Within East Asian international politics, current Russo-Japanese relations are as complicated as Japan's relations with its immediate neighbors, Korea and China. The relations are fraught because they touch upon unresolved issues of memory and legacy of the Japanese empire, World War II in Asia, and the Cold War alliances that are still in place in the region. After all, Russia and Japan did not sign a peace treaty after the end of World War II, primarily because Japan disputes the Southern Kuril Islands and insists that a peace treaty is conditioned upon the transfer of the islands to Japan.

Paul Richardson's book At the Edge of the Nation is not, however, about Russo-Japanese diplomatic negotiations. Rather, it explores how the Southern Kuril Islands became critically important in the making of Russian national identity after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For Richardson, the debates over whether or not to transfer the Kurils to Japan pointed to the existence of a plurality of ideas on federal and regional levels regarding territory and identity. Furthermore, in post-Soviet Russia the formation of national identity and foreign policy became mutually constitutive, and as a result the “destiny of [the Southern Kuril] islands became bound to ideas concerning the parameters of the state, the memory of the empire, the dynamics of center-periphery relations, and Russia's place as a great power in Europe and Asia” (pp. 35–36).

The first two chapters lay out Richardson's framework, which highlights top-down visions of national identity produced and negotiated by three coalitions of political and intellectual elites. Engaging Craig Calhoun's sociological understanding of nationalism as a discursive formation, Richardson examines how nationalism and the idea of the “nation” were activated around the issue of the Southern Kurils by the Russian elites “in order to strengthen and legitimate their efforts to wield the power and resources of the state for their own political ends” (p. 13). The first coalition of academics, journalists, politicians, diplomats, and bureaucrats were liberal institutionalists who, during the early 1990s, advocated the return of all four islands to show the world that the new Russia had abandoned the aggressiveness of the Soviet period and was a lawful, moral, and liberal state (chapter 3). They quickly faced a backlash from territorial imperativists (communists, nationalists, the military, and even former pro-Western democratic parties), who strongly advocated for the preservation of the borders inherited from the Soviet Union (chapter 4). Regional elites in the Russian Far East, who were overwhelmingly against any negotiations with Japan, further heightened the nationalist fever of the territorial imperativists by generating a “cult of the border,” a sense of exceptionality and sanctity of the border region (chapter 6).

By the early to mid-2000s, the federal and regional territorial imperativists linked the issue of the Kurils to the memory of World War II, which made it extremely difficult for dissenting views to discuss the issue without being accused of “subverting national history and denying the sacrifices of the nation” (p. 61). The most curious recent development is that since 2010, the local authorities in Sakhalin and the Kurils have been celebrating the Day of the Ending of the Second World War on September 2 (which is now an official national holiday), the date associated outside of Russia with Japan's surrender and the end of the Asia-Pacific War (p. 109). In the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, Victory Day is May 9, which underscores the Soviet victory over German Nazism and the general importance of the European front over the war in Asia, while September 2 has never been recognized or celebrated.

The third and final coalition, led by the current Russian president Vladimir Putin, is characterized by Richardson as pragmatic patriots (chapter 5). They stand between the first two approaches, leaning, however, more toward the territorial imperativists. Richardson argues that Putin is playing a “grand geopolitical” game in order to secure Russia's status as a great power in Asia and Europe, although considering the worsening international and domestic conditions after Crimea, he notes, it is uncertain how long Putin can maintain his dual position. As the population of the Southern Kurils faced dire economic conditions during the 1990s and 2000s, local people challenged the nationalist claim on the borders, transfiguring it to what Richardson calls a “hyperborder,” or imagining the local community “beyond” state space (chapter 7). This local rejection of the Russian state's authority, however, has been checked by the growing and stifling political control from Moscow since 2006.

Richardson, however, concludes with the important observation that post-Soviet Russia's domestic and foreign policy has been an extension of an “ongoing struggle to define What and Where is Russia,” which will not be resolved by the center alone but rather through its negotiations with regional and local forces. Richardson's excavation of the post-Soviet debates over national identity, territory, and prestige will offer non-Russia specialists valuable insight into Russian foreign policy thinking.