SEPTEMBER 11, 1854, BECAME A DAY OF HUMILIATION FOR THE Russian navy, later to be recast as a day of Russian glory and sacrifice. On that late summer day, the commanders of the Russian Black Sea Fleet were ordered to sink five battleships and two frigates in Sevastopol harbor, their home base. That was just the beginning. In August 1855, all the remaining Russian ships went to the bottom of the harbor. The Russian army soon left Sevastopol, marking the empire’s defeat in the Crimean War of 1853–1856.
The Russian fleet was sunk because it turned out to be of little use in stopping the joint French-British-Ottoman invasion of the Crimea—sails were no match for the steam engines of the British and French battleships, and the empire had no steam-powered battleships on the Black Sea. On the day of the allied landing there in September 1854, there was no wind to fill the sails, and the Russian ships could not move. All that remained was to sink them in order to block the access of the allied fleet to Sevastopol harbor. To the embarrassment of the rulers of the empire and the amazement of future historians, the occupying powers got around that problem by building the first railroad in the Crimea, so that they could bring supplies from the port of Balaklava to the town of Sevastopol.
The peace treaty signed in Paris in 1856 was viewed in Russia as humiliation at the hands of the West. The conquerors of Paris in 1814, the Russians returned to that city forty years later to sign an arrangement that violated the territorial integrity of their empire. St. Petersburg was forced to abandon imperial possessions in the Caucasus and the Danube area, and eleven years later, the cash-strapped government sold Alaska to the United States, lacking the resources to defend it. It kept the Crimea but was banned from maintaining a fleet or fortifications on the Black Sea littoral. Even more significant was the empire’s loss of face as a great power.
Something had to be done to restore Russia’s international status. The government’s priorities were building a new navy and reforming the army, but those tasks required large-scale social reforms. The new emperor, Alexander II, believed that this vast undertaking could be achieved without relinquishing much of his autocratic power. Nevertheless, he and his advisers understood that some liberalization of the previous regime’s policies was inevitable. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the case of the Polish question—the empire’s relations with its most mobilized and independently minded nationality.
Russia’s loss of the Crimean War and the worsening of its international position, coupled with the uncertainty and internal turmoil caused by the emancipation of the serfs in February 1861, emboldened Polish society in its demands for the return of previously lost freedoms. In the former Kingdom of Poland and among the Polish nobility in the western provinces of the empire, hopes ran high that Alexander II would return to the policies of Alexander I, his uncle and namesake, by restoring liberties and the constitution. The kingdom, which had lost its sovereignty after the November Uprising of 1830, retained a degree of autonomy. But the government had no such plans, and the disillusioned Poles rebelled once again.
The new Polish revolt, which began in January 1863, became known as the January Uprising. Young Poles attacked Russian military units in the cities of the Kingdom of Poland, and the revolt soon spread to the Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian provinces of the empire. It took more than a year for the Russian army to crush it. The fighting was followed by repression of the leaders and participants in the uprising, as well as a new campaign to Russify the borderlands. It soon occurred to the government that solving the Polish question was all but impossible without reimagining the Russian nation itself. It was during the public debate of the first years of Alexander II’s rule that Russia first began to take on the character of a tripartite nation of Great, Little, and White Russians.
FROM THE VERY BEGINNING OF THE POLISH CRISIS, THE FUTURE of the former Polish territories outside the Kingdom of Poland was the principal concern of the imperial government and the general public. Alexander II had begun his rule with concessions to Polish public opinion, canceling his father’s directives requiring Polish officials to serve in the Russian provinces before they could take government offices in the former Polish lands. Alexander II also lifted restrictions on the employment of non-Orthodox officials in the former Polish lands of the empire. But the question of “de-Polonizing” the region did not disappear from the government’s agenda.
With the start of Alexander’s reforms in the late 1850s, the supporters of Metropolitan Iosif Semashko—who had finally managed to bring most of the Uniates in the empire under the umbrella of Russian Orthodoxy, and believed in one indivisible Russian nation as a bulwark against Polish domination—spotted a new threat from the Polish side. A group of khlopomany, or “peasant-lovers,” appeared among the young nobles of the Right-Bank Ukraine, causing a split in the Polish camp and threatening an even greater one in imperial Russia. The khlopomany renounced their Polish Catholic upbringing and embraced the Orthodox faith of the peasants. This would have been good news for the authorities if the khlopomany had declared themselves Russian, but they chose to identify themselves as South Russians, or Ukrainians. Among them was Włodzimierz Antonowicz, who changed his name to Volodymyr Antonovych: in time, he would become a prominent Ukrainian historian.
Semashko’s supporters claimed that Ukrainophilism was nothing but a Polish intrigue. In 1859, Sylvestr Gogotsky, a professor at Kyiv University and one of the leading lights of the pan-Russian movement, put forward a program to stop the advance of the Ukrainian movement. Gogotsky’s program was as follows:
a) We should immediately take measures to educate the people on both sides of the Dnieper; b) From now on we should support the idea of the unity of the three Russian tribes; without that unity, we shall perish very quickly; c) The Russian literary language should be the same for all in primers. Faith and language should be binding elements. But it will do no harm to add something in our simple language as well; d) By no means should we promote discord between Great Russia and ourselves. The desire for change can be expressed in other ways. Do not forget that our enemies are the Poles and Rome!
The three Russian tribes that Gogotsky had in mind were the Great Russians, Little Russians, and White Russians. This tripartite model of the Russian nation had deep historical roots. Its origins could be traced back to 1656–1721, when the tsars had been called the sovereigns of Great, Little, and White Russia. By the time Peter I changed his title in 1721, becoming all-Russian emperor, only Great Russia and parts of Little Russia remained under Russian control—White Russia, or Belarus, had been lost to the Poles more than fifty years earlier under the terms of the Truce of Andrusovo (1667). When Russia regained eastern Belarus after the first partition of Poland in 1772, there was no change in the emperor’s title or in official discourse, and in the second and third partitions of Poland, the new “Russian” lands, including Right-Bank Ukraine, Volhynia, Podolia, and western or Black Belarus, were annexed to the empire. There were simply too many Rus’ nationalities to count. In 1823, when the leader of the Decembrist movement, Pavel Pestel, sat down to write his rebel constitution, he counted five rather than three groups of Russians to be merged into one Russian nation.
The rise of interest in local folklore and language that began in the western borderlands of the empire in the 1820s and developed in the 1830s did not make it any easier to answer the question of how many distinct groups Russia contained. There were numerous dialects of what imperial scholars considered to be the Russian language, even among the Great Russians themselves. Ivan Sakharov, a medical doctor and an alumnus of Moscow University, counted four major Great Russian dialects, divided into numerous subdialects, in his Sayings of the Russian People About the Family Life of Their Ancestors (1836). The Little Russian dialect was said to consist of three subdialects. Numerous dialects would also be recorded in Belarus, where in the 1850s Russian military officers found, apart from Belarusian, a Black Russian dialect and identified southern Belarusian groups speaking the Little Russian dialect. Few participants in this ethnographic study of the imperial borderlands had any doubt that all those dialects were Russian and that their speakers constituted one Russian nation. But the newly discovered linguistic diversity of the “Russian tribe” raised the question of how many dialects there were, and—as the early ethnographers believed that every language corresponded to a nationality—how many Russian nationalities and subnationalities in fact existed.
The first to suggest that the Russian nation consisted of three subgroups was probably Nikolai Nadezhdin, a strong believer in both the diversity and the unity of the Russian nation. In 1841, fresh from internal exile after publishing the explosive Philosophical Letters of Petr Chaadaev (1836), and on his way to becoming editor of the journal of the Ministry of the Interior, Nadezhdin published a review of a work by the Vienna Slavist Jernej Kopitar. In the review he presented a historical scheme of the development of the Russian dialects and identified three of them: Pontic Slavic, or Little Russian; Baltic Slavic, or Belarusian; and Great Russian. According to Nadezhdin, the first two dialects were the oldest. The third, the Great Russian dialect, was a mixture of the first two and had developed in newly colonized areas east of the original settlements where the first two dialects were spoken.
Nadezhdin’s brief review, published in German, and outside of the Russian Empire, remained largely unknown at home, but the same tripartite division of the Russian language and people would soon be introduced to a Russian readership. In 1842, the forty-seven-year-old Slovak censor Pavol Jozef Šafárik published a book titled Slovanský národopis (Slavic Ethnography) in Prague. Šafárik, reputed to be the foremost Slavist of his era, presented, in meticulous detail, a scheme of Russian dialects very similar to what Nadezhdin had proposed; in fact, Nadezhdin, in one of his own articles, identified himself as one of Šafárik’s consultants. These mentions of a tripartite division of what was then considered a single “Russian world” were the first shocks of a linguistic earthquake that would eventually change the political map of Eastern Europe.
Šafárik’s three dialects included Great Russian, which he said included the Novgorodian subdialect; Little Russian, which encompassed not only the population of Russian-ruled Ukraine but also the populations of Austrian Galicia and Hungarian Transcarpathia; and White Russian, spoken in eastern and western Belarus. Šafárik believed language and nationality were closely connected, so he wrote not only about linguistic groups but also about the Great, Little, and White Russians. Although Šafárik never conducted ethnographic or linguistic research on the “Russian” dialects, he closely followed the literature coming from the Russian Empire and was in touch with some of the leading Russian Slavists of the era. He met Mikhail Pogodin in Prague in 1835, and Pogodin subsequently gave him financial support.
Šafárik was also acquainted with Osyp Bodiansky, the Ukrainian-born professor of Slavic studies at Moscow University who had published History of the Rus’. Bodiansky supplied Šafárik with linguistic materials and in 1837 sent him a copy of the Belarusian “remake” of Kotliarevsky’s Eneïda. He also provided Šafárik with a map of Ukrainian and Belarusian dialects. In November 1842, Bodiansky wrote to one of his colleagues, the Kharkiv professor Izmail Sreznevsky, “I have always been of the opinion that the latter river (the Prypiat) is the natural boundary between the White Russians and the Little Russians, especially as the so-called Black Russians or Pinchuks live on both sides of the river and constitute a transition from the Khokhols [Ukrainians] to the Belarusians, and if I indicated our boundary differently to Šafárik in this instance, then I did so as a result of accounts given by Belarusians themselves who had earlier become Polonized.” Šafárik enjoyed unquestioned authority as a linguist among the Moscow-based Slavophiles, and as soon as Slovanský národopis appeared in print, Bodiansky, who had just returned to Moscow from trips abroad—he spent some time in Prague, where he consulted with Šafárik—sat down to produce a Russian translation of the book.
A year later, in 1843, Bodiansky’s translation was published in the journal Moskvitianin (The Muscovite), edited by Pogodin. Šafárik’s tripartite division of the Russian language—and consequently, of the Russian nation—became the basis of Pogodin’s reinterpretation of Russian history. In the 1850s, he employed the division of the Russian people into Great, Little, and White Russians in his polemics with his Kyivan friend and intellectual opponent Mykhailo Maksymovych. But despite the broad popularity of Šafárik’s tripartite model, its acceptance in the empire was by no means assured. It was easy to see in it an attempt to undermine the notion of the unity of the Russian nation and state that was so cherished by the government and its supporters. Yet surprisingly, resistance to the model came not from the Great Russians, but from the Little Russian and White Russian sides.
At Kharkiv University, Izmail Sreznevsky, Bodiansky’s correspondent and the empire’s most respected linguistic authority of the period, came up with his own division of “Russian” languages. In 1843, the year in which the translation of Šafárik’s work was published—and one year after returning from his own extensive journey to the Slavic lands—Sreznevsky postulated a division of Russian into two groups: Southern Russian (or Little Russian) and Northern Russian (or Great Russian). He was following in the footsteps of Mykhailo Maksymovych, who had made a similar division of the Russian nation in 1837. Yurii Venelin, a native of Transcarpathia who was an expert on the Bulgarian language and culture, suggested the same division around the same time. Sreznevsky admitted the existence of the Belarusian dialect, but he considered it a variant of Great Russian.
Translated into the language of ethnography, labeling the Belarusian dialect a variant of Great Russian meant that the Belarusians were a subgroup of the Great Russians, not a distinct nationality. According to police records, that was exactly what some members of the Cyrillo-Methodian Brotherhood in Kyiv also thought. More importantly, on the eve of the Polish uprising some of the former members of the brotherhood began to talk about the Ukrainians, also known as Little or South Russians, as a nationality separate from the Great Russians.
THE RETURN OF THE “POLISH QUESTION” IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE gave new urgency to the “Ukrainian question” in imperial politics and culture. Aleksandr Herzen, a writer and intellectual known today as the father of Russian populism and socialism, introduced the notion of Ukraine as an independent factor in the contest for the territories between Russia and Poland. In the January 1859 issue of his Russian-language journal, Kolokol (The Bell), which was published in London, Herzen wrote: “Well, and what if, after all our considerations, Ukraine, remembering all the oppressions of the Muscovites, and the condition of serfdom, and the draft, and the lawlessness, and the pillage, and the knout on the one side, and not forgetting, on the other, how it fared under the Commonwealth with the soldiers, lords, and Crown officials, should not wish to be either Polish or Russian? As I see it, the question is to be decided very simply. In that case, Ukraine should be recognized as a free and independent country.”
The genie was out of the bottle. In writing openly about the possibility of Ukrainian independence, which had so alarmed the authorities when they investigated the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, Herzen said what Mykola Kostomarov had never dared to say in his Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People, where he had been the first to address the question. And yet Herzen’s suggestion of Ukrainian independence was only a rhetorical tool—a point in the heat of argument over the future of the Russo-Polish borderlands, and an assertion of the right of the region’s inhabitants to decide their fate as they pleased. When it came to practical politics, both Herzen and Kostomarov preferred a federal solution to the nationality problem, and Herzen wrote as much in his article in Kolokol.
Kostomarov was very appreciative of Herzen’s position and wrote to Kolokol endorsing the position its publisher had taken. His contribution, titled “Ukraine,” appeared anonymously in Kolokol in January 1860. Kostomarov began with an expression of gratitude to Herzen: “You have expressed an opinion about Ukraine that the thinking part of the South Russian people has long treasured as a precious and sacred possession of its heart.” He referred to his homeland as Ukraine, called its people Ukrainians, or the South Russian nation (narod), and expressed reservations about the term “Little Russians.” Kostomarov’s article was in many ways a development of his earlier ideas. By emphasizing the democratic nature of Ukraine’s Cossack past, he provided historical justification for treating the Ukrainians as a distinct people.
Kostomarov developed his ideas further in an article titled “The Two Rus’ Nationalities,” which appeared in print in St. Petersburg in 1861 in the journal Osnova (Foundation), published by Panteleimon Kulish. In this piece, Kostomarov demolished the cocoon of the all-Russian nationality, declaring that in fact there were two separate Rus’ nationalities: “Besides the Rus’ nationality that holds sway in the outer world, another one now makes its appearance, claiming equal civil rights in the sphere of word and intellect.” He argued that the name “Rus’” had effectively been stolen from its original owners, the South (or Little) Russians, by their northern neighbors. Kostomarov maintained that the distinct histories of the two Rus’ nationalities had shaped their characters differently. Whereas the South Russians valued individual freedom and the principles of collegiality and federalism, the North Russians valued collectivism, the state, and authoritarian rule. In choosing between Polish and Russian orientations for the nascent South Russian nation, Kostomarov argued in favor of the latter. He believed that the South Russians had a better chance of establishing equal relations with the Great Russians than they did with the Poles.
This article would become a rallying point for the Ukrainian movement in the Russian Empire for generations to come. Since “The Two Rus’ Nationalities” was signed and published in the empire, Kostomarov did not use the terms “Ukraine” and “Ukrainians,” as he had done a year earlier in the anonymous Kolokol publication, leaving future generations of Ukrainian activists to sort out the confusion between the two Russias and the two Russian nations. But the article clearly declared, for the first time in the public press, the birth of a separate nationality on a par with the Great Russian nationality. Kostomarov was nominally following in the tradition established by Mykhailo Maksymovych in the 1830s. Maksymovych had divided Rus’ into two parts: northern and southern. Kostomarov’s scheme had two parts also, but unlike Maksymovych, Kostomarov did not consider them parts of the same entity. As far as Kostomarov was concerned, they were separate. Moreover, he argued that in some respects the South Russians were closer to the Poles than to the Russians. “If the South Russian nation is farther from the Poles than from the Great Russians in the structure of its language, it is nevertheless much closer to them in national traits and fundamentals of national character,” he wrote.
Kostomarov considered the Belarusians a branch of the Great Russian nation, but that proposition did not sit well with many of his readers, either in the imperial capitals or in Belarus itself.
THE TERM “BELARUS,” WHICH HAD FIGURED IN THE TSAR’S SHORT title in the second half of the seventeenth century and was dropped from it in the first decades of the eighteenth, returned to the official imperial vocabulary in the aftermath of the first partition of Poland in 1772, when the eastern Belarusian lands were annexed to the Russian Empire. The Belarusian eparchy of the Roman Catholic Church was also created at that time, and in 1797, after Catherine’s death, the Russian Orthodox Church established its Belarusian archbishopric. “Belarus” was considered a wholly legitimate term until the Polish uprising of 1830–1831.
In 1828, that name was given to the Uniate eparchy of the region, and in 1829 it was applied to the educational district that included both the eastern and the western lands of Belarus. But the uprising of 1830–1831 changed the political connotation of the term. Polish intellectuals who had earlier referred to their homeland as Lithuania, such as the poet Adam Mickiewicz, a native of the Brest region, adopted the name “Belarus” after the revolt. Spelled “Białoruś” in Polish, it was applied to the region east of the core Polish territory that was also considered historically, culturally, and lingustically Polish. The new interest in the language and customs of the simple folk no longer allowed culturally conscious Polish nationalists to refer to Belarus as “Lithuania,” whose inhabitants spoke a language profoundly different from Slavic.
This ethnographic turn was fully apparent in a talk on folk culture that Aleksander Rypiński, a native of the Vitsebsk region of Belarus, delivered in Paris in 1839. Rypiński had taken part in the uprising of 1830 and, like many of his compatriots, had found refuge in France. He defined the territory of Belarus as the part of Polish lands extending from the Prypiat River and the Pinsk marshes in the south to Pskov and Velikie Luki in the north. The language of the inhabitants of this region, he asserted, was different from the languages spoken in Russia, Russian-ruled Ukraine, and Austrian Galicia, and was closer to Polish than to any of those languages. According to Rypiński, speakers of Belarusian had been blood relatives of the Poles since time immemorial. The talk received such a warm response from Polish émigrés that Rypiński published an expanded version of it in Paris in the following year.
In 1840, the same year Rypiński published his brochure, Nicholas I banned the use of the words “Belarusian” and “Lithuanian” in government documents, but the measure could not be enforced outside official circles. It was too little, too late. In 1835, Roman Catholics issued a Belarusian-dialect catechism written in the Polish alphabet for the local peasantry. By the end of the decade, a Polish-alphabet Belarusian version of Ivan Kotliarevsky’s Eneïda began to circulate among the local nobility. In 1844–1846, a native of the Polatsk region of Belarus, Jan Barszczewski, published his four-volume collection of literary works, where he tried his hand at writing in Belarusian, employing the Polish alphabet. The 1850s witnessed a small explosion of similarly written texts when Wincenty Dunin-Marcinkiewicz, one of the Polish promoters (and creators) of a bilingual Belarusian culture, published prose works for the common people in Belarusian and prepared a translation into that language of Adam Mickiewicz’s classic poem Pan Tadeusz.
The Russian Orthodox hierarchs and some government officials became increasingly concerned about what they regarded as a “Polish intrigue” intended to corrupt the “Russian” peasantry. The Polish-inspired project of producing and distributing Belarusian-language literature in the Polish alphabet for the common reader faced a setback in 1859. There had been Austrian and Polish attempts to switch Ruthenian publications in Austrian Galicia from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet, and Russian authorities responded by banning the import of these texts. Similar publications in the empire were also stopped in their tracks, but Belarusian literature in Cyrillic did not fill the resulting vacuum. Back in 1846, the Russian Academy of Sciences had turned down the manuscript of a Cyrillic-alphabet Belarusian grammar prepared by the ethnographer Pavel Shpilevsky on grounds of poor academic quality. In 1862, the first grammar of Belarusian was finally published with the support of a local marshal of the nobility, but the Polish uprising of 1863 put an end to further Belarusian publications in the empire.
In 1862, there had been discussions among those in the inner circle of the governor general of Vilnius, Vladimir Nazimov, about publishing a journal in the local Belarusian dialect. Differences arose over the language to be used—Russian, slightly adapted to local usage, or the Belarusian dialect—with the governor backing the latter option. Nazimov petitioned the imperial minister of education, arguing that the religious education of Belarusian Catholics—former “Russian” Uniates who had converted to Roman Catholicism—should be conducted in the “local Belarusian language.” The journal, he wrote, should be published in a language that he defined as “Russian or, better, Belarusian, consisting of the writing of the local Ruthenian dialect on paper in Russian script.” The governor was desperate to overcome his Polish opponents, led by Wincenty Konstanty Kalinowski, who in their publication The Peasant Truth, addressed to the peasantry, were using local Belarusian dialects written in the Polish alphabet to appeal to the local peasant population.
Neither Nazimov and his advisers, who argued for the use of the Belarusian language, nor the Polish publishers of The Peasant Truth equated Belarusian with any particular nationality or considered the Belarusians a distinct ethnic group. Nazimov regarded the local peasants as members of the Russian nation, while Kalinowski called on them to fight for the Polish cause. Neither man appeared to take the Belarusians seriously as independent political actors, and both hoped to manipulate them by making effective use of the local Belarusian dialect. While Kalinowski managed to publish in Belarusian, Governor Nazimov’s proposal to establish a Cyrillic-alphabet Belarusian journal was never approved by St. Petersburg. Even so, Nazimov’s proposal indicated that the authorities could no longer ignore the rise of Belarusian cultural assertiveness.
How to handle that unexpected rise remained a highly controversial issue. No one contributed more to the debate than Mikhail Koialovich, a native of western Belarus and the son of a Uniate priest who had studied with Iosif Semashko. Mikhail Koialovich was eleven years old in 1839 when Semashko engineered the “reunification” of the Uniates. Educated in Orthodox schools, he became a professor of history at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy and took an active part in Russian debates before and during the Polish uprising of 1863. He believed in the unity of the Russian nation while recognizing the existence of a Belarusian “tribe” that spoke the Belarusian “dialect,” but he did not regard language and ethnicity as criteria for defining a separate group within the big Russian nation. In his opinion, nationality was defined in social terms and shaped by common historical experience. Thus, he divided the Russian nation into two parts, but unlike Kostomarov, who had divided Rus’ into northern and southern branches, Koialovich posited an east-west division.
Today, Koialovich is considered the father of a trend in Belarusian political thought that imagined Belarus as part of a broader entity called Western Rus’. This view had deep historical roots, as it was based on the division of the Rus’ lands in the decades and centuries following the Mongol invasion. By the fourteenth century, most of the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands had ended up within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and those were the territories that, for Koialovich, constituted Western Rus’. He defined its inhabitants in social terms, not in the ethnic or religious ones accepted by the other nation-builders of the era. Koialovich was an early populist who lumped together the lower classes of society irrespective of whether they were Slavs or Lithuanians.
Populism was an orientation that Koialovich shared with Kostomarov, but Kostomarov’s populism did not cross ethnonational boundaries. The two writers were at odds with regard to the definition of their respective nationalities, and they debated their views in the press before and during the Polish insurrection. On the one hand, Koialovich considered the Ukrainophiles the only true public activists of Western Rus’, given their readiness to work with the people. On the other, he was disappointed by what he considered their narrow-mindedness.
Koialovich wrote that the Ukrainophiles were “strong in numbers, popular education, and energy.… But it must be acknowledged with regret that one can hardly expect any great service from them for the people of all Western Rus’. To all appearances, they are great egoists (not all of them, of course): in actual fact, Little Rus’ does not suffer so much from Polonism and Jesuits, and the people there are able to stand up for themselves.” Kostomarov, who thought in ethnolinguistic terms, maintained that the Little Russians and Belarusians belonged to different nations. In fact, he argued that the Belarusians were descended from the North Russian or Great Russian tribe—an idea that can be traced back to the testimonies of members of the Cyrillo-Methodian Brotherhood in 1847. Koialovich was outraged and, in response to Kostomarov’s argument, wrote, with reference to the proto-Belarusian Krivichian tribe of the Kyivan Rus’ era, “The children of the old Krivichians cannot be represented by the young historical children of the Northern Rus’ tribe.”
Kostomarov’s Ukrainophilism was just one of the obstacles that Koialovich had to address in his struggle for the recognition of the Western Rus’ branch of the big Russian nation. The other front was represented by Russian Slavophiles, whom Koialovich accused of the mindless “Russification” of Western Rus’/Russia. He called on his Great Russian colleagues “to restrain all foolish Great Russian passions in encounters with the West Russian people and win their love with good humane deeds.” This appeal did not mollify his Russian opponents, who were alarmed by what they regarded as the rise of Belarusian separatism, a local counterpart of Ukrainophilism.
The Russian Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov wrote to Koialovich, “Russia is now saving Belarus from mortal danger: the point is to destroy Polonism, but Belarus, as if it were already safe from the threat, is concerned not with deliverance from the Polish yoke but with the preservation of local particularities! And yet those basic particularities are few in number.” Mikhail Katkov, a former professor of philosophy at Moscow University and editor of the influential newspaper Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow News), was even more outspoken: “They write to us from St. Petersburg that some kind of Belarusophile party is being born. Petersburg is so overloaded with social forces that it wants to fertilize all our dialects at all costs and create as many Russian nationalities and languages as there are lands suitable for chopping off.” He envisioned the Polish “nationalists” rejoicing over “this new attempt to divide the Belarusian land mentally from Russia.”
Thus, Koialovich’s idea of a bipartite Russian nation divided into east and west was rejected on all fronts. Kostomarov maintained his concept of a north-south divide, while Aksakov and other Russian Slavophiles thought in terms of three branches, leaving Koialovich a Belarusian niche within the Russian nation. He would not settle for it but was unable to make his view prevail. The tripartite nationality advocated by Katkov was endorsed by the imperial authorities, providing justification for the empire’s eventual transformation into a nation-state.
THE TRIPARTITE RUSSIAN NATIONALITY EMERGED AS THE DOMINANT model of Russian nation-building in the wake of the Polish uprising of 1863–1864. In political terms, it was a means of dealing with Polish nationalism while accommodating the cultural demands of the growing Ukrainian national movement. In purely conceptual terms, it was a way of reconciling the principle of Russian nationality formulated by Uvarov back in 1832 with the growing realization that the big Russian nation was in fact diverse and could be imagined in a number of ways. Whereas Pavel Pestel counted five Russian nationalities to be merged in a pan-Russian entity, the Russian Slavophiles and imperial nationalists of the post-1863 era agreed on three. The vernacular languages spoken by the three branches were termed “dialects,” and there was to be one literary language, Russian or all-Russian, allegedly created by all three groups. The union of the three branches was justified by raison d’état: the Russian Empire had to be a politically viable unit like the nationalizing states of Europe.
In historical terms, the tripartite model harked back to the mid-seventeenth century, when, after attaching Cossack Ukraine and conquering eastern Belarus, the Muscovite tsar added the names of Great, Little, and White Rus’ to his title. This was a two-stage process. The terms “Great” and “Little” Rus’ were the first to come into use, reflecting Muscovite expansion into the Ukrainian-Belarusian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. “Little Rus’” was then divided into two parts: the “Little Rus’” that denoted the Ukrainian lands, and “White Rus’,” which included the lands of eastern Belarus. This nomenclature denoted the different statuses of the two territories—one, Ukrainian, taken under Muscovite protection on the basis of the agreement reached with Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1654; the other, Belarusian, conquered with no grant of special rights or privileges. Now, in the mid-nineteenth century, the tripartite division of Rus’/Russia was recognized once again, but this time on linguistic rather than political grounds. But the recognition of differences was not intended to prepare for a federal arrangement, with local autonomy for Russia’s constituent parts. The goal was to unite the three branches, not only in dynastic and religious terms but also under the cultural cloak of the Russian tsars.