Anatolii Fomenko is a distinguished Russian mathematician turned popular history writer, founder of the so-called New Chronology school, and part of the explosion of alternative historical writing that has emerged in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Among his more startling claims are that the Old Testament was written after the New Testament, that Russia is older than Greece and Rome, and that the medieval Mongol Empire was in fact a Slav-Turk world empire, a Russian Horde, to which Western and Eastern powers paid tribute. While academic historians dismiss Fomenko as a dangerous ethno-nationalist or post-modern clown, Fomenko’s publications invariably outsell his conventional rivals. Just as Putin has restored Russia’s faith in its future, Fomenko and an army of fellow alternative historians are determined to restore Russia’s faith in its past. For Fomenko, the key to Russia’s greatness in the future lies in ensuring that Russians understand the true greatness of their past. Fomenko and other pseudo-historians have built upon existing Russian notions of identity, specifically the widespread belief in the positive qualities of empire and the special mission of Russia. He has drawn upon previous attempts to establish a Russian identity, ranging from Slavophilism through Stalinism to Eurasianism. While fantastic, Fomenko’s pseudo-history strikes many Russian readers as no less legitimate than the lies and distortions peddled by Communist propagandists, Tsarist historians and church chroniclers.

Co-winner of the 2009 SUNY Press Dissertation/First Book Prize in Women's and Gender Studies, Imagining Russia uses U.S.–Russian relations between the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 as a case study to examine the deployment of gendered, racialized, and heteronormative visual and narrative depictions of Russia and Russians in contemporary narratives of American nationalism and U.S. foreign policy. Through analyses of several key post-Soviet American popular and political texts, including the hit television series The West Wing, Washington D.C.'s International Spy Museum, and the legislative hearings of the Freedom Support Act and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, Williams calls attention to the production and operation of five types of "gendered Russian imaginaries" that were explicitly used to bolster support for and legitimize U.S. geopolitical unilateralism after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, demonstrating the ways that the masculinization of U.S. military, political, and financial power after 1991 paved the way for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

This astonishing book explores the delusional imaginings of Russia's past by the pseudo-scientific 'Alternative History' movement. Despite the chaotic collapse of two empires in the last century, Russia's glorious imperial past continues to inspire millions. The lively movement of 'Alternative History', diligently re-writing Russia's past and 'rediscovering' its hidden greatness, has been growing dramatically since the collapse of Communism in 1991. Virtually unknown in the West, these pseudo-historians have published best-selling books, attracted widespread media attention, and are a prominent voice in Internet discussions about Russian and world history. Alternative History claims that Russia is much older than Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome; that the medieval Mongol Empire was in fact a Slav-Turk world empire; and that, in the twentieth century, duplicitous foreign powers stabbed Russia in the back and stole its empire. For its followers the key to Russia's greatness in the future lies in ensuring that Russians understand the true wealth of their past. Alternative history has become a popular therapy for Russians still coming to terms with the reality of Post-Soviet life. It is one of the forces shaping a new Russian nationalism and an important factor in the geopolitics of the twenty-first century.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Russian empire made a dramatic advance on the Pacific by annexing the vast regions of the Amur and Ussuri rivers. Although this remote realm was a virtual terra incognita for the Russian educated public, the acquisition of an 'Asian Mississippi' attracted great attention nonetheless, even stirring the dreams of Russia's most outstanding visionaries. Within a decade of its acquisition, however, the dreams were gone and the Amur region largely abandoned and forgotten. In an innovative examination of Russia's perceptions of the new territories in the Far East, Mark Bassin sets the Amur enigma squarely in the context of the Zeitgeist in Russia at the time. Imperial Visions demonstrates the fundamental importance of geographical imagination in the mentalité of imperial Russia. This 1999 work offers a truly novel perspective on the complex and ambivalent ideological relationship between Russian nationalism, geographical identity and imperial expansion.

Igor Torbakov explores the nexus between various forms of Russian political imagination and the apparently cyclic process of the decline and fall of Russia's imperial polity over the last hundred years. While Russia's historical process is by no means unique, two features of its historical development stand out. First, the country's history is characterized by dramatic political discontinuity. In the past century, Russia changed its "historical skin" three times: following the disintegration of the Tsarist Empire accompanied by violent civil war, it was reconstituted as the communist USSR, whose breakup a quarter century ago led to the emergence of the present-day Russian Federation. Each of the dramatic transformations in the twentieth century powerfully affected the notion of what "Russia" is and what it means to be Russian. Second, alongside Russia's political instability, there is, paradoxically, a striking picture of geopolitical stability and of remarkable longevity as an imperial entity. At least since the beginning of the eighteenth century, "Russia" has been a permanent geopolitical fixture on Europe's northeastern margins with its persistent pretense to the status of a great power. Against this backdrop, the book's three sections investigate (a) the emergence and development of Eurasianism as a form of (post-)imperial ideology, (b) the crucial role Ukraine has historically played for the Russians' self-understanding, and (c) contemporary Russian elites' exercises in historical legitimation.

In Children of Rus', Faith Hillis recovers an all but forgotten chapter in the history of the tsarist empire and its southwestern borderlands. The right bank, or west side, of the Dnieper River—which today is located at the heart of the independent state of Ukraine—was one of the Russian empire’s last territorial acquisitions, annexed only in the late eighteenth century. Yet over the course of the long nineteenth century, this newly acquired region nearly a thousand miles from Moscow and St. Petersburg generated a powerful Russian nationalist movement. Claiming to restore the ancient customs of the East Slavs, the southwest’s Russian nationalists sought to empower the ordinary Orthodox residents of the borderlands and to diminish the influence of their non-Orthodox minorities.Right-bank Ukraine would seem unlikely terrain to nourish a Russian nationalist imagination. It was among the empire’s most diverse corners, with few of its residents speaking Russian as their native language or identifying with the culture of the Great Russian interior. Nevertheless, as Hillis shows, by the late nineteenth century, Russian nationalists had established a strong foothold in the southwest’s culture and educated society; in the first decade of the twentieth, they secured a leading role in local mass politics. By 1910, with help from sympathetic officials in St. Petersburg, right-bank activists expanded their sights beyond the borderlands, hoping to spread their nationalizing agenda across the empire.Exploring why and how the empire’s southwestern borderlands produced its most organized and politically successful Russian nationalist movement, Hillis puts forth a bold new interpretation of state-society relations under tsarism as she reconstructs the role that a peripheral region played in attempting to define the essential characteristics of the Russian people and their state.

The Romantic search for a national past was a European preoccupation in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Russia, this process led to the formation of the Russian style that has to today so captivated the world's imagination. While the manifestations of this style are easily recognizable in gleaming gilt, vibrant colors, onion domes, peasant costume, and tsarist regalia, hardly anyone has realized the pioneering and defining role that Fedor Solntsev (1801-1892) played in the development of a Russian national aesthetic. This book rescues Solntsev from obscurity and celebrates his major contributions to the arts, archaeology, architecture, ethnography, icon painting, restoration work, and Russian nationalist ideology as well as place his work in a general European context. Contributors include: Marc Raeff, Wendy Salmond, Richard Wortman, Anne Odom, Irina Bogatskaia, Marina Evtushenko, Olenka Pevny, Irina Reyfman, Nathaniel Knight, Lauren M. O'Connell, and J. Robert Wright.