Peter the Great is known to history as the ruler who pushed for the westernization of Russia; who defeated Sweden, thereby making Russia a Baltic power; and who then built a great capital on that Baltic Sea to be Russia’s window to the west. Yet on his deathbed Peter was thinking of Asia, dreaming of a passage to China and India through the Arctic Sea.

It's with this vignette that Chris Miller begins his new book We Shall Be Masters: Russia’s Pivots to East Asia from Peter the Great to Putin. As Miller makes clear, Russia has never been constantly interested in Asia, but cyclically interested. The Tsar's colonized Alaska, California, and Hawaii, and abandoned them all. They leveraged the Qing Dynasty to control the Amur River, imagining that it would be an Asian Mississippi–and then lost interest in it. Most Russian attempts to find security, wealth, and glory in Asia end up being half-hearted, and result in failure. What can explain these cycles of fascination and indifference?

Chris Miller is Assistant Professor of International History at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He was last heard on Historically Thinking in Episode 153 discussing the Chinese surveillance state.