| Summary/Abstract |
One of the key issues on Russia’s current and long-term political agendas is whether Russian identity is possible without Ukraine. The purpose of this article is to study the issue through a possible transformation of the “big narrative” in Russian history. An analysis of “big narratives,” a practice established in the 1970s-80s in the continental research tradition, combines historical, philosophical, and sociological approaches. Russia’s big historical narrative is essentially imperial, which implies that Ukraine is not an indispensable constitutive element with a preset value. Therefore, in this narrative “Russianness” has no fundamental relation to the issue of Ukraine. An alternative approach towards creating a big Russian narrative as a national one suggests that it is in conflict with the Ukrainian narrative since both seek to embrace the same groups and territories. In the long term, the prevailing imperial narrative will most likely include as its essential element the interpretation of the current state as “a decline of the empire” and a “loss,” while the probability of its successful radical transformation now looks fairly low.
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