Russia Ukraine war, page-230889

heres another fun fact

the term ukraina
emerged in Poland-Lithuania during the 16th century for referring to the ‘eastern
peripheral region’ in this polity (Halushko 2016: 10-13). Eventually, at the turn of the
20th century this term yielded a name for the country of Ukraine. In Russian the
meaning of ‘a periphery of a state,’ or ‘borderland,’ began to be denoted with the plural
form of the noun okraina, that is, okrainy (cf Pereverzov 1788: 122-123). Both
forms of this common Russian noun continued to be used equitably until the 1830s.
Then the anti-tsarist uprising of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility (1830-1831) prompted the
Russian ruling elite in 1833 to adopt the new homogenizing imperial ideology of
Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality.2 This ideology drew a clear line of distinction – in
ethnic and spatial terms – between the Orthodox and Russphone (Muscovian) core of
the Russian Empire and its non-Orthodox and/or non-Russophone (border) regions, or
okrainy. ‘Russophone’ in this historic context meant Orthodox Slavic-speakers whose
elite employed invariably Cyrillic for writing. This script was seen as ‘Orthodox’ or
‘Russian’ letters, ideologically opposed to the ‘Polish’ or ‘Latin’ letters (Flynn 1986;
Whittaker 1978).