Serhij Savčenko. Moscovian World through the Eyes of Ruś of 1500—1700

The questions of the succession between the Old Ruњ and the modern ethnic and territorial formations — Russia and Ukraine — appeared to be extremely overfulled with ideology. Concerning the widespread assertion of misappropriation by the Russians of the inheritance of Kievan Ruњ as a logical product of imperial mentality, the author considers that the conception of succession „Kievan Ruњ — Moscovian Rule» was a great deal created by the Ukrainian church publicity, polemical literature, and by the leaders of „Cossack Ukraine» in the seventeenth century. The rise and development of pro-Moscovian disposition in the seventeenth century Ukraine was a consequent of the Union of Beraњcie of 1596. In the light of eschatological expectations caused by religious persecutions these dispositions took on special features that resulted in idealization of the Moscow Tsar as „the last tsar» before the doomsday and of Moscovian Rule as a country bordering upon the Kingdom of God.