Volume 51, Number 15 · October 7, 2004
Russia: Unmanifest Destiny
By Robert Cottrell
Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe
by Willard Sunderland
Cornell University Press, 239 pp., $35.00
History, Memory, and Identity in Post-Soviet Estonia: The End of a Collective Farm
by Sigrid Rausing
Oxford University Press, 176 pp., $98.00
The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold
by Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy
Brookings Institution, 303 pp., $46.95; $18.95 (paper)
Foreigners have tended to see Russia as a state with an excessive appetite for land, whereas Russians have tended to see themselves as a naturally restless people. It is a matter of national pride to Russians, even of national identity, that their borders stretch for thousands of miles in every direction, enclosing a space far larger than they can settle or order. Between the middle of the sixteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century Russia added territory equal in size to the Netherlands, on average, every year.[1] In the eighteenth century it continued to expand, pushing deeper into the southern 'steppe'—the huge belt of largely treeless prairie running from the Volga region to the Black Sea—and partitioning Poland.
Review, 3792 words
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