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According to Benedict Anderson, as late as 1840, almost 98 percent (!) of the Russian population was illiterate. (Cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 75–76.) However, the Russian defeat in the Crimean War was caused not only by the illiteracy of the Russian serf soldiers, but also by the use of obsolete military technology. According to Daniel Headrick, “During the Crimean War, while French and British soldiers carried modern rifles, almost all Russian soldiers used smoothbore muskets, the same kind of guns used in the war against Napoleon. The Russian government tried to purchase new guns from the American Samuel Colt and from gun makers in Liège but were not able to import them in time.” (Daniel R. Headrick, Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 169.)

15.

Pintner, “Russian Military Thought,” 362.

16.

As concerns Russia’s membership of the G-8, even Moscow’s mayor and 1999 presidential hopeful, Yury Luzhkov, remarked: “Its [Russia’s] full membership of the ‘Big Eight’ is obviously also a self-deceit.” Luzhkov, however, was here not so much referring to Russia’s deficient democratic credentials, as to its insufficient economic potential. (Y. M. Luzhkov, The Renewal of History: Mankind in the 21st Century and the Future of Russia (London: Stacey International, 2003), 151–152).

17.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (March/April 1994), 71.

18.

Daniel Headrick contrasts this smooth, swift, and easy conquest of Siberia by the Russians with the slow conquest of its Western frontier by the young United States, where, due to the fierce resistance of the Native American tribes, “the conquest was slow, difficult, and costly” (Headrick, Power over Peoples, 277). “The contrast with the Russian expansion into Siberia is striking,” wrote Headrick. “In the 1590s, Russia was confined to the west of the Ural Mountains. By 1646, Russian explorers and fur traders had reached the eastern edge of Siberia and had founded Okhotsk off the sea of that name and Anadyrsk in northeastern Asia. By 1689—after only a hundred years—Russia controlled almost all of Siberia to the Pacific Ocean, 3,500 miles from European Russia” (Headrick, Power over Peoples, 278).

19.

Nicholas J. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power, with a new introduction by Francis P. Sempa (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 69.

20.

Cf. Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 31.

21.

Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 140.

22.

Tilly, Coercion, Capital, 141.

23.

Colin S. Gray, “The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era: Heartland, Rimlands, and the Technological Revolution,” Strategy Paper No. 30, National Strategy Information Center, Inc., (New York: Crane, Russak & Company, Inc., 1977), 35. Charles Tilly even spoke of “two and a half centuries, [in which] Russian expansion scarcely ceased” (cf. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, 189). The Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen estimated that “every seven years from 1500 until his day [around 1910, MHVH], Russia gained an amount of territory equal to that of his own country, the Kingdom of Norway.” (Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Inside the Kremlin (London: W. H. Allen & Co Plc, 1988), 262–263.) The land surface won by Russia in four hundred years, was, according to Nansen, approximately fifty-seven times that of Norway, which is about 17 million square kilometers. The surface of the tsarist empire in 1910 was about 23 million square kilometers. Nansen’s estimate seems rather plausible.

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