The Russian Empire: Military Encounters and National Identity
Journal: Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks
Year: 2010

In 1767, the preamble to Catherine II’s ‘Instruction’ stated that ‘Russia is a European State’. She was making a political and cultural statement rather than a geographical one. The ‘European’ expansion and strategic concerns of the Russian Empire, and for that matter the Soviet Union, have always concerned both Russia’s rulers and her international rivals more than her Asiatic ambitions. The expansion within Europe in the Napoleonic period was substantial and, at least in part, threatening to o