How Russia Got Big - (Russian Shorts) by Paul W Werth (Hardcover)

About the Book

An exploration of two crucial questions for the history of Eurasia and the wider world: What territory did Russia occupy at different stages of its history-and why?

Book Synopsis

How Russia Got Big accounts for Russia's changing physical scope over some seven centuries.

Even people who know little about Russia know that it is big. This concise book tells the story of how it became so. Beginning with the small principality of Moscow in the early 14th century, Paul W. Werth recounts the construction of the world's largest country-from Muscovy and the Russian Empire through the USSR to today's Russian Federation-as well as its territorial retrenchment and even collapse on several occasions. Integrating geography, diplomacy, war, and imperial politics, the book ranges across three continents and recounts diverse interactions with neighboring polities and peoples. Werth likewise contemplates different ways of conceptualizing territorial possession and related understandings of sovereignty, authority, and belonging. The result, illustrated with 29 original maps, is a grand story from a bird's-eye view that reveals deeper rhythms to Russia's territorial history involving alternations of enlargement and crisis-ones that continue in our own day.

Review Quotes

"A compelling overview of a critically important topic by a major scholar in the field. This book is must reading for anyone interested in the deep historical context of the Ukrainian war and problems of territory in Russia, past and present" --Willard Sunderland, Henry R. Winkler Professor of Modern History, University of Cincinnati, USA

About the Author

Paul W. Werth is Professor of History and Department Chair at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA. Since 2009, he has been serving as Editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, a leading international journal. His books include At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia's Volga-Kama Region (2002), Orthodoxy, Non-Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy: Sketches on the History of Religious Diversity in the Russian Empire (2012) [in Russian], and The Tsar's Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (2014).