Telling the story of Russia's imperial experience has usually been either a story of conquest or collapse, often a tale of artistic and literary triumphs, more often of failed reforms and perverted revolutions. Literary scholar Alexander Etkind frames his history of the Russian Empire with his idea of internal colonization, the process of the state colonizing its own people. Deeply knowledgeable about Russia's history and culture, Etkind brings a disparate array of insights about the empire. It was basically insecure; its territorial vastness divided more than connected its various parts; the regime applied typically colonial methods of governance—indirect rule, coercion, using its culture as an instrument of rule. “Rich in coercion and poor in capital, the Empire had to master and protect its enormous lands, which were taken for various purposes that had been largely forgotten” (5–6).

Major Russian thinkers interpreted the famous story found in the Primary Chronicle of the early Slavs inviting in a foreigner, Riurik, to rule over them as the first instance of colonization by consent. As Russians moved to eastern and southern frontiers, they settled sparsely populated lands, a process described as “self-colonization” (62). Although there were bloody conquests of native peoples in Siberia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, Etkind points out that Russian colonization was more a matter of the axe (felling forests) than the sword, and both were followed by the plow. Great historians like Vasilii Kliuchevskii played down the violence employed to build the empire, which was seen as a generally progressive phenomenon—at least until the early Soviet period. Etkind sweeps through centuries of Russian expansion noting its dependence on cheap available resources. “There have been two resource-bound periods of Russian history—the era of fur and the era of gas…. The state's dependence on them makes the population superfluous. Extracting, storing, and delivering these resources makes security more important than liberty. Reliance on these resources destroys the environment, natural and cultural” (89).

The cohesion of the empire was maintained by more than simple coercion. Both the empire of the tsars and the empire of the soviets were marked by a “reversed imperial gradient.” That is, those in the peripheries lived better than those in the metropole. Political order may have come with the uniformed Russian officers, but even more important was Russian culture. “In the long run, Russian literature proved to be an extremely successful instrument of cultural hegemony. With its classics, heretics, and critics, it conquered more Russians, non-Russians, and Russian enemies than any other imperial endeavor” (169). And yet there was “an uneasy dialectics. The more productive a literary text was in the machinery of hegemony, the more destructive it became to the hierarchy of domination” (253). From reading Russian classics, opposition arose to the repressive empire in which they had been created.

This is not a conventional history of imperial Russia. Rather it is the vision of an eclectic and erudite mind. A reader should not expect an accessible narrative; one needs to come to this book with knowledge of what happened and when. But the various set pieces, short biographies, and literary insights provide sparkling prisms through which one can view fresh appreciations and understandings of what was gained and lost in the Russian imperial experience.