Abstract

The idea of an All-Russian nation, an attempt to integrate the western regions of the empire inhabited by Belarusians and Ukrainians into the imperial and Russian-speaking context, fell in a deep crisis with the emergence of the Ukrainian national movement. The affirmation of Ukrainian identity meant, for Russian nationalists, not just an external threat, but also the danger of a disintegration of the empire at its heart. In this sense, the territories of Galicia, under Hapsburg rule, represented not only a further strategic theater in the battle against the Ukrainian identity, being the «Piedmont» of that national movement, but, at the same time, constituted a battlefield for the affirmation of the All-Russian nation, in the context of the First World War. Aim of paper is to analyze the Galician question in the context of Russian Nationalism, reconstructing the activities of the Galician- Russian Society in the Tsarist empire and during the occupation of the region in 1914-15, and how this was the last call for the All-Russian nation idea ("obscherusskaia natsiia").