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July 15 - July 21, 2023
In Muscovy, that concept had to compete with the alternative vision of Russia advanced by the Old Believers—traditionalists who rejected the Kyivan innovations in the Muscovite Orthodox Church and rebelled against the tsar, who supported the innovations.
The war of manifestos revealed profound differences between the Russian and Ukrainian sides in definitions of values and presentation of goals. Tsar Peter presented Mazepa’s action as a vassal’s betrayal of his sovereign. Mazepa responded to the accusations of betrayal by pleading loyalty not to the tsar but to his homeland. As Mazepa defined it, the political conflict was a battle not between a suzerain and a vassal but between two nations. “Muscovy, that is, the Great Russian nation, has always been hateful to our Little Russian nation; in its malicious intentions it has long resolved to
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Charles and Mazepa fled to the Ottoman dependency of Moldavia in the aftermath of the battle.
Peter’s letters and decrees show an interesting transformation of his understanding of the term “fatherland” (otechestvo), which changed its meaning in the course of the first decades of the eighteenth century from the tsar’s patrimony to a patria common to all Muscovites.
The Kyivans had successfully imparted their Western ideas to Peter and his court.
The court’s almost immediate reaction was to undo some of his most drastic reforms. In 1728, the advisers to Peter’s grandson, Peter II, decided to move the capital of the realm from St. Petersburg, the embodiment of Peter’s Western aspirations, where he had established it in 1712, back to Moscow.
Anna’s rule produced a widespread sense of resentment and anti-Western feeling among the imperial elites. With Anna’s death and the ascension to the Russian throne of Peter I’s daughter Elizabeth in 1741, the anti-Western attitude became a sea-change. Elizabeth was regarded and fashioned herself as a quintessentially Russian princess, and it was the “faithful sons of Russia,” the guards officers, who brought her to power as a true Russian princess.
The rule of Elizabeth also witnessed a backlash against foreigners in the Russian service. What had begun as a trickle under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich became a flood during the rule of his son, Peter I, and continued under his successors. Resentment and distrust of foreigners in government were accompanied by an unprecedented growth of Russian national assertiveness.
Peter’s all-Russian empire was about to acquire an all-Russian nation, all-Russian history, and all-Russian language—all during the age of Elizabeth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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
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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 concise imagery of Greek and Latin.”
“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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
More important, she abolished the office of hetman altogether. It was the third and final liquidation of the office of Cossack leader, the first two having occurred under Peter and Anna Ioannovna. It would take Catherine another two decades to eliminate all the institutions of the Hetmanate, including its system of military regiments, but the empress took her time and stayed her course.
The hodgepodge of long-established customs and special privileges accumulated in the course of history was to yield to well-ordered and homogeneous bureaucratic norms.
“Little Russia, Livonia, and Finland are provinces governed by confirmed privileges, and it would be improper to violate them by abolishing them all at once. To call them foreign and deal with them on that basis is more than erroneous—it would be sheer stupidity. These provinces, as well as Smolensk, should be Russified as gently as possible so that they cease looking to the forest like wolves.… When the hetmans are gone from Little Russia, every effort should be made to eradicate from memory the period and the hetmans, let alone promote anyone to that office.”
the Four-Year Diet, which began its proceedings in Warsaw in 1788, launched a number of reforms intended to modernize the Polish state. Adopted by the pro-reform faction of the Diet, the Constitution of May 3, 1791, strengthened the position and powers of the king, made the Diet a more workable institution by getting rid of the liberum veto—the requirement that all decisions be made by unanimous vote—and establishing the separation of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. None of that was good news for Russia, which saw the reforms not only as impairing its ability
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In Russian imperial historiography, the partitions of Poland were often referred to as the reunification of Rus’—a term emphasizing that, with the exception of Lithuania, all the other lands annexed to the Russian Empire as a result of the partitions were settled by Eastern Slavs, who had been subjects of Kyivan princes centuries earlier. The ethnic selectivity of the Russian territorial acquisitions was by no means accidental and signaled changes in the Russian national imagination that would take place during Catherine’s rule.
The territory of Russia’s first partition was defined not by any historical claims but by the desire of the Russian military to have clear-cut borders that would be easy to defend. The new line was drawn along the Dnieper and Daugava Rivers and their tributaries—a border first suggested by the president of the Military College, Zakhar Chernyshev, in the early 1760s. But the treaty on the first partition signed
She found it in the historical claims of the Hungarian kings to the medieval Principality of Galicia-Volhynia. As the Austrian emperors were considered heirs of the Hungarian kings, the new territories became known as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria—the latter term being the Latinized form of the word “Volodymeria,” referring to the capital of Volhynia, the town of Volodymyr, which remained in Poland for the time being.
Where possible, the borders of the second and third partitions were drawn along rivers, but this time historical, religious, and ethnonational considerations were involved along with strategic ones.
In doing so, she prevented Emperor Joseph II of Austria from obtaining Volhynia—the land that the Austrians had claimed as part of their inheritance (Galicia and Lodomeria) from the Hungarian kings. The Austrians had to be satisfied with Little Poland, including Cracow and Lublin, claiming that those lands were in fact “Western Galicia.”
Catherine began to think about the new lands not just in historical and religious terms, as she had earlier, but also in ethnic ones.
“to deliver the lands and towns that once belonged to Russia, established and inhabited by our kinsmen and professing the same faith as ours, from the corruption and oppression with which they are threatened.”
Catherine II, who believed that the Orthodox population of the Commonwealth (the Ukrainians and Belarusians) belonged to the same tribe as the Russians, had no fraternal feelings toward the Poles.
“The experience of the past and the current disposition of conditions and attitudes in Poland, that is, the inconstancy and frivolity of this people, the hostility and hatred it has shown us, and particularly the inclination it has shown toward the depravity and violence of the French, indicate that we shall never have in it either a peaceful or a secure neighbor unless we reduce it to utter weakness and impotence.”
“the treachery of the Poles was revealed to the utmost by their perfidious attempt to annihilate the Russian troops who were peacefully and securely posted in Warsaw under the terms of a treaty of alliance concluded in good faith. All of them, young and old, had a hand in perpetrating this villainous act.”
FOR MOST OF CATHERINE’S RULE, THE UKRAINIANS AND BELARUSIANS of the Commonwealth were defined by religious terminology as adherents of the Greek-Russian—or simply Greek—Church, suggesting that they were Orthodox. But the absolute majority of the “Belarusian nation” that Russia acquired in the partitions was non-Orthodox. This was true not only of the Polish or Polonized nobility, which was Catholic, or the Jews, who were not Christian at all, but even of the majority of the Eastern Slavs—they were Uniates. In the lands annexed to Russia after the second partition, only 300,000 people were
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She wrote about “the most suitable eradication of the Uniate faith” as a whole, not just the conversion of a few willing parishes.
The empress who had defended the Orthodox of the Commonwealth in the name of religious toleration and had been acclaimed for that by Voltaire suddenly turned into the persecutor of another religion. How to explain this? Although the reference in the pastoral letter to Uniates as people of the same tribe can elucidate the background to her thinking about the connection between religion and ethnicity, the immediate reason should be sought elsewhere. By 1794, in response to the French Revolution and to what she saw as a French-style attack on the authoritarian order coming from Poland and its new
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Catherine’s erstwhile defense of religious toleration was not replaced with a justification of intolerance. What she now claimed to be doing was redressing the previous injustice done to the Orthodox. They had been forcibly converted to the Union by the Polish authorities, and now she was merely trying to bring them back to their ancestral faith. The return to “the faith of fathers and forefathers,” as the conversion campaign was called in official pronouncements of the Russian church and state, proceeded with spectacular success in Right-Bank Ukraine, where almost no Uniate parishes remained
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THE PROCESS OF MERGING EMPIRE AND NATION UNDER THE AUSPICES of a powerful state began under Peter and was highly developed under Catherine, who employed Enlightenment practices of rational governance to eliminate regional and ethnic particularities, thereby strengthening central control over the empire’s diverse lands. Besides reshaping the administrative structure and institutions of the state, empire-building involved the articulation of a historical mythology, the development of a common language, and the rethinking of the status of Orthodoxy in a multiethnic polity.
As increasing centralism broke down regional loyalties and autonomous enclaves such as the Hetmanate, an all-Russian identity emerged. Social norms were also changing: Russians were now not only “sons of the Fatherland” obediently serving the state but also citizens endowed with rights. The Russian imperial outlook was still as opposed to the West as it had been in Elizabeth’s time, but it became less xenophobic.
It was only toward the end of her reign that the partitions of Poland, which brought millions of largely non-Orthodox subjects into the Russian Empire, helped introduce ethnicity into official Russian discourse.
the imperial government refused to adopt a multi-religious model of the Russian nation, launching instead a program of forcible conversion of the Uniates to the faith of their “fathers and forefathers.”
“ONE POLE IS A CHARMER; TWO POLES—A BRAWL; THREE Poles—well, this is the Polish question,” quipped Voltaire.
A full-fledged political nation, it was not prepared to give up the ideal of independent statehood.
Its usual strategy had been to make a deal with local elites at the expense of the lower classes and thus establish its supremacy. A deal was made in this case as well, but the local elite was not fully cooperative and occasionally refused to cooperate at all.
The advent of nationalist ideology, with its emphasis on linguistic and ethnic particularism, created another obstacle to the successful integration of the annexed territories.
