How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History

How Russia Got Big accounts for Russia’s changing physical scope over some seven centuries.
Beginning with the small principality of Moscow in the early 14th century, the book recounts the construction of the world’s largest country in the form of the Russian Empire and the USSR, as well as its collapse and territorial restriction on two separate occasions. Integrating topics of geography, diplomacy, migration, and environment, and supported by 15 helpful maps, Paul W. Werth ranges across three continents and accordingly asserts a significant role for Russia in world history. Werth contemplates different ways of conceptualizing territorial possession and related understandings of sovereignty, authority, and belonging. The result is a grand story from a bird’s-eye view, one that revels in details connected with territorial oddities such as exclaves, diplomatic compounds, and spheres of influence and which is as concise as it is wholly original.

Paul W. Werth is Professor of History and Department Chair at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA. Since 2009, he has been serving as Editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, a leading international journal. His books include At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-Kama Region (2002), Orthodoxy, Non-Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy: Sketches on the History of Religious Diversity in the Russian Empire (2012) [in Russian], and TheTsar’s Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia (2014).