Putting One and One Together? "Ukraine," "Malorossiia," and "Russia"

"What? … Another History of Malorossiia…? When will this end?" That is how the caustic intellectual, journalist, and editor Osip Senkovskii greeted the History of Malorossiiaby Mykola Markevych (Nikolai Markevich) in 1843. Markevych, deeply offended, fired back with an epigram "To the Enemy of Ukraine" ( sic). Quite unexpectedly, this exchange triggered a long reevaluation of mutual relations in the Russian-Polish-Ukrainian "triangle" involving Markevych's compatriots, Polish landlords, and Russian imperial elites. ¹ The episode typifies one of the many controversies pertaining to the modern nation-building process among Russians and Ukrainians, whose relations were crucial to the very existence of the multinational Russian Empire. The double Malorossian (Little Russian)/Ukrainian name of the country we now call "Ukraine" is only one of them.

The imperial legacy of "Russia" is the key to answering many questions about past and present issues of identity, historical alternatives, and national terminology. ²The modern "Ukrainian" and "Russian" national discourses developed in opposition to each other. For the last two centuries, consequently, both of these designations have remained highly ambivalent. There have been several "Ukraines" (Russian, Polish, Malorossian, Eastern, Western, etc.) and many "Rus´/Russias" (White, Red, Black, Great, Little, Northern, Southern, etc.). Most of these designations were used interchangeably until the ongoing Ukrainian-Russian competition for their shared historical and geographic legacy made such usage politically and nationally sensitive. ³The question is whether an imperially produced historical terminology and the debates concerning it reflect multiple processes of national identity formation or terminological imprecision.

As William Edgerton put it more than 40 years ago, the "Ukrainian question" is the most perplexing of the many controversies and conflicts among the Slavic peoples: "On this question, among scholars of Russian and Ukrainian background alike, and even among scholars who have no Slavic ethnic heritage at all, dispassionate objectivity is almost as scarce as hens' teeth. Almost, but not quite." ⁴Nowadays, with the world seemingly on the brink of a new Cold War, this somewhat sarcastic verdict is still relevant. Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian "hybrid war," accompanied by a fierce propaganda campaign, have deeply affected Ukrainian and Russian academic institutions, which have been involved in respective nation- and state-building processes since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. ⁵How has the global community of Western scholars specializing in the Russian and Ukrainian fields reacted to changing political, geographic, and academic landscapes in the two largest states of the former Soviet space? ⁶

The Ukrainian question has an important place in imperial Russian studies, especially in subfields concerned with the issue of empire and nationalism. ⁷Since the publication of Andreas Kappeler's groundbreaking book, the Russian Empire has been perceived as a multinational state similar to the Soviet Union—an umbrella for different peoples, nations, and cultures rather than a Russian nation-state. ⁸Paradoxically enough, some historians have recently noted that Russia's imperial borderlands and various nationalisms have been attracting much more scholarly attention than the Russian "heartland" and the "Russian question." ⁹If this observation is accurate, then it indicates that the well-known distinction among national, imperial, and regional components of nation building among the Eastern Slavs of the Russian Empire requires further conceptualization. Establishing the meanings and mutual relations among "Russian," "Malorossian," ¹⁰and "Ukrainian" designations, in turn, necessitates new terminological debates...