The Ukrainian Question

The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the 19th Century
Author: 
ISBN: 
978-963-9241- 60-2
cloth
$90.00 / €79.00 / £71.00
Publication date: 
2003
306 pages

This pioneering work treats the Ukrainian question in Russian imperial policy and its importance for the intelligentsia of the empire. Miller sets the Russian Empire in the context of modernizing and occasionally nationalizing great power states and discusses the process of incorporating the Ukraine, better known as "Little Russia" in that time, into the Romanov Empire in the late 18th and 19th centuries. This territorial expansion evolved into a competition of mutually exclusive concepts of Russian and Ukrainian nation-building projects.

Introduction
Theoretical concepts in the book
Comparative historical Context
The ‘All-Russian Nation’ Project
On terminology

Chapter 1. Russia and Ukrainophilism in the First Half of the XIX Century
Chapter 2. The first years of Alexander II’s Reign and Latent Ukrainophilism
Chapter 3. The dynamics of Ukrainophilism in the 1860s. Osnova and Russian Press
Chapter 4. The Empire and Ukranophilism in 1862-1863. Genesis of the Valuev Circular
Chapter 5. The Valuev Circular in Public Opinion
Chapter 6. The Government Policy After the Valuev Circular
Chapter 7. The Russian Assimilation Potential in the Western region
Chapter 8. The Kiev Period of Ukrainophilism 1872-1876
Chapter 9. The Ems Edict
Chapter 10. The “Execution” of the Ems Edict
Chapter 11. The Consequences of the Ems Edict
Chapter 12. Subsidizing the Newspaper Slovo. Galician Ruthenians in the Petersburg Policy
Chapter 13. The Crisis of Power 1880-1881 and the Attempt to Abolish the Ems Edict
Conclusion

Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Sources and Literature
Glossary

"This is a book that connects Russian scholarship with trends in North American and European scholarship. At the same time, this book also relates to Post-Soviet reflections about what constitutes the Russian nation...Miller's views are revisionist with regard to Ukrainian historiography, and they should provoke some rethinking or reaction from that quarter."
"Alexei Miller is representative of a new type of Russian international scholar who is rewriting the history of Eastern Europe and Eurasia...Pioneering work on the Ukrainian question in Russian imperial policy."
"Alexei Miller's new book makes a particularly important contribution to bridging the East-West divide by applying recent theories of nationality to the issue of Russian–Ukrainian relations and then testing his hypotheses with thorough research in archives and contemporary periodicals. The result both sums up a large historiography and adds to it substantially. For anyone interested in tsarist Russia's nationality policy, or Russian or Ukrainian history, this book is a must read."
"Without doubt this is the most thorough analysis to date of the emergence of an Imperial policy toward the Ukrainian movement and the process of defining 'Russianness' as coterminous with Great Russian language and culture."