After Empire: Nationalist Imagination and Symbolic Politics in Russia and Eurasia in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century

Igor Torbakov explores the nexus between various forms of Russian political imagination and the apparently cyclic process of decline and fall of Russia’s imperial polity over the last hundred years. While Russia’s historical process is by no means unique, two features of its historical development stand out. First, the country’s history is characterized by dramatic political discontinuity. In the past century, Russia changed its “historical skin” three times: following the disintegration of...