How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History
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.

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How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History
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.

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How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History

How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History

How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History

How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History

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Overview

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.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781350284012
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date: 09/18/2025
Series: Russian Shorts
Pages: 184
Product dimensions: 5.08(w) x 7.79(h) x 1.00(d)

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).

Stephen M. Norris is Walter E. Havighurst Professor of Russian History and Director of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University (OH), USA. He is the author and editor of seven books, including A War of Images: Russian Popular Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity, 1812-1945 (2008) and Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, Patriotism (2012).

Polly Jones is Professor of Russian at University College, Oxford, UK. She has published extensively on Soviet literature and memory politics, including two monographs Myth, Memory, Trauma (2013) and Revolution Rekindled (2019), several edited volumes, including The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization (2006) and numerous articles. She is embarking on a new collaborative project about the concept of the '101st kilometre' in Soviet penal policy and practice.

Table of Contents

List of Maps
List of Tables
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I: Enlargement & Crisis
1. Muscovite Enlargement, 1300-1611
2. Russia Gets Really Big, 1611-1812
3. A (Mostly) Asian Century, 1812-1919
4. Still One-Sixth, 1919-1942
5. From Victory to Collapse, 1942-1991
6. The Pattern Continues, 1991-2024
7. Expansion-Why and How?
PART II: Complications
8. Russia Beyond
9. Russia Within
Epilogue: The End of Enlargement?
Bibliography
Index

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