Dreams of Emancipation
A Transnational History of Revolutionary Russia
Given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, why do emancipation messages that emanated from Russia count? Navigating multilingual sources, this book addresses the role of Russia’s multiethnic society and borderlands in generating kaleidoscopic repercussions of its 1917 Revolution. It also sees the USSR’s interactions with its neighboring countries as a crucible of the Soviet modality of communism. The book shows how the collapse of the Russian Empire further released a vast range of liberationist projects and dreams, far from confined to the goals of Bolshevism, in its borderlands and beyond, and how the Soviet Union became a highly ambiguous source of emancipatory inspiration in the long twentieth century overshadowing today’s global politics.
Norihiro Naganawa
is a historian of modern Central Eurasia and a professor at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His works have appeared in Slavic Review, Kritika, Ab Imperio, and Religion, State & Society. He is the author of an award-winning book Islamic Russia: Empire, Religion, and Public Sphere, 1905-1917.
