Podcast with Michael Khodarkovsky, “The Steppe and Its Empires”
Winston Churchill famously called Russia “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” But what if the riddle is partly of our own making—the product of a habit of looking only west for answers? Michael Khodarkovsky today argues that to understand Russia, we need to look east, to the steppe and the empires it shaped.
Michael’s new book, The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts (Yale, July 2026), sets Russia beside the Ottoman, Persian, and Mughal empires in order to uncover the things that connect them: universal monarchy, reliance on outsider elites, law in the service of the state. From the Mongol conquest to Putin’s Russia, the steppe ends up explaining more than we’d expect it to.
Michael is a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author, most recently, of Russia’s 20th Century: A Journey in 100 Histories and Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800.
