Some 20 years ago, shortly after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the late Russian military historian Aleksandr Kavtaradze was invited to give a series of talks at a university in New England. The obligatory campus tour took him to the institution’s Memorial Quadrangle, a monument to the Great War. Flanked by a neoclassical dining hall inscribed with the names of such battles as…
David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye
David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye is a professor of Russian history at Brock University. His most recent book is Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (Yale University Press, 2010). He is currently writing a diplomatic and cultural study of 19th-century tsarist expansion in Turkestan titled Russia’s Great Game: The Struggle for Mastery in Central Asia, and is one of the editors of Russia’s Great War and Revolution, a major international project to re-examine the First World War’s Eastern Front.