Russia: People and Empire

This impressive book seeks to provide a new interpretative framework
for Russian history in the pre-Revolutionary period. Although pursued
with great cogency and mastery of the scholarship., both ancient and
modern, the central theme is disarmingly simple: the peculiar historical
course of Russia in the modern age was determined above all by a cru-
cial and ever-widening gap between two different concepts of the Russian
nation, one (Rossiia) based round the imperial ideal as formulated in the
seventeenth and eighteenth century and supported by an increasingly
westernised elite; the other (Rus') an older version of Russian identity,
more directly connected to the people, the language, and pre-imperial
Russia. At every stage of Russia's development, this imperial mission cut
across and obstructed developments which might have enabled Russia
to have followed the path which led to nation-building elsewhere in
Europe. The failure to provide a mutually acceptable vision of Russian
identity drove the elites and masses ever further apart, blocking the emer-
gence of a civic nation, and was one of the fundamental causes of the
collapse of 1917.