ABSTRACT
There is no reason to mourn the failure of the imperial projects of Algirdas, who dreamed of conquering all of Rus', or of Vytautas, who sought to succeed the legacy of the Golden Horde. Their success would have probably thwarted the emergence of the modern ethno-linguistic Lithuanian nation. Chauvinist Russian historians tell the history of Muscovy's conquests in the second half of the fifteenth century as the story of "Russia's unification", anachronistically comparing them to the political unification of the German and the Italian nations of the mid-nineteenth century. However, they had been readied for this by a long run of economic and cultural integration processes that had no analogies in fifteenth-century North East Rus'. The five Ruthenian members of the East European inter-polity system in the middle of the fifteenth century were old political organisms with statehood traditions that had proven their vitality on numerous occasions.
