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Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals
How does one empire differ from another? Why do empires rise and fall? What has made empires flourish in some eras and regions of the world but not in others? In this broad and ambitious book, Dominic Lieven explores the place and meaning of empire from ancient Rome to the present. The central focus of the book is Russia and the rise and fall of the Tsarist and the Soviet Empires. The overwhelming majority of works on empire concentrate on the European maritime powers. Lieven's comparative approach highlights the important role played by Russia in the expansion of Europe and its rise to global dominance. The book contrasts the nature, strategies, and fate of empire in Russia with that of its major rivals, the Habsburg, Ottoman, and British empires, and considers a broad range of other cases from ancient China and Rome to the present-day United States, Indonesia, India, and the European Union. Many of the dilemmas of empire persist in today's world, and Lieven throws new light on some of the most intractable current examples, including the crisis in the former Soviet Union, the troubles in Ulster, and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. This major examination of the imperial experience presents history on the grandest scale, combining formidable erudition with stimulating readability.
528 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2000
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About the author
Dominic Lieven
19 books104 followersDominic Lieven is Professor of Russian studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, a Fellow of the British Academy and of Trinity College, Cambridge.
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December 6, 2010
Most governments are in truth private societies pitted against each other in the international arena and giving in the meantime at home exhibits of eloquence and more rarely of enterprise… (George Santayana, Reason in Society)
The above would make an excellent epigraph for Dominic Lieven’s study of Russian imperial elites in six centuries of competition with everyone from the Tartar Khan to the nuclear-armed North Americans. Like a philosopher Lieven watches on heights from which the monumental features of politics—elites, masses, polities, dominions, empires, civilizations—can be seen and their contours compared. But for all the laconic loftiness of his survey, Lieven never skims over the chancy splashes of individuals, the pathologies of the great rulers or tyrants without whom, in Cioran’s words, “the idea or the course of empire would be inconceivable”—an observation that applies to Russia more than to almost any other nation.
The realm of Muscovy began as an ancestor-worshipping pagan periphery ruled by descendents of the “semi-mythical Viking chieftain Rurik.” During the 13th and 14th centuries, its princes bowed before the Mongols and the tribute-collectors of their successor state, the Golden Horde. In the 15th century, united after a princely civil war, and infected by “Byzantine monarchial ideology and symbolism,” Muscovy began to expand into the vacuum left by the collapse of Byzantium and the decay of the Golden Horde. Under Ivan the Terrible, it conquered the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan. Under Michael Romanov, the dynasty’s founder, it drove off the scavenging Swedes and Poles who gnawed at Russia in the aftermath of Ivan. Under Peter the Great, cannon-caster and navy-builder, teacher of Western warcraft, Russia’s new European-style professional army (peasants conscripted for life) stormed to the Baltic Sea, annexed modern Estonia and Latvia, and recruited Baltic Germans as the super-efficient administrative cadre needed to staff the bureaux of the new imperial capital and fleet base, St. Petersburg. Under Catherine, Russia took a big bite out of Poland, added much of modern day Ukraine and Belarus, thrashed the Ottomans in two wars to gain access to the Black Sea, and finally asserted its might on the grassy steppe, that highway of nomadic raiders since Mongol times. Under Alexander I, Russia destroyed the grandest army Napoleon was ever to field, and contributed 200,000 men, headed by the Tsar in person, to the reactionary alliance that in 1813-14 pushed Napoleon out of central Europe, invaded France and breached the gates of Paris.
Peter the Great wanted Russia to compete as one of Europe’s Absolutist kingdoms, and as such Russia was spectacularly successful from Peter’s reign to the Napoleonic wars. But as industrial capitalism and mass politics accelerated the 19th century beyond the grasp of all but the most nimble statesmen (and depressed visionary poets), the conservative Russian empire began to lose ground. For one, the military technology essential to successful statecraft was emerging from a century of deceptive stasis; as John Keegan once noted, the infantries of Marlborough and of Wellington, Britain’s two great generals, fought the French with essentially the same musket, though a century apart in time. By the commence of the Crimean War (1854-56), in which Russia took on Britain, France, Austria and the Ottomans all at once, things had changed. In a recent review of Orlando Figes’ Crimea: The Last Crusade, Lieven mentions that the British redcoat’s rifled musket—the Pattern 1853 Lee-Enfield, which in Confederate hands was to shatter so many Union assaults in the American Civil War—outranged every weapon in the Russian arsenal, including its field artillery. Russia’s defeat in the Crimea thus prompted the second of the three great cycles of top-down Westernization Lieven sees as the engines of modern Russian history.
The reformist Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861 but Russia’s imperial elites were still hobbled by absolutist habits of mind. They still viewed the masses as a vegetative peasantry, an unprotesting instrument, at a time when the great fact of European societies, even of comparatively backward Russia, was the spread of literacy and urbanization:
In the past, to control the masses, to squeeze them of revenue and conscripts, it had been enough to command the allegiance of their local lords; by contrast, the literate, urbanized, master-less citizen had to be wooed more or less directly—had to be granted the vote, had to be allowed the illusion of schooling, had to be convinced that the interests of the nation were synonymous with those of the empire. Lieven doesn’t descend to inspect the citizen co-opted by 19th century imperial elites, but he’s a familiar enough figure: literate, but only basically so; essentially provincial, yet emboldened to pronounce upon the destinies of distant peoples; lowly and ineffectual, but aggrandized vicariously through ethno-nationalist identification with hero-statesmen, Napoleons and Bismarcks. Adolf Hitler is of course the hellish mutation of the type. An Austrian petit-bourgeois who identified wholly with the German imperial idea, Hitler was given the keys to the kingdom by social and military elites who, while they disdained his origins and style, could not ignore his re-enchantment of the masses with dreams of empire, at a time when they might have been disillusioned. Little could these elites suspect that Hitler was to realize and orchestrate all their primordial nightmares (the cordon of foes, ravenous Asiatic hordes, the extinction of the unified German state). It is this operatic self-immolation, this piece by piece dismantling of his own ideal that in Cioran’s judgment made Hitler “unique as a monster” and “the most sinister character in history.”
Ironically, the absolutist rein-tightening and imposed Westernization of Peter and Catherine, integral to Russia’s success in the 18th century, disrupted Russian society so profoundly, so polarized masses and elites, that the relaxation or refinement of coercion required of 19th century imperial elites who would rule literate subjects was simply too dangerous to fully implement. Alexander II, the liberal Tsar, emancipator of the serfs, was blown up by revolutionaries the day after he drafted plans to establish a parliament; and when the Poles were given a longer leash, they took the opportunity to revolt. Conservative advisers warned the last Tsars “that only an authoritarian police state could hold Russian society together and preserve the existence of its propertied elites”—advice Lieven thinks not necessarily wrong. This theme of socially disruptive modernization, successful in the short run but weakening the legitimacy of elites over time, is one Liven also identifies in the arc of the Soviet phase of Russian empire. The Soviets, above all Stalin, industrialized the economy and urbanized the populace, but at a traumatic cost. By 1991, Lieven concludes, “the Russian people had suffered so much in the cause of communism and empire that they were totally unwilling to suffer further in defense of either.”
The above would make an excellent epigraph for Dominic Lieven’s study of Russian imperial elites in six centuries of competition with everyone from the Tartar Khan to the nuclear-armed North Americans. Like a philosopher Lieven watches on heights from which the monumental features of politics—elites, masses, polities, dominions, empires, civilizations—can be seen and their contours compared. But for all the laconic loftiness of his survey, Lieven never skims over the chancy splashes of individuals, the pathologies of the great rulers or tyrants without whom, in Cioran’s words, “the idea or the course of empire would be inconceivable”—an observation that applies to Russia more than to almost any other nation.
The realm of Muscovy began as an ancestor-worshipping pagan periphery ruled by descendents of the “semi-mythical Viking chieftain Rurik.” During the 13th and 14th centuries, its princes bowed before the Mongols and the tribute-collectors of their successor state, the Golden Horde. In the 15th century, united after a princely civil war, and infected by “Byzantine monarchial ideology and symbolism,” Muscovy began to expand into the vacuum left by the collapse of Byzantium and the decay of the Golden Horde. Under Ivan the Terrible, it conquered the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan. Under Michael Romanov, the dynasty’s founder, it drove off the scavenging Swedes and Poles who gnawed at Russia in the aftermath of Ivan. Under Peter the Great, cannon-caster and navy-builder, teacher of Western warcraft, Russia’s new European-style professional army (peasants conscripted for life) stormed to the Baltic Sea, annexed modern Estonia and Latvia, and recruited Baltic Germans as the super-efficient administrative cadre needed to staff the bureaux of the new imperial capital and fleet base, St. Petersburg. Under Catherine, Russia took a big bite out of Poland, added much of modern day Ukraine and Belarus, thrashed the Ottomans in two wars to gain access to the Black Sea, and finally asserted its might on the grassy steppe, that highway of nomadic raiders since Mongol times. Under Alexander I, Russia destroyed the grandest army Napoleon was ever to field, and contributed 200,000 men, headed by the Tsar in person, to the reactionary alliance that in 1813-14 pushed Napoleon out of central Europe, invaded France and breached the gates of Paris.
Peter the Great wanted Russia to compete as one of Europe’s Absolutist kingdoms, and as such Russia was spectacularly successful from Peter’s reign to the Napoleonic wars. But as industrial capitalism and mass politics accelerated the 19th century beyond the grasp of all but the most nimble statesmen (and depressed visionary poets), the conservative Russian empire began to lose ground. For one, the military technology essential to successful statecraft was emerging from a century of deceptive stasis; as John Keegan once noted, the infantries of Marlborough and of Wellington, Britain’s two great generals, fought the French with essentially the same musket, though a century apart in time. By the commence of the Crimean War (1854-56), in which Russia took on Britain, France, Austria and the Ottomans all at once, things had changed. In a recent review of Orlando Figes’ Crimea: The Last Crusade, Lieven mentions that the British redcoat’s rifled musket—the Pattern 1853 Lee-Enfield, which in Confederate hands was to shatter so many Union assaults in the American Civil War—outranged every weapon in the Russian arsenal, including its field artillery. Russia’s defeat in the Crimea thus prompted the second of the three great cycles of top-down Westernization Lieven sees as the engines of modern Russian history.
The reformist Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861 but Russia’s imperial elites were still hobbled by absolutist habits of mind. They still viewed the masses as a vegetative peasantry, an unprotesting instrument, at a time when the great fact of European societies, even of comparatively backward Russia, was the spread of literacy and urbanization:
Within Europe in the nineteenth century nationalism was increasingly adopted in most polities by conservative elites and right-wing parties. Bismarck and Disraeli were in the forefront of this process. In part nationalism served as a popular doctrine with which to challenge the potential hold on the masses of radical and socialist ideologies. In part too it was a natural response of leaders trying to retain a sense of solidarity and purpose in a community whose traditional values and identities had been transformed by urbanization, mass education and work in the factory. The old dynastic, religious and local loyalties which might suffice for a peasant needed to be fused with something broader and more inclusive for his newspaper-reading, city-dwelling children.
In the past, to control the masses, to squeeze them of revenue and conscripts, it had been enough to command the allegiance of their local lords; by contrast, the literate, urbanized, master-less citizen had to be wooed more or less directly—had to be granted the vote, had to be allowed the illusion of schooling, had to be convinced that the interests of the nation were synonymous with those of the empire. Lieven doesn’t descend to inspect the citizen co-opted by 19th century imperial elites, but he’s a familiar enough figure: literate, but only basically so; essentially provincial, yet emboldened to pronounce upon the destinies of distant peoples; lowly and ineffectual, but aggrandized vicariously through ethno-nationalist identification with hero-statesmen, Napoleons and Bismarcks. Adolf Hitler is of course the hellish mutation of the type. An Austrian petit-bourgeois who identified wholly with the German imperial idea, Hitler was given the keys to the kingdom by social and military elites who, while they disdained his origins and style, could not ignore his re-enchantment of the masses with dreams of empire, at a time when they might have been disillusioned. Little could these elites suspect that Hitler was to realize and orchestrate all their primordial nightmares (the cordon of foes, ravenous Asiatic hordes, the extinction of the unified German state). It is this operatic self-immolation, this piece by piece dismantling of his own ideal that in Cioran’s judgment made Hitler “unique as a monster” and “the most sinister character in history.”
Ironically, the absolutist rein-tightening and imposed Westernization of Peter and Catherine, integral to Russia’s success in the 18th century, disrupted Russian society so profoundly, so polarized masses and elites, that the relaxation or refinement of coercion required of 19th century imperial elites who would rule literate subjects was simply too dangerous to fully implement. Alexander II, the liberal Tsar, emancipator of the serfs, was blown up by revolutionaries the day after he drafted plans to establish a parliament; and when the Poles were given a longer leash, they took the opportunity to revolt. Conservative advisers warned the last Tsars “that only an authoritarian police state could hold Russian society together and preserve the existence of its propertied elites”—advice Lieven thinks not necessarily wrong. This theme of socially disruptive modernization, successful in the short run but weakening the legitimacy of elites over time, is one Liven also identifies in the arc of the Soviet phase of Russian empire. The Soviets, above all Stalin, industrialized the economy and urbanized the populace, but at a traumatic cost. By 1991, Lieven concludes, “the Russian people had suffered so much in the cause of communism and empire that they were totally unwilling to suffer further in defense of either.”
April 17, 2017
Interesting attempt to compare the major European Empires (including the Ottoman) with the emphasis on Russia and the Soviet Union. The book is necessary high level and based on the secondary sources. I found some comparisons patchy. However, I learned quote a lot about Habsburg Empire. It might be considered as a partial prototype for the European Union.
It may be considered a good intro into the comparative analysis of European imperialism and the reasons for its (at least partial) collapse.
It may be considered a good intro into the comparative analysis of European imperialism and the reasons for its (at least partial) collapse.
July 1, 2022
Lieven overreaches himself by devoting entire chapters to the Ottoman, Habsburg and British examples on top of dispersed but punctual comparisons amidst his knowledgeable text on the Russian / Soviet empire.
Reading this in 2022, his 2002 forecast that renewed expansionist ambitions by the Russian Federation would clash themselves to pieces against a well-organised European union, compared to 1939-41, tastes bitter indeed. Get off your ass, NATO!
Reading this in 2022, his 2002 forecast that renewed expansionist ambitions by the Russian Federation would clash themselves to pieces against a well-organised European union, compared to 1939-41, tastes bitter indeed. Get off your ass, NATO!
May 30, 2016
An oddly organized book that seemed to be multiple books patched together. Lieven's goal is to discuss the Russian empire and its rivals but his main focus is obviously meant to be Russia since he is a Russian historian and "Russian" is in the subtitle. But the actual book seems to jump between being about Russian empire, and comparing this empire to others, and "books" about the other empires. He goes many pages without mentioning Russia. There were times when I forgot what the book was "about." He has many interesting things to say but I think it could have been better organized in a way that would have taught more.
July 12, 2013
Dominic Lieven, the historian of Imperial Russia (he is the author a very cogent biography of Czar Nicholas II), has written a long book on a big subject. In spite of the broad title ("Empire"), the book, as suggested by the sub-title, is really a comparison between modern continental European empires (Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Soviet) and a modern Atlantic Empire (British). He also takes a couple of stabs at the Chinese empire, although wisely steers away from making many points about this subject, which is likely to suck in the unwary. He does not attempt a definition of empire as such, and while acknowledging the socio-geographical school of thought (pioneered by Montesquieu and currently incarnated in Huntington), largely steers clear of "German-philosophy-type-First-Principles" and such. This is a relief, because he has much to say just looking at actual facts.
Although he concludes that, after the (probably terminal) eclipse of France as a continental great power after the First Empire, the real competition is between Germany and Russia, and that when one is in the ascendant (as was Germany in 1871-1945 and since 1990) the other one is in the relapse (Russia was ascendant between the Vienna Congress and the creation of the German Reich). While his arguments are intuitively appealing, Lieven does not say enough about Germany proper (the "Drang Nach Osten", for example) to support this contention, given that his focus is on the Southern part of cultural Germany, the Austro-Hungarian empire.
As a historian of Ukraine, Lieven observes that the Russian heartland is Ukraine and that Russia may not be a great power separated from Ukraine, which raises the ugly likelihood of a future anexation of Ukraine and other neighbouring territories of historical, cultural or military significance by the extant Russia, not unlike what Germany did with the Saarland, the Sudetenland and other regions, prior to invading Poland and precipitating we-know-what. What is clear is that Russia is not likely to remain within its current borders, which have stripped out virtually all territorial gains made by the successive Russian and Soviet Regimes since Peter the Great at least.
He points out that Russia has experienced three modernization waves: one, starting with Peter the Great and probably "petering" out with the disappointments of Alexander I and the regression of Nicholas I (i.e., circa 1700 to 1825), the second one starting with the liberation of the serfs by Alexander II and extending to the Soviet times, winding down with the ossification of the regime with Breznev and Andropov after a failure by Kruschev to re-ignite the revolutionary fires (1861-1964), and a third one started by Gorbachov and still apparently in full swing (1985-Present). Given that each renewal was accompanied by a period or Russian Hegemony (the first one culminated during the second half of the XVIII century, under Catherine the Great and the second one in the 1940s and 1950s, under Stalin and Kruschev), it is clear that Lieven believes that a Russian comeback is waiting around the corner, hard is it may be to believe this now.
Very perceptively, Lieven notes that growing unrest with Islamic nations can only lead to a rapprochement between the USA and Russia. This was published in 2000, well before S-11 and the current entente cordiale between the 2 great nations.
He also has a few things to say concerning current multi-lingual "empires", such as Malaysia, Indonesia and (surprise, surpise) the European Union. As may be expected with an author writing on this subject, he has antipathy towards nationalism and thinks that such "empires" may yet make a comeback. But he acknowledges that they are not sustainable absent an over-arching ideology powerful to overcome nationalism, such as counter-reformation in the Habsburg Empire in XVI and XVII centuries or Communism in the Soviet Union (or Nazism in the Third Reich, or Islam in the Ottoman Empire). Whether contemporary multinational "empires" have such ideologies is not obvious (particularly defficient in this respect is the European Union).
Although Lieven is erudite and writes engagingly, and in spite of the interest of his mildly revisionist views on the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, I missed some of the other empires that competed with the Russians in their quest for continental mastery. A small chapter dealing with the Baltics (Polish, Swedish and Lithuanians) would have been useful. A major rival empire that fought Russia not once but twice within the XX century, Japan, is barely mentioned. And British rivalry with Russia in the context of the "Big Game" (over Afghanistan) also is mentioned only in passing.
Still, it's difficult not to like such a sane writer, who clearly sees that apparatchik kleptocrats such as those lording it over most of the former Soviet Union (and some of its satellites) are probably preferable to gaunt, angry cultural nationalists who are still waiting on the wings and sometimes getting their licks in (when the two groups merge, as in Milosevic's Serbia, the results are scary indeed). The same point was made perhaps more humoristically by P.J. O'Rourke in some of his earlier books. He sees very clearly that the Soviet Union was just a nastier version of the Russian empire and faced some of the same problems, such as dealing with large, rich, culturally distinct "colonies" (such as Poland). He clearly misses the multi-cultural empires such as the Austro-Hungarian empire (a short detour on the Spanish-Italo-Belgian empire would not have been amiss either), which he believes looks positively dazzling when compared with the hellishness of Hitler's Ostmark and the colonization of Soviet times. Whether his domesticated empires (of which the European Union is the most recent version) will survive is anybody's guess.
Although he concludes that, after the (probably terminal) eclipse of France as a continental great power after the First Empire, the real competition is between Germany and Russia, and that when one is in the ascendant (as was Germany in 1871-1945 and since 1990) the other one is in the relapse (Russia was ascendant between the Vienna Congress and the creation of the German Reich). While his arguments are intuitively appealing, Lieven does not say enough about Germany proper (the "Drang Nach Osten", for example) to support this contention, given that his focus is on the Southern part of cultural Germany, the Austro-Hungarian empire.
As a historian of Ukraine, Lieven observes that the Russian heartland is Ukraine and that Russia may not be a great power separated from Ukraine, which raises the ugly likelihood of a future anexation of Ukraine and other neighbouring territories of historical, cultural or military significance by the extant Russia, not unlike what Germany did with the Saarland, the Sudetenland and other regions, prior to invading Poland and precipitating we-know-what. What is clear is that Russia is not likely to remain within its current borders, which have stripped out virtually all territorial gains made by the successive Russian and Soviet Regimes since Peter the Great at least.
He points out that Russia has experienced three modernization waves: one, starting with Peter the Great and probably "petering" out with the disappointments of Alexander I and the regression of Nicholas I (i.e., circa 1700 to 1825), the second one starting with the liberation of the serfs by Alexander II and extending to the Soviet times, winding down with the ossification of the regime with Breznev and Andropov after a failure by Kruschev to re-ignite the revolutionary fires (1861-1964), and a third one started by Gorbachov and still apparently in full swing (1985-Present). Given that each renewal was accompanied by a period or Russian Hegemony (the first one culminated during the second half of the XVIII century, under Catherine the Great and the second one in the 1940s and 1950s, under Stalin and Kruschev), it is clear that Lieven believes that a Russian comeback is waiting around the corner, hard is it may be to believe this now.
Very perceptively, Lieven notes that growing unrest with Islamic nations can only lead to a rapprochement between the USA and Russia. This was published in 2000, well before S-11 and the current entente cordiale between the 2 great nations.
He also has a few things to say concerning current multi-lingual "empires", such as Malaysia, Indonesia and (surprise, surpise) the European Union. As may be expected with an author writing on this subject, he has antipathy towards nationalism and thinks that such "empires" may yet make a comeback. But he acknowledges that they are not sustainable absent an over-arching ideology powerful to overcome nationalism, such as counter-reformation in the Habsburg Empire in XVI and XVII centuries or Communism in the Soviet Union (or Nazism in the Third Reich, or Islam in the Ottoman Empire). Whether contemporary multinational "empires" have such ideologies is not obvious (particularly defficient in this respect is the European Union).
Although Lieven is erudite and writes engagingly, and in spite of the interest of his mildly revisionist views on the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, I missed some of the other empires that competed with the Russians in their quest for continental mastery. A small chapter dealing with the Baltics (Polish, Swedish and Lithuanians) would have been useful. A major rival empire that fought Russia not once but twice within the XX century, Japan, is barely mentioned. And British rivalry with Russia in the context of the "Big Game" (over Afghanistan) also is mentioned only in passing.
Still, it's difficult not to like such a sane writer, who clearly sees that apparatchik kleptocrats such as those lording it over most of the former Soviet Union (and some of its satellites) are probably preferable to gaunt, angry cultural nationalists who are still waiting on the wings and sometimes getting their licks in (when the two groups merge, as in Milosevic's Serbia, the results are scary indeed). The same point was made perhaps more humoristically by P.J. O'Rourke in some of his earlier books. He sees very clearly that the Soviet Union was just a nastier version of the Russian empire and faced some of the same problems, such as dealing with large, rich, culturally distinct "colonies" (such as Poland). He clearly misses the multi-cultural empires such as the Austro-Hungarian empire (a short detour on the Spanish-Italo-Belgian empire would not have been amiss either), which he believes looks positively dazzling when compared with the hellishness of Hitler's Ostmark and the colonization of Soviet times. Whether his domesticated empires (of which the European Union is the most recent version) will survive is anybody's guess.
December 24, 2010
A book-long compare-and-contrast essay about the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, the Habsburg Empire, the British Empire and other empires. The chapter about the Soviet Union is generally accurate, though far too short for so inexhaustible a topic. Lieven says, correctly in my opinion, that the territories annexed by the Soviet Union after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact were a millstone around its neck, since the peoples who live there, the Balts, the Western Ukrainians and the Moldovans, desired for it to break up more than anyone. I must add that now, 70 years after the annexations and World War II, there is a war of interpretations of these historical events between Russia and the part of Ukraine inside the 1939 borders on the one hand, and the Baltic countries and the part of Ukraine annexed in 1939 on the other hand.
July 30, 2016
Про РИ написано едва ли не меньше, чем про британскую империю. Примерно по 30%, остальное - про Османскую, А.-В., чуть-чуть про Китай.
Книга будет интересна тем, кто вообще ничего не знает про империи, изложение очень обобщенное, без подробного анализа хоть чего-либо, без развернутых цитат и т.п. (что я и ожидал увидеть).
Позиция у автора настолько взвешенная и аккуратная, что её почти незаметно. Ни одной серьезной и интересной идеи на почти 700 страниц, которую хотелось бы обсудить.
Если, конечно, не воспринимать как новую идеи, что империи как были похожи, так и отличались, несли не только зло и порабощение, но и что-то другое, и в разных местах проводили разную политику, и так далее.
Переводчик раз десять поправляет Ливена в важных "мелочах" (Ливен, например, говорит, что русских не изгоняли насильственно из бССРР, это не так, случаи были, в ср. Азии).
Книга будет интересна тем, кто вообще ничего не знает про империи, изложение очень обобщенное, без подробного анализа хоть чего-либо, без развернутых цитат и т.п. (что я и ожидал увидеть).
Позиция у автора настолько взвешенная и аккуратная, что её почти незаметно. Ни одной серьезной и интересной идеи на почти 700 страниц, которую хотелось бы обсудить.
Если, конечно, не воспринимать как новую идеи, что империи как были похожи, так и отличались, несли не только зло и порабощение, но и что-то другое, и в разных местах проводили разную политику, и так далее.
Переводчик раз десять поправляет Ливена в важных "мелочах" (Ливен, например, говорит, что русских не изгоняли насильственно из бССРР, это не так, случаи были, в ср. Азии).
April 12, 2008
Excellent analysis. Well written book. It's a very broad topic, but he handles it with maturity and honesty. Fascinating read for those interested in any of the world's major empires. In addition there is some discussion of general themes such as the definition of empire, what characteristics they can be said to share, and past trends of interest when thinking about the future of the United States.
May 10, 2013
Простенький, но интересный обзор судеб европейских сверхдержав 16-20 веков.
December 24, 2013
I feel a warning is necessary to other readers. I started reading this book to find out about the development of the Russian and soviet empires. I've since discovered that it spends the first one hundred pages and more discussing Chinese Roman and other empires rather than Russia's. Not what I wanted! From other reviews written there is supposedly ungenerous coverage of large elements of the Russian empire such as Ukraine and the Central Asian states. I have subsequently abandoned this book. I found the writing style of the author rather dry for such a supposedly interesting subject. I'll be looking elsewhere for a history of this empire.
November 21, 2022
We open our read with the author's preface which informs us that it is important to clarify what he does not mean by empire: "The more usual definition sees empire as the political and cultural domination, and the economic exploitation, of the colonial periphery by the metropolitan state and nation. This definition owes most to twentieth-century Marxist scholarship." These arguments about empire, as we see, went to the heart of Cold War polemics." Empire in our current world comprises entities/organizations that join in focus, purpose, and semi-political endeavors for a global-centric mechanism of causation-control.
"Samuel Huntington of Harvard is a contemporary of America's equivalent to Oswald Spengler or Arnold Toynbee... In his view American cultural influence is shallow and largely confined to elites, whose legitimacy in their own civilizations is limited... The American dream appalls members of some civilizations because of the values it embodies, and angers others because it remains so unobtainable for themselves."
We see the ostracism of those who choose to not comply with 'the narrative' or adhere to crowd mentality or believe 'facts' presented without empirical verification as the 'anti' peoples rather than as those historic intellectuals who do accept blindly what is presented to them.
- Excerpts:
"The core element in Slavophilism was an attack on modern Western society for its materialism, its individualism and its secularism. The West might in short run be rich and dynamic but in the longer term in the Slavophiles' view a community needed to be more than just a loose association of anonymous individuals hell-bent on acquiring wealth and restrained by nothing but fear of legal sanctions."
"Most of the great states discussed in this book were happy to be called empires. The Soviet Union is the exception. Its rulers understood empire and imperialism in Leninist terms, in other words as the last refuge of a capitalist world on the eve of socialist revolution. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the great enemy of this world, the leader of the socialist camp. To call the USSR an empire -- to equate it, for example with tsarist Russia, was seen as a mere propaganda ploy of the capitalist enemy in the Cold War."
- Other works that may be of interest:
Yermak’s Campaign in Siberia by Terence Armstrong
Peter the Great: The compelling story of the man who created modern Russia, founded St Petersburg and made his country part of Europe by Robert K. Massie
Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K Massie
Putin's Playbook: Russia's Secret Plan to Defeat America by Rebekah Koffler
"Samuel Huntington of Harvard is a contemporary of America's equivalent to Oswald Spengler or Arnold Toynbee... In his view American cultural influence is shallow and largely confined to elites, whose legitimacy in their own civilizations is limited... The American dream appalls members of some civilizations because of the values it embodies, and angers others because it remains so unobtainable for themselves."
We see the ostracism of those who choose to not comply with 'the narrative' or adhere to crowd mentality or believe 'facts' presented without empirical verification as the 'anti' peoples rather than as those historic intellectuals who do accept blindly what is presented to them.
- Excerpts:
"The core element in Slavophilism was an attack on modern Western society for its materialism, its individualism and its secularism. The West might in short run be rich and dynamic but in the longer term in the Slavophiles' view a community needed to be more than just a loose association of anonymous individuals hell-bent on acquiring wealth and restrained by nothing but fear of legal sanctions."
"Most of the great states discussed in this book were happy to be called empires. The Soviet Union is the exception. Its rulers understood empire and imperialism in Leninist terms, in other words as the last refuge of a capitalist world on the eve of socialist revolution. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the great enemy of this world, the leader of the socialist camp. To call the USSR an empire -- to equate it, for example with tsarist Russia, was seen as a mere propaganda ploy of the capitalist enemy in the Cold War."
- Other works that may be of interest:
Yermak’s Campaign in Siberia by Terence Armstrong
Peter the Great: The compelling story of the man who created modern Russia, founded St Petersburg and made his country part of Europe by Robert K. Massie
Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K Massie
Putin's Playbook: Russia's Secret Plan to Defeat America by Rebekah Koffler
May 25, 2022
A long — though entertaining — read comparing the British, Habsburg, Ottoman and Russo-Soviet empires.
I read it in 2022, and the book was published in 2000. Needless to say, the state of the world has changed significantly in the first quarter of the 21st century. Lieven's observations about Ukraine, Russia and Belarus are very prescient and useful.
The best thing that could be added to this book is a guest preface (or Lieven himself) in the years ahead looking at how his predictions of a renewed Islamic fundamentalism, a stronger China, economic hardship in the West, and a Russia rediscovering imperial ambitions has... uh... "worked out."
I read it in 2022, and the book was published in 2000. Needless to say, the state of the world has changed significantly in the first quarter of the 21st century. Lieven's observations about Ukraine, Russia and Belarus are very prescient and useful.
The best thing that could be added to this book is a guest preface (or Lieven himself) in the years ahead looking at how his predictions of a renewed Islamic fundamentalism, a stronger China, economic hardship in the West, and a Russia rediscovering imperial ambitions has... uh... "worked out."
June 6, 2018
This is not an introductory work - the author likes to jump around in time and place to make a good comparison and is occasionally lax in explaining events he expects you to know. But for all that it contains fascinating thoughts on the nature of empire in general and the two manifestations of Russian empire in particular, as well as what happens after empire.
January 12, 2010
This is a major synthesis of a massive amount of information, starting from the Roman Empire, the Han Dynasty to the post-Soviet Union. Rather than giving nitty-gritty of each empire, the author summarizes points of comparison -- he doesn't say it clearly but obviously his interest is how the metropole understood and treated the peripheries. Understandably many parts are quite reductionist and teleological, but that seems to be the only way to show the causal relationships of various phenomena in this book. A very interesting part is that, from the Russian Empire's perspective, maritime empires are not as relevant as Ottoman, Habsburg, Han etc. That was refreshing.
March 31, 2014
Решил полистать что-нибудь политически актуальное :). Книга, конечно, не про Россию. Это азбука империализма, своеобразный ликбез по построение империализма в Новое время и попыткам сохранить её в Новейшее.
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