The Read: Faith Hillis, Children of Rus': Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
Well, there’s this war…
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes. By way of getting to its main specific argument, the book reviews a lot of the overall history of the region that is now Ukraine (and eastern Poland) and that was extraordinarily helpful for giving me more details. Though in the end I found it even more interesting in the context of comparative histories of nationalism.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I wouldn’t dare teach it—there is so much more I don’t know about this area of history. But I do think it will inform some things I am working on now that touch or or comment on nationalism. I’d also certainly review Part One of the book any time I felt I needed a refresher on Ukraine’s history and its entanglement with Russia.
Quotes
“On many counts, the southwestern borderlands would seem an unlikely locale to give rise to a Russian nationalist imagination. They were one of the Russian Empires’s last territorial acquisitions, claimed during the late eighteenth-century partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a Catholic state. They were also one of Russia’s poorest and least developed corners—a place where the horizons of most residents remained purely local. They could scarcely be considered Russian in demographic or cultural terms: even in the last years of the nineteenth century, after one hundred years of imperial rule, only 4 percent of their inhabitants spoke Russian as a first language. About three-quarters of local residents were Ukrainian speakers (called ‘Little Russians’ in official parlance); most, but not all, were Orthodox believers of peasant stock.”
“Peasants, nobles and urban merchants relied on each other for survival, and the region’s elites created a unique, multilingual hybrid culture of their own.”
“Why did a diverse, peripheral region nearly one thousand miles from Moscow and St. Petersburg lead the empire on a search for a Russian nation? What did nationalist activist mean when they called themselves Russian, and how did they manage to convince local residents to join their cause?”
“In the wake of the 1863 revolt, more officials began to see the ethnoconfessional status of individuals as an indicator of their loyalty to the state—and therefore as a legitimate consideration in imperial governance". In a set of policies referred to as ‘Russification,’ bureaucrats struggled to enhance the status of the Orthodox Church and the Russian language across the empire and to reduce the influence of Polish-speaking Catholics as well as other non-Russian minorities in its western borderlands.”
“Some though of confession or language as the most significant markers of difference; others discerned different tribes (plemeni), people (narody), ethnicities (narodnosti), or nations (natsii) within Russia’s borders. This epistemological and terminological uncertainty created practical problems for the offical advocates of Russification; lacking comprehensive census data and standardized systems of taxonomy, they were left to debate what distinguished a Pole from a Russian.”
“Yes there is also a strong tendency in the existing literature to deproblematize the Ukrainian national project. Underestimating the complications that accompanied efforts to adapt national ideas to the Russian imperial context, scholars of the lands that ultimately came to constitute Ukraine have tended to take it for granted that nationalism would emerge as a driving force of politics; they have also presented Ukrainian national identity as the natural and expected by-product of discussions about local folk traditions and culture. This book takes a different approach. Rather than chronicling the Ukrainian national awakening—or the competition between Ukrainian nationalists and their rivals—it asks how residents of the right bank came to conceive of local society in national terms in the first place.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
This is a quintessential historical monograph, in the best possible sense. It’s one reason that the folks who demand that every work of scholarship be accessible to general readers, stripped of most detail and footnotes, etc. can be really annoying, because here’s a case where the details are the argument, as is often the case with excellent scholarly history. Meaning, Hillis is saying that if you want to understand the origins of Ukrainian nationalism in the 19th Century, you have to understand the intricate contingencies of how a great many different groups, institutions and state structures came together. You particularly have to understand, she argues, that at least one major component of the emergence of Ukraine as a nation-state (before its incorporation into the Soviet Union) was paradoxically the active efforts of groups that identified themselves as “Russian”, who Hillis argues ended up playing an important role not just in Ukrainian nationalism but in the shaping of a national conception of Russia itself. There’s no way to strip out the complexity of that history and do it justice—to ask for it in a simpler form is to ask for something untrue, if you accept what Hillis lays out in this book.
The book doesn’t change what I had to say about Russia’s war on Ukraine last week, but it does enrich my understanding of the contending histories that are being invoked and referenced by various parties, which is useful—it’s important to not rush into the breach asserting that the distinctions between Ukraine and Russia as national projects are so utterly clear and absolute. The real distinction that matters in the last ten years is that Ukraine was becoming a more democratic, inclusive and dynamic state while Russia was trending ever more in the opposite direction.
This, I think, is part of the story too in the 19th Century—that the confusing array of different projects and languages that various groups were pursuing—to reinvent and preserve a multi-cultural, multi-linguistic empire, to make nations, to reform systems of rule and authority with little specific concern about the nature of who was being ruled, to dramatically reform social relations and unseat traditional ruling elites, to make dynamic new cultures in cities—end up in nations (and then in the Soviet Union) because of the intricacy of how those projects and conceptual frames ended up overlapping both in their propositional content and in the scrum of practical alliances between distinct groups of social actors. We tend to erase the numerous other possibilities that emerged in various places in the 19th Century and 20th Century about territories, boundaries, states, and systems—some of which never were concretely realized, others of which flashed into brief life and were then consolidated or eliminated. Nationalism wasn’t (and isn’t) one thing, and it had many doubles and dopplegangers.
I also kept thinking about a subject I’ve been interested in for a while, which is the strange relationship between the major multi-ethnic empires in Europe and the Mediterranean of the 19th Century (the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire) and nationalism. It feels to me sometimes like the nations which in some sense “settled” on a pluralistic understanding of their national identity were in some fashion relabelling that older model of empire. The problem with those empires structurally was always that they couldn’t fully satisfy the aspirations of all localities and couldn’t fully build models of inclusion into the metropolitan core—something that pluralistic nation-states still can’t manage very well.
She had a good piece in The Atlantic a week ago: "Seize the Oligrachs' Wealth" and many of her recommendations have since been adopted.