holder of a Postdoc.Mobility grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation. Following studies in Geneva, Saint Petersburg, and Oxford, he completed his PhD in history at the University of Basel in 2020. From 2021 to 2022 he was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago.
He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Dynasty Divided: A Family History of Russian and Ukrainian Nationalism, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Dynasty Divided at the publisher's website.The nexus between politics, business, and private life offers a fresh perspective on Kiev’s Russian nationalists. Dmitrii Pikhno’s professional successes and failures were inseparable from his national-political choices and his family network. His specific brand of agrarian nationalism was rooted both in his academic work as an economist and in his practical experience as a buyer and owner of several estates in right-bank Ukraine. During the political watershed of 1904–1905, Pikhno and his associates radicalized their vision of the Russian nation in reaction to several external threats. As the Russo-Japanese War and the following revolutionary agitation plunged the empire into a deep crisis, Kievlianin launched a powerful counterattack and became the vanguard of a nationalist movement that found fertile soil in an ethnically diverse region. After 1905, Pikhno and his son Vasilii Shul′gin transferred their nationalizing project from Ukraine to the grand political stage of Saint Petersburg. In doing so, the Pikhno-Shul′gins used family connections as a political vehicle—to the point of turning politics into a family business.To my own surprise, the test works rather well! Page 99 is part of the introduction to the book’s third chapter and introduces readers to one of its main protagonists. Dmitrii Pikhno was a fascinating man: Born as a miller’s son in the Ukrainian countryside, he came to Kiev (now Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine) as a teenager and went on to make a brilliant career in Russian imperial society. Despite his relatively lowly social background, he became an economist, a newspaper editor, and finally, an influential politician in the imperial capital, Saint Petersburg. As the above excerpt states, these successes were intimately linked to his private life (which, frankly speaking, was rather peculiar, involving a long relationship with his stepdaughter and four sons born out of wedlock).
And this brings us straight to the book’s main themes. Dynasty Divided tells the story of a family of politicians, journalists, and intellectuals in nineteenth-century Kiev, a family that split up along national lines. The members of one branch came to think of themselves as Russians, the members of the other branch saw themselves as Ukrainians. Family members went on to become important leaders in both the city’s Russian and Ukrainian nationalist movements. My book argues that in Ukraine’s nineteenth-century intelligentsia, individuals’ nationality was not a matter of ethnic heritage but the result of conscious political choices. And these choices, as the case of Dmitrii Pikhno illustrates, were often connected with family life. Parents and siblings influenced individual activists’ nationalist worldviews, private households were the sites of political socialization, and family networks were exploited for organizational purposes. To find out more about how this ultimately led to a deep fissure in the local intelligentsia – a fissure that is part of the pre-history to Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine – you will have to read more than page 99, I’m afraid.
--Marshal Zeringue
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