“The whole region with people, nature and all the riches...” (Review: Paul Dukes, A History of the Urals: Russia’s Crucible from Early Empire to the Post-Soviet Era [London: Bloomsbury, 2015])

Abstract

A History of the Urals by British historian Paul Dukes is the first book to introduce the English-speaking reader to the life of the Urals from Ivan the Terrible to the present day, the characters of the narrative thus being not only Yermak and Tatishchev, but also Trotsky, Yeltsin, and Roizman. Known from his publications of Catherine's Russia and of the USA and the USSR superpowers, among others, Dukes became interested in the Urals through communications with Ural historians. Duke's addressing of their works allows the reader to evaluate the advances in (re)understanding the 1990s—2000s  history of the region. Dukes is trying to attack the stereotypical perception of the Urals as just the boundary between Europe and Asia in featuring both the national and global significance of the region. In addition, today, the vertical axis of the "north—south" is much more relevant then the "Europe—Asia" horizontal. Analytically, the history of the Urals is revealed through three waves of Russian modernization, and considering data on governmental control, the exploitation of resources, and the cultural adjustment for each period. There is a noteworthy interplay of regional and national scales in A History of the Urals, to which the comparative observations of the Russian and British empires, and the Soviet and American industrializations are sometimes added. The book envisages the Urals via a set of aligned and brilliantly matched images, from the “Slata baba” (Golden Woman) of ancient maps, to the Mistress of the Copper Mountain, captured by Paul Dukes himself during his recent excursion to the Europe-Asia boundary.