ABSTRACT
This book opens with a chapter offering an account of what it means to be an exceptional state. The origins of the term may date back to Alexis de Tocqueville’s study of America in the mid-1850s but were revived more recently by American sociologists. The exceptionalism model caught on and has been applied to the case of Russia in the 2010s when Vladimir Putin took charge. Using analogies for contemporary high politics, the chapter returns to the reign of Tsar Alexander II and his ‘era of great reforms’ as an exceptional period; his war against the Ottoman empire laid out a vision of extended Russian imperial power. Recent scholarship on Russia’s participation in decisive wars is examined, and a series of extrapolations on the country’s exceptionalism is made, helping us understand its troubled history and its unique characteristics.
