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

by Serhii Plokhy

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.