This extensive analysis of Russian national identity spans three centuries of Russian cultural history to place post-communist Russia within a broad historical background. Combining a rich historical study with a rigorous analytical framework, the book is an essential tool for understanding contemporary Russia.

Theories of nationalism and their applicability to the Russian case; forging the matrix of the Russian national idea; the Russian orthodox church; the main currents of Russian nationalism in the 19th and early 20th centuries; nationalism and the empire; Bolshevism and nationalism; nationalism and the demise of the USSR; Post-imerial Russia in search of new self definition; conclusion.

'Russia: Inventing the nation by Vera Tolz makes a major contribution towards elucidating how Russians' own understanding of themselves has evolved over the past three centuries. Most previous Western histories have treated the Soviet Union as an irrelevant or regressive period in the evolution of Russian nationhood. Tolz "brings back the Soviet Union", not idealizing it but showing that it played its own paradoxical and ambivalent role.' Times Literary Supplement 'Russia, by Vera Tolz, is thoroughly researched and clearly written. Reading the book is illuminating...' History: Reviews of New Books. 'Although a volume so kaleidoscopic in content, so allusive in argument, and so multilayered in construction necessarily yields more to those familiar with the subject than it can to the novice, Tolz writes vigorously throughout, and readers at all levels of sophistication will have something to learn from her consistently interesting book.' Slavonica '[A] substantive and solid overview of the basic concepts and formative issues related to Russian nationalism...[A] valuable addition to the existing studies on these issues.' Slavic and East European Journal

This extensive analysis of Russian national identity spans three centuries of Russian cultural history to place post-communist Russia within a broad historical background. Combining a rich historical study with a rigorous analytical framework, the book is an essential tool for understanding contemporary Russia.

'Nationalist' writers and politicians have been apt to take the 'nation' as a 'given' entity, perhaps indeed, a providential one. But a more recent trend in historical writing has been to emphasize the extent to which 'nations' are made not born. The histories in this new series take as their organizing principle the forging of the 'nation', whether the process was a matter of conscious manipulation by an elite, guided by more 'popular' imperatives, or a combination of the two. Each volume in the series aspires to explain how the modern nation state of its title came about, and at the same time to demonstrate that the process was complex, contingent and anything but pre-ordained.