The three East Slavic countries – Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus – all emerged as independent nations in 1991, when the Soviet Union was broken up. All three of these countries trace their origins back to a sprawling medieval state known as Rus’. So far, so clear. Where things become cloudy is when we consider all the terms that derive from this simple three-letter word, and the meanings that have been imputed to them.
Russian, Rus’ian (that’s not a misprint), Ruthenian, Great Russian, Little Russian, White Russian (and I don’t mean the drink): it’s too big a subject for one blogpost. But I can give you some pointers, some idea of the complications involved.
One problem is that of translation. The English word “Russian” can be misleading, because it is used for two meanings that are distinct in the Russian Federation. One meaning (let’s call it Russian-1) means people who are ethnically Russian (russkiy). The other meaning refers to citizens of Russia who are not ethnic Russians (rossiyane, with the adjective rossiyskiy) – that is, Tatars, Buryats, Chuvash and the many other nationalities of the Russian Federation (let’s call it Russian-2). Conversely, you might be an ethnically Russian citizen of Kazakhstan or Estonia: in that case you'd be Russian-1 but not Russian-2. In English, we use the same word to cover both meanings, and that leads to confusion.
When Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane was shot down over the USSR in 1960, he was put on trial for espionage in a Soviet court. I watched some footage of his testimony, which he gave through an interpreter. At one point, he stated that he was “not an enemy of the Russian people.” In context, it was clear that he meant “the Soviet people.” But taken literally, he could be saying that he might be an enemy of Ukrainian, Kazakh, Georgian, or other Soviet people who were not Russian-1 – self-evidently an absurd statement. This was clearly one of those cases where the interpreter had the right to correct the speaker’s words in the interests of clarity, yet he did not do so – he translated Powers as saying that he was “not an enemy of Russian-1 people.”
Closer to home, my wife had an ethnically Tatar colleague – someone who was Russian-2 but not Russian-1. Landing at Heathrow on a business trip, he had to fill out a landing card, which requested his “nationality.” Interpreting this not in the sense of citizenship but of ethnicity, he refused to write “Russian” and wrote “Tatar.” This led to some confusion with British Customs, who assumed everyone coming from Russia was just Russian, full stop.
Let’s confuse you further. Another language that distinguishes between these two terms is Polish – but there, it means something completely different. In Polish, ruski refers to the Rus-descended populations of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania: in other words, the people now known as Ukrainians and Belarusians. “Russian” in both senses is covered by rosyjski. Thus “Russian literature” in Russian is russkaya literatura, but in Polish it’s literatura rosyjska. The latter wording would sound odd in Russian, suggesting perhaps law codes and other bureaucratic documents rather than novels and poems.
Once in a cafeteria in Poland, I saw a dish on the menu called pierogi ruskie. To a Russophone, this might suggest “Russian pies.” In the Polish context, it means something like “Ukrainian-style dumplings.” English translations of this dish include both “Russian dumplings” and “Ruthenian dumplings.” The dish originates in the historical region known in Polish as Ruś Czerwona; English Wikipedia provides three differing translations of this term (Red Ruthenia, Red Rus’, and Red Russia).
Let’s look at that term “Ruthenian” for a bit. Deriving from the Latin Rutheni, it has been used in various contexts to mean 1) the people we now call Ukrainians and Belarusians (i.e. the Polish meaning of ruski); 2) the language(s) they spoke (but which is/are also known as Rus’ian (“language of Rus”), Old Belarusian (somewhat anachronistically), West Russian (ditto), and even West Russian Chancellery Language (to be really academic)); 3) the people now known as Carpatho-Rusyns or simply Rusyns, who live or have lived predominantly in Ukraine, Slovakia, and Pennsylvania. Well-known Ruthenian-Americans have included Andy Warhol, the jazz pianist Bill Evans (Welsh father and Rusyn mother), and the actress Sandra Dee. To add to the confusion, Rusyn-Americans have historically sometimes described themselves as Russian or Ukrainian.
Another use of “Russia” that has gone by the wayside is the older English term for Belarus – “White Russia” (a term which, by way of analogy with our “red” example above, could also be translated as White Rus’ or White Ruthenia). To add to the confusion, people from this land were referred to as “White Russians” – a term which was also the usual way to refer to anti-Bolshevik emigres. Nabokov and Stravinsky were White Russians in this sense, but they had nothing to do with the country currently known as Belarus.
So – what does all this mean in practical terms? Essentially, it means that “Rus'” and all the terms deriving from it mean different things to different people, and these differences frequently manifest themselves politically. Depending on where you stand, how you identify yourself, and how you interpret history, you can be Russian, Rus’ian, Ruthenian, or something else entirely. The grand irony is that nobody really knows the origin of the word, so searching for some kind of absolute meaning is pointless.