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Description
The study presents a new perspective on one of the most debated issues now: Russia's imperial legacies, their continuity, and changes over the last decades. It offers an innovative way to understand how Vladimir Putin's regime is founded in Russian political traditions and popular emotions. The book consists in a comparison of ideological answers to two crises of the empire: the one from the early twentieth century, and the other one from the end of the century, 1991 - the fall of the Soviet Union. Beginning from Mikhail Menshikov, presented here as the first author of the Russkiy Mir, through Pyotr Savitsky, a "founding father" of contemporary Eurasianism, the book reevaluates Lenin and Stalin's imperial legacies as inspiring today's debates in Russia. A detailed analysis of messianisms of the post-Soviet intelligentsia and the revived obsession with a geopolitical game against the West lead up to the final chapter, which looks at the view of Russia and its history presented by Putin.
"Once I started reading the book, I couldn't stop it. It's a superb work, like other works of this author. It admirably combines historical analyses with contemporary commentaries. It situates today's Russia with a historical context. I've learned a great deal from reading this text. The prose is smooth and very readable."
Hiroaki Kuromiya
"Andrzej Nowak's excellent monograph about Russia's peculiar obsession with empire is exceptionally, if tragically, timely. Nowak takes us back 100 years for a detailed examination of the ideological threads of Russian imperial thinking in the fin-de-siècle and the revolutionary periods, and then fast-forwards to unpack the ubiquitous urge for what he calls "imperial re-conquest" after 1991. He develops a sophisticated perspective that analyzes the ideology of empire in Russia at once as a top-down construction as well as a mentality deeply rooted in popular culture and tradition. Meticulously researched and presented with great erudition, Russia's Empires offers a wealth of insights that help us better understand the sources of the catastrophe that today confronts the people of Ukraine, and Europe more broadly."
Mark Bassin Andrzej Nowak is professor at the Institute of History of the Jagiellonian University and the Polish Academy of Sciences. He lectured as a visiting professor at several universities in the United States of America, Great Britain, and the Czech Republic.
