THE THIRD ROME ILLUSION

Two Romes have fallen. Is the third one next?

In 1510, a Russian monk wrote a sentence that would outlive every empire built to justify it: Moscow was the last true Rome, and there would be no fourth. Five centuries later, a new generation of Russian theorists has revived that claim - not as theology, but as geopolitics. They call it Eurasianism, and they argue Russia is destined to anchor a multipolar world rising from the ashes of American primacy.

The Third Rome Illusion takes that claim seriously enough to test it. Robert F. Geissler traces the doctrine from Filofei's monastery cell through Ivan the Terrible, Catherine's Greek Project, and Stalin's wartime concessions to the Church, before turning to the hardest data available in 2026: Russia's collapsing fertility rate, its sanctions-evasion shadow fleet, its increasingly one-sided partnership with Beijing, and the fiscal reserves being spent down to fund a war with no clear end.

Neither propaganda nor dismissal, this book gives the strongest Eurasianist arguments a fair hearing - then holds them against the numbers. The verdict is more precise, and more useful, than either triumphalism or collapse: a nation that will not disappear, but may never become what its own theorists claim it must.

Which nations rise. Which nations fall. And why the doctrine that built an empire may not survive contact with a spreadsheet.