187acknowledgments
After a long time working on this book, it is a pleasure to acknowledge the
many people who helped make it happen. I thank first Laura Engelstein and
Stephen Kotkin at Princeton for their extraordinary support over the years.
Both Laura and Steve impressed on me the need for clarity and precision, and
forbade jargon, incoherence, and pretentiousness. I thank them for that. Their
insistence on seeing Russia in relation to other parts of the world made Russian
history so much more interesting, and has left a deep imprint on my thinking.
Laura’s devotion to her students is legendary, and I must thank her for the time
she has given me, reading drafts and helping me to release my arguments, in
person, by phone, and over e-mail. I am grateful to Suzanne Marchand and
Christine Stansell, whom I also studied with and met at Princeton. They were
both crucial sources of support and encouragement in graduate school and
beyond. I got my start in Russian history as an undergraduate at Brown, where
I had the great fortune to study with Pat Herlihy and Tom Gleason. I thank
them both for their support and inspiration.
I am grateful to the many institutions that supported this book. At Prince-
ton, I received generous funding from the Department of History, the Center
for the Study of Religion, the Center for Trans-Regional Study, and the Univer-
sity Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. A fellow-
ship from the American Council of Teachers of Russian (ACTR) helped fund
my dissertation research in Russia. The Harriman Institute at Columbia Uni-
versity supported this project with a postdoctoral fellowship, which allowed me
to write the first chapters. Grants from the American Historical Association,