With its southward expansion during the 18th century, the Russian Empire incorporated a number of Cossack populations inhabiting the steppes to the north of the Black Sea. Previously, parts of these lands along the Dnieper river had been organized into a military-social polity called the Hetmanate; it had been under loose Polish control before it became a client state of the Russian Empire under the hetman Bogdan Hmel’mnic’kyj in 1654, and had been ruinously reduced following the ill-fated resistance of Hetman Ivan Mazepa in the early 18th century. The hetmanate had issued from a looser structure still in force in the wild and almost-uninhabited regions to the south of the Dnieper Rapids (Zaporožia in Russian, “trans-Rapids”) where Cossacks had been organized around a “sich” (fortress) and habituated to a warlike lifestyle owing to the proximity of hostile steppe nomads. The Hetmanate was incorporated into Russia as the governorate of “Little Russia”, Zaporožia became part of the “New Russia” governorate under Catherine the Great.

In the 19th century, with former Cossack leaders and career officers accommodated into Russia’s petty-nobility military class, Kharkov/Kharkiv and the newly-founded port city of Odessa functioned as urban centres for these regions. A university was founded in Kharkiv in 1805; a Russian-language regional magazine appeared there entitled Ukrainskij vestnik (“The Ukrainian herald”, 1861, suppressed in 1819).  With its 1831 successor the Ukrainsij almanah, it was among the first publications post-1815 to use that name for the Empire’s western and southern marches.

These division of these marches or borderlands (which is what the Russian word Украина connotes) between the Habsburg and Romanov empires was consolidated around the Napoleonic period. The inhabitants (Cossacks and their neighbouring populations to the north and west), characterized by their use of the Ruthenian language, were partly under Austrian rule (around Lemberg/L’viv: Galicia, Ruthenia), partly under Russian rule, and united as such with the more northern area around Kiev/Kyiv. Unlike the former Hetmanate and Zaporožian Sich, the Kievan Ukrainians looked back not so much to a Cossack past as to the Empire’s great forerunner state, medieval Kievan Rus’ (from which their ethnonym as Rus’, their Orthodox religion, and the language-name Ruthenian were derived).

The cultural memories that set Ukrainians apart from “Greater Russia” combined Cossack myths and the ancestral state of Kievan Rus’. These myths and memories were merged in a manuscript history composed around 1790, Istorija Rusov ili Malij Rossij (“History of Rus’ or of Little Russia”), which established a narrative lineage between them. Cultural production was initially concentrated in Kharkov/Kharkiv, where  Izmail Sreznevskij taught at the university, and collected folk songs and dumy. He drew on these materials for an almanac that appeared in the 1830s, Zaporožskaja Starina. Its 1835 issue was wholly given over to a “Ukrainian chronicle of 1640-1657”, one of the first attempts to turn the poorly-archived Hetmanate past into an actual historiography; as Sreznevskij stated in the preface, “The scarcity of historical records about the past of the Cossacks compels the interested student to look for other sources of information, and he finds for his study a rich, inexhaustible mine in the people’s legends and historical songs.” The example was followed by Pantelejmon Kuliš, who asked the readers of his historical Cossack novel Myhajlo Čarnyšenko (1843) to furnish him with family anecdotes in order to compile a “History of Little-Russian families”.

Ukrainian national interest spilled over from Kharkiv to Kyiv in the 1840s, largely through an adept of Sreznevskij, Mykola Kostomarov, who had studied in Kharkiv, had been deeply influenced by Sreznevskij’s work, and obtained, after many setbacks, a teaching post in Kyiv. Arriving in Kyiv in 1844, Kostomarov encountered a cultural climate that had been primed by Pan-Slavic currents from various sides. To begin with, there was a large Polish-Lithuanian presence in the city; a Masonic lodge had been founded there with a predominantly Polish membership under the Pan-Slavic name Jedność Słowiańska (“Slavic Unity”; it was a forerunner of the Decembrist Society of United Slavs of 1823, with which it merged in 1824). Although the Polish Uprising of 1830-31 ruptured these allegiances, a conspiratorial revival tradition followed the 1834 foundation of a university in Kyiv. (Named after St Vladimir, the medieval prince under whose rule Kievan Rus’ had embraced Orthodox Christianity, the university was intended to compensate for the closure of Vilnius University in the wake of the 1830-31 Uprising.) A clandestine Polish student society was formed, Związek Ludu Polskiego (“Alliance of Polish People”), the discovery of which led to the closure of the university for six months in 1838.

Other Pan-Slavic and Romantic-Nationalist currents reached Kiev as a result of the arrival of Pantelejmon Kuliš, whose Myhajlo Čarnyšenko had been deeply informed not only by the (as yet unprinted) Istorija Rusov, but also by readings from Karadžić and Venelin. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the philologist Osyp Bodjan’skyj – who had been inspired by his associate Šafárik to investigate the medieval Slavic ethnogenesis following the missions of SS Cyril and Methodius – had seen the Istorija Rusov into print (1843). Foundational texts were increasing in number: Kuliš had published a Homeric-Ossianic poem Ukraina in 1843, and Kostomarov combined the examples of the Istorija Rusov and of Mickiewicz’s “Books of the Polish people and of the Polish pilgrimage” (Księgi narodu polskiego i peilgrzymstwa polskiego, published in France in 1832) into a mystical text called “The books of the genesis of the Ukrainian people” (Knyhy buttia ukrainskoho narodu). It remained unpublished and was intended mainly for the benefit of the clandestine “Brotherhood of SS Cyril and Methodius” which he, together with Kuliš, had formed in Kiev in 1846. Like other Pan-Slavic initiatives of the pre-1848 period, it combined anti-absolutism and inter-Slavic fraternization in equal measure. Drawing as it did on the tradition of Polish anti-Russian intransigence, it could not but be suspect to the deeply autocratic Russian state. What is more, the Ukrainian argument that their cultural community and its language were not an offshoot of the Muscovite-descended Russian ethnicity, but rather an independently-descended successor to Kievan Rus’, was a taxonomy with explosive implications. If cultural co-equality with, rather than subsidiarity to, Muscovite descent was applied metaphorically to the constitutional relations between the two parts of the Russian Empire, this stood at odds with the primacy of “Greater Russia”. To be sure, a regional local colour of Cossack memories and rustic “Little-Russian” folk songs was effortlessly accommodated into an imperial Pan-Russian Reichspatriotismus, and the warlike strength of the Cossack regiments in the Imperial Army was celebrated in many forms (much as the Highland regiments were seen as a colourfully-regionalist strengthening of the British Army). But it was problematic to represent these cultural characteristics as manifestations of a separate Ukrainian language and ethnicity with an independent position in the Slavic family. The Brotherhood was accordingly suppressed, its members (the poet-painter Taras Ševčenko among them) punished with exile and/or penal servitude.

Some relaxation set in after the Crimean War. The exiled members of the Brotherhood, having served the sentences of exile but still barred from returning to the Ukraine, gathered in the capital, where they formed a loose association, hromada (named after ancient village assemblies). These Ukrainian hromada assemblies spread across the Russian cities in the 1860s and engaged in the usual types of cultivation of culture: publishing a journal (Osnova, 1861-62), fostering popular education and literacy through Sunday schools, and producing amateur theatre and choral performances. The hromada movement maintained its insistence on the separate taxonomical status of  the Ukrainian language vis-à-vis Russian, but turned from the glorification of the past to an interest in the peasantry – as so many other forms of Romantic Nationalism did in Europe at the time. In a parallel development, the Chlopoman or “peasant-enthusiast” tradition was shared by Polish intellectuals at the time (who, following the failure of the 1863-64 Uprising, turned away in disgust from the aristocratic ethos of the szlachta); a similar populist trend took hold in Ukrainian nationalism. The Kiev hromada around Volodymyr Antonovyč was exemplary in this regard, and the canonical status of Taras Ševčenko, as a persecuted ex-serf, was enhanced in the process.

Alarmed by the Estonian work of Bornhöhe and the Polish work of Sienkiewicz, the Russian censorship became increasingly mistrustful of historical novels and tales in the 1890s, fearing they might stir up anti-Russian feelings in the peripheral provinces; but they were fighting yesterday’s battle as historicism was giving way to populism. The measure also misfired because it left other fields of cultural production unaffected: the theatre and history-writing. The hetman-themed tragedy Sava Calyj, by Ivan Karpenko-Karyj, was performed in Kiev in 1900. (A Ukrainian national theatre was founded in Kiev in 1907.) The historian/politician Myhajlo Hruševs’kyj, later to be president of an independent Ukraine, published the first volume of his nativist/populist 10-volume Istorija Ukraïny-Rusy in 1904.

The hromada operated on the edges of what the Russian authorities would tolerate, and at times would publish extraterritorially, e.g. Dragomanov’s periodical Hromada, which appeared in Geneva in 1878-82. The Russian minister Pëtr Valuev declared in 1863 (in the wake of the Polish insurrection of that year) that there was no such thing as a Ukrainian language, saw the literary movement as a Polish-inspired plot to weaken the Russian state, and banned the printing of Ukrainian except for belles-lettres – a repressive move similar to the one imposed on Lithuanian in the same year. The repression was continued and intensified in the Ems Ukaz of 1876 and in the centralist policies of Alexander III after 1881. Within Russia, the most viable platform for the public performance of Ukrainian culture was that of music, e.g. the songs and operas of Mykola Lysenko (1842–1912).

Meanwhile, the constitutional reform of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1867 had liberalized the climate for Ukrainian cultural production in Habsburg-governed Galicia. A Ševčenko Society was established in Galicia in 1873, provoking some Russian misgivings, and later, Kuliš developed cross-border contacts. Ukrainian culture in the “Ruthenian” Habsburg lands developed in confrontation with Polish and Hungarian, rather than Russian counterparts. The so-called “Old Ruthenians”, mainly in Uniate Church circles, had sought to counterbalance Polish hegemony in the region by relying on the Habsburg regime; after 1848, anti-Polish feelings could even trigger pro-Russian feelings among Galician Ruthenes. This culturally conservative, Russophile trend was particularly strong in the Galician-Ruthene matica (Matitsya), founded in L’viv in 1848. It was counterbalanced by a populist, peasantry-oriented tendency, analogous to the Chlopoman trend across the border and culturally organized in the so-called Prosvita societies, the first of which was founded in L’viv in 1868, and which by the 1880s had established a network of reading rooms across the region. In addition, L’viv had a Ruthenian cultural club, Ruska Besida, founded in 1861, with a reading room and an amateur theatre company (1864). The Besida Theatre undertook extensive tours in Galicia and the Russian Empire in the 1870s and 1880s, bringing a Ukrainian dramatic repertoire to various far-flung localities. In 1882, a university was established even in the Bukovinian borderland  at Czernowitz/Chernivtsi,  with separate Ukrainian and Romanian departments.

By 1900 the Ukrainian cultural revival on both sides of the frontier had generated a public life that was integrated into the emerging party-political opposition. Given Galicia’s rapid industrialization and the growth of an urban working class, authors like Ivan Franko and Drahomanov could extend cultural populism in a social-democratic political direction. In 1879, the Kiev hromada changed from a cultural association into a broader social movement, the “Pan-Ukrainian political association”, forerunner of the Ukrainian Democratic Party (1904). Similarly, in the Habsburg lands, the Prosvita movement spawned a more broadly political movement in the later 1880s, the “People’s Council”, which in the 1890s merged into the new party-political landscape.

The revolutionary events of 1905 and the imperial downfalls of 1917-18 made it possible for Ukrainians under Hruševs’kyj to set up an autonomous government which was recognized in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk; under the Treaty of Saint-Germain (1919) this was merged with the autonomous Ukrainian republic proclaimed in Galicia in 1918 (Bukovina being ceded to Romania). The Soviet Red Army, bitterly opposed by Russia’s various Cossack communities, conquered large parts of this republic; further territorial arrangements took place as a result of the Polish-Russian War of 1920-21. Still straddling disputed borders, parts of the Ukrainian lands ended up in Czechoslovakia (Ruthenia) and Poland (Galicia); the rest became a Soviet republic.

Some ethnic sub-groups, like the Carpathian Rusyns and Hutsuls, were marginalized in the 19th-century process of Ukrainian nation-formation; in some cases, there were attempts in the course of the 20th century at an ethnogenetic self-proclamation as a separate nationality.