TY - BOOK AU - Hillis,Faith TI - Children of Rus': Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation SN - 9780801469268 AV - DK508.772 .H55 2016 U1 - 320.540947 23 PY - 2013///] CY - Ithaca, NY PB - Cornell University Press KW - Nationalism KW - Russia KW - History KW - 19th century KW - Ukraine KW - Political Science & Political History KW - Soviet & East European History KW - HISTORY / Russia & the Former Soviet Union KW - bisacsh KW - 'Little Russian' identity KW - Russian Civil War KW - Russian History course KW - Russian History student KW - Russian History survey KW - Slavic and East European Journal KW - Slavic unity KW - Ukrainian national evolution KW - czarist history KW - eurasian history KW - eurasian studies KW - history of the tsarist empire KW - late Imperial Russia KW - late Imperial Russian history KW - nineteenth-century European history KW - russian czars KW - russian history KW - russian nationalism KW - russian political history KW - russian political science KW - russian studies KW - slavic studies KW - state-society relations under tsarism KW - tsarist history KW - twentieth-century European history KW - tzarist history KW - ukraine history KW - ukraine political history KW - ukrainian nationalism N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; List of Maps --; Acknowledgments --; Note to the Reader --; Abbreviations --; Introduction --; Part One: The Little Russian Idea and the Russian Empire --; 1. The Little Russian Idea and the Invention of a Rus′ Nation --; 2. The Little Russian Idea in the 1860s --; 3. The Little Russian Idea and the Imagination of Russian and Ukrainian Nations --; Part Two: The Urban Crucible --; 4. Nationalizing Urban Politics --; 5 Concepts of Liberation --; Part Three: Forging a Russian Nation --; 6. Electoral Politics and Regional Governance --; 7. Nationalizing the Empire --; 8. The Limits of the Russian Nationalist Vision --; Epilogue --; Selected Bibliography --; Index; restricted access N2 - 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 UR - https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801469268 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780801469268 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780801469268/original ER -