Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation

by Serhii Plokhy

The transformation of the Russians from a people guilty of imperial domination to the leading Soviet nation coincided with and was fueled by Stalin’s defeat of his opponents in the late 1920s and his rise to supreme power in the course of the 1930s. Accordingly, the revival of traditional notions of fatherland and patriotism went hand in hand with the Stalin regime’s emphasis on the paramount importance of the Russian state, and these positions were accompanied by a growing cult of strong rulers involving the rehabilitation of the Russian tsars, most notably Peter I and Ivan the Terrible. Although Russian nationalism often returned to the political scene in the garb of imperial Russia, the new understanding of Russianness was different from the one prevailing before 1917. The Russian nation of the late 1930s no longer included the Little or White Russians, who were now officially recognized as distinct Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalities. This made the Russian nation of the pre–World War II era coterminous in ethnic and territorial terms with the Great Russians of the pre–World War I period. The shock of