In this book, James Cracraft and Daniel Rowland gather a group of authors from a wide variety of backgrounds - including history and architectural history, linguistics, literary studies, geography and political science - to survey the political and symbolic meanings of many different kinds of structures. Fourteen heavily illustrated chapters demonstrate the remarkable fertility of the theme of architecture, broadly defined, for a range of fields dealing with Russia and its surrounding territories. The authors engage key terms in contemporary historiography - identity, nationality visual culture - and assess the applications of each in Russian contexts.