Hillis, Faith Children of Rus′: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 744 images and texts commemorating the family’s achievements. The subtle ways in which monarchs like Ferdinand II and Rudolph II continued this agenda is conveyed in abundant detail, even if the occasionally questionable claims for the efficacy of the propaganda is betrayed by the frequency of words like ‘probably’ (e.g., p. 108). Roughly half of the book deals with the period after 1790, and the core argument is well put on page 186: the Habsburgs survived the upheavals of the French revolutionary period, and into the twentieth century, because they ‘credibly positioned themselves as ready and willing to coordinate their interests with public needs’. This might not always have seemed obvious to the Monarchy’s multifarious subjects; but chapter six, on ‘Constructing Commitment’, is interesting on the conscious ways in which Francis Joseph, in particular, after the disastrous early decades of his reign, eventually learned how to ‘market’ the dynasty, whether in public ceremonies or images or books, which consistently humanized the Emperor and his family. There is a persistent lopsidedness to the book, in that Fichtner is clearly more authoritative on the Cisleithanian side of the Monarchy, devoting less attention to the Hungarian side. But the latter half of the book abounds in perceptive comments which suggest that, for all his hard-won media savvy, Francis Joseph was ultimately fighting a losing battle for the loyalty of his subjects; this conclusion becomes increasingly unavoidable towards the turn of the nineteenth century, which saw the ‘waning’ of the dynasty’s central importance to the arts, as an independent and wealthy middle class took up the role of cultural patrons (p. 247). Fichtner appropriately finishes with a chapter on the Monarchy’s role in Bosnia-Hercegovina, the ultimate challenge for the Habsburgs’ salesmanship of themselves as legitimate stewards of multi-ethnic and multiconfessional lands, and a challenge which they failed to surmount. University of Exeter Ian D. Armour Hillis, Faith. Children of Rus´: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2013. xvi + 329 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $55.00. More wide-ranging than its title leads one to suppose, Professor Hillis’s book is about the changing fortunes of the ‘Little Russian idea’ in the tsarist empire (and to a small degree the Habsburg empire) from the later eighteenth century to 1917. Intellectuals who espoused this idea held that although ‘Little Russians’ (Ukrainians) differed in points of detail from Russians, the two peoples belonged to a single nation because both of them descended from the medieval REVIEWS 745 polity which centred on Kyiv. Both of them, in other words, were ‘children of Rus´’ (a phrase which, by her own confession, the author has made up). On the other hand, people who rejected the idea held that for historical, linguistic, ethnographic, ecological, economic, social, religious and other reasons the differences between Russians and Ukrainians were so great that it was at best difficult, and at worst impossible, to smooth them over. In view of the fact that Russians and Ukrainians were much the most numerous of the many ethnic groups ruled by the tsar in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Russians nearly two-and-a-half times more numerous than Ukrainians in the census of 1897, Ukrainians nearly three times more numerous than the next-largest group), disagreements about the merits and drawbacks of Little Russianism threatened the integrity of the tsarist empire as a whole. The author might have made this a little more clear. By choosing a sub-title which gives the impression her book is to be confined to the operation of the Little Russian idea in the three provinces of the tsarist empire which lay on the west or right bank of the River Dnipro (Volyn´, Kyiv, Podillia), she downplays the importance of her subject. In practice, however, she has a good deal to say about parts of Ukraine other than those in her sub-title (partly because some of the leading protagonists in the story came from the left or east bank of the Dnipro, partly because some of them left the tsarist empire and continued...