Concerned as he is to expose the myths that nations create about themselves, he bases his analysis upon a revealing comparison of American and Russian expansion through the centuries. This technique forces the observer to recognise similarities, identify differences and question why both similarities and differences exist. In a sense, then, the reader gets two books for the price of one, Russian history as well as American. The parallels are striking. In the very same decade, the 1860s, Russia emancipated its serfs and the US freed its slaves. The ideology of corporate capitalism emerged at the same time as Marxism. Both nations marched towards the Pacific from their ancestral lands, from the Thirteen Colonies in the one case and from Muscovy in the other. Both reached the ocean by conquest of nomadic tribes – or as Americans like to say, by ‘settlement’ or ‘colonisation’ or, occasionally, by ‘annexation’. And finally, to take a question, was there really any difference between the Monroe Doctrine that America used to justify its interventions in Latin America and in the Caribbean and the concept of ‘Pan-Slavism’ that Russia prayed in aid when exercising its designs on the Balkans?
