ABSTRACT
The most visible legacy of Imperial Russia is the territorial configuration and ethnic composition of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In the Soviet context, the rehabilitation of Russian Orthodoxy revives an old imperial legacy: the Tsarist policy of denying the Ukrainians and Belorussians a distinct identity, including a separate identity in religious matters. The relationship between economic performance and political legitimacy and identity is well worth pondering as one analyzes the Soviet situation. The Leningrad historian Evgenii Anisimov attributed the present sharpening of national relations in Soviet society to various and serious shortcomings in the treatment of the history of Soviet nationalities, especially the "relapses into imperial consciousness". Mikhail Gorbachev identifies the source of the Soviet Union's problems in the model of state-society relations established after the Revolution, although he prefers to speak about Lenin's death as the time when things took a wrong turn.
