SUMMARY:

Jane Burbank reviews Decolonizing Russia? Disentangling Debates (2025) by Adam Lenton and coauthors, which seeks to clarify high-pitched debates surrounding decolonization in Russian studies. The book provides a concise overview of five centuries of Russian imperial practices. It argues that Russia’s imperial rule varied greatly across different regions; settler colonialism was not a policy uniformly designed or universally applied. It also cautions against using a purely ethnocentric lens to analyze identity and decolonization. While Burbank praises the book’s emphasis on the variability of imperial experiences and its insistence that the USSR was an empire, she raises key criticisms. She finds that the analysis is overly anchored in comparisons with Western European colonialism and in terms derived from that context. The authors’ astonishing claim that no “empire studies” subfield exists in Russian history overlooks decades of robust scholarship devoted to this topic.