“Origines gentis et nominis Russorum,” or “The Origins of the Russian People and Name,” was the title of a talk given by Gerhard Friedrich Müller at a meeting of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences on August 23, 1749. Müller was an ethnic German who came to St. Petersburg in 1725, the year in which Tsar Peter I had founded the Imperial Academy of Sciences as a research and teaching institution. The presentation did not go well. Müller’s research pointed to the Scandinavian origins of the Rus’ name and dynasty. These conclusions would have been welcomed by many Muscovite rulers of previous centuries, including Ivan the Terrible, who traced his origins through the Rurikids to Emperor Augustus and considered himself a German. But in 1747, Müller’s arguments were found not only unpatriotic but also damaging to Russia’s prestige. The academy canceled his scheduled longer presentation and appointed a commission to look into his research. Müller’s address set off the first academic debate in Russian historiography, and the outcome influenced its development for decades, if not centuries, to come.
Patriotic fever was running high in St. Petersburg in the wake of another Russian war with Sweden (1741–1743). But the academy’s negative reaction to Müller’s conclusions was more than a reflection of a short-lived patriotic upswing. Imperial officials had been greatly concerned about patriotism in the academy since the beginning of Elizabeth’s rule. In the early 1740s, the academy was hit by defections—scholars, most of them German, were leaving the Russian service and going to Europe to publish research conducted in the Russian Empire. This was a blow to Russia’s prestige, to say nothing of its academic potential. In 1744, the authorities posted guards in the academy’s buildings, restricting access to its library, archives, and research materials. Foreigners were no longer to be trusted.
Two years later, the imperial court intervened in the affairs of the academy by appointing a new president. He was Kirill Razumovsky (Kyrylo Rozumovsky), the younger brother of the empress’s favorite, Aleksei Razumovsky. A recent graduate of the University of Göttingen, he was only eighteen at the time of the appointment. His age seemed less important than his closeness to Elizabeth and the fact that he was the first “Russian” president of the academy, which had been chaired, controlled, and run largely by foreigners—four previous presidents had come from abroad.
It fell to Razumovsky and his close adviser Grigorii Teplov, a former disciple of Prokopovych and an adjunct at the academy, to deal with the “historiography crisis.” They appointed a commission to investigate and debate Müller’s findings. The debates in the academic commission took up twenty-nine meetings between the fall of 1749 and the spring of 1750. Müller’s main opponent in the historiographic debates was an ethnic Russian, Mikhail Lomonosov. The son of a fisherman from Russia’s north, Lomonosov was known largely for his accomplishments as a chemist. But the new age of national mobilization called for universality, and he branched out of the sciences into history and linguistics, becoming an amateurish but also forceful and influential supporter of the nativist approach to both. Lomonosov argued that Müller’s work glorified “the Scandinavians or Swedes,” while “doing almost nothing to illuminate our history.” Kirill Razumovsky took Lomonosov’s side in the historiographic debate on the origins of Rus’. The print run of Müller’s dissertation on that subject was destroyed.
For Lomonosov, the main inspiration in his debates with Müller was the outdated and often inaccurate Kyivan Synopsis of 1674. But it was the ideas of the book rather than the facts that mattered most. This book on the origins of the Rus’ nation had finally found not only publishers but also readers in Russia who appreciated its focus on the origins of the nation, as opposed to the state and dynasty. Lomonosov wanted the academy to adopt the Synopsis as its standard history textbook. In accepting its historical explanation of the origins of the Rus’ people, Lomonosov embraced a historical myth that stressed the unity of the Great and Little Russian heirs to the medieval Kyiv state, separating them from the European West.
THE NEW ALL-RUSSIAN NATION NEEDED NOT ONLY A COMMON past but also a common language. The reforms of Peter I had opened Russia to direct Western influence, which manifested itself in the linguistic sphere in borrowings from Western languages (predominantly German). Another, less obvious, import from the West was the practice of basing the literary language on the vernacular. Until then it had been based largely on Church Slavonic, a language created by medieval Christian proselytizers to convert the Slavs and later used as the language of liturgy and belles lettres in the Orthodox Slavic lands, including Muscovy and the Ukrainian and Belarusian territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was a language that united Great, Little, and White Russia but belonged to the past, not to the future. The state bureaucracy created by Peter required a new secularized language to run the state. The chancery language of the Muscovite bureaucracy, also based largely on Church Slavonic, was not suited to that purpose. Thus, Peter introduced a simplified (“civil”) script and often encouraged his subordinates and the translators of Western works to write as simply as possible, avoiding the high style of Church Slavonic.
It was only the upsurge of Russian patriotism in the era of Empress Elizabeth that abruptly halted the decline of Church Slavonic, which all of a sudden turned from a symbol of religious traditionalism and backwardness into a bulwark of national identity and a token of true Russianness. Like the controversy about the history of Rus’, the debate on the future of the language began within the walls of the Academy of Sciences. It pitted two major Russian literary figures, the poets and playwrights Vasilii Trediakovsky and Aleksandr Sumarokov, against each other, with Mikhail Lomonosov as their judge. Trediakovsky, who had originally favored the trend toward modernization and vernacularization of the written Russian language, changed his mind during the rule of Elizabeth, asking: “Why should we voluntarily suffer the poverty and limitations of French when we have the multifarious richness and breadth of Slavo-Rossian?” Sumarokov, however, remained critical of the Church Slavonic—in fact, Kyivan—legacy in Russian literature. With regard to Prokopovych, he wrote: “The sage Teofan, whom nature Endowed with the beauty of the Slavic people As regards eloquence / Produced nothing decent in verse.”
In the fall of 1748, Sumarokov submitted his drama Hamlet to the academy for prepublication review. Trediakovsky, who was a professor in the academy, cited stylistic flaws. “Unevenness of style is apparent throughout, that is, sometimes surpassing theatricality in Slavonic, elsewhere descending beneath tragedy into coarse marketplace jargon,” wrote Trediakovsky. The review triggered open conflict between Sumarokov and Trediakovsky. At stake were their places at the top of the emerging Russian literary scene and the future of the Russian language in which new works would be written. Trediakovsky defended the high style rooted in Church Slavonic, while Sumarokov wanted the language to be as close to the Great Russian vernacular as possible.
A compromise position on the future of the Russian language was taken by Mikhail Lomonosov. He advocated the continuing use of Slavonic as a basis for the development of literary Russian. Like Trediakovsky, he sought the roots of Russian in Kyivan Rus’ and hailed it as a rich, beautiful, and powerful language. Although Lomonosov defended Slavonic and the linguistic tradition associated with it, he also tried to accommodate the new Western-inspired trend toward the vernacular. He managed to reconcile the two approaches by developing a theory of three literary styles that assigned a different literary language to each: the high style, to be used for the composition of epics, odes, and poems, was supposed to employ the vocabulary common to Church Slavonic and literary Russian; the intermediate style, to be used in dramatic works, was to rely on the vernacular but avoid colloquialisms; and the third, lower style, which admitted the language of townsfolk and peasants, was reserved for comedy.
In the introduction to his Slavonic grammar of 1757, Lomonosov wrote that Russian had “the majesty of Spanish, the vivacity of French, the firmness of German, the delicacy of Italian, and the richness and con
cise imagery of Greek and Latin.” This formula was hardly original: Lomonosov’s praise of Russian was suspiciously close to the encomium to English in Richard Carew’s Epistle on the Excellencies of the English Tongue (1605). Unlike Carew, however, Lomonosov was praising a language that was struggling to meet the challenges of the modern world, its grammar and vocabulary still underdeveloped. Whence, then, his optimism about the prospects for Russian? The answer is apparent from his comment on the history of German: “The German language remained poor, simple, and weak as long as Latin was the language of religious services. But once the German people began to read sacred books and hear the liturgy in their own language, its richness multiplied, and skillful writers appeared.” The Russian language had avoided the tortuous development of German, one may infer, thanks to its close association with Church Slavonic, which had saved it from subordination to a foreign tongue and made it great.
The linguistic discussions of the mid-eighteenth century were directly related to the question of which linguistic tradition—the Great or the Little Russian, or, in present-day terms, Russian or Ukrainian—should prevail in imperial Russian culture. Thus Sumarokov accused Trediakovsky of spelling his surname in the Little Russian manner, not “Tred’iakovskoi” but “Tred’iakovskii.” He claimed that Trediakovsky was giving “the name of his lineage a Little Russian ending.” Another significant feature of the Russo-Ukrainian cultural encounter was the discussion on the correct pronunciation of the letter “г.” The Church Slavonic pronunciation was closer to the Ukrainian h, while the Russian pronunciation favored the phoneme g. Lomonosov devoted a poem to the subject, trying to teach his reader which words should be pronounced with a g and which with an h.
Like Lomonosov’s other compromises, this one proved temporary in effect. The development of Great Russian syntax, vocabulary, and phonetics was slowly but surely making the Russian literary language a less hospitable home for Little Russians than it had been at the beginning of the eighteenth century. To be sure, such Ukrainians in the imperial service as Danylo Samoilovych, who advocated the creation of a Russian medical vocabulary, or Hryhorii Poletyka, who compiled a comparative dictionary of Russian, as well as other alumni of the Kyivan Academy, had no difficulty in mastering the new Russian literary language, but in doing so they had to abandon their own accustomed speech, thereby undermining the hitherto peaceful coexistence of the two linguistic traditions.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the Kyiv intellectuals had come a long way from the time when Simeon of Polatsk first greeted Tsar Aleksei in his city with references to the “Russian nation” being liberated by the “Eastern Tsar.” In the course of a century, they had managed to instill elements of Western, often national or proto-national discourse into the official language and, eventually, into the thinking of the Muscovite elites. They also helped create a common “all-Russian” historical narrative and contributed to the formation of the “all-Russian” imperial language. They did so just as Muscovy was refashioning itself into the Russian Empire. The confusion between empire and nation, and the various peoples overshadowed by the umbrella of the “Russian nation,” would last for centuries.
II
THE REUNIFICATION OF RUS’
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THE ENLIGHTENED EMPRESS
SOPHIE FRIEDERIKE AUGUSTE VON ANHALT-ZERBST-DORNBURG became the Russian empress Catherine II on June 28, 1762. For her, that day began in the early morning with disturbing news about the arrest of one of the officers involved in the plot to depose her husband, Emperor Peter III, and bring her to power. Chances were that she would soon be arrested and possibly executed. She and her advisers decided to act immediately and launch the coup that had long been in the making. Peter was away from St. Petersburg, and Catherine immediately left her palace in the St. Petersburg suburb of Peterhof and drove to the capital. There she was welcomed by the guards regiments, whose commanders were involved in the plot. The army was on her side. A few days later, it would all be over. Peter III, Catherine’s unfortunate husband, was surrounded by troops loyal to her and forced to abdicate. He died under suspicious circumstances less than ten days later.
Although the coup was well prepared and successful, it still badly needed justification and legitimization. Catherine had to show why she—a German-born princess who had come to Russia at the age of fifteen, had never managed to shed her German accent, and had violated every rule of succession to the throne—was a better Russian than her husband, the grandson of Peter I. The manifesto issued on behalf of Catherine on June 28 claimed that she had assumed power to save Russia from mortal danger: “It was clearly apparent to all upright sons of the Russian Fatherland what a grave danger this presented to the whole Russian State.” The authors of the manifesto relied mainly on the religious factor, claiming that Catherine was more genuinely Orthodox than Peter. He had allegedly planned to change Russia’s state religion from Orthodoxy to Lutheranism. “Our Greek church was already utterly exposed to ultimate danger by the change of Orthodoxy, ancient in Russia, and the adoption of an infidel faith,” read the manifesto.
According to Catherine, the manifesto was written on the fly. Some scholars think that it was prepared ahead of time. One way or another, it reflected important elements of Russian thinking at the time: given the close association of the Russian state with the Orthodox Church, a threat to either was deemed sufficient reason for the “sons of the Fatherland” to intervene and depose an otherwise legitimate ruler. It was now up to Catherine II to prove her loyalty and usefulness to Russia lest she suffer a similar fate. She accomplished the task admirably, becoming known in Russia and abroad as Catherine the Great.
DURING CATHERINE’S LONG REIGN OF ALMOST THIRTY-FIVE YEARS (1762–1796), the formation of the imperial Russian nation begun under Peter I and Elizabeth took on new impetus and new characteristics. As one would expect under the rule of a foreign-born princess, the civic elements of the new Russian identity became more important than the ethnic ones. The concepts of nation, state, and fatherland were disseminated far beyond the circle of the tsarina’s Western-leaning and foreign-trained advisers. It was also during her rule that the idea of citizenship made its way into Russian discourse. The ethnocentric model of Russian identity formed under Elizabeth turned into one of civic loyalty to the empire. The ideas of the Enlightenment, of which Catherine was a student and admirer, transformed the understanding of empire from a patchwork of territories that maintained particular rights and privileges acquired over the centuries to a centralized state that relied on administrative uniformity even as it celebrated its ethnic and religious diversity.
Catherine presented her vision of the relation between empire and nation in another important document, a manifesto of 1785 that confirmed the right of the Russian imperial nobility to forgo obligatory service to the state. The manifesto read: “In the true glory and greatness of the empire we taste the fruits and recognize the results of the deeds of our subject, obedient, courageous, dauntless, enterprising, and mighty Russian people.” The same manifesto left no doubt about the identity of the leading stratum of the nation and the true “sons of the Fatherland.” “In the course of eight hundred years from the time of her founding,” wrote Catherine, “Russia has found commanders and leaders among her sons. At all times it has been, is, and, with God’s help, always will be characteristic of the Russian nobility to distinguish itself with qualities making for brilliant leadership.” Thus the nobility was the vanguard of the Russian nation, and the Russian nation was the leading force of the empire.
Among the “true sons of the Fatherland” who brought Catherine to power in 1762 was the president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and hetman of the autonomous Cossack state on the Left Bank of the Dnieper, known in history as the Hetmanate, Kirill Razumovsky. It was the printers of the academy who issued Catherine’s first manifesto, leaving no doubt about Razumovsky’s political allegiance. As the new empress showered her supporters with titles, gifts, and lands, Razumovsky was among the
first in line. We do not know whether he made any requests on behalf of the academy, but his plans for the Hetmanate were quite extensive. Backed by local Cossack officers, he planned to strengthen its autonomy and institutions. Many in the Hetmanate were looking forward to a bright future for their autonomous polity.
In the fall of 1762, a few months after Catherine’s coronation, Semen Divovych, a scribe in the Hetmanate’s headquarters in the city of Hlukhiv on today’s Russo-Ukrainian border, produced a long poem titled A Conversation Between Great Russia and Little Russia. One passage read as follows:
Great Russia:
Do you know with whom you are speaking, or have you forgotten?
I am Russia, after all: do you ignore me?
Little Russia:
I know that you are Russia; that is my name as well.
Why do you intimidate me? I myself am trying to put on a brave face.
I did not submit to you but to your sovereign,
Under whose auspices you were born of your ancestors.
Do not think that you are my master:
Your sovereign and mine is our common ruler.
These verses presented a vision of empire in which the little Hetmanate called Little Russia would be linked to the huge Russian Empire only by name and common ruler, undoing all that the Russian emperors, starting with Peter I, had done to limit the autonomy of the Hetmanate. That vision made scant provision for a common state, nation, or fatherland. Hopes were high in the capital of the Hetmanate, and at first they appeared to be justified. Catherine began her rule with a minor concession to her loyal hetman and the Little Russian elites, reinstating the Hetmanate’s traditional court system in 1763. The Cossack officer council asked for more, and Razumovsky threw in an additional request: he wanted the hetman’s office to become hereditary and stay in his family.
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