Title of Research

The Transformation of New Russia: From Frontier to Province to Myth

Abstract

The ongoing conflict in Ukraine is not only a conflict over regional autonomy or geopolitics. It is also a conflict over history whereby both sides promote incompatible ethnocentric visions of historical justice. As state legitimacy collapsed in the Ukrainian south-east in 2014, New Russia (Novorossia), a toponym from imperial times, once again entered the political discourse and was actively exploited by rebel groups. Ironically, however, we still have no satisfactory answer as to how the geographical region of the Pontic Steppe became a “New Russia.” In this vein, I intend to revise the history of the contested region diachronically, connecting past developments to present issues and focusing on history of such concepts as Southern Ukraine and its primary competitor New Russia.

Biography

Andriy Posunko defended his PhD thesis at Central European University in 2018. His research focused on the social and military history of Cossack units in the Pontic Steppe region of the Russian Empire. His other publications deal with the peculiarities of irregular military service in New Russia / Southern Ukraine, Bessarabia, and the Caucasus; trans-imperial movement of people, goods and ideas between Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg empires; as well as ambiguities of social and legal status of the inhabitants in the borderlands contested by these three states. Currently, he is a researcher at Dnipropetrovsk National Historical Museum, where, besides duties in heritage management and heritage protection, he continues his research on imperial transformations in the Pontic Steppe region during the late eighteenth - early nineteenth centuries.