What’s in the Label? Measuring Imperial and Nationalist Logics in Today’s Russia
What is Russia – an empire, a nation-state, or something else entirely? In this lecture at Maastricht University, I trace five centuries of Russian identity from Ivan the Terrible to Putin's war in Ukraine.
In this lecture delivered at Maastricht University, I examine the longue durée relationship between imperial and national identity in Russian history, spanning roughly five centuries from Ivan the Terrible's conquest of Kazan to the present war in Ukraine. Drawing on scholarship in new imperial history, I trace how Russia repeatedly reinvented itself – through 1917, 1991, and the Putin era – and how the tension between empire, universal ideology, and Russian nationalism was never fully resolved but only reconfigured. I argue that the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 represents a decisive, if paradoxical, turning point: a moment when the logic of the ethno-national nation-state begins to overtake the classic multi-ethnic imperial project that has defined Russian statehood since the sixteenth century.