This book represents the first concerted effort to place 19th and 20th century Russia in European context, as well as to understand Soviet Russia against the historical background of Imperial Russia. In a wide-ranging selection of topics--from corporal punishment to diary-writing, from the rise of nationalism to biological engineering--the authors argue that Russia shared in a larger European modernity marked by increased overlap and sometimes merger of realms that had previously been treated as separate entities: the social and the political, state and society, government and economy, and private and public.