Alexander Etkind. Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience.

Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. ix+289 p.

ISBN 978-0-7456-5130-9.

Although Alexander Etkind’s book concerns “Russia’s imperial experience,” he presents empire as an “international project” (46). “International product” would be a more emphatic term to describe this important corrective to most recent studies of imperialism, which rarely transcend the national optic (Bassin 1999; Gerasimov, Kusber, and Semyonov 2009; Lieven 2000; Maiorova 2010). His reader is invited to a share of imperial experience through the double gaze of imperial administrators, theorists, and writers, who worked under multiple empires. Etkind uncovers echoes of Thomas Macaulay in Nikolai Gogol, ideas of Henri de Boulainvilliers in Vasilii Tatishchev, and those of American theorist of the frontier Frederick Jackson Turner and French race theorist Arthur de Gobineau in Sergei Uvarov. The Abbé Raynal’s Russian partner is Nikolai Radishchev, and that of eminent French historian Fustel de Coulanges is the historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii.