Oleksandr Polianichev1; 1 Södertörn University, Sweden
Discussion
Following the Russian Empire’s defeat in its war against Japan in 1905, the tsarist officer corps sought new ways to foster patriotism among the imperial population by invoking the memory of the empire's "glorious past." Established in 1907, the Russian Society for Military History (RVIO) became the first institution tasked with shaping Russia's historical memory grounded in a legacy of victorious battles and military exploits. The paper focuses on the 1909 expedition of the Society’s Odessa branch along the lower Dnieper in search of traces of the Zaporozhian Sich. It will explore how the branch's leaders with multi-layered cultural and political loyalties—Baltic German Aleksandr Kaul’bars and Lithuanian Tatar Matvei Sul’kevich—became ardent, if inadvertent, promoters of the Zaporozhian, and consequently Ukrainian, historical legacy of the empire’s southern regions, repurposing the myth of the Zaporozhian Sich to serve imperial interests.
