How Russia Got Big: A Territorial History by Paul W.Werth. Russian Shorts. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. 184 pp. $61.00. ISBN 978‐1‐350‐28402‐9

Paul W. Werth’s recent book is a tour de force summary of the empire’s growth from the fourteenth century to the present. This brief book (in Bloomsbury’s “Russian Shorts” series) chronicles seemingly all of Russia’s acquisitions and losses, postulating a recurring pattern of expansion, crisis, loss, and often restoration of territory. His brevity will frustrate specialists, but the general reader will find this an accurate and useful summary of the territorial growth of a state that came to cover, as Russians proudly declared, “one-sixth” of the earth’s surface. The index allows the reader to pursue a given territory over time, and twenty-nine excellent maps illuminate related discussions. It must have been frustrating for so insightful and entertaining an author as Werth to stick to the empirical, chronological description that he adopts for more than half the book (six of nine chapters). We wait until chapter 7 for the interpretive explanation of the “how and why” of territorial growth, yet even there brevity risks overgeneralization. Werth presents multiple reasons for expansion, generalized over time, not linking specific episodes to specific motives. That litany includes the geographical ease of expansion across the plain, the state’s need to support the army with land in the Muscovite era, and modern ideologies of civilizing mission, Soviet expansionism, or neo-Eurasianism. He dismisses “myths” about why Russia expanded (the Third Rome theory, messianism) and follows Charles Maier in pointing out that Russia’s European and global peers were building empires throughout these centuries as well. Ultimately, he asserts that Russia expanded for economic reasons—quests for resources (furs, iron ore), ports, and trade routes. All very sensible, but a bit detached from the historical unfolding. Addressing “how” Russia expanded, Werth acknowledges that it was primarily by conquest, often horribly brutal. He might have paused to focus on patterns of conquest, particularly mass deportations, as a counterweight to the book’s primary argument that Russia generally pursued expansion with “flexibility” (pp. 18, 29, 35, 50, 101–6, 127–8, as well as chapter 8). Repeatedly Moscow tolerated “incomplete sovereignty,” “shared sovereignty,” and other forms of “composite” rule, as did other early modern states (p. 35). Suggesting that Russia often preferred weak underlings to annexation of new territory, Werth devotes chapter 8 to institutional forms that he calls “Russia beyond”—vassal states, protectorates, satellites, and outright occupation (p. 125). He follows Alfred Rieber in asserting that partial sovereignty was endemic to empires: “Sovereignty, rather than being an all-or-nothing proposition, involves gradations” (p. 127). Werth devotes his final chapter to “Russia within”—that is, how Russians in the era of nationalism, particularly post-1991, have grappled with defining their national identity and “Russia” as territory. Throughout he has demonstrated the separate path of the Ukrainian lands, in and out of Russian control throughout the centuries, setting him up to observe that Russians’ claim that Ukrainian lands are fundamentally Russian is a “political project,” not historical reality (p. 134). This is a deeply informed, jam-packed book; perhaps the tyranny of word count prevented him from directly addressing the theme of governance. Werth occasionally remarks that it took decades, or centuries, to “integrate” Russia’s disparate lands into a single realm: “not everyone on the territory Russian claimed was actually subject to its authority” (p. 35). Diversity of governance strategies was a structural consequence of the “flexibility” of imperial acquisition and Russia had a systematic approach to it, which Werth does not cite or employ (he does argue against John LeDonne’s “unitary state” framework). That is the “empire of difference” style of rule whereby Eurasian empires like Russia tolerated ethnic, religious, linguistic, institutional, legal, and other diversity across the realm, insisting only on very basic claims of central power (mobilizing resources, monopolizing violence, and providing the criminal law). Scholars of premodern Russia have followed this model in action to about 1800, but few have tracked how it fared in the modern centuries. Briefly stated, the late imperial state tried Russification (too little, too late) and the Bolsheviks struggled to homogenize governance and identity around a Soviet paradigm, but all constantly confronted multiethnic diversity. Werth, however, without evoking the framework, actually shows how that tension in governance played out. Had he shaped his narrative around such a framework, the book would have been less empirical. Werth concludes that Russia today conceals “a smaller (but still immense) empire behind a mask of federalism,” perhaps an “anachronistic” state formation in the twenty-first century, but still very powerful, still pursuing territorial conquest (p. 150). He wisely leaves the reader to ponder what comes next.