ABSTRACT
Pogodin was a conservative historian and tutor to the tsarist family, so his enthusiasm was to be expected. But even people who got on the wrong side of the tsar could still feel the imperial mystique. In 1820 on his way to banishment in the south for thinking too freely, the young poet Alexander Pushkin marvelled at the Russian conquest of the Caucasus region (‘the sultry frontier of Asia’) and imagined more glory to come. ‘Perhaps’, he wrote in his notebook, ‘Napoleon’s chimerical plan for the conquest of India will come true for us.’2
