Natalia Yusova. The legitimation of the conception of Old Russian nationality.
The article is dedicated to the problem of the legitimation of the conception of Old Russian nationality on the background of the development of the historical thought in USSR during 1940th — the first half of the 1950th. The author investigated scientific, social and cultural prerequisites caused the origin of the conception. The conception was formed during the Great Patriotic war as the result of accumulation of new materials as well as theoretical investigation made in the humanities (history, archaeology, ethnic genetics, linguistics and others) in the 20th—30th by the representatives of the all three eastern Slavic historiographies. For the first time the term «Old Russian nationality» was worded by V.Mavrodin in 1945 but it got a wide dissemination in the beginning of the 1950th after publication of the Stalin’s work «Маrxism and questions of linguistics». A second factor impotent to the ligitimation of this conception was its consonance to the paradigm of Ukraine’s reunion to Russia. By the 1954 the conception got the status of a theory in the Soviet historiography.