2006, The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus
1059 ViewsPaperRank: 3.7400 Pages
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I have been reading the History of Eurasia and Central/Eastern Europe for the last 60 years. I have to say that when reading the history of Eastern Europe, it is very difficult to follow the history of any one nation in a linear fashion. This is the best book written on this topic by any historian and believe me I think I have read most of them. The first problem are the histories written by the victors and then histories written by the defeated. Second there is the problem of countries popping up and then disappearing and then popping up and so forth ad nauseum. Third is the problem of multi-national empires. Fourth there are Nations without political borders or a National ruling elite. Fifth the National Elites change their national allegiances. Ultimately we have the book written by Prof. Plokhy and finally all is clear!
Victor Ostapchuk
The European Tributary States of the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Boston and New York: Brill, 2013)
34 Pages
Publication Name: The European Tributary States of the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Boston and New York: Brill, 2013)
In the Shadows of Poland and Russia: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Sweden in the European Crisis of the mid-17th Century. PhD dissertation. Södertörn University, 2006, 347 pp.
361 Pages
https://tinyurl.com/ycke6477
This book examines and analyses the Union between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Sweden signed in 1655 at Kėdainiai and the political crisis that followed. The union was a result of strong separatist dreams among the Lithuanian-Ruthenian Protestant elite led by the Radziwiłł family, and if implemented it would radically change the balance of power in the Baltic Sea region. The main legal point of the Union was the breach of Lithuanian federation with Poland and the establishment of a federation with Sweden. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania aspired to return to international relations as a self-governing subject. The Union meant a new Scandinavian alternative to Polish and Russian domination. The author places the events in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the general crisis that occurred in Europe in the middle of the 17th century characterized by a great number of wars, rebellions and civil wars from Portugal to Ukraine, and which builds the background to the crisis for Lithuania and Sweden. The research proved the importance of lesser powers in changing the geopolitical balance between the Great Powers. The conflict over Lithuania and Belarus was the main reason for the Swedish-Russian, Polish-Russian and Ukrainian-Russian wars. The failure of the Union with Sweden was caused by both internal and external factors. Internally, various ethnic, confessional and political groups within the nobility of Lithuania were split in favour of different foreign powers – from Muscovy to Transylvania. The external cause for the failure of the Union project was the failure of Swedish strategy. Sweden concentrated its activity to Poland, not to Lithuania. After the Union, Swedish authorities treated the Grand Duchy as an invaded country, not an equal. The Swedish administration introduced heavy taxation and was unable to control the brutality of the army. As a result Sweden was defeated in both Lithuania and Poland. Among the different economic, political and religious explanations of the general crisis, the case of Lithuania shows the importance of the political conflicts. For the separatists of Lithuania the main motive to turn against Poland and to promote alliance with Sweden, Russia or the Cossacks was the inability of Poland to shield the Grand Duchy from a Russian invasion.The Lithuanian case was a provincial rebellion led by the native nobility against their monarch, based on tradition of the previous independence and statehood period. It was not nationalism in its modern meaning, but instead a … View full abstract
“Russia’s First ‘Orient’: Catherine in the Crimea, 1787.”
2002, Kritika 3.1, pp. 3-25
514 ViewsPaperRank: 2.324 Pages
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Russian culture discovered its first “Orient” in the late 18th century when Catherine II extended the boundaries of her empire to Southern Ukraine and the Crimea. While Russians had interacted for centuries with their Asiatic neighbors, they had not systematically characterized them as Oriental “others” until Catherine’s reign. The 1783 conquest of new territory on the shores of the Black Sea, which coincided with the rising popularity of Oriental fashions in West European literature and culture, provided an opportunity to do so. Accordingly, these southern borderlands were the first landscapes in the empire to be elaborately imagined according to the Western parameters of Oriental stylization. An especially powerful stimulus to representations of the Crimea as an “Eastern” or “Oriental” territory was Catherine II’s trip to the Crimea in 1787. Commentary on the journey, written by the empress herself, members of her entourage, and her various correspondents, illustrates the initiatory formulation of an exotic Crimean imaginary -- a year before Byron’s birth and 12 years before Pushkin’s. This was not yet the full-fledged Orientalism of Said’s classic model and thus, though there is a direct link between Catherinian descriptions of the Crimea and later Orientalist characterizations of the Caucasus, Russia’s encounter with the Crimea is better described as a preliminary process of “otherization”: the production and circulation of images and stereotypes that expressed the region’s “otherness” or ontological difference from the norms of the dominant culture, in this case those of Western Europe. Not surprisingly, initial forays into Orientalist literary discourse were complicated by the fact that Catherine’s empire was hardly a typical Western power at all: geographically, politically, and culturally defined by its position on Europe’s periphery, Russia itself had often been cast in the role of the West’s Oriental other. The annexation of the Crimea provided a welcome opportunity for Russia to more assertively claim the status of a Western-style empire, the rhetorical construction of Russia’s first Orient ultimately providing compelling evidence of Russia’s Western pedigree.
The Imperial Roots of Soviet Orientology
David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye
David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye
(Brock University)
Geography has made Russia intimately familiar with the East from its very beginnings.
The caches of Near Eastern coins dating from as early as the eighth century found on its lands testify to a lively Slav intercourse with the Orient even before the rise of Kievan Rus. Commerce, conflict and intermarriage continued to characterise Russia’s relations with its Asian neighbours on the Steppe and beyond after its conversion to Christianity in988. However, the sparse literature about the East that survived the medieval era was strongly influenced by the mother church in Constantinople. Monastic chronicles and other texts tended to caricature Asians as a sinister other, more in keeping with Byzantine anti-Islamic polemics than physical contact.
There were exceptions. “The Journey beyond Three Seas”, the fifteenth-century merchant Afanasii Nikitin’s account of his travels to India, portrayed the subcontinent and its Muslim overlords in a relatively objective light. Nikitin’s “Journey” suggests that the Russian laity did not necessarily share their church’s hostility to the non-Christian East. Moreover, since Russians developed a sense of national identity relatively late, their sense of race tended to be much weaker than among western Europeans. Many families in the official Tsarist genealogy proudly claimed a Tatar provenance, including distinguished names like Iusupov, Kurakin, Dashkov, Kochubei, Ushakov, and Karamzin, among a host of others. As for the peasantry, until the modern age, its primary allegiance was to its Eastern Christian faith rather than the nation. But this loyalty was to the triple-armed Orthodox cross, not the simpler Latin version. The Catholic nemets (western foreigner) was just as alien as the Turkic basurman (Muslim infidel).
The caches of Near Eastern coins dating from as early as the eighth century found on its lands testify to a lively Slav intercourse with the Orient even before the rise of Kievan Rus. Commerce, conflict and intermarriage continued to characterise Russia’s relations with its Asian neighbours on the Steppe and beyond after its conversion to Christianity in988. However, the sparse literature about the East that survived the medieval era was strongly influenced by the mother church in Constantinople. Monastic chronicles and other texts tended to caricature Asians as a sinister other, more in keeping with Byzantine anti-Islamic polemics than physical contact.
There were exceptions. “The Journey beyond Three Seas”, the fifteenth-century merchant Afanasii Nikitin’s account of his travels to India, portrayed the subcontinent and its Muslim overlords in a relatively objective light. Nikitin’s “Journey” suggests that the Russian laity did not necessarily share their church’s hostility to the non-Christian East. Moreover, since Russians developed a sense of national identity relatively late, their sense of race tended to be much weaker than among western Europeans. Many families in the official Tsarist genealogy proudly claimed a Tatar provenance, including distinguished names like Iusupov, Kurakin, Dashkov, Kochubei, Ushakov, and Karamzin, among a host of others. As for the peasantry, until the modern age, its primary allegiance was to its Eastern Christian faith rather than the nation. But this loyalty was to the triple-armed Orthodox cross, not the simpler Latin version. The Catholic nemets (western foreigner) was just as alien as the Turkic basurman (Muslim infidel).
