ebooks Letters Across the Divide: Two Friends Explore Racism; Friendship; and Faith by David Anderson; Brent Zuercher in History

Description

In Children of Rus'; Faith Hillis recovers an all but forgotten chapter in the history of the tsarist empire and its southwestern borderlands. The right bank; or west side; of the Dnieper River―which today is located at the heart of the independent state of Ukraine―was one of the Russian empire’s last territorial acquisitions; annexed only in the late eighteenth century. Yet over the course of the long nineteenth century; this newly acquired region nearly a thousand miles from Moscow and St. Petersburg generated a powerful Russian nationalist movement. Claiming to restore the ancient customs of the East Slavs; the southwest’s Russian nationalists sought to empower the ordinary Orthodox residents of the borderlands and to diminish the influence of their non-Orthodox minorities.Right-bank Ukraine would seem unlikely terrain to nourish a Russian nationalist imagination. It was among the empire’s most diverse corners; with few of its residents speaking Russian as their native language or identifying with the culture of the Great Russian interior. Nevertheless; as Hillis shows; by the late nineteenth century; Russian nationalists had established a strong foothold in the southwest’s culture and educated society; in the first decade of the twentieth; they secured a leading role in local mass politics. By 1910; with help from sympathetic officials in St. Petersburg; right-bank activists expanded their sights beyond the borderlands; hoping to spread their nationalizing agenda across the empire.Exploring why and how the empire’s southwestern borderlands produced its most organized and politically successful Russian nationalist movement; Hillis puts forth a bold new interpretation of state-society relations under tsarism as she reconstructs the role that a peripheral region played in attempting to define the essential characteristics of the Russian people and their state.