Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation is Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy's account of how Russian national identity has been entangled, for more than five centuries, with imperial expansion and with claims to the lands and peoples of Ukraine and Belarus. Plokhy, director of Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute, wrote the book in the aftermath of Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and war in the Donbas, and he argues that those events can only be understood against a long history in which Russian rulers and intellectuals defined their nation as larger than the Russian state itself.
The narrative begins in the late fifteenth century with Muscovy's claim to be the heir of medieval Kyivan Rus, a myth of origins that served to justify westward expansion. Plokhy traces how this idea evolved through the Cossack era and the 1654 agreement at Pereiaslav, the imperial ideology of the Romanovs, and the nineteenth-century notion of a single all-Russian nation composed of Great, Little, and White Russians, an idea used to suppress the Ukrainian language and identity. He follows the story through the Soviet period, when nationalities policy alternately promoted and repressed non-Russian identities, and into the post-Soviet era, when Vladimir Putin revived the vision of a Russian world. Clear, chronologically organized, and focused on key political, religious, and intellectual figures, the book shows how the unresolved question of where Russia ends has repeatedly driven its foreign policy, an argument that took on even greater force after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.