THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR THAT EXPLODED IN 2014 COMPELLED me to write this book. But in many ways, it is a continuation of my earlier project on the history of East Slavic identities, which resulted in the publication of The Origins of the Slavic Nations by Cambridge University Press in 2006. For years since the publication of that book, I have been teaching a seminar on “East European Identities: Russia and Ukraine,” which helped me continue the inquiry begun in The Origins into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Russian annexation of the Crimea and the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine put the current debates about Russian history and identity into the center of my research and writing. Recent events also prompted me to turn what would otherwise have been a purely academic monograph into a work for a larger audience that tackles big questions of immediate political and cultural importance.
While this book has been long in the making, and a good part of it is based either on my earlier works or on research specifically done for this volume, much of my account and analysis relies on excellent work done by others. Many of them have been my friends and colleagues, to whom I owe many intellectual debts.
My understanding of Muscovite history and identities has been informed by the works of Charles J. Halperin, Valerie Kivelson, Nancy Kollman, and Donald Ostrowski. I found the monographs of Zenon E. Kohut and Barbara Skinner very useful in dealing with Russian imperial politics of the eighteenth century. The works of Serhiy Bilenky, Mikhail Dolbilov, Faith Hillis, Alexei Miller, Oleksii Tolochko, and Andrei Zorin helped me grasp the complexities of Russian imperial nationality and religious policies in the western borderlands of the Russian Empire. The writings of David Brandenberger, Terry Martin, Richard Pipes, Ana Procyk, Per Rudling, Roman Szporluk, and Serhy Yekelchyk provided the basis for my understanding of twentieth-century developments.
John LeDonne, Roman Procyk, and Igor Torbakov graciously agreed to read the manuscript and made a number of important corrections and comments. I would also like to thank Richard Wortman for inviting me to speak in his seminar on Russian imperial history at Columbia University, and one of the participants in the seminar, Nathaniel Knight, for sharing with me his archival findings on Osyp Bodiansky and Nikolai Nadezhdin. My colleague Tim Snyder from Yale and Jonathon Wyss from Beehive Mapping generously allowed me to use some of their maps in this book, as did the editors of the Cambridge University and University of Toronto presses. Myroslav Yurkevich did an excellent job of “Englishing” my prose. As always, my wife, Olena, has been the most careful and critical reader of the numerous drafts of this book and helped make it more reader-friendly.
I am grateful to Jill Kneerim for convincing Lara Heimert to add this work to the impressive list of historical writings published by Basic Books. Lara enthusiastically embraced the concept and, with her advice and careful editing, turned the manuscript into the book it is today. I was happy to work once again with the Basic Books team, including Betsy DeJesu, Roger Labrie, Alia Massoud, and Jennifer Thompson. At Basic Books I also had the pleasure of collaborating again with Kathy Streckfus and Collin Tracy. None of the people mentioned above have anything to do with any shortcomings in this book. If there are any, please blame them on the author or, even better, on the complexity of Russian history itself.