SUMMARY:

Klimenti Fedevitch discusses the paradoxical case of Ukrainian “Russian nationalism” after 1905. The Pochaev chapter of the URP in Volhynia province was the largest in the empire. The absolute majority of these Volhynian Russian nationalists were Ukrainian peasants in a region that just three decades later would become a hotbed of Ukrainian militant anti-Russian nationalism as embodied by the OUN (the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists). Fedevitch tackles this paradox by offering a prosopography of the URP Pochaev chapter’s main leaders – high-ranking Russian Orthodox clergymen. They broadly relied on the Ukrainian language in their propaganda, and they cultivated Ukrainian culture, thus laying the ground for the rise of modern Ukrainian nationalism in the future. Almost all of them were newcomers to Ukraine and had had prior experience of special missionary training and work in the Middle Volga. The practices developed for Turkic- and Finnish-speaking minority groups were deliberately applied to Ukrainians, who were officially recognized as part of the big Russian nation and accepted by local Russian nationalist leaders as a separate people. Fedevitch points to the Russian Orthodox hierarchs’ suspicious attitude toward if not contempt for the imperial government and dynasty, increasingly deemed hostile to Russian national interests, in the wake of the 1905 Revolution.