Russia

Description

This work traces the development of Russian national consciousness from the time of the reforms of Peter the Great in the early-18th century, when ideas of nation and nationalism first penetrated Russia, up until Russia's current post-imperial identity crisis. It looks at nationalism both as an ideology and a movement that incorporates political and cultural dimensions.

Vera Tolz is Professor of Russian Studies, University of Manchester.

Russia: Inventing the nation by Vera Tolz makes a major contribution towards elucidating how Russians' own understanding of themselves has evolved over the past three centuries. Most previous Western histories have treated the Soviet Union as an irrelevant or regressive period in the evolution of Russian nationhood. Tolz "brings back the Soviet Union", not idealizing it but showing that it played its own paradoxical and ambivalent role. Times Literary Supplement Russia, by Vera Tolz, is thoroughly researched and clearly written. Reading the book is illuminating .. History: Reviews of New Books. Although a volume so kaleidoscopic in content, so allusive in argument, and so multilayered in construction necessarily yeilds more to those familiar with the subject than it can to the novice, Tolz writes vigorously throughout, and readers at all levels of sophistication will have something to learn from her consistently interesting book. Slavonica