About the book: 2014 / Covering more than a century of research by the outstanding French historian-Slavist, Professor Daniel Beauvois, who taught at the universities of Nancy, Lille, Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne, dedicated to the history of Right Bank Ukraine - Kiev region, Volyn, Podolia - as part of the Russian Empire. The focus is on the struggle between the Russian autocracy and Polish elites for dominance in the region and control over the Ukrainian peasantry. Equally deeply analyzing social, economic and cultural processes, the author shows the difficulties of integrating the former lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth into the Romanov Empire; explains why the Polish landowning aristocracy, despite the rise of Russian nationalism, remained a privileged and prosperous group until 1917; illuminates the dramatic fate of those “intermediate” categories of the population, almost forgotten by historians, who did not fit into the rigid class hierarchy of Russian society. Proving that all projects of both Polonization and Russification of the bulk of the population of the Dnieper Right Bank were unrealistic, the book presents the formation of the Ukrainian nation as a natural product of the historical conditions prevailing on these lands.