How Russia Got Big accounts for Russia's changing physical scope over some seven centuries.
Even people who know little about Russia know that it is big. This concise book tells the story
of how it became so. Beginning with the small principality of Moscow in the early 14th century
Paul W. Werth recounts the construction of the world's largest country-from Muscovy and the
Russian Empire through the USSR to today's Russian Federation-as well as its territorial
retrenchment and even collapse on several occasions. Integrating geography diplomacy war and
imperial politics the book ranges across three continents and recounts diverse interactions
with neighboring polities and peoples. Werth likewise contemplates different ways of
conceptualizing territorial possession and related understandings of sovereignty authority
and belonging. The result illustrated with 29 original maps is a grand story from a
bird's-eye view that reveals deeper rhythms to Russia's territorial history involving
alternations of enlargement and crisis-ones that continue in our own day.
