PositiveThe Wall Street Journal...gathered lands and peoples lie at the center of Serhii Plokhy’s sweeping study Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation. Mr. Plokhy, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, seeks to explain the centrality of the so-called western provinces to Russian identity ...traces the relationship between what became the Russian state, based in either Moscow or St. Petersburg, and the western lands wherein Russia’s origin myth dwells ... His gaze rarely strays from Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, Belarus, with an occasional eye toward the closely related Polish and Lithuanian lands ... There is never any doubt that Mr. Plokhy sees similar rhetoric underpinning Mr. Putin’s policies in the 'near abroad.'
