The history of people’s struggles to emancipate themselves from the power of empire over their social, cultural, and political lives is a persistent modern theme, with relevance also to the present. As Norihiro Naganawa, the editor of this excellent collection, observes in his chapter on Soviet “anti-imperialist” “entanglements” in Central Asia and the Middle East, the emancipatory dreams of pluralistic democracy, freedom, and equality, embraced by both Soviet Russia and the United States, have remained unrealized in the lands they have ruled and continue to rule.

The book’s title speaks of “revolutionary Russia,” but the book’s chronology and topics suggest this is meant conceptually more than chronologically. Or, rather, implicitly, these authors have us rethink conventional timelines of “revolutionary Russia” as 1917–21 or 1905–31 or similarly drawn variants. It is a key argument in this book that the revolution in the Russian empire, especially the imperial and autocratic collapse of 1917, “released a vast range of liberationist projects and dreams” (3), which “radiated” (4) from the revolution but took a “dizzying” (5) plenitude of forms and directions. Connecting socialism and national self-determination was one key to the revolution’s explosive and lasting force. Chronologically, the story told here reaches from the 1905 revolution through the Cold War. Geographically, Russia is “decentered” to focus on Russian and especially Soviet borderlands and on the “entanglements” of all of these actors with the larger world of empires and anti-imperial and anti-colonial movements and ideas.

“Sovereignty” is a leitmotif in Dreams of Emancipation, often treated critically and with full recognition of its complexity and variety of meanings. Peter Holquist, for example, examines the Provisional Government’s “liberationist occupation” (23) of Ottoman eastern Anatolia and Austrian Galicia as an imagined, but mostly unrealized, project of liberating small nations, including Ukrainians (a vision of annexation as liberation we have seen before and since). Sarah Slye examines projects of “regionalism” and “federalism” as compelling and widely embraced alternatives to ethno-national separatism, with evidence from the Caucasus, though we see similar alternatives to ethno-nationalism in Siberia, as David Rainbow explores, in Central Asia, as we know from the work of Adeeb Khalid, who contributes a brilliant Afterword to the collection, and elsewhere. Rainbow’s study of anti-Bolshevik regionalists in Siberia deepens and complicates our understanding of the ideals and practices of “autonomy” as a project for grounding “sovereignty” in “the people” (97), but also the sharp uncertainties around these categories and how to realize this emancipatory project. Yuexin Rachel Lin takes these questions into the distinctive transnational space of Harbin after the collapse of the Russian empire, with newly “empowered groups” (117), especially Chinese leaders, pursuing projects of anti-imperial resistance and emancipation to reclaim sovereignty. Naganawa considers Bolsheviks’ contradictory orientation toward Muslim nations inside and outside the former empire in their efforts to promote decolonization and national liberation while treating these nations as monolithic “objects of agitation” (168) rather than diverse historical actors. Samuel Hirst shows how these themes are illuminated by a close study of Soviet trade policy, particularly the idea of equitably balanced trade, with Soviet-Turkish economic relations as his case study. In the final two chapters, Zbigniew Wojnowski’s examination of “socialist friendship” after World War II and Martin Wagner’s study of the revival and adaptation of Leninist ideas of collective rule in post-Stalin USSR and post-Mao China, “sovereignty” is considered less explicitly but connections to earlier eras can be recognized.

As my brief summary of one key leitmotif in the book may suggest, in addition to this book’s obvious methodological contributions to thinking about transnational connectedness—specifically the global ramifications of the collapse of the Russia empire, torn down in part by diverse historical actors inspired by radical emancipatory ideals (a vision of equality, democracy, freedom, and diversity that remains “undesirable” to today’s authoritarians and empire makers)—this collection encourages and demonstrates methodological attention to heterogeneity, contingency, discontinuity, and local specificity in historical experiences past and present, a point that Khalid underscores in his Afterword. Contradictoriness and ambiguity are ubiquitous in these diverse stories, offering a more complex and vital history than the familiar treatment of revolution as a tragic or ironic story of ideals and failures. Authoritarian regimes past and present hate uncertainty and diversity. But it is the stuff of life. And telling history this way is a most powerful means, as Khalid suggests, to decolonize history itself from those who wish to extinguish difference and suppress emancipation.