From Rus To Ukraine
Meanwhile the southwestern territories of historical Rus had been incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (whose full name was Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Rus' and Samogitia). The Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as a whole, was dominated by Rus, as it was populated mainly by Rus, many of its nobles were of Rus origin, and a descendant of the Old East Slavic language, Ruthenian, is the language of most surviving official documents prior to 1697 (excluding Polish).
The southern territories dominated by Lithuania have cognate names in Russian and Polish, respectively:
- Belarus and Ruś Biała — White Ruthenia, or White Rus', or Belarus;
- Chorna Rus and Ruś Czarna — Black Ruthenia, part of modern Belarus; and
- Chervona Rus and Ruś Czerwona — Red Ruthenia, now a small strip in Poland (Przemyśl) and the rest in Ukraine (Galicia). Poland called this area the "Ruthenian Voivodeship."
- Zelena Rus - Siberia.
- New Rus - Novorossiya.
While Russian descendants of the Rus called themselves Russkiye, the residents of these lands called themselves Rusyny or Ruskiye (Ruthenians).
The word "Ukraine" (ukraina) is first recorded in the fifteenth-century Hypatian Codex of the twelfth and thirteenth-century Primary Chronicle, whose 1187 entry on the death of Prince Volodymyr of Pereyaslav (aka Volodymyr/Vladimir Monomakh) says “The Ukraina groaned for him”, ѡ нем же Оукраина много постона (o nem že Ukraina mnogo postona). The term is also mentioned for the years 1189, 1213, 1280, and 1282 for various East Slavic lands (for example, Galician Ukrayina, etc.), possibly referring to different principalities of Kievan Rus' (cf. Skljarenko 1991, Pivtorak 1998) or to different borderlands (Vasmer 1953-1958, Rudnyc’kyj and Sychynskyj 1949).
In 1654, under the Treaty of Pereyaslav, the Cossack lands of the Zaporozhian Host came under the protection of Muscovy, including the Hetmanate of Left-bank Ukraine, and Zaporozhia. In Russia, these lands were referred to as Little Russia (Malorossiya). Colonies established in lands ceded from the Ottoman Empire along the Black Sea were called New Russia (Novorossiya).
In the final decades of the eighteenth century, the Russian Empire, Prussia and Austria dismembered the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in a series of partitions, and all of historic Rus, save for Galicia, became part of the Russian Empire.
During a period of cultural revival after 1840, the members of a secret ideological society in Kiev, the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, revived the use of the name Ukrayina for the homeland of the "Little Russian" people. They drew upon a name which had been used by 17th-century Ukrainian Cossacks. It had earlier appeared on 16th-century maps of Kiev and its local area (Kievan Rus). Ukrayina was originally an Old East Slavic word for a "bordered land" or "a separated land parcel, a separate part of a tribe's territory", attested as far back as the 12th century. See krajina for cognates.
In the early twentieth century, the name Ukraine became more widely accepted, and was used as the official name for the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic, West Ukrainian National Republic and Ukrainian Hetmanate, and for the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Application of the name "Ruthenia" (Rus') became narrowed to Carpathian Ruthenia (Karpats’ka Rus’), south of the Carpathian mountains in the Kingdom of Hungary, where many local Slavs consider themselves Rusyns. Carpathian Ruthenia incorporated the cities of Mukachiv (Rusyn: Mukachevo; Hungarian: Munkács), Uzhhorod (Hungarian: Ungvár) and Prešov (Pryashiv; Hungarian: Eperjes). Carpathian Rus had been part of the Hungarian Kingdom since 907 AD, and had been known as Magna Rus but was also called Karpato-Rus’ or Zakarpattia.
Read more about this topic: Rus (name)