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2 1 1 From the beginning of their recorded history, the fertile lands surrounding the Dnieper River played host to a diverse array of peoples speaking different languages and professing different faiths. For most of the early modern and modern periods, the region found itself on the periphery of two sprawling multiethnic states: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian empire. Both states instituted socially stratified estate systems to cope with their heterogeneity, enlisting a diverse cast of local elites as partners in governance. The Polish kings guaranteed citizenship and self-governance rights to the Polish Catholic szlachta, Orthodox notables, and Jewish, Armenian, and Lutheran burghers and mercantile elites; they obligated peasants of many faiths to serve local gentry as serfs. Although the Russian empire, which claimed the left bank of the Dnieper in the seventeenth century and its right bank in the eighteenth, revoked the citizenship rights that Commonwealth elites had enjoyed, it left the basic social structure of the Polish-Lithuanian state in place. Tsarist officialsaffirmedtheestateprivilegesoflocalnotables—regardlessoftheirconfession, mother tongue, or cultural traditions—and obligated millions of Orthodox believers to serve as the serfs of non-Orthodox lords. This chapter examines how residents of the Dnieper region came to envision alternatives to the estate system. The first challenges to estate society arose in the seventeenth century, when Orthodox clerics and Cossack leaders reimagined the region as the center of an epic struggle for survival among coherent and hostile confessional communities. By the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Little Russian nobles descended from the early modern Cossack generals came to see the confessional communities that their ancestors had imagined in ethnonational terms. They described the Orthodox East Slavs as the “native” inhabitants of the lands surrounding the Dnieper and chronicled their efforts to protect the traditions that they had inherited from Rus′; they portrayed Poles and Jews as members of coherent nations that had long subjugated the Rus′ people and their culture. Presenting their native region as a citadel that had preserved authentic East Slavic values as well as a battlefield on which local residents struggled to defend their traditions, the Little Russian gentry thus insisted that the future of the East Slavs and the Russian empire would be decided on the banks of the Dnieper. The Little Russian Idea and the Invention of a Rus′ Nation 22 c h a p t e r o n e Although this Little Russian idea enjoyed great influence among local notables, through the first third of the nineteenth century it remained a purely regional phenomenon , exercising little influence on imperial policy or intellectual life. Beyond the borderlands, Russian intellectuals and officials tended to view the empire as the creation of an autocratic dynasty, not as a conglomeration of national groups engaged in a zero-sum battle. This rapidly changed in the aftermath of the 1830–31 revolt, however. Focusing on the interactions between imperial bureaucrats and Little Russian patriots between 1830 and 1860, this chapter traces the emergence of an informal alliance between the two camps. Recognizing the potential of the Little Russian idea to contest Polish claims on the southwestern borderlands, officials enabled its proponents to use the cultural institutions of the imperial state to their benefit—and even to present their agenda on an all-imperial stage. Little Russian activists, for their part, pressed officials to acknowledge and rectify the injustices of the estate system. The engagement of Little Russian patriots in the official campaign to marginalize Polish nationalism in the southwest was a creative attempt to reconcile the interests of state and society at a moment of crisis. But as we shall see, it also created new national dilemmas, challenging imperial officials to maintain control of the nationalizing project that they allowed to unfold in the southwest. The Rus′ Lands in Antiquity and Early Modernity According to chronicles, in the ninth century warring Slavic tribes inhabiting the forests of what is today western Russia invited the Varangians of Scandinavia to bring peace to the region. The Varangians soon established a state ruled from Kiev, which theybuiltonbluffsoverlookingtheDnieperRiver,thenamajortraderouteconnecting the Baltic Sea to the Byzantine world. Before long, the Rus′ state developed into a complex and diverse polity: it swallowed up lands stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from the Carpathians to the Volga, and acquired Jewish, Muslim, Greek, Slavic, and Lithuanian subjects along the way. The Greek missionaries Cyril and Methodius provided the Rus′ people with an alphabet andliterary Slavic language, and in the tenth century, the Kievan...

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