Morrison, Alexander Stephen2016-04-182016-04-182015Alexander Stephen Morrison; 2015; The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union: too soon to talk of Echoes?http://nur.nu.edu.kz/handle/123456789/1414This paper is a rather general 'thought piece' in which I have unwisely allowed myself to speculate on some of the contemporary resonances of the Russian Imperial and Soviet past. I have not updated it since 2012, and in the nature of these things parts of it already look dated. As Sir Walter Raleigh put it when justifying the decision to write his 'History of the World' only about Antiquity 'Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.' My father discovered this twenty-four years ago when writing a biography of Boris Yeltsin, and I owe the quotation to him. n.b. the published version of this paper also includes an egregious factual error on the second page - the Treaty of Nerchinsk between Russia and Qing China of course dates to 1689, not 1657.enAttribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United StatesRussian StudiesSoviet HistoryCentral Asia (History)History of the USSRCentral Eurasian StudiesArticle