Ilya Repin's 1903 painting “Ceremonial Meeting of the State Council” is a famous collective portrait of Russian imperial officials; the artist managed to create an enormous picture of more than eighty most important dignitaries of the Romanov empire. A book by Malte Rolf, professor of modern European history at the University of Oldenburg, is an endeavor very similar to Repin's. Its author succeeded to present a story of dozens of imperial bureaucrats, who administered the Polish provinces of the Romanov empire, one of its key regions. Representatives of this elite—general-governors, governors, heads of local police, and educational institutions—are the main heroes of Rolf's book, which puts them, their ideas of how to govern the provinces, and their relations both with the locals and their superiors in St. Petersburg in its spotlight. Add to them a large number of other representatives of the imperial society in the region—army officers, journalists, university professors, priests, entrepreneurs, engineers, advocates, not all of whom were state servants, Orthodox, or Russian—and the canvas presented by Rolf would very much resemble Repin's, although this book studies only one borderland of the empire. Unlike the painting by Repin though, the portrait painted by Rolf is not of a group of people united by a common aim and a consistent interventionist policy to imperialize or Russify one of the imperial borderlands. Instead, in his room one sees constant quarrels, inconsistencies, contradictions, struggles for power, and intrigues.

This volume initially appeared in German in 2015 as Imperiale Herrschaft im Weichselland: das Königreich Polen im russischen Imperium (1864–1915); its English translation was released last November as Imperial Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland, 1864–1915 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. As one can see from the titles, the Russian edition is not a translation from German, but an expanded version of the book. Even though its structure remained the same, the Russian text contains a much expanded second chapter, dedicated to the Romanov rule over Poland in 1772–1863. If its German counterpart serves as an introduction to the main story of the author, the Russian version of it is a self-standing chapter. Even though it is largely based on the existing historiography, this immediately makes Pol΄skie zemli an even more useful reading for the classes on Russian imperial history and on history of managing a multinational and multiconfessional empire. To specify it, Rolf's well-researched book, based on a large number of relevant archival materials from the collections of St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Warsaw is a story of an everyday empire, or how the ways of its governance influenced day-to-day political, social, and cultural processes in Poland and especially in Warsaw. According to the author, this history was not only full of conflicts, but included a number of spaces for peaceful entanglement and cooperation between the imperial officials and local society. On the other hand, an important argument of this excellent book suggests that administration of the region was not only influenced by a rather heterogeneous center, but in its turn had a constitutive impact on the center and other peripheries as well (for instance, during the revolution of 1905).

The only misprints that could be corrected in the English translation are few geographical errors. Brest-Litovsk was not part of the Kingdom of Poland, but a district town of the Grodno province (143); to the best of my knowledge, it was known as “Brest-Litovsk” much prior to 1864. And if one is to believe the data of the Warsaw observatory as reported by Varshavskii Dnevnik (№356, December 24 (January 6) 1913, 3), it was +1.1°C in Warsaw on December 24 (January 6), 1913, not as cold as it probably could have been. My last remark is related to the book's illustrations, which are included in an inset in the middle of the book. They could have constituted a narrative on their own: the last photos very symbolically present Russian soldiers leaving Warsaw in 1915 and the ruins of the Aleksandr Nevskii Cathedral in 1925. Unfortunately, the previous thirty-two pictures are not arranged chronologically. The text itself referred to none of them. The illustrations also contain a number of black and white maps, which are not easy to read, and would have made much more sense as part of a companion web page, providing access to them and other similar visual materials in color and high resolution.