ABSTRACT
The southwestern provinces of Kiev, Volhynia, and Podolia posed a challenge for the nationality policy of the Romanov Empire. During half a century after its acquisition from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Russian emperors and the central imperial bureaucracy conceived this region, which was populated by numerous ethnic and religious groups, as quite an exotic Polish territory, occasionally even “associating it with something similar to the overseas colonies of Western European empires.” 1 Even though the indifference of the emperors toward the national composition of the formerly Polish terra incognita had already started to change during the last weeks of Nicholas I's life, 2 it was definitely bound to change after the January Uprising of 1863–64. It turned out that the area was mainly populated by peasants, the majority of whom were defined by ethnographers not as Poles, but as Orthodox and Catholic Little Russians/Ukrainians. 3 As Little Russians, they were declared to be members of the tripartite Russian nation who potentially could be relied upon by the government in its new nationality policy in the region. At the same time, their Russianness was problematized by the emerging Ukrainian national movement and its activists. The latter clearly argued that the southwest of the empire was populated not by Little Russians, but by Ukrainians who were distinct from both Russians and Poles. No wonder that both visions dramatically collided after the emergence of the public sphere in the Romanov Empire in 1906. The history of Russian nationalism in the Romanov Empire and, in particular, its southwestern provinces, has recently become fashionable in historiography. It has been discussed not just in scholarly literature, but even in popular historical monographs and edited collections. 4 The general argument suggested by historians to explain the emergence of Russian nationalism since Hugh Seton-Watson's idea of “official nationalism” (and its popularization by Benedict Anderson) is that since the 1830s, the empire required a new ideological foundation to preserve its stability. 5
