“Here we provide only glimpses of particular settings,” Jane Burbank writes “In Place of a Conclusion.” The claim is a deceptively modest one. To be sure, Imperial Russia, a collection of twelve essays originally presented at workshops held in Washington, D.C., and Portland, Oregon, eschews the construction of grand narratives, at least those of failure that were so prominent in Soviet and Western historiography. If nothing else, the decision to focus primarily on the prereform period—eleven of the twelve essays are situated chronologically before 1861—militates against another walk down the path to revolution. Whether it also avoids narratives of success is less clear.