Vasilii Kliuchevsky, the dean of Russian historiography at the turn of the twentieth century, defined Russian history from the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century as an 'all-Russian' period, in opposition to the earlier age, which he called Great Russian and Muscovite.

During the 'all-Russian period,' according to Kliuchevsky, 'the Russian people spreads across the whole flatland from the Baltic and White Seas to the Black Sea, to the Caucasus Mountain range, the Caspian Sea and the Urals, and even penetrates south and east far beyond the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea and the Urals.

Politically, almost all parts of the Russian nationality are united under one rule: one after another, Little Russia, White Russia and New Russia join Great Russia, forming the All-Russian Empire.'¹ Kliuchevsky's conception of the empire as essentially a nation-state was more the norm than the exception in European historiography of the period.² The roots of that conception are to be found in Russia's encounter with the West in the course of the eighteenth century.

In his groundbreaking study, National Consciousness in EighteenthCentury Russia, Hans Rogger interpreted the development of national identity in the Russian Empire as a process that began under Western influence and in reaction to it. Rogger's discussion of the Russian imperial elites' search for identity in the spheres of politics, customs and morals, historiography, and linguistics laid the foundations for subsequent research on the subject.³ His view of eighteenth-century Russian identity as a product of interaction between Russia and the West was fully shared by Liah Greenfeld in her Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernityⁱ and by Vera Tolz in her monograph on the 'invention' of Russia. Tolz also noted the contradiction inherent in the Western-inspired view of the multiethnic Russian empire as a nation-state. 'This idea,' wrote Tolz, 'was articulated by Russian intellectuals in an attempt to apply the West European concept of nation to Russian reality... Those intellectuals who first formulated it in the late eighteenth century and then developed it more fully in the nineteenth were members of the intellectual elite residing in the two capitals, St.

Petersburg and Moscow. This elite was multiethnic, with Ukrainians and Russified Germans playing a particularly important role. [I]n the course of the nineteenth century, this vision of the entire empire as a Russian nation-state proved to be bluntly at odds with reality.'⁵

This chapter takes the debate over the construction of modern Russian identity one step further, pointing out the existence of two models of Russian identity in the eighteenth-century Russian Empire. One of them, which can be called ethnic or 'nativist,' included in the Russian nation the Slavic imperial elites consisting of Great Russians and Ukrainians from the Hetmanate. The other, which we may call 'civic' or imperial, admitted imperial elites of non-Slavic background to the Russian nation. In my view, competition between these two models of Russian identity was most fully manifested in the realm of historiography, influencing the course of the first public debate in imperial Russia - the controversy over the origins of the Rus' state and the role of the Varangians in it.

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Source: Plokhy S.. Ukraine and Russia: Representations of the Past. University of Toronto Press,2008. — 412 р.. 2008

Vasilii Kliuchevsky, the dean of Russian historiography at the turn of the twentieth century, defined Russian history from the early seven­teenth to the mid-nineteenth century as an 'all-Russian' period, in opposition to the earlier age, which he called Great Russian and Mus­covite.

Vasilii Kliuchevsky, the dean of Russian historiography at the turn of the twentieth century, defined Russian history from the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century as an 'all-Russian' period, in opposition to the earlier age, which he called Great Russian and Muscovite.