Rethinking the End of the Russian and Habsburg Empires

Historians often think of World War I and the period surrounding it as the acme of nationalism in European politics. In two very different books, Joshua Sanborn and Dominique Kirchner Reill have recently questioned several core assumptions in the literature on this period, such as the idea that national state-building precipitated the end of empire, and that the politics of nationalist grievance were paramount among the post-imperial peoples of Central Europe. Sanborn is the author of Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire (Oxford UP, 2015). Reill is the author of The Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Harvard UP, 2020).

Stephen V. Bittner is Special Topics Editor at Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and Professor of History at Sonoma State University.