The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus

Description

This book documents developments in the countries of eastern Europe, including the rise of authoritarian tendencies in Russia and Belarus, as well as the victory of the democratic 'Orange Revolution' in Ukraine, and poses important questions about the origins of the East Slavic nations and the essential similarities or differences between their cultures. It traces the origins of the modern Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian nations by focusing on pre-modern forms of group identity among the Eastern Slavs. It also challenges attempts to 'nationalize' the Rus' past on behalf of existing national projects, laying the groundwork for understanding of the pre-modern history of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The book covers the period from the Christianization of Kyivan Rus' in the tenth century to the reign of Peter I and his eighteenth-century successors, by which time the idea of nationalism had begun to influence the thinking of East Slavic elites.

Serhii Plokhy is Professor of History at the University of Alberta. His numerous publications in Russian and Slavic history include Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History (2005) and, with Frank E. Sysyn, Religion and Nation in Modern Ukraine (2003).

"Plokhy offers innovative and convincing reinterpretations of the key controversies in the histories of the national development of the East Slavs...his contribution to the history East Slavic identities is huge. He has, indeed, delivered on his promise to reconceptualize the field. This is must reading for all historians of the East Slavs in the pre-modern period." - H-Nationalism, David G. Rowley, Department of Social Sciences, University of Wisconsin--Platteville "[An] ambitious, revisionist, and impressive monograph... Plokhy's detailed, sustained interpretation sheds new light on such processes as the gradual alienation among the three East Slavic peoples as their historical fates differed, and such events as the mutual misunderstanding characterizing the 1654 Union of Pereiaslav. Plokhy has set the bar very high for future historians, who will be stimulated by this superb book to address the question of East Slavic national identity." - Canadian Journal of History, Charles J. Halperin "Plokhy has produced an impressive and often persuasive study" Daniel H. Kaiser, Slavic Review