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Je doit faire le compte-rendu du magnifique ouvrage de Sören Urbansky ci-dessous pour une revue U.S, mais avant toute publication j'aimerais partager quelques impressions de lectures avec le twitter francophone #RussianHistory #Borderstudies #ChineseHistory #SovietStudies⬇️ 
Alors déjà : on en parle, de cette magnifique couverture ? La taille, le choix des polices, tout est équilibré. Et l'illustration est superbe : c'est la couverture d'un roman soviétique de 1930, qui rend hommage aux vaillants gardes protégeant la frontière avec la Chine.
La peau d'ours sur les épaules, la taïga et le chemin de fer en arrière-plan, le mirador : tout l'imaginaire de la frontière sino-soviétique est là, dans un pur style où l'on retrouve à la fois les lignes dures du modernisme 20's, et l'inspiration populaire du "lubok".
Let's go. #Russia1914. A voyage down the Volga. With one incongruous aside as preamble, which is as follows: I have been using a clam shell to stay the pages of my copy of the Handbook while I work at my perch at the kitchen table.
The Volga River. Centuries ago it was the Atel. Or Etel. Or Itel. (Those pesky ambiguous primary vowels.) Centuries before that it was the Rha. The Oaros.
It probably still is all those things. Names piling in its throat like silt at its mouth.
If you don't understand the horrors experienced by Russia in the 20th century (and before) you can never understand their mentality & policy considerations.
Russia lost probably the equivalent of the whole of its current population (around 170 million) in single 50 year time span due to wars, revolutions, civil war, purges, famines, another war.
All due to either 1) invasions from the West or 2) ideologies imported from the West (Marxism). Assuming the Russian Empire had stayed intact in some modified form without those calamities it would probably have 1/2 billion people or more
