Little Russia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Little Russia, originally Little or Lesser Rus’ (Russian: Malorossiya; Ukrainian: Mala Rus’), was the name for the territory of Ukraine applied in the time of the Russian Empire and earlier. The term originates from the name given to the land by Byzantines who called the northern and southern part of the lands of Rus’ as: Μακρα Ρωσία (Makra Rosia, 'Great Russia') and Μικρα Ρωσία (Mikra Rosia, 'Little Russia'), respectively.

The term was adopted by Muscovite Russia, to refer to the Cossack Hetmanate of Left-bank Ukraine, when it fell under Russian protection, after the 1654 Treaty of Pereyaslav. It was later applied to Right-bank Ukraine when it was gained from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The official title of Russian Tsars and Emperors gained the wording (literal translation): "The Sovereign of all Rus': the Great, the Little, and the White."

While the term Little Russia was the Russian name for the geographic territory since the middle of the seventeenth century, the modern name Ukraine (Ukrayina) has been introduced in the sixteenth century. For political reasons, Ukraine as a proper name for the nation and the land became accepted only in the late nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries when the term Little Russia started to fall out of use.

Although the terminology originated as a geographic description of a part of medieval Kievan Rus’, it is now archaic and its current usage in the modern context often implies the Imperial view that the Ukrainian territory and people ("Little Russians") belong to "one, indivisible Russia", and implies that the Ukrainian language (malorusskiy yazyk) is merely a dialect of Russian. Although up to the early-twentieth century these terms were not considered offensive, their modern usage evoke an "older brother" attitude and are associated with off-and-on Imperial oppression of Ukrainian, for example the secret Valuyevsky Ukaz of 1863 and the Ems Ukaz of 1876, which banned Ukrainian in publications and public performances.