It is a historic irony that the Bolsheviks, who had demolished the decrepit empire, were the only force able to reconstruct it. In order to survive, the empire needed a new sign by which to justify the new energy of its unificatory yoke. [1] The contemporary return to authoritarian politics and neo-imperial conquest in the twenty years since Soviet collapse has generated an urgent call to attend to what Abkhazian novelist Fazil Iskander described as the “new sign” of the Soviet Union’s...