Empire De/Centered: New Spatial Histories of Russia and the Soviet Union

In 1991 the Soviet empire collapsed, at a stroke throwing the certainties of the Cold War world into flux. Yet despite the dramatic end of this last empire and political commentators consigning the idea of empire to the dustbin of history, new forces filling the vacuum left by the end of the Soviet Union repeatedly draw upon the language and concepts of imperialism. Bringing together a multidisciplinary and international group of authors to study Soviet society and culture through the categories empire and space, this collection demonstrates the enduring legacy of empire with regard to Russia, whose history has been marked by a particularly close and ambiguous relationship between nation and empire building, and between national and imperial identities.