Children of Rusʹ : right-bank Ukraine and the invention of a Russian nation / Faith Hillis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hillis, Faith.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Nationalism--Ukraine--History--19th century.

Nationalism.

Nationalism--Russia--History--19th century.

Ukraine--Politics and government--19th century.

Ukraine.

Russia--Politics and government--1801-1917.

Russia.

Ukraine--Relations--Russia.

Russia--Relations--Ukraine.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (348 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In Children of Rus', Faith Hillis recovers an all but forgotten chapter in the history of the tsarist empire and its southwestern borderlands. The right bank, or west side, of the Dnieper River-which today is located at the heart of the independent state of Ukraine-was one of the Russian empire's last territorial acquisitions, annexed only in the late eighteenth century. Yet over the course of the long nineteenth century, this newly acquired region nearly a thousand miles from Moscow and St. Petersburg generated a powerful Russian nationalist movement. Claiming to restore the ancient customs of the East Slavs, the southwest's Russian nationalists sought to empower the ordinary Orthodox residents of the borderlands and to diminish the influence of their non-Orthodox minorities. Right-bank Ukraine would seem unlikely terrain to nourish a Russian nationalist imagination. It was among the empire's most diverse corners, with few of its residents speaking Russian as their native language or identifying with the culture of the Great Russian interior. Nevertheless, as Hillis shows, by the late nineteenth century, Russian nationalists had established a strong foothold in the southwest's culture and educated society; in the first decade of the twentieth, they secured a leading role in local mass politics. By 1910, with help from sympathetic officials in St. Petersburg, right-bank activists expanded their sights beyond the borderlands, hoping to spread their nationalizing agenda across the empire. Exploring why and how the empire's southwestern borderlands produced its most organized and politically successful Russian nationalist movement, Hillis puts forth a bold new interpretation of state-society relations under tsarism as she reconstructs the role that a peripheral region played in attempting to define the essential characteristics of the Russian people and their state.

Contents:

The Little Russian idea and the invention of a Rusʹ nation

The Little Russian idea in the 1860s

The Little Russian idea and the imagination of Russian and Ukrainian nations

Nationalizing urban politics

Concepts of liberation

Electoral politics and regional governance

Nationalizing the empire

The limits of the Russian nationalist vision.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780801469251

0801469252

9781501710667

1501710664

9780801469268

0801469260

OCLC:

922998441