The Russian dynasty of the Romanov tsars began in 1613 during an era of intense civil strife with the coronation of Mikhail Fedorivch Romanov and was destroyed in the revolutionary turmoil of 1917.

In the intervening three centuries the relatively small, land-locked kingdom of Muscovy grew into the world's largest land empire. Yet size was no protection for the dynasty, and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a conflicting triangular relationship developed which had, at its apex, the tsarist autocratic government and, at the other two angles, the separate focuses of...

Alan Wood's ambitious work is the first to address the whole span - both chronologically and thematically - of the development of Siberia, and its role in both the Russian and the global context. With a scope that reaches from to Muscovy's conquest of Siberia in the 16th and 17th centuries to modern times, it explores the effects of colonial exploitation, the Revolutions of 1917 and developments during the Soviet period. Russia's Frozen Frontier is also the first book to detail the history of Siberia from the view of Siberians themselves - both Russian and native - rather than seen...