“Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market,” Eric Hobsbawm observed in “Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe Today,” Anthropology Today, Vol. 8, No. 1 (February 1992), p. 3. Well, since that time, in Russia at any rate, large numbers of people evidently think that academic historians have not been producing sufficiently strong stuff. History as Therapy takes on a fascinating subject: the vastly popular “alternative histories” that have become, for an alarming number of Russians, their main source of information about history. Books, blogs, films, and television series devoted to sensational imaginaries claim to set the record straight about Russia's glorious past, which has previously been suppressed by, among others, the “German” Romanovs beginning in the eighteenth century. The extraordinary popularity of such works, which sell in the hundreds of thousands of copies, is far more significant...

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