What was so little about “Little Russia”?

The Monument of Yaroslav the Wise in front of Golden Gate in Kyiv. Photo: Sharon Wildie / Shutterstic

Western atlases and historians of co-opted these terms. One can still find Britons of a certain age who use the terms “White Russia” and “the Ukraine”. But “Little Russia” has vanished and is today deemed horribly offensive. Belarus, or Byelorussiya, quite literally remains White Russia. But Ukraine was not “little” because it was considered as the “little brother” among the Eastern Slavs. Its modern borders inherited from the Soviet Union are not exactly small and neither is the historic space which it occupied. Nor were Ukrainians a small group situated at the far reaches of the Russian Empire. It is important to highlight in this piece that unlike Belarus and White Russia, “Little Russia” and “Ukraine” are not – and have never been – mutually exclusive terms. It is, however, a product of a complicated history.

A matter of location

Geographically, and politically speaking, “little” often applies to peripheral places and spaces. In New York for example, Little Italy is not Fifth Avenue or Central Park West, but Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. The Bronx was indeed a world away from New York’s high society. But Little Italy was peripheral because the mostly poor and Catholic Italians were looked down upon and discriminated against. They and the Bronx were a part of the city fabric, but confined to its margins, and thus “little” entailed a lower status.

It should also be stressed that regions or places dubbed “great” also imply a periphery. Consider London and Greater London, or even Great Baddow on the outskirts of Chelmsford. Moscow Oblast might be considered Moscow by inhabitants of Yekaterinburg, but Muscovites would not dare consider Sergiyev Posad, Orekhovo-Zuyevo, Zelenograd or even Podolsk as part of Moscow. In the Russian context, “Great Rus’” meant the centre of political and religious power, yet the term only ever caught on when they both had left Kyiv.

Little Russia was nothing like Arthur Avenue, even though it was also peripheral within the context of Peter the Great’s Russian Empire and gave it a lesser status. As the reader is no doubt aware, the translation of Ukraine is “at the edge” or “borderland”. The question historians have often contended with is at the edge or on the border of what? Some have argued it was on the border of Europe and the Great Steppe; others have maintained it to be the edge of Christendom (or at least Catholicism).

One of the many theories explaining the origins of “White Rus’” for instance suggests it was the Christianised part of Northern Ruthenia, whereas “Black Ruthenia” was occupied by pagans and Balts. This shows why geography cannot be discounted here either. Rome was long considered the centre of Europe, even though geographically speaking, it is more like Vilnius. This means that Ukraine, Belarus and Russia were never peripheral parts of Europe. Both the Muscovite and Kyivan state and culture originated in Europe, but expanded its territory into Asia.

Yet, this in and of itself is telling of the Old Rus’ position within Europe – the Eastern Slavs were known well before the Kyivan state came into existence. Throughout Kyivan Rus’ history, the princes and princesses of Rus’ married into other European royal families. There were high-profile marriages to Norwegian, German, Hungarian and of course Byzantine royalty, forming greater cultural and trading links. Moreover, many of Russia’s oldest churches, like those in the Golden Ring region, were built with the help of German and Italian architects. And it was in the final chapter of Kyivan Rus’ history where the idea of a “Little Russia” on the periphery was born.

Towards the Golden Gates

The expansion of Kyivan Rus’ in the 12th and 13th centuries began the journey towards a Little, Great and White Russia. To be more specific, it is rooted in the transfer of political and spiritual power from Kyiv to the fortress city of Vladimir. Despite their early mentions by the chroniclers, the Golden Ring cities of Vladimir, Suzdal and Rostov were initially outside the Rus’, or what was then considered Rus’. Although according to the Primary Chronicle, Rurik settled in Novgorod, Kyiv became the senior most city where the grand princes ruled from and church metropolitans later sat. The grand princes of Kyiv also assumed the title of “all Rus’”, as later would the Tsars. This title was chosen because the princes ruled not just the Kyivan lands, but a much larger territory, stretching across the Volga river to the east, and even as far as part of the Urals.

As Kyiv struggled to control its peripheries, consolidate its power and fight off numerous steppe invaders, many of the Eastern Slavs began migrating to the economically prosperous principality of Vladimir-Suzdal, in the northeast of Rus’. Surrounded by vast forestry and rivers, it was rich in furs, timber, fish, wax and located far from the steppe invaders. It was a politically stable principality, headed by a powerful autocrat, who, at one time, controlled Europe’s largest army. One can argue that in Vladimir, Russian autocracy as we know it, was born.

Taking advantage of Kyiv’s weaknesses, in 1169 Prince Andrey Bogolyubsky of Vladimir-Suzdal sacked the city of Kyiv. He claimed the title of Kyivan grand prince but chose not to remain in the city. Instead, he returned to his new palace in Vladimir, and in so doing, the seat of political power transferred with him. The church metropolitan of Kyiv and all the Rus’ moved to Vladimir in 1299. With these transfers, Great Rus’ moved and so too did its surrounding territories.

There are various early references to Great, Little and White Rus’. A Byzantine Diocese list from the 12th century references which churches were under the control of Great Rus’, namely Rostov, an important bishopric. The name was also used by Patriarch Callistus I of Constantinople in 1361 when creating the metropolitans of Great Rus’ in Vladimir and Kyiv and Little Rus’ with its centres in Halych and Novogrudok (Navahrudak). However, these were not official terms yet and the implied territories would change. When political and religious power shifted to Moscow after the end of Mongol rule, Vladimir and Novgorod were still a part of Great Rus’, but on the periphery of the Muscovite state.

Kyiv and Galich meanwhile were lost to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Linguistically, these lands began to change. Originally, those in Little, Great and White Russia all spoke a common tongue which derived from the old Eastern Slavonic language, Ruthenian. Among the former lands of Rus’ under the control of the Mongol-Tatar yoke, western influences never reached the upper Volga Basin, from where Moscow launched its expansion, also known as the “regathering of Russian lands”. As the northern and southern parts of Kyivan Rus’ absorbed by Poland were affected linguistically, Vladimir-Suzdal and its surrounding settlements became regarded as the birthplace of the Russian language. Ukrainian and Belarusian were considered linguistically peripheral and dismissed as regional dialects.

When the Soviet state constructed the tourist route now known as the Golden Ring, this idea of the symbolic heartlands of Great Rus’ was exploited and became the region’s unique selling point. It was to offer something different from Central Asia and the Baltics, and became a sort of escape from Soviet stagnation into a mythical past. However, in a political system with many self-imposed restrictions, the Soviet state had to use the story of Vladimir-Suzdal carefully within a Marxist framework. Whilst figures such as Alexander Nevsky were easy to use as symbols of state power and fighting against the Germans (as in the Great Patriotic War), any connections to the Romanovs had to be downplayed or glossed over. This is despite the fact that listening to the bells of Rostov became something of a fashion in the late 1960s.

As such, the first symbol of the Golden Ring motoring route produced a contradictory image: an Orthodox onion-shaped dome, symbolising ancient traditions, and a crane and electricity pylon – a long-standing metaphor for socialist modernity. But mentions of Kyiv or even Novgorod were nowhere to be found. The project was designed to enhance the cultural significance of the regions and local identities to boost foreign tourism. Instead, the Golden Ring became a metaphor for Russian national feelings based on a shared history and culture rooted in an ancient past. Or as the journalist who helped forge it wrote, “the cradle of Russian culture”.

Russia looks West

Despite earlier mentions, it was not until Peter the Great’s reign when “Little Russia” was officially co-opted and could be located on a map. The linguistic distinction of Great and Little Russia was also a key part of establishing a separate “Ukrainian” identity. By 1721, the distinctions between Rus’, Russia and all the “Russias” were confused. After Peter set about carving up Poland-Lithuania and annexing the former parts of Old Rus’, Russian bureaucrats embarked on a renaming mission as they themselves underwent a forced westernisation. The northern stretches of Ruthenia became “White Russia” and the southern stretches of Ukraine “Little Russia”. Not pleased with such terminology, many set about calling themselves Ukrainians, because the term ruski had been appropriated by the Muscovite state and this led to the language being called “Ukrainian”.

Over the course of the next three centuries, the Ukrainian language was often banned and actively suppressed even as many Ukrainians made great careers in Moscow as governors, cultural figures and church clerics. After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, persecutions increased by both the Russian and Austrian authorities, who controlled a portion of Western Ukraine right up to the Ternopil and Chernivtsi oblasts. Retreating Austrians executed Ukrainians who were suspected of sympathising with Russia. Russians suppressed all Ukrainian cultural and political activities, exiled many prominent Ukrainians to Siberia and accused the Austro-Hungarian government of promoting a fictional language to drive a wedge between the Russian peoples.

Little, White and Great were political and geographical terms used to define the lands and peoples caught in the crosshairs of Poland, Prussia, Russia and the Ottoman Empire for almost three centuries. Whilst it cannot be denied that Russia and Ukraine do have a shared history, it has also been severed for at least a quarter of the last millennium. Both sides understand and view the “little” label very differently. The Russian state views it as a symbol of historic and cultural unity whereas the Ukrainian state deems it an oppressive and colonial label. There are merits and mistakes on both sides of this argument, but to coin a phrase, history is an assault on the present.

James C. Pearce is a historian at Anglia Ruskin University College and author of The Use of History in Putin’s Russia (Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2020).

Kyivan Rus, Russia, Russian history, Ukrainian history