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The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts
Winston Churchill famously called Russia "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." But what if the riddle is partly of our own making—the product of a habit of looking only west for answers? Michael Khodarkovsky today argues that to understand Russia, we need to look east, to the steppe and the empires it shaped.
Michael’s new book, The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts (Yale UP, 2026), sets Russia beside the Ottoman, Persian, and Mughal empires in order to uncover the things that connect them: universal monarchy, reliance on outsider elites, law in the service of the state. From the Mongol conquest to Putin's Russia. the steppe ends up explaining more than we’d expect it to.
Michael is a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author, most recently, of Russia’s 20th Century: A Journey in 100 Histories and Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800.
You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Steppe and Its Empires. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.
Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
5 Oct 2026
The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts with Michael Khodarkovsky (Yale UP, 2026)
What is Russia? For two centuries, observers inside and outside the country have tried to answer that question, and most of them have looked west. The familiar story holds that Peter the Great pulled a backward Muscovy toward Europe and that Catherine the Great finished the job by declaring Russia a European state.
In The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts (Yale UP, 2026), Professor Michael Khodarkovsky looks south and east instead. He argues that Russia is best understood as a hybrid Eurasian empire, shaped as much by the steppe frontier as by Europe. He places Muscovite and Romanov practices alongside those of the Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Qing empires, all heirs in different ways to the political world the Mongols built.
Moving chapter by chapter, Khodarkovsky shows how these empires imagined their rulers as universal monarchs. He traces how they used treaties, hostages, and tribute to bind frontier peoples, often with each side understanding the relationship very differently. He also shows how they drew on elites from conquered peoples to govern, and how they took part in a vast Eurasian slave trade that until the eighteenth century was larger than the Atlantic one. He follows how they approached law, including how the Russian Empire governed the legal and religious lives of its Muslim subjects, and how all of these empires were built above all to wage war. Along the way, he argues that Russia's rulers were in some respects less restrained than their Ottoman or Qing counterparts, and that the deep structural break with the steppe inheritance came not with Peter but with the Great Reforms of the 1860s.
In our conversation, we talk about how the book grew out of Khodarkovsky's decades of work on Russia's frontiers, from the Kalmyk steppe to the North Caucasus. We also discuss what the comparison reveals that a Russia-only story cannot, and where the book sits in today's debates about Eurasianism and about Russia as a colonial empire.
26 Sept 2026
Weaponizing Civilian Protection: Counterinsurgency and Collateral Damage in Afghanistan with Thomas Gregory (Oxford UP, 2025)
Thomas Gregory is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His new book, Weaponizing Civilian Protection (Oxford UP, 2025), exposes how coalition efforts to minimize and mitigate civilian casualties during the recent conflict in Afghanistan also worked to rationalize the harm inflicted upon Afghan civilians.
Drawing on declassified documents and interviews with coalition officials, the book traces how civilian protection was reimagined as a martial tactic rather than a humanitarian imperative, with coalition officials reframing civilian casualties as strategic setbacks that could imperil the entire mission.
Gregory examines the restrictions that coalition officials imposed on combat operations to minimize unnecessary harm to civilians, whilst showing how these restrictions served to constitute civilian casualties as necessary in certain situations, rendering their lives losable and their deaths ungrievable. At the same time, it examines the post-incident mitigation measures coalition officials used to prevent civilian casualties becoming strategic setbacks, including the condolence payments that were offered when civilians were harmed. Rather than seeking to make amends for the harm inflicted upon them, it claims that these post-incident mitigation measures are best characterized as a necropolitical device concerned with managing mortality more effectively. Crucially, Weaponizing Civilian Protection shows that co-opting civilian protection into a martial logic that is more concerned with winning wars than protecting the civilian population works to devalue and dehumanize civilians, leaving them more vulnerable to death and destruction in future conflicts.
Who has been a guest on New Books in Central Asian Studies
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Zohra Saed
Sahar Muradi
Chris Aslan
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