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When I read Zenon's Ph.D. dissertation,11 knew that I had to change my research plans. I had done so once already, for, having embarked on a study of the ministers and assistant ministers of Alexander I (their education, career patterns, interconnections, wealth, ideas and importance), I had been overwhelmed by the material and was trying to find out whether the ministers who came from Ukraine were a distinctive interest group (this was the time of David Ransel's Politics of Catherinian Russia2). My first change of direction had led me to start thinking about where the St. Petersburg Ukrainians came from. After reading Zenon's Ph.D. dissertation, I realized that it would not be sensible for me to contemplate trying to become a specialist on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ukraine per se. But I could still work on Ukrainians outside Ukraine and on Russian policies towards Ukraine at other points in time. In view of the fact that I have been studying these things ever since, it is no exaggeration to say that Zenon showed me the way forward.
The present essay is about Russia's Ukrainian policies from the middle of the nineteenth century to the second World War. In the course of writing various articles on the Russo-Ukrainian relationship under the late Romanovs,3 I began wondering whether the forms that it took at that time had anything in common with the forms that it took in the first quartercentury of the Soviet period. Both periods seemed to include short phases of Russian generosity towards Ukraine followed by long phases of hostility. Was this no more than a coincidence, or did it spring from long-term underlying considerations? If underlying factors were at work, what were they?
Although, in general terms, the idea of continuity across the 1917 divide dates back at least to the time of Nicholas Timasheff,4 it was not a subject of mainstream academic debate until after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Sheila Fitzpatrick lent it a certain respectability among social historians when she argued that in the 1930s "Soviet 'class' increasingly assumed the meaning of imperial soslovie."5 At more or less the same time Andreas Kappeler concluded his long-range study of the ethnic groups of the tsars' domains with...