Lost Kingdom: A History of Russian Nationalism from Ivan the Great to Vladimir Putin

by Serhii Plokhy

Despite what one reads in textbooks and hears in official pronouncements, Russia, especially by European standards, is a relatively young state. Its history as an independent polity officially begins less than six hundred years ago, in the 1470s, when Ivan III, the first ruler of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy to call himself tsar, challenged the suzerainty of the Mongol khans. At stake was not only the independent status of the rulers of Muscovy—the principality centered on the city of Moscow—but also their control over other Rus' lands, in particular Novgorod, whose independence from Moscow the Mongol khans sought to maintain. It was then that the Kyivan roots of the Muscovite dynasty and church helped form a powerful myth of origin that distinguished Muscovy from its immediate Mongol past and nourished its self-image as heir to Byzantium.

exploits. Despite Russia’s long history of imperial conquest, its vision of “gathering the Rus' lands,” initiated during the reign of Ivan III, was fulfilled only during the brief period from 1945 to 1991—less than half a century. In those years of superpower status, Moscow was able to extend its rule to the westernmost regions of the old Kyivan state, settled predominantly by Eastern Slavs—Ukrainian Galicia, Bukovyna, and Transcarpathia.

But Russia also faces a major issue that most former imperial powers, especially the maritime empires, did not encounter—the definition of the Russian nation per se. In the words of the British historian Geoffrey Hosking, “Britain had an empire, but Russia was an empire—and perhaps still is.” The traditional view holds that Russia’s problem with self-identification derives from the fact that it acquired an empire before it acquired a nation. This is probably true for a number of empires, including the British, the Spanish, and the Portuguese, but what makes the Russian situation unique is that none of those empires shared common historical roots and myths of origin with their foreign subjects, as had been the case with Russia throughout a good part of its imperial history.

The strength of Ivan’s army allowed him to subjugate Novgorod and repel the Great Horde, the main successor to the Golden Horde. But the new status of the Grand Principality of Moscow and its constant acquisition of new territories required justification in the eyes of its subjects and neighbors. According to the Muscovite scribes, who conveniently produced a new rendition of the Russian chronicles in 1472, Ivan III had taken Novgorod and punished the republic for its insubordination on the basis of his patrimonial rights, which went back to Prince Volodymyr of Kyiv. “From antiquity you, the people of Novgorod, have been my patrimony,” the Muscovite envoys allegedly said on behalf of Ivan III, “from our grandfathers and our ancestors, from Grand Prince Volodymyr, the great-grandson of Rurik, the first grand prince in our land, who baptized the Rus' land. And from that Rurik until this day, you have recognized only one ruling clan of those grand princes …. [W]e, their kin, have ruled over you, and we bestow [our mercy] upon you, and we protect you against [all adversaries], and we are free to punish you if you do not recognize us according to the old tradition.”

Muscovy, which got to keep Novgorod, began its history as a fully independent state by crushing a democratic rival that had sought to distance itself from the heirs of the Golden Horde.

The Muscovites were gaining the upper hand thanks to the strength of Ivan III’s armies and the unwillingness of Ivan’s rival, Casimir IV of Poland and Lithuania, to attract and accommodate the descendants of the princes of Kyiv in the lands that now constitute Ukraine and Belarus. As Ivan annexed one principality after another, using his family’s Kyivan descent to legitimize the process, Casimir abolished the only principality still extant in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania—that of Kyiv. He did so in 1470, and his decision would bear directly on Lithuania’s “loss” of Novgorod to Muscovy one year later. The Kyiv principality had been ruled by the Olelkovych family, which traced its origins to one of the first Lithuanian rulers, Algirdas, and whose dynastic status was close to, if not on a par with, that of the grand dukes of Lithuania. Prince Mykhailo Olelkovych, who came to Novgorod in 1470 to help defend the republic against Muscovy, was a member of the Kyivan branch of the family. His departure from Novgorod in 1471 was motivated in part by his hope of assuming his father’s office in Kyiv. But he was in for a surprise. Not only did Casimir not allow him to become the next prince of Kyiv, but he abolished the office and the principality altogether, appointing his own representative to administer the region.

Ivan the Terrible died in 1584, one year after a peace with Sweden ended the Livonian War. He left his son and successor, Fedor Ivanovich, who would be the last Rurikid on the Muscovite throne, a country economically broken and devastated by war and terror but more centralized than under any previous Muscovite ruler. He also left Fedor the title of tsar, which was now recognized by foreign leaders, and Monomakh’s Cap as the crown of the Tsardom of Muscovy. The cap and the legend attached to it embodied the complex identity of the tsardom and its elites as it had evolved in the course of the sixteenth century. Featuring Central Asian gold and jewels and Muscovite furs, the cap was swathed in invisible layers of historical mythology, first Kyivan, then Byzantine, and finally Roman. Whether the Muscovites sought a Roman connection by way of the Baltics and Prussia or the Black Sea and Constantinople, all ways led through Kyiv, the seat of the first Rurikid princes, without whom there could be no claim to anything but the Mongol tradition.

It was the Kyivan myth of origins that became the cornerstone of Muscovy’s ideology as the polity evolved from a Mongol dependency to a sovereign state and then an empire. The ruling dynasty, which relied on Kyivan roots to legitimize its rule, would subsequently find it difficult, if not impossible, to divorce itself from that founding myth.

The Time of Troubles posed new challenges to the Muscovite historical, political, and cultural identity that had taken shape in the previous century and a half, following the end of Mongol rule. On the one hand, the crisis began the process of separating the person of the tsar from the state over which he ruled, laying the foundations for the early modern Russian nation. On the other hand, the patriotic reaction to the Polish invasion that accompanied and exacerbated the crisis closely identified loyalty to the tsar with loyalty to church and fatherland. In official Muscovite discourse of the era, disloyalty to one came to mean disloyalty to all.

In fact, if one did not count the Kyivan Cave Monastery and Orthodox churches, the city was already dominated by Polish culture. Visitors heard more Polish spoken in the streets of Kyiv than Russian or Ukrainian. In Kyiv province there were 43,000 Polish nobles as against slightly more than 1,000 Russian ones, and it was Poles who defined the public face of Kyiv.

In a number of polemical articles published in 1911 and 1912, one of the leaders of the party, Petr Struve, formulated his (and, as many believed, his party’s) position on the Ukrainian question. He first presented his views on the issue in January 1911, responding to an article by a Zionist leader and native of Odesa, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who questioned Struve’s treatment of the Russian Empire as a Russian nation-state. With only 43 percent of the population consisting of Great Russians, Russia was nothing but a multiethnic empire, argued Jabotinsky. Struve, who included the Ukrainians and Belarusians in the Great Russian camp, disagreed: for him, the key was not ethnicity but culture. Struve considered Russia to be a work in progress, like the United States and Great Britain. The Russian nation that Struve had in mind was to be held together not by ethnicity but by culture—Russian culture. He insisted that that culture was not Great Russian but all-Russian, and thus included the Little and White Russians along with Great Russians as core members.

Hrushevsky’s program soon became that of the Central Rada and was supported by numerous congresses of peasants’ and soldiers’ deputies—the true source of legitimacy and power in the months following the February Revolution. Whereas in the Russian provinces of the empire the revolution brought about peasant revolts against the local nobility, and in the Caucasus and Central Asia it took the form of an insurgency of autochthonous populations against Russian colonists, in Ukraine the peasants were mobilized by Ukrainian activists in support of territorial autonomy. Having played his role in the abdication of Nicholas II, Vasilii Shulgin returned to his native Kyiv, complaining that Ukrainian activists were stirring up the peasants by telling them that if they assumed a Ukrainian identity and supported Ukrainian autonomy, they would assure themselves of the right to obtain land of their own and prevent foreigners, especially Russian peasants, from claiming the rich Ukrainian soil. The soldiers, who had been allowed to form Ukrainian units since June 1917, also supported the Rada, seeing it as the only institution that could end the war and send them back home in time for the redistribution of the land.

The Politburo ordered a stop to Ukrainization outside Soviet Ukraine, mainly in the Kuban and Far Eastern regions of the Russian Federation, which had significant Ukrainian populations. That decision led to the closing of newspapers, schools, and teacher-training institutions, and eventually to the Russification of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Ukrainians. In Soviet Ukraine, Stalin installed new leaders of the party and the secret police. He also ended the Ukrainization not only of the proletariat but also of large groups of bureaucrats and engineers working for the ever-increasing number of institutes and enterprises belonging to all-Union ministries. The Ukrainian Famine took place in the midst of a full-scale onslaught by Stalin against the Ukrainian political elite and the Ukrainian language and culture—a well-established link that prompts many in Ukraine today to speak of the Great Famine as a genocide aimed not only at the peasantry but also at the Ukrainian nation as a whole.

Putin’s claim that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people and his branding of those who believed otherwise as nationalists ran counter to a long Soviet and post-Soviet tradition of treating Russians and Ukrainians as historically and culturally close, but still separate peoples. Putin’s statement challenged the foundations not only of Ukrainian national identity but also of modern Russian identity. The affirmation that Russians constituted a distinct people had been the legitimizing foundation of Russia’s revolt against the dying Soviet Union in 1991 and of the existence of the Russian Federation ever since.

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.