Following the Napoleonic era, a Polish state was restored with the tsar as king. But a new Polish revolt in 1863 soon spread to Lithuanian, Belarussian and Ukrainian provinces of the empire. After the Imperial Russian Army crushed this revolt, the tripartite Russian nationality became the dominant model. Russian Slavophiles who wanted to protect their unique culture and spiritual traditions and imperial nationalists who wanted the empire to further urbanise and westernise both agreed on three branches: Great Russians, White Russians and Little Russians. Each spoke its own dialect, but there was to be only one literary language. Now publications in Ukrainian were banned but this rather strengthened secret brotherhoods. Writers, folklorists and poets who rebelled, like Taras Shevchenko, were shadowed by secret police, arrested and then enrolled into the army or imprisoned before being send into exile.

However, a new Ukrainian nation emerged from the cocoon of the old Little Russian identity. Encouraged by like-minded intellectuals and students in Moscow and Saint Petersburg to investigate popular cultures and study issues of nationality, Little Russians brought to the salons not only a language quite different from Russian, but also a history, like the one of the Hetmanate, quite distinct from that of the Russian people and state. Soon Little Russian writers realized that language, history and culture could be used not only to construct a past separate from that of the Great Russians, but to project a different future as well. For them Little Russia turned into Ukraine. The imperial government did everything in its power to put the Ukrainian genie back into the Little Russian bottle, but to no lasting avail.