From the eighteenth century until its collapse in 1917, Imperial Russia – as distinct from Muscovite Russia before it and Soviet Russia after it – officially held that the Russian nation consisted of three branches: Great Russian, Little Russian (Ukrainian), and White Russian (Belarusian). After the 1917 revolution, this view was discredited by many leading scholars, politicians, and cultural figures, but none were more intimately involved in the dismantling of the old imperial identity and its historical narrative than the eminent Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866–1934).

Hrushevsky took an active part in the work of Ukrainian scholarly, cultural, and political organizations and became the first head of the independent Ukrainian state in 1918. Serhii Plokhy’s Unmaking Imperial Russia examines Hrushevsky’s construction of a new historical paradigm that brought about the nationalization of the Ukrainian past and established Ukrainian history as a separate field of study. By showing how the ‘all-Russian’ historical paradigm was challenged by the Ukrainian national project, Plokhy provides the indispensable background for understanding the current state of relations between Ukraine and Russia.

Serhii Plokhy is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard University.

Serhii Plokhii's profile page

• Short-listed, Wallace A. Fergusson Prize - Canadian Historical Association
• Short-listed, Wallace A. Fergusson Prize - Canadian Historical Association

'Plokhy's account of Hrushevsky's role in nationalizing the past of a part of Eastern Europe into "Ukrainian history," thereby "unmaking imperial Russia," is truly, as advertised, a fine piece of scholarship. A nuanced, complex analysis that cannot be summarized in a short review…'

The English Historical Review

'Serhii Plokhy is to be congratulated on producing a magisterial survey of Ukraine's "national historian" ... this is a book which matches up to the shape of Hrushevsky's work--a big and bold achievemnt.'

Slavonic and East European Review