine how imperial practices shaped choices and limited alternatives. Using the concept of empire, they look at the ways in which 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.

Russia's Empires

Valerie A. Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny

Description

Russia's Empires explores the long history of Russia, the Soviet Union, and the present Russian Federation through the lens of empire, analyzing how and why Russia expanded to become the largest country on the globe and how it repeatedly fell under the sway of strong, authoritarian leaders. Authors Valerie A. Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny examine how imperial practices shaped choices and limited alternatives. Using the concept of empire, they look at the ways in which 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.

Russia's Empires tackles the long history of the region, following the vicissitudes of empire--the absence, the coalescence, and the setbacks of imperial aspirations--across the centuries. The framework of empire allows the authors 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 extensive history in an imperial guise encourages students to pay attention 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

Valerie A. Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny

List of Maps
Preface
About the Authors

Introduction
Thinking About Empire
Empires
Russia's Imperial Formations

Chapter One: Before Empire: Early Rus' Visions of Diversity of Lands and Peoples
Before the State: The Peoples of Rus
New Models for Understanding Kiev Rus': Stateless Head or Galactic Polity
Appanage Rus' and Further Fragmentation
Mongol Khans and the Aura of Empire

Chapter Two: Imperial Beginnings: Muscovy
Building a State; Claiming an Empire
Ivan the Terrible: Imperial Principles in Practice
Muscovite Autocracy: Power and Obligation
Who Were the Muscovites? What was Rus'?
The People Speak: The Time of Troubles
Imperial Conquest and Control

Chapter Three: Disrupting the Easy Road from Empire to Nation State: A Theoretical Interlude
Nation, Nationalism, and the Discourse of the Nation

Chapter Four: Responsive Rule and Its Limits: Force and Sentiment in the Eighteenth Century
Succession, Consultation, and the Politics of Affirmation
The Petrine Revolution and the Imperial State
Peter's Successors: A Century of Women (and Children) on Top

Chapter Five: Russians' Identities in the Eighteenth Century: A Multitude of Possibilities
What does Russian mean? Thinking about Nations in the Eighteenth Century
A Multiplicity of Nations: The Peoples and Divisions of Empire
Imperial Expansion in the Eighteenth Century

Chapter Six: Imperial Russia in the Moment of the Nation, 1801-1855
A Kind of Constitution
Clash of Empires
Imperial Conservatism
The Decembrists
Official Nationality
The Intelligentsia
Expansion, Conquest, and Rebellion
Imagining the Russian "Nation": Between West and East

Chapter Seven: War, Reforms, Revolt, and Reaction
A Foolish War
The Great Reforms: Nations, Subjects, and Citizens
Participatory Politics and Categories of Difference
Who Are We? More Questions of National Identity
Russification, Diversity, and Empire
"Pacifying" the Peripheries
Conquering Central Asia
Counter-Reforms and Political Polarization
Empire and the Revolutionary Movement

Chapter Eight: Imperial Anxieties: 1905-1914
The Fate of Empires in the Twentieth Century
The Modernizing Empire and its Discontents
Imperial Overreach: Tsarist Modernization and Expansion
The First Revolution, 1905
When Nationalism Goes Public: Reimagining Empire

Chapter Nine: Clash and Collapse of Empires: 1914-1921
The Great War
Nationality and Class Across the Revolutionary Divide
Soviet Power
Soviet Nationality Policies

Chapter Ten: Making Nations, Soviet Style: 1921-1953
The Stalin Years, 1928-1953
Beating Peasants into Submission
Empire-State and State of Nations
Building National Bolshevism
From Hot War to Cold War: External Empire as Defensive Expansion
Cold War at Home: The Internal Empire
Soviet Discursive Power

Chapter Eleven: Imperial Impasses: Reform, Reaction, Revolution
Policy and Experience: Friendship of the Peoples
A Strange Empire
The Soviet Union in the World
Stagnation
Gorbachev and the Test of Perestroika

Chapter Twelve: The End of Empire, 1991-2016 . . . Or Not?
Vladimir Putin and the Rebuilding of the State
Democratic Recession in the Post-Soviet States
Post-Superpower Russia and NATO Expansion
Red Lines in the Near Abroad: Georgia and Ukraine

Conclusion

Russia's Empires

Valerie A. Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny

Author Information

Valerie A. Kivelson is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is the author of several books, including Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2013) and Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2006). She is the editor of Witchcraft Casebook: Magic in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, 15th-21st Centuries [Russian History/Histoire russe vol. 40, nos. 3-4 (2013)], and co-editor, with Joan Neuberger, of Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (2008).

Ronald Grigor Suny is William H. Sewell, Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan; Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago; and Senior Researcher at the Higher School of Economics, National Research University, St. Petersburg, Russia. He is the author or editor of eighteen books, including The Structure of Soviet History: Essays and Documents, Second Edition (OUP, 2013), and The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States, Second Edition (OUP, 2010).

Russia's Empires

Valerie A. Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny

Reviews and Awards

"Original, authoritative, and beautifully illustrated--no other short survey engages Russia's remarkable history of diversity as fully and effectively as Russia's Empires. This should become the go-to text for college courses. An impressive achievement."--Willard Sunderland, University of Cincinnati

"In this remarkable work, two of the leading historians of the 'imperial turn' have drawn on the past quarter-century of historical work and produced the most readable and insightful single volume of Russian history to date. Kivelson and Suny reveal how Russia's empires functioned as polities by employing not just coercive power but discursive power. In doing so, they illuminate how Russia also became an 'imperial nation,' one where national and imperial policies developed simultaneously yet frequently produced tensions. Russia's Empires is historical synthesis at its finest."--Stephen M. Norris, Miami University

"Kivelson and Suny give us a concise and elegant new way to think about the development of Russia as an enormously complex multi-ethnic, multi-religious Eurasian empire over the course of its 1,000-year history."--Shoshana Keller, Hamilton College

"Russia's Empires provides an elegant, stimulating, and comprehensive account of Russian history, placing the management of imperial diversity at the heart of the narrative. It is both readable and rigorous, and should help to introduce a new generation of students to the many fascinations of Russia's imperial past and present."--Alexander Stephen Morrison, Nazarbayev University

Russia's Empires

Valerie A. Kivelson and Ronald Grigor Suny

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A quiet but intense debate has been going on among the dwindling group of Russian experts in the United States and Europe, who are increasingly disturbed by the hyperbolic rhetoric about Russian leader Vladimir Putin during and since the American presidential campaign, in the media, and from public intellectuals. Putin has been described as Hitler, Stalin, without a soul, and even crazy.

Posted on January 10, 2017

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