Making Russians is a valuable and insightful examination, based on a solid archival foundation, of the nationalities policies in tsarist Russia's northwestern borderlands of Lithuania and Belarus. Making Russians explores the various strategies of "Russification" that the imperial government pursued - largely unsuccessfully - in this region. The book is essential reading for all students of imperial Russia. It has applications for the present as well, when issues of national identity continue to engage the citizens of both Russia and the states of the Former Soviet Union.

This book deals with the spatial concepts of Lithuania and other geo-images that either "competed" in the nineteenth century with the term Lithuania or were of a different taxonomic level (Samogitia, Prussia's Lithuania, Lithuania Minor, Poland, the Western Region, the Northwest Region, Lita/Lite, Belarus, East Prussia etc.). The Russian, Lithuanian, Polish, Belarusian, Jewish, and German geo-images of this territory are analyzed in separate chapters of this volume. The spatial and topographical turns, especially the innovative perspective suggested by French Marxist Henri Lefebvre to look at...