We Shall Be Masters
Russian Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
An illuminating account of Russia’s attempts—and failures—to achieve great power status in Asia.
Since Peter the Great, Russian leaders have been lured by opportunity to the East. Under the tsars, Russians colonized Alaska, California, and Hawaii. The Trans-Siberian Railway linked Moscow to Vladivostok. And Stalin looked to Asia as a sphere of influence, hospitable to the spread of Soviet Communism. In Asia and the Pacific lay territory, markets, security, and glory.
But all these expansionist dreams amounted to little. In We Shall Be Masters, Chris Miller explores why, arguing that Russia’s ambitions have repeatedly outstripped its capacity. With the core of the nation concentrated thousands of miles away in the European borderlands, Russia’s would-be pioneers have always struggled to project power into Asia and to maintain public and elite interest in their far-flung pursuits. Even when the wider population professed faith in Asia’s promise, few Russians were willing to pay the steep price. Among leaders, too, dreams of empire have always been tempered by fears of cost. Most of Russia’s pivots to Asia have therefore been halfhearted and fleeting.
Today the Kremlin talks up the importance of “strategic partnership” with Xi Jinping’s China, and Vladimir Putin’s government is at pains to emphasize Russian activities across Eurasia. But while distance is covered with relative ease in the age of air travel and digital communication, the East remains far off in the ways that matter most. Miller finds that Russia’s Asian dreams are still restrained by the country’s firm rooting in Europe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tufts University historian Miller (Putinomics) delivers a rich and well-informed chronicle of Russia's engagement with Asia over the past three centuries. He details the establishment of Russian trading posts in Alaska and northern California in the early 1800s, and captures the immensity, complexity, and importance of Russia's eastern borderlands through the eyes of its explorers, including Nikolai Przhevalsky, who mapped Central Asia in the mid-19th century. Arguing that Russia's enduring fixation on Europe and "episodic and erratic" foreign policy in Asia have hampered its dream of becoming a major presence in the region, Miller discusses the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the late 1800s; Stalin's purging of "spies, saboteurs, and hidden enemies" in the Russian Far East in the 1930s (according to Miller, 15,000 people died in the crackdown and several hundred thousand more were "deported, jailed, or sent to a gulag"); the militarization of the border with China under Brezhnev; Gorbachev's decision to withdraw troops from Mongolia and end the nearly decade-long war with Afghanistan; and Putin's prioritization of relations with Asia over the U.S. and Europe. The result is a comprehensive and fluidly written survey that will be welcomed by students of international history.
