Paul Werth is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He has held research fellowships in the US, Germany, and Japan, and in 2010-15 he was an editor of the journal Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. His previous research focused on the problems of religion and empire in Russian History, and in 2014 he published The Tsar's Foreign Faiths: Toleration and the Fate of Religious Freedom in Imperial Russia with OUP. Earlier research convinced him of the importance for Russian history of the 1830s-and 1837, in particular.