Willard Sunderland is Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of The Baron's Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War and Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe, both from Cornell, and coeditor of Russia’s People of Empire: Life Stories from Eurasia, 1500 to the Present and Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History.