Vera Tolz, “Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods” (Oxford UP, 2011)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Oct 5, 2011 · 1h 6m

Everyone knows that the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire was the largest land based empire around, and that it was growing yet- at fifty-five square miles a day, no less. But how did Moscow and St. Petersberg go about making the bewildering array of peoples and ethnicities into subjects subject of a Russian empire? Vera Tolz’s Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford University Press, 2011) examines ‘Orientalism’ as it evolved in the Russian metropole, developed by scholars and pedagogues from every corner…