Sublime

Peter the Great understood that the survival of his regime depended upon membership of the European states system and the diplomatic leverage it could be used to secure – like his useful alliance with Denmark against Sweden. To be driven out of ‘political Europe’ by Poland or Sweden would have been a catastrophe.

Muscovy’s struggle to transform itself into a dynastic regime able to absorb the North Russian states, resist Poland–Lithuania and overawe the Volga khanates marked a decisive phase in the eventual emergence of Russia as the engine of Europe’s expansion into Northern Eurasia.

Like it or not, the grand dukes of Muscovy could survive only by entering the European diplomatic system (to seek allies against Poland) and (no less important) by competing on cultural and ideological terms with the new-style monarchies of fifteenth-century Europe. Much of later Russian history would turn on the delicate balance between the distin

Russian threat to Europe has reemerged. This might have been inevitable given that the Soviet Union lost the Cold War, saw its external empire in Eastern Europe break free, and then experienced its own internal breakup. Russia accounts for roughly half the population and three-fourths of the land area of the former Soviet Union. It has retained a p

la Russie n’a pas moins tiré profit du système capitaliste que l’Amérique ou l’Angleterre ; elle y a joué le rôle classique du parlementaire qui fait fortune dans l’opposition. Bref, les régimes jadis opposés par l’idéologie sont maintenant étroitement unis par la technique.

Russia emerged in the eighteenth century as Eurasia’s vast land empire of the north, seen in figure 6.6. As the inheritor of the Mongol and Timurid empires, Russia became history’s second largest contiguous empire by size, 22 million km2 at its peak in 1895, second only to the Mongol empire’s 23 million km2 at its maximum extent in 1270. Only the B