Empire of Nations, published in English in 2005, has already earned the status of a classic study on the history of Soviet national politics. Francine Hirsch traces the interaction of power and expertise in the process of state building, showing the contributions of ethnographers, anthropologists, geographers, linguists and other specialists in the formation of Soviet ideas about nation and race, as well as the development of the very principles of the USSR as a multinational state. It was from experts who had pre-revolutionary training and relied on Western European ideas that specific forms of state policy in relation to certain peoples depended in the 1920s and 1930s. Based on extensive archival research, the author shows how, through planning and conducting censuses, mapping, and creating museum exhibitions, the general ideas of the Bolsheviks crystallized into political decisions. The European idea of cultural evolutionism, the Marxist theory of staged development and the Leninist idea of the ability of a revolutionary party to accelerate historical development became the basis of the state policy of integrating different peoples and cultures within the framework of the Soviet project.