ON JANUARY 8, 1654, WHEN THE TSARIST ENVOY VASILII BUTURLIN accepted a loyalty oath from the Ukrainian hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky and his officers in the city of Pereiaslav, he took a major step toward what Russian imperial historians would call the “reunification of Rus’” and their Soviet successors rendered as the “reunification of Ukraine and Russia.” But the act later hailed as a “reunification” was accompanied by the signing of a document that stressed not unity but diversity. That day Bohdan Khmelnytsky wrote to the tsar, addressing him not as sovereign of all Rus’, as was customary at the time, but as sovereign of Great and Little Rus’. This revision was probably discussed with Buturlin, as the tsar soon changed “all Rus’” to “Great and Little Rus’”in his official title.
These names had originated in the early fourteenth century, when the Metropolitanate of All Rus’ was divided in the wake of the Mongol invasion and a new Metropolitanate of Little Rus’ was established in the Ukrainian town of Halych. The “Great” and “Little” Rus’ terminology was brought back to Eastern Europe in the late sixteenth century with the help of Middle Eastern hierarchs who traveled through the Rus’ lands of the Commonwealth in search of alms from the tsar. Under the new circumstances, “Little Rus’” meant the Orthodox lands administered from Kyiv, while “Great Rus’” referred to the Muscovite realm. The religious terminology was transferred to the political realm at the time of the Pereiaslav Agreement.
White Rus’ (Belarus) was added to the tsar’s title in 1655. These changes marked a departure from the old religious terminology, reflecting the new military and political situation in the region. The name Little Rus’, earlier applied to the territory of the Kyiv Metropolitanate, was now applied to Ukraine, or the Rus’ lands of the Kingdom of Poland. They were either under the control of the Cossacks or claimed by them, and they enjoyed special rights and privileges granted by the tsar to the Cossack hetman. Those rights and privileges did not apply to White Rus’, which was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. When a successful Muscovite military campaign brought White Rus’ under the rule of the tsar, no special rights were granted to its inhabitants. Nor did the Orthodox connection help the Belarusians secure such rights: the Orthodox parishes of White Rus’ came under the jurisdiction of Moscow, while those of Ukraine remained subordinate to Kyiv.
Just as the tsarist scribes insisted on differentiating not only Great and Little Rus’ but also White Rus’, so the intellectuals of the latter two realms maintained that the identities of Little and White Rus’ were separate from that of Great Rus’. Educated in the same Kyivan College under Metropolitan Peter Mohyla, those intellectuals considered themselves part of a distinct Rus’ community, basing their view not only on dynastic and religious considerations but also on the new idea of nationality. In their minds, they constituted one Rus’ nation. Curiously enough, from today’s point of view, they were reluctant to extend membership in the nation that they called “Rossian” (in present-day English, “Russian”) to the inhabitants of Great Rus’.
On July 5, 1656, one of the best-known alumni of the Kyivan College, Simeon of Polatsk, and his students welcomed a distinguished guest, Tsar and Grand Prince Aleksei Mikhailovich of Muscovy, to their city in northern Belarus. They greeted him as a true Eastern or Orthodox ruler and as the legitimate master of Rus’ lands inherited from Prince Volodymyr of Kyiv, but not as a member of the same nation. “Live, long-awaited solace of the nation / Granted to the persecuted Russian clan,” declaimed one of the students, referring to the Rus’ population of the former Commonwealth. Another student explained that his “Russia” consisted of two parts: “All Russia, White and Little, kisses [the tsar] / Having become enlightened with the light of faith under you.” For the Polatsk students, Aleksei Mikhailovich was an Eastern or Orthodox tsar who had come to their “Russia” from abroad, a place called the “northern country.”
Aleksei Mikhailovich and his entourage did not seem to mind that the citizens of Polatsk did not treat them as conationals. Ethnicity did not yet have the political significance that it would acquire in the age of national states. Muscovite thinking was monarchic, patrimonial, and increasingly confessional, but the Muscovite elites rarely thought of themselves in national terms, and to the extent that they did so, they did not include the Rus’ population of the Commonwealth in their nation. The Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) elites, by contrast, did think in national terms, but at this time they did not imagine themselves as part of the Muscovite nation.
IT TOOK BOTH GROUPS SOME TIME TO ADJUST THEIR THINKING TO the new political reality and come to think of their lands and peoples not only as a realm ruled by the same sovereign, but also as one nation. Nothing promoted that process more than the fierce struggle for the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands that pitted Muscovy against its two regional rivals, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire.
Muscovy found it difficult to retain the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands captured in 1654–1655 in their entirety. According to the Truce of Andrusovo, signed in 1667 in a village near Smolensk after three years of negotiations, Muscovy lost eastern Belarus to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Chernihiv in northeastern Ukraine remained under Muscovite control, but indirectly—it was part of the Cossack Hetmanate, which accepted the suzerainty of the tsar. Muscovite suggestions that the Cossacks subordinate Chernihiv directly to them fell on deaf ears, as the Cossacks were now in charge of Ukraine on the left or eastern bank of the Dnieper River. The rest of Ukraine, including most of the Kyiv region, Volhynia, Podolia, and Galicia—all parts of what the Kyivans defined in political and ecclesiastical terms as Little Rus’—remained under Commonwealth rule.
Kyiv, the old capital of the Rus’ princes and the center of Rossia/Russia as imagined by Simeon Polotsky and his Kyivan professors and classmates, found itself in a precarious position. The city was located on the Right Bank of the Dnieper, and so the tsar and his advisers were prepared to give it up to ensure peace with Warsaw. According to the Truce of Andrusovo, Kyiv was to be handed over to the Poles two years after the signing. That never happened, despite the difficulty of defending the Kyivan “bridgehead” on the other side of the river. The handover was prevented, in part, by the lobbying efforts of the city’s Orthodox clergy, which wanted to maintain the tsar’s military protection against Kyiv’s enemies at all costs.
In 1674, faced with a possible Ottoman attack on the city, the Kyivan intellectuals recapitulated their arguments in favor of the city’s remaining under the tsar in a historical text titled Synopsis, or brief compendium of various chronicles about the origin of the Slavo-Rossian nation and the first princes of the divinely protected city of Kyiv and the life of the holy, pious grand prince of Kyiv and all Russia, the first autocrat Volodymyr, and about inheritors of his virtuous Rus’ domain, even unto our illustrious and virtuous sovereign, Tsar and Grand Prince Aleksei Mikhailovich, autocrat of all Great, Little, and White Russia.
The book was issued by the printshop of the Kyivan Cave Monastery and is usually attributed to the pen of Inokentii Gizel, the abbot—or, to give him his traditional Orthodox title, archimandrite—of the monastery. It represents a continuation of Kyivan chronicle writing and is preoccupied with questions of Kyivan history, the origins of the Rus’ church, and issues of nationhood. The Synopsis was received with great interest by readers in Kyiv and beyond. New editions were published in 1678 and 1680. Not surprisingly, the Synopsis presented a highly Kyiv-centric vision of Rus’ and its history. At its core was the presentation of Moscow as a second Kyiv—the city that had been crucial to the construction of the paradigm of Moscow as the Third Rome but remained in Constantinople’s shadow until the publication of the Synopsis. The Kyivan monks were now insisting on their city’s importance, stressing its centrality to Rus’ and Muscovite history.
Kyiv emerges from the pages of the Synopsis as the birthplace of the Russian dynasty, state, and church. No less important to the author of the Synopsis was the status of Kyiv as the birthplace of the “Rossian” nation. The section on the origins of Kyiv was titled “On the Most Renowned City of Kyiv, Supreme and Principal for the Whole Rossian Nation.” What was that nation? In the Synopsis, it was counted as one of the Slavic nations and identified as “Slavo-Rossian.” The Slavo-Rossian nation included those who were living in the territories of the medieval Kyivan state. This was a major departure from the established canon of Ukrainian chronicle writing, which had followed Polish historiography in distinguishing clearly between the two nations (narody) of Muscovy and Rus’.
The Synopsis became the first textbook of Russian history to be used in the eighteenth-century Russian Empire, and by the early nineteenth century sixteen reprints or new editions had appeared. As the numerous editions and reprints of the Synopsis educated the Muscovite public in the basics of its history, they prompted the Muscovites to think about themselves as a nation. That nation, however, was anything but purely Muscovite, as the history and nation of Muscovy described in the book were unimaginable without Kyiv and the lands then known as Little and White Rus’. The author(s) of the Synopsis encouraged readers to consider extending the tsar’s possessions not primarily as a dynastic realm or an Orthodox state but as a nation. This was a revolutionary idea.
Although the new concept of a Russian nation historically centered in Kyiv, and uniting the Muscovite subjects of the tsar with those who, until recently, had been subjects of the Commonwealth, was widely publicized by the Synopsis, the acceptance of that model was by no means a given. In Muscovy, that concept had to compete with the alternative vision of Russia advanced by the Old Believers—traditionalists who rejected the Kyivan innovations in the Muscovite Orthodox Church and rebelled against the tsar, who supported the innovations.
One of the leaders of the schism, Archpriest Avvakum, called on the tsar to maintain and strengthen his traditional Rus’ identity and use his native language: “After all, you are a Russian, not a Greek. Speak your native language; do not demean it in church, in your home, or in anything you say. God loves us no less than he loves the Greeks.” Avvakum protested even more strongly against elements of Catholic practice brought to Muscovy by Kyivan intellectuals such as Simeon of Polatsk, who settled in Moscow in 1664 and became one of Avvakum’s foremost opponents. “Oh, poor Rus’, why did you desire Latin customs and practices but come to despise and reject your true Christian law?” wrote Avvakum in one of his missives.
If Avvakum’s Russia rejected the tsar’s authority, that of Simeon of Polatsk embraced it. Along with religious innovations and new national thinking, the Kyivans brought to Moscow elements of Western secular culture, embodied in education, literature, theater, and visual representation. There would be no stronger supporter of these new elements of Russian identity than Peter I, the tsar known in Russian and Western historiography as Peter the Great.
ON JUNE 27, 1709, ON A FIELD NEAR THE CITY OF POLTAVA IN Cossack Ukraine, a Swedish army of 24,000, supported by close to 6,000 Cossacks and Polish cavalrymen, confronted a Russian army of 52,000 supported by more than 20,000 Cossacks and Kalmyk horsemen. The Russians were led into battle by the energetic Tsar Pëtr (Peter) Alekseevich, who became the sole ruler of Muscovy in 1696 after outliving his half-brother and co-ruler Ivan V, while the Swedes were under the command of their young but already battle-hardened King Charles XII. The outcome of the battle would decide the fate of the Great Northern War (1700–1721), in which Sweden and Russia fought each other as members of ever-shifting alliances for access to and supremacy over the Baltic region. It would also define the future of Russia as a nation and as an empire.
In 1700, the first year of the war, Charles confronted a Muscovite army of close to 40,000 with a Swedish corps numbering barely more than 10,000 troops near the town of Narva. He emerged victorious, losing fewer than 1,000 men to Muscovy’s 9,000 and taking more than 20,000 prisoners. In the summer of 1708, after defeating his enemies in Central Europe, Charles turned eastward once again. He began his march from Saxony to Muscovy, but with winter fast approaching, and supplies running out even faster, he turned south toward Ukraine, where he hoped to find plenty of supplies as well as winter quarters. Both were promised him by Hetman Ivan Mazepa, until then a loyal ally of the tsar, who had joined Charles and his staff in October 1708 because of his dissatisfaction with Peter’s treatment of Cossack Ukraine. The rest of the Cossack army was supposed to follow him in a matter of weeks, if not days. But Peter sent troops to Ukraine, captured the Hetmanate’s capital of Baturyn, massacred its residents, and replaced Mazepa with a hetman loyal to himself.
Throughout the winter of 1708 and the spring of 1709, Charles and Peter and the two Ukrainian hetmans—the pro-Swedish Ivan Mazepa and the pro-Muscovite Ivan Skoropadsky—engaged in a war of manifestos intended to win over the Cossack army and the Ukrainian population at large. The war of manifestos revealed profound differences between the Russian and Ukrainian sides in definitions of values and presentation of goals. Tsar Peter presented Mazepa’s action as a vassal’s betrayal of his sovereign. Mazepa responded to the accusations of betrayal by pleading loyalty not to the tsar but to his homeland. As Mazepa defined it, the political conflict was a battle not between a suzerain and a vassal but between two nations. “Muscovy, that is, the Great Russian nation, has always been hateful to our Little Russian nation; in its malicious intentions it has long resolved to drive our nation to perdition,” wrote Mazepa. Another object of Mazepa’s loyalty was the “Little Russian fatherland.” Peter and his scribes never referred to Muscovy in such terms. It looked as if only the Little Russians had a nation and a fatherland, while the tsar and his people, including those whom Mazepa called the “Great Russian nation,” had none. That was about to change.
The change came with the Russian victory at Poltava in June 1709. This time the Russians had more than numbers in their favor. In the years preceding the showdown with Charles, Peter had built a much more professional army. It was well trained and fresh. The Swedes, for their part, were exhausted by the unusually cold winter they had spent in Ukraine, constantly harassed by pro-Muscovite Cossacks and peasants. Besides, Charles XII had been wounded during a reconnaissance mission a few days earlier and could not lead his regiments into battle. With a disorganized leadership, the Swedes lost their way and, eventually, the battle as well. Charles and Mazepa fled to the Ottoman dependency of Moldavia in the aftermath of the battle.
Peter would celebrate the Poltava victory more than once and devise elaborate commemoration ceremonies for those events. One of the first formal celebrations took place in Kyiv on July 24, 1709. There, in the ancient St. Sophia Cathedral, Peter was welcomed with a sermon delivered by the prefect of the Kyivan College, Teofan Prokopovych. Almost fifty years had passed since Simeon of Polatsk’s address to Tsar Aleksei in Polatsk. The message delivered in 1709 by another alumnus of the Kyivan College, Prokopovych, to Aleksei’s son Peter also included references to Russia and the Russian nation, but their meaning was much broader than Simeon’s. Prokopovych’s “Russia” referred to the tsar’s entire realm, “starting from our Dnieper River to the shores of the Euxine [Sea] in the south, eastward from there to the Caspian or Khvalinian Sea, even to the borders of the Persian kingdom, and from there to the farthest reaches of the Sino-Chinese Kingdom… and to the shores of the Arctic Ocean.”
Referring to the monarchy, state, and nation (narod), Prokopovych called all of them “Russian,” an “all-national” (obshchenarodnoe) name. He also spoke of “all-Russian” joy on the occasion of the Poltava victory. For Prokopovych, Russia was also a fatherland no longer limited to the Little Russian fatherland of Mazepa and of Peter’s pre-Poltava manifestos. More importantly, Prokopovych called Peter the father of that new fatherland. He had used the same appellation for Mazepa (father of the Little Russian fatherland) a few years earlier. According to Prokopovych’s sermon, Peter, the “Russian Samson” (not Simeon’s distant “Eastern Tsar”), had saved the Russian fatherland from mortal danger and now deserved gratitude for his achievement.
Peter doubtless appreciated what he heard. A few years later, he would invite Prokopovych to join him on a military campaign. By 1717, Prokopovych was already in St. Petersburg, delivering sermons to the tsar and becoming one of his main ideologues and promoters of Westernization. His influence at court eclipsed that of the other former Uniate adviser to the tsar, Simeon of Polatsk. Peter was a fast learner, and many of Prokopovych’s concepts and ideas were not entirely unfamiliar to him. Peter’s letters and decrees show an interesting transformation of his understanding of the term “fatherland” (otechestvo), which changed its meaning in the course of the first decades of the eighteenth century from the tsar’s patrimony to a patria common to all Muscovites.
In 1721, on the occasion of the Russian victory in the Great Northern War, the Senate and the Synod—consultative bodies created by Peter himself—bestowed on him the title of “All-Russian Emperor” and the appellations “the Great” and “Father of the Fatherland.” The “Tsar of All Russia” was now the “All-Russian Emperor.” The two other appellations, “Great” and “Father of the Fatherland,” were officially justified as having been merited by the tsar’s achievements. According to the document signed by the senators, “Your Majesty’s labors for the advancement of our fatherland and your subject all-Russian people are known to the whole world.” Peter responded with references to the nation and the common good. He declared: “One must labor for the general welfare and prosperity that God sets before our eyes, both internal and external, which will ease the people’s lot.”
Peter and his aides had clearly mastered the national discourse, with its emphasis on the fatherland, the nation, and the common good. Teofan Prokopovych, who was the first to introduce some of those notions to Russian officialdom, was not only present at the ceremonial conferral of the new titles on Peter, but also read out the text of the Nystad peace treaty with Sweden and delivered a sermon on that occasion. Another Kyivan cleric, Metropolitan Stefan Yavorsky, the interim head of the Moscow patriarchate, served the liturgy afterward. The Kyivans had successfully imparted their Western ideas to Peter and his court.
PETER DIED UNEXPECTEDLY IN 1725, HAVING ENDED THE LONG Northern War victoriously but scarcely begun the formation of the new imperial state and its nation-minded political elite. The court’s almost immediate reaction was to undo some of his most drastic reforms. In 1728, the advisers to Peter’s grandson, Peter II, decided to move the capital of the realm from St. Petersburg, the embodiment of Peter’s Western aspirations, where he had established it in 1712, back to Moscow. Around the same time, the office of hetman was restored in Ukraine. These were indications that the Russian elite wanted to go back to pre-Petrine times. But there was no turning back, especially when it came to Russia’s Western orientation. After the death of Peter’s grandson, Peter II, in 1730, with no male heir in sight, the courtiers placed their bets on Duchess Anna Ioannovna of Courland, a daughter of Peter I’s elder brother, Ivan. She was invited by the Supreme Privy Council, a consultative body to the tsars that was now in the business of choosing a new ruler, to assume the throne, but only on certain conditions.
Anna disappointed those who thought they could dictate conditions to the tsars. The authoritarian nature of the office was soon restored, as was the status of St. Petersburg as the imperial capital and the ruler’s fascination with European political and cultural models. In Russian historical memory, Anna’s ten-year rule (1730–1740) has been remembered as one dominated by foreign advisers, in particular Ernst Johann von Biren (Biron), who had been Anna’s lover and court favorite since her time in Courland. Legends about Biron and crimes committed by him and his family survived long after the end of Anna’s rule.
Anna’s rule produced a widespread sense of resentment and anti-Western feeling among the imperial elites. With Anna’s death and the ascension to the Russian throne of Peter I’s daughter Elizabeth in 1741, the anti-Western attitude became a sea-change. Elizabeth was regarded and fashioned herself as a quintessentially Russian princess, and it was the “faithful sons of Russia,” the guards officers, who brought her to power as a true Russian princess. A clear indication of the change was the simple fact that while Elizabeth, like Anna, remained officially unmarried, her favorite and morganatic husband was not a “German” but a “Russian.” The son of a Ukrainian Cossack and, in the appellation of the time, a Little Russian, Oleksii Rozum made his way to St. Petersburg as a talented singer and became Elizabeth’s favorite courtier before her ascension to the throne. Once she took the throne, the former Cossack became a count, and later field marshal under the name Aleksei Razumovsky. Having little interest in affairs of state, Razumovsky, unlike Biron, kept a low profile: court regulars referred to him as the “night emperor.”
The rule of Elizabeth also witnessed a backlash against foreigners in the Russian service. What had begun as a trickle under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich became a flood during the rule of his son, Peter I, and continued under his successors. Resentment and distrust of foreigners in government were accompanied by an unprecedented growth of Russian national assertiveness. It was during Elizabeth’s rule that key discussions took place about the empire’s history and literary language—two major elements of all nation-building projects in early modern Europe. Peter’s all-Russian empire was about to acquire an all-Russian nation, all-Russian history, and all-Russian language—all during the age of Elizabeth.
“Origines gentis et nominis Russorum,” or “The Origins of the Russian People and Name,” was the title of a talk given by Gerhard Friedrich Müller at a meeting of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences on August 23, 1749. Müller was an ethnic German who came to St. Petersburg in 1725, the year in which Tsar Peter I had founded the Imperial Academy of Sciences as a research and teaching institution. The presentation did not go well. Müller’s research pointed to the Scandinavian origins of the Rus’ name and dynasty. These conclusions would have been welcomed by many Muscovite rulers of previous centuries, including Ivan the Terrible, who traced his origins through the Rurikids to Emperor Augustus and considered himself a German. But in 1747, Müller’s arguments were found not only unpatriotic but also damaging to Russia’s prestige. The academy canceled his scheduled longer presentation and appointed a commission to look into his research. Müller’s address set off the first academic debate in Russian historiography, and the outcome influenced its development for decades, if not centuries, to come.
Patriotic fever was running high in St. Petersburg in the wake of another Russian war with Sweden (1741–1743). But the academy’s negative reaction to Müller’s conclusions was more than a reflection of a short-lived patriotic upswing. Imperial officials had been greatly concerned about patriotism in the academy since the beginning of Elizabeth’s rule. In the early 1740s, the academy was hit by defections—scholars, most of them German, were leaving the Russian service and going to Europe to publish research conducted in the Russian Empire. This was a blow to Russia’s prestige, to say nothing of its academic potential. In 1744, the authorities posted guards in the academy’s buildings, restricting access to its library, archives, and research materials. Foreigners were no longer to be trusted.
Two years later, the imperial court intervened in the affairs of the academy by appointing a new president. He was Kirill Razumovsky (Kyrylo Rozumovsky), the younger brother of the empress’s favorite, Aleksei Razumovsky. A recent graduate of the University of Göttingen, he was only eighteen at the time of the appointment. His age seemed less important than his closeness to Elizabeth and the fact that he was the first “Russian” president of the academy, which had been chaired, controlled, and run largely by foreigners—four previous presidents had come from abroad.
It fell to Razumovsky and his close adviser Grigorii Teplov, a former disciple of Prokopovych and an adjunct at the academy, to deal with the “historiography crisis.” They appointed a commission to investigate and debate Müller’s findings. The debates in the academic commission took up twenty-nine meetings between the fall of 1749 and the spring of 1750. Müller’s main opponent in the historiographic debates was an ethnic Russian, Mikhail Lomonosov. The son of a fisherman from Russia’s north, Lomonosov was known largely for his accomplishments as a chemist. But the new age of national mobilization called for universality, and he branched out of the sciences into history and linguistics, becoming an amateurish but also forceful and influential supporter of the nativist approach to both. Lomonosov argued that Müller’s work glorified “the Scandinavians or Swedes,” while “doing almost nothing to illuminate our history.” Kirill Razumovsky took Lomonosov’s side in the historiographic debate on the origins of Rus’. The print run of Müller’s dissertation on that subject was destroyed.
For Lomonosov, the main inspiration in his debates with Müller was the outdated and often inaccurate Kyivan Synopsis of 1674. But it was the ideas of the book rather than the facts that mattered most. This book on the origins of the Rus’ nation had finally found not only publishers but also readers in Russia who appreciated its focus on the origins of the nation, as opposed to the state and dynasty. Lomonosov wanted the academy to adopt the Synopsis as its standard history textbook. In accepting its historical explanation of the origins of the Rus’ people, Lomonosov embraced a historical myth that stressed the unity of the Great and Little Russian heirs to the medieval Kyiv state, separating them from the European West.
THE NEW ALL-RUSSIAN NATION NEEDED NOT ONLY A COMMON past but also a common language. The reforms of Peter I had opened Russia to direct Western influence, which manifested itself in the linguistic sphere in borrowings from Western languages (predominantly German). Another, less obvious, import from the West was the practice of basing the literary language on the vernacular. Until then it had been based largely on Church Slavonic, a language created by medieval Christian proselytizers to convert the Slavs and later used as the language of liturgy and belles lettres in the Orthodox Slavic lands, including Muscovy and the Ukrainian and Belarusian territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was a language that united Great, Little, and White Russia but belonged to the past, not to the future. The state bureaucracy created by Peter required a new secularized language to run the state. The chancery language of the Muscovite bureaucracy, also based largely on Church Slavonic, was not suited to that purpose. Thus, Peter introduced a simplified (“civil”) script and often encouraged his subordinates and the translators of Western works to write as simply as possible, avoiding the high style of Church Slavonic.
It was only the upsurge of Russian patriotism in the era of Empress Elizabeth that abruptly halted the decline of Church Slavonic, which all of a sudden turned from a symbol of religious traditionalism and backwardness into a bulwark of national identity and a token of true Russianness. Like the controversy about the history of Rus’, the debate on the future of the language began within the walls of the Academy of Sciences. It pitted two major Russian literary figures, the poets and playwrights Vasilii Trediakovsky and Aleksandr Sumarokov, against each other, with Mikhail Lomonosov as their judge. Trediakovsky, who had originally favored the trend toward modernization and vernacularization of the written Russian language, changed his mind during the rule of Elizabeth, asking: “Why should we voluntarily suffer the poverty and limitations of French when we have the multifarious richness and breadth of Slavo-Rossian?” Sumarokov, however, remained critical of the Church Slavonic—in fact, Kyivan—legacy in Russian literature. With regard to Prokopovych, he wrote: “The sage Teofan, whom nature / Endowed with the beauty of the Slavic people / As regards eloquence / Produced nothing decent in verse.”
In the fall of 1748, Sumarokov submitted his drama Hamlet to the academy for prepublication review. Trediakovsky, who was a professor in the academy, cited stylistic flaws. “Unevenness of style is apparent throughout, that is, sometimes surpassing theatricality in Slavonic, elsewhere descending beneath tragedy into coarse marketplace jargon,” wrote Trediakovsky. The review triggered open conflict between Sumarokov and Trediakovsky. At stake were their places at the top of the emerging Russian literary scene and the future of the Russian language in which new works would be written. Trediakovsky defended the high style rooted in Church Slavonic, while Sumarokov wanted the language to be as close to the Great Russian vernacular as possible.
A compromise position on the future of the Russian language was taken by Mikhail Lomonosov. He advocated the continuing use of Slavonic as a basis for the development of literary Russian. Like Trediakovsky, he sought the roots of Russian in Kyivan Rus’ and hailed it as a rich, beautiful, and powerful language. Although Lomonosov defended Slavonic and the linguistic tradition associated with it, he also tried to accommodate the new Western-inspired trend toward the vernacular. He managed to reconcile the two approaches by developing a theory of three literary styles that assigned a different literary language to each: the high style, to be used for the composition of epics, odes, and poems, was supposed to employ the vocabulary common to Church Slavonic and literary Russian; the intermediate style, to be used in dramatic works, was to rely on the vernacular but avoid colloquialisms; and the third, lower style, which admitted the language of townsfolk and peasants, was reserved for comedy.
In the introduction to his Slavonic grammar of 1757, Lomonosov wrote that Russian had “the majesty of Spanish, the vivacity of French, the firmness of German, the delicacy of Italian, and the richness and concise imagery of Greek and Latin.” This formula was hardly original: Lomonosov’s praise of Russian was suspiciously close to the encomium to English in Richard Carew’s Epistle on the Excellencies of the English Tongue (1605). Unlike Carew, however, Lomonosov was praising a language that was struggling to meet the challenges of the modern world, its grammar and vocabulary still underdeveloped. Whence, then, his optimism about the prospects for Russian? The answer is apparent from his comment on the history of German: “The German language remained poor, simple, and weak as long as Latin was the language of religious services. But once the German people began to read sacred books and hear the liturgy in their own language, its richness multiplied, and skillful writers appeared.” The Russian language had avoided the tortuous development of German, one may infer, thanks to its close association with Church Slavonic, which had saved it from subordination to a foreign tongue and made it great.
The linguistic discussions of the mid-eighteenth century were directly related to the question of which linguistic tradition—the Great or the Little Russian, or, in present-day terms, Russian or Ukrainian—should prevail in imperial Russian culture. Thus Sumarokov accused Trediakovsky of spelling his surname in the Little Russian manner, not “Tred’iakovskoi” but “Tred’iakovskii.” He claimed that Trediakovsky was giving “the name of his lineage a Little Russian ending.” Another significant feature of the Russo-Ukrainian cultural encounter was the discussion on the correct pronunciation of the letter “г.” The Church Slavonic pronunciation was closer to the Ukrainian /h/, while the Russian pronunciation favored the phoneme /g/. Lomonosov devoted a poem to the subject, trying to teach his reader which words should be pronounced with a /g/ and which with an /h/.
Like Lomonosov’s other compromises, this one proved temporary in effect. The development of Great Russian syntax, vocabulary, and phonetics was slowly but surely making the Russian literary language a less hospitable home for Little Russians than it had been at the beginning of the eighteenth century. To be sure, such Ukrainians in the imperial service as Danylo Samoilovych, who advocated the creation of a Russian medical vocabulary, or Hryhorii Poletyka, who compiled a comparative dictionary of Russian, as well as other alumni of the Kyivan Academy, had no difficulty in mastering the new Russian literary language, but in doing so they had to abandon their own accustomed speech, thereby undermining the hitherto peaceful coexistence of the two linguistic traditions.
By the mid-eighteenth century, the Kyiv intellectuals had come a long way from the time when Simeon of Polatsk first greeted Tsar Aleksei in his city with references to the “Russian nation” being liberated by the “Eastern Tsar.” In the course of a century, they had managed to instill elements of Western, often national or proto-national discourse into the official language and, eventually, into the thinking of the Muscovite elites. They also helped create a common “all-Russian” historical narrative and contributed to the formation of the “all-Russian” imperial language. They did so just as Muscovy was refashioning itself into the Russian Empire. The confusion between empire and nation, and the various peoples overshadowed by the umbrella of the “Russian nation,” would last for centuries.