Why study the Russian-Armenian relationship during the imperial period? What can we learn from it about Russia’s treatment of ethnic and religious ‘Others’? And what does it tell us about the agency that non-Russians had in the process of empire-building? These are some of the main questions raised in Stephen Badalyan Riegg’s recent monograph Russia’s Entangled Embrace. The Tsarist Empire and the Armenians, 1801–1914.