The first occasion demonstrated to the world that Japan had arrived as a legitimate military power with its stunning defeat of the Russian Empire in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5.
He goes on to argue, in a sweep that extends to Russia's privatisation programmes and left-over Russian communities in every last corner of the ex-Soviet empire, that the failure in Chechnya was symptomatic of a wider decline in Russia.
And look how they turn to their profit -- as well as that of the same Russian-speaking minorities they want to bring back into the bosom of the Empire -- the argument of the "duty to intervene" that might justify the exactions, in Gori and elsewhere, of the Russian army and its militias.
Is the Russian Federation basically a Russian empire, with a few non-Russians living in it as second-class citizens?
They invaded a small, democratic neighbor to gain more control over the world's oil supply, intimidate other neighbors, and further their ambitions of re-assembling the Russian empire.
As a liberal city open to the world, Odessa was an aberration by the 19th-century standards of the Russian empire.
The discord dates back to the 1800s, when an expanding Russian empire managed to wrest control of most of what is modern-day Azerbaijan from Iran.
Russian history was of little help, since most of it involved empire-building abroad and totalitarianism at home, on both of which Russia was supposed to have turned its back.
And look how they turn to their profit as well as that of the same Russian-speaking minorities they want to bring back into the bosom of the Empire the argument of the "duty to intervene" that might justify the exactions, in Gori and elsewhere, of the Russian army and its militias.
He has an abiding fascination with the Russian empire and the respects in which it resembled and differed from its British, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian competitors.
The story of his quest to discover Gannibal's identity in places as far-flung as Novoselenginsk on the Chinese border, and Pskov at the other end of the Russian empire, is engagingly told.
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