Arctic Mirrors

'This fascinating and authoritative book covers the history of relations between Russian civilization and the hunter-gatherer peoples of northern Eurasia. Slezkine charts changing Russian policies toward these circumpolar cultures beginning with the fur trade...in the eleventh century, through the expansion of the Russian empire under the tsars, to the modernization policies of the Soviets. He argues that attention to this kind of history reveals as much about the construction of Russian identity as it does about the cultural identity of the northern 'others.'