Book description
A fundamental dimension of the Russian historical experience has been
the diversity of its people and cultures, religions and languages,
landscapes and economies. For six centuries this diversity was
contained within the sprawling territories of the Russian Empire and
the Soviet Union, and it persists today in the entwined states and
societies of the former USSR. Russia's People of Empire explores this
enduring multicultural world through life stories of 31
individuals-famous and obscure, high born and low, men and women-that
illuminate the cross-cultural exchanges at work from the late 1500s to
post-Soviet Russia. Working on the scale of a single life, these
microhistories shed new light on the multicultural character of the
Russian Empire, which both shaped individuals' lives and in turn was
shaped by them.
"This is the first book, to my knowledge, to present such
compelling, nuanced and sustained portraits of personalities stamped
with the varied practices of Russian/Soviet imperial
multiculturalism.... I anticipate that it will become a classic."
-Roberts Crews, Stanford University
Stephen M. Norris is Associate Professor of History at Miami
University of Ohio. He is author of A War of Images: Russian Popular
Prints, Wartime Culture, and National Identity and editor (with Helena
Goscilo) of Preserving Petersburg: History, Memory, Nostalgia (IUP,
2008) and (with Zara Torlone) of Insiders and Outsiders in Russian
Cinema (IUP, 2008).
Willard Sunderland is Associate Professor of History at the
University of Cincinnati and author of Taming the Wild Field:
Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe.
