With the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the tsarist past has caught up with Russia"s present with a vengeance. The process of rethinking the past is not without its pitfalls: the negative evaluations of tsarist Russia, obligatory in the former Soviet Union, have given way to uncritical romanticizing. There has never been a greater need for a fair, balanced interpretation of the tsarist record. This book re-examines Russia"s imperial past from the reign of Peter the Great to the collapse of tsarism in 1917. It presents pre-revolutionary Russia as an empire of great internal contradictions. A colossus that extended over one-sixth the earth"s landmass, it was ever vulnerable to foreign invasion. It possessed one of the world"s largest populations, the majority of whom lived in poverty and discontent. It commanded the world"s richest natural resources, yet its productive forces were constricted by the remnants of feudalism. It strove to cement its multiethnic population by systematic Russification, which only stimulated nationalist movements. It gloried in being a people"s autocracy" at a time when the regime was increasingly detached from its people.