Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  The Crimean annexation and the war in the Donbas brought together Russian statists and Russian nationalists both within and outside the government. It boosted the morale of both groups at a time when nostalgia for former Soviet and East Slavic unity was in decline in Russia and in other post-Soviet states. Although the Russian government was quite successful in mobilizing support among the largely ethnic Russian population of the Crimea, the effect of Russian propaganda in the Russian-speaking—but for the most part ethnically Ukrainian—regions of eastern and southern Ukraine was mixed at best. The pan-Russian idea was brought to Ukraine by armed militias along with authoritarian rule and the concept of a nation monolithic in ethnicity, language, and religion—a proposition that was always a hard sell in the historically multiethnic and multicultural borderlands of Eastern Europe. Thus, Russia succeeded in annexing or destabilizing areas where the majority or plurality of inhabitants considered themselves ethnic Russians, but failed in culturally Russian areas where most of the population associated itself ethnically and politically with Ukraine.

  The long-term outcome of the conflict and its impact on nation-building in the region are still unclear, but, contrary to the wishes of its authors, it accelerated the disintegration of one big Russian-dominated historical and cultural space and strengthened the model of ethnic nationhood on both sides of the front line. The Russian government decided to annex only territory with a predominantly ethnic Russian population (the Crimea); the plan of turning the mainly ethnic Ukrainian but Russian-speaking southeastern region of Ukraine into a Russian dependency failed; and Russia refused to consider an annexation scenario for the Donbas, which it had helped to destabilize. Ethnic Russians inhabiting a peninsula not adjoining Russian territory found themselves eligible for annexation in the eyes of the Kremlin, but Russian-speakers immediately across the border were denied that honor.

  On the Ukrainian side, Russian aggression mobilized the multiethnic and multicultural Ukrainian political nation, and Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, with its predominantly ethnic Russian population, and the loss of a good part of the Donbas, where that population constituted a plurality in the big cities such as Donetsk, dramatically increased the percentage of ethnic Ukrainians in the territorially diminished Ukrainian state. As a result of the conflict, Russia became more ethnically Russian and Ukraine more ethnically Ukrainian. More and more Ukrainians of all ethnic backgrounds tend today to embrace Ukrainian culture as a symbol of their identity.

  Will the Russian government and the Russian political and cultural elites accept the “loss” of Ukraine? This is the essence of the “Russian question” in its present form. As recent events have shown, the unresolved Russian question threatens peace and stability in Europe and the world in general. This threat is no less serious than the one posed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the German question—the idea of uniting all the German lands to forge a mighty German Empire.

  Many believe that the outbreak of World War II can be traced back to the failure to resolve the German question by peaceful means, and some find a parallel between Hitler’s Germany and Putin’s Russia in their use of the nationality card to destabilize and annex neighboring territories. The Russo-Ukrainian conflict has already become the worst international crisis in East-West relations since the end of the Cold War. It remains to be seen whether the annexation of the Crimea and the war in the Donbas are the final episodes in the disintegration of the USSR or a new and terrible stage in the reshaping of European borders and populations.

  The answer will depend on the ability and readiness of the Russian elites to accept the post-Soviet political realities and adjust Russia’s own identity to the demands of the post-imperial world. The future of the Russian nation and its relations with its neighbors lies not in a return to the lost paradise of the imagined East Slavic unity of the medieval Kyivan state, but in the formation of a modern civic nation within the borders of the Russian Federation. This was the path followed by former imperial metropoles such as Britain, and modern nation-states like Germany, which recognized the independence of English-and German-speaking countries and enclaves beyond their borders. The alternative might be a new Cold War or worse.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR THAT EXPLODED IN 2014 COMPELLED me to write this book. But in many ways, it is a continuation of my earlier project on the history of East Slavic identities, which resulted in the publication of The Origins of the Slavic Nations by Cambridge University Press in 2006. For years since the publication of that book, I have been teaching a seminar on “East European Identities: Russia and Ukraine,” which helped me continue the inquiry begun in The Origins into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Russian annexation of the Crimea and the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine put the current debates about Russian history and identity into the center of my research and writing. Recent events also prompted me to turn what would otherwise have been a purely academic monograph into a work for a larger audience that tackles big questions of immediate political and cultural importance.

  While this book has been long in the making, and a good part of it is based either on my earlier works or on research specifically done for this volume, much of my account and analysis relies on excellent work done by others. Many of them have been my friends and colleagues, to whom I owe many intellectual debts.

  My understanding of Muscovite history and identities has been informed by the works of Charles J. Halperin, Valerie Kivelson, Nancy Kollman, and Donald Ostrowski. I found the monographs of Zenon E. Kohut and Barbara Skinner very useful in dealing with Russian imperial politics of the eighteenth century. The works of Serhiy Bilenky, Mikhail Dolbilov, Faith Hillis, Alexei Miller, Oleksii Tolochko, and Andrei Zorin helped me grasp the complexities of Russian imperial nationality and religious policies in the western borderlands of the Russian Empire. The writings of David Brandenberger, Terry Martin, Richard Pipes, Ana Procyk, Per Rudling, Roman Szporluk, and Serhy Yekelchyk provided the basis for my understanding of twentieth-century developments.

  John LeDonne, Roman Procyk, and Igor Torbakov graciously agreed to read the manuscript and made a number of important corrections and comments. I would also like to thank Richard Wortman for inviting me to speak in his seminar on Russian imperial history at Columbia University, and one of the participants in the seminar, Nathaniel Knight, for sharing with me his archival findings on Osyp Bodiansky and Nikolai Nadezhdin. My colleague Tim Snyder from Yale and Jonathon Wyss from Beehive Mapping generously allowed me to use some of their maps in this book, as did the editors of the Cambridge University and University of Toronto presses. Myroslav Yurkevich did an excellent job of “Englishing” my prose. As always, my wife, Olena, has been the most careful and critical reader of the numerous drafts of this book and helped make it more reader-friendly.

  I am grateful to Jill Kneerim for convincing Lara Heimert to add this work to the impressive list of historical writings published by Basic Books. Lara enthusiastically embraced the concept and, with her advice and careful editing, turned the manuscript into the book it is today. I was happy to work once again with the Basic Books team, including Betsy DeJesu, Roger Labrie, Alia Massoud, and Jennifer Thompson. At Basic Books I also had the pleasure of collaborating again with Kathy Streckfus and Collin Tracy. None of the people mentioned above have anything to do with any shortcomings in this book. If there are any, please blame them on the author or, even better, on the complexity of Russian history itself.

  SERHII PLOKHY is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard and the director of the university’s Ukrainian Research Institute. The prize-winning author of many books, including The Last Empire, The Gates of Europe, and The Man with the Poison Gun, Plokhy lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INTRODUCTION

  Tim Baycroft, France, Inventing the Nation (London, 2008); Stefan Berger, Germany, Inventing the Nation (London, 2004); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Na
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  CHAPTER 1: THE BIRTH OF THE TSARDOM

  Michael Cherniavsky, “Klan or Basileus?: An Aspect of Russia Medieval Political Thought,” in idem, ed., The Structure of Russian History (New York, 1970), pp. 75–77. Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, 750–1200 (London, 1996); I. Gerasimov, S. Glebov, A. Kaplunovski, M. Mogilner, and A. Semyonov, eds., “Novaia imperskaia istoriia Severnoi Evrazii,” chapter 5, Ab Imperio, no. 3 (2014): 363–407; Charles J. Halperin, The Tatar Yoke: The Image of the Mongols in Medieval Russia (Bloomington, IN, 2009); Mykhailo Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus’, vol. 1 (Edmonton, 1997); Janet Martin, Medieval Russia, 980–1584, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 2008); Donald Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589 (Cambridge, 2002); V. T. Pashuto, B. N. Floria, and A. L. Khoroshkevich, Drevnerusskoe nasledie i istoricheskie sud’by vostochnogo slavianstva (Moscow, 1982); Jaroslaw Pelenski, The Contest for the Legacy of Kievan Rus’ (Boulder, 1998); Serhii Plokhy, The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (Cambridge, 2006); Daniel Stone, The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386–1795 (Seattle, 2001).

  CHAPTER 2: THE THIRD ROME

  Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths, 2d ed. (New York, 1969); Chester S. L. Dunning, A Short History of Russia’s First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov Dynasty (University Park, PA, 2004); Borys A. Gudziak, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Cambridge, MA, 1998); Mykhailo Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus’, vol. 7 (Edmonton, 1999); Tat’iana Oparina, Ivan Nasedka i polemicheskoe bogoslovie kievskoi mitropolii (Novosibirsk, 1998); Donald Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural Influences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589 (Cambridge, 2002); Maureen Perrie, Pretenders and Popular Monarchism in Early Modern Russia: The False Tsars of the Time of Troubles (Cambridge, 2002); S. F. Platonov, The Time of Troubles (Lawrence, KS, 1970); Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford, 2001).

  CHAPTER 3: THE IMPERIAL NATION

  Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1992); M. S. Grinberg and B. A. Uspenskii, Literaturnaia voina Tred’iakovskogo i Sumarokova v 1740-kh—nachale 1750-kh gg. (Moscow, 2011); Georg B. Michels, At War with the Church: Religious Dissent in Seventeenth-Century Russia (Stanford, CA, 2000); Serhii Plokhy, Ukraine and Russia: Representations of the Past (Toronto, 2008); Elena Pogosian, Petr I—arkhitektor russkoi istorii (St. Petersburg, 2001); Hans Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1960); Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva, “The Role of the Religious Factor and Patriarch Nikon in the Unification of Ukraine and Muscovy,” Acta Polonia Historica 110 (2014): 5–22; Vera Tolz, Russia, Inventing the Nation (New York, 2001); Boris Uspenskii, “Foneticheskaia struktura odnogo stikhotvoreniia Lomonosova (istoriko-filologicheskii ėtiud),” in idem, Izbrannye trudy, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1996–1997), 2:207–241; V. V. Vinogradov, Ocherki po istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (Moscow, 1982).

  CHAPTER 4: THE ENLIGHTENED EMPRESS

  John T. Alexander, Catherine the Great (New York, 1989); Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1992); Zenon Kohut, Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy: Imperial Absorption of the Hetmanate, 1760s–1830s (Cambridge, MA, 1989); John LeDonne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650–1831 (Oxford, 2003); Jerzy Lukowski, The Partitions of Poland, 1772, 1793, 1795 (New York, 1999); Robert K. Massie, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman (New York, 2011); Barbara Skinner, The Western Front of the Eastern Church: Uniate and Orthodox Conflict in Eighteenth-Century Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia (DeKalb, IL, 2009); Yuri Slezkine, “Naturalists Versus Nations: Eighteenth-Century Scholars Confront Ethnic Diversity,” Representations 47 (Summer 1994): 170–195; Sergei M. Soloviev, History of Russia, vol. 46, The Rule of Catherine the Great: Turkey and Poland, 1768–1770, trans. Daniel L. Schlafly Jr. (Gulf Breeze, FL, 1994).

  CHAPTER 5: THE POLISH CHALLENGE

  Serhiy Bilenky, Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford, CA, 2012); John LeDonne, The Russian Empire and the World, 1700–1917: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Containment (Oxford, 1996); Dominic Lieven, Russia against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace (London, 2009); Alexei Miller, “‘Official Nationality’? A Reassessment of Count Sergei Uvarov’s Triad in the Context of Nationalism Politics,” in idem, The Romanov Empire and Nationalism: Essays on the Methodology of Historical Research (New York, 2006), 139–160; idem, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘natsiia’ v Rossii,” Otechestvennye zapiski 1 (2012); M. Polievktov, Nikolai I: Biografiia i obzor tsarstvovaniia (Moscow, 1918); Piotr S. Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918 (Seattle, 1975); Andrei Zorin, “Zavetnaia triada: Memorandum S. S. Uvarova 1832 goda i vozniknovenie doktriny ‘pravoslavie—samoderzhavie—narodnost’, ” in idem, Kormia dvuglavogo orla: Literatura i gosudarstvennaia ideologiia v Rossii v poslednei treti XVIII–pervoi treti XIX veka (Moscow, 2001), 337–370.

  CHAPTER 6: THE BATTLE FOR THE BORDERLANDS

  Inna Bulkina, “Politika Nikolaia I v Iugo-Zapadnom krae i uchrezhdenie Universiteta Sv. Vladimira,” Trudy po russkoi i slavianskoi filologii: Literaturovedenie 7 n.s. (Tartu, 1999); Wasyl Lencyk, The Eastern Catholic Church and Czar Nicholas I (New York, 1966); Alexei Miller, “‘Official Nationality’? A Reassessment of Count Sergei Uvarov’s Triad in the Context of Nationalism Politics,” in idem, The Romanov Empire and Nationalism: Essays on the Methodology of Historical Research (New York, 2006), 139–160; idem, “Istoriia poniatiia ‘natsiia’ v Rossii,” Otechestvennye zapiski 1 (2012), www.strana-oz.ru/2012/1/istoriya-ponyatiya-naciya-v-rossii; Marian Radwan, Carat wobec Kościoła greckokatolickiego w zaborze rosyjskim, 1796–1839 (Lublin, 2004); Aleksei Tolochko, Kievskaia Rus’ i Malorossiia v XIX veke (Kyiv, 2012); Stephen Velychenko, National History as Cultural Process: A Survey of the Interpretations of Ukraine’s Past in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Historical Writing from the Earliest Times to 1914 (Edmonton, 1992).

  CHAPTER 7: THE ADVENT OF UKRAINE

  Olga Andriewsky, “The Russian-Ukrainian Discourse and the Failure of the ‘Little Russian Solution,’ 1782–1917,” in Culture, Nation, and Identity: The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter (1600–1945), ed. Andreas Kappeler, Zenon E. Kohut, Frank E. Sysyn, and Mark von Hagen (Edmonton, 2003), 182–214; Alexei Miller, The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2003); Orest Pelech, “The History of the St. Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood Reexamined,” in Synopsis: A Collection of Essays in Honour of Zenon E. Kohut, ed. Serhii Plokhy and Frank Sysyn (Edmonton, 2005), 335–344; Thomas M. Prymak, Mykola Kostomarov: A Biography (Toronto, 1996); David Saunders, “Mykola Kostomarov (1817–1885) and the Creation of a Ukrainian Ethnic Identity,” Slavonica 7, no. 1 (2001): 7–24; Andrei Teslia, “‘Slavianskii vopros’ v publitsistike M. P. Pogodina, 1830–1850-kh gg.,” Sotsiologischeskoe obozrenie 13, no. 1 (2014): 117–138; Aleksei (Oleksii) Tolochko, Kievskaia Rus’ i Malorossiia v XIX veke (Kyiv, 2012); P. A. Zaionchkovskii, Kirillo-Mefodievskoe obshchestvo (1846–1847) (Moscow, 1959).

  CHAPTER 8: GREAT, LITTLE, AND WHITE

  Mikhail Dolbilov, Russkii krai, chuzhaia vera: Ėtnokonfessional’naia politika imperii v Litve i Belorussii pri Aleksandre II (Moscow, 2010); Aleksandr Dulichenko, Vvedenie v slavianskuiu filologiiu (Moscow, 2014); Orlando Figes, The Crimean War: A History (New York, 2012); Efim Karskii, Belorussy, 3 vols. (Moscow,
1955–1956); Alexei Miller, The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2003); V. Petronis, Constructing Lithuania: Ethnic Mapping in Tsarist Russia, ca. 1800–1914 (Stockholm, 2007); Steven Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (Chicago, 2012); Darius Staliunas, Making Russians: Meaning and Practice of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus After 1863 (New York, 2007); P. V. Tereshkovich, Ėtnicheskaia istoriia Belarusi XIX–nachala XX vv. v kontekste Tsentral’no-Vostochnoi Evropy (Minsk, 2004).

  CHAPTER 9: KILLING THE LANGUAGE

  Andrii Danylenko, “The Ukrainian Bible and the Valuev Circular of July 18, 1863,” Acta Slavica Iaponica 28 (2010): 1–21; John-Paul Himka, Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine: The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900 (Montreal, 1999); Johannes Remy, “The Valuev Circular and Censorship of Ukrainian Publications in the Russian Empire (1863–1876): Intention and Practice,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 49, nos. 1–2 (2007): 87–110; David Saunders, “Mikhail Katkov and Mykola Kostomarov: A Note on Petr A. Valuev’s Anti-Ukrainian Edict of 1863,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 17, nos. 3–4 (1993): 365–383; idem, “Russia and Ukraine Under Alexander II: The Valuev Edict of 1863,” International History Review 17, no. 1 (1995): 23–50; idem, “Pan-Slavism in the Ukrainian National Movement from the 1840s to the 1870s,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 30, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 27–50; Anna Veronika Wendland, Die Russophilen in Galizien: Ukrainische Konservative zwischen Österreich und Russland, 1848–1915 (Vienna, 2001).