Nikolay Ulyanov. Origin of Ukrainian separatism

“The Origin of Ukrainian Separatism” is a historical monograph, the main work of the Russian historian Nikolai Ulyanov. It was first published in 1966 in New York. In 1996 and 2007 it was republished in Russia by Indrik and Grifon publishing houses. To date, it is considered virtually the only scientific study on the topic of Ukrainian separatism.

Born in the Russian Empire and becoming a historian during the Soviet period, Nikolai Ulyanov found himself in occupied territory during the Great Patriotic War and in 1943 was sent to forced labor in Germany. After the war, he moved to Casablanca (Morocco), and in the spring of 1953 he moved to Canada, where he lectured at the University of Montreal. In 1955 he settled in the United States, where, with the assistance of the emigre historian Georgy Vernadsky, he got a job as a teacher of Russian history and literature at Yale University.

Original taken from chrono61 in The origins of Ukrainian separatism

Nikolay Ulyanov. Origin of Ukrainian separatism
First published in Madrid in 1966.

The peculiarity of Ukrainian independence is that it does not fit any of the existing teachings about national movements and cannot be explained by any “iron” laws. It does not even have national oppression, as the first and most necessary justification for its emergence. The only example of “oppression” - the decrees of 1863 and 1876, which limited the freedom of the press in a new, artificially created literary language, were not perceived by the population as national persecution. Not only the common people, who had no involvement in the creation of this language, but also ninety-nine percent of the enlightened Little Russian society consisted of opponents of its legalization. Only an insignificant group of intellectuals, who never expressed the aspirations of the majority of the people, made it their political banner. For all 300 years of being part of the Russian State, Little Russia-Ukraine was neither a colony nor an “enslaved people”.

Independentists change cultural and historical terminology, change traditional assessments of heroes and events of the past. All this does not mean understanding or affirmation, but the eradication of the national soul. Truly national feeling is sacrificed to invented party nationalism.

The scheme for the development of any separatism is as follows: first, supposedly, a “national feeling” awakens, then it grows and strengthens until it leads to the idea of separating from the previous state and creating a new one. In Ukraine, this cycle occurred in the opposite direction. There, a desire for separation was first revealed, and only then an ideological basis began to be created as a justification for such a desire.

In the title of this work, it is no coincidence that the word “separatism” is used instead of “nationalism”. It was precisely the national base that Ukrainian independence lacked at all times. It has always looked like a non-popular, non-national movement, as a result of which it suffered from an inferiority complex and still cannot get out of the stage of self-affirmation. If for Georgians, Armenians, and Uzbeks this problem does not exist, due to their clearly expressed national image, then for Ukrainian independentists the main concern is still to prove the difference between a Ukrainian and a Russian. Separatist thought is still working on the creation of anthropological, ethnographic and linguistic theories that should deprive Russians and Ukrainians of any degree of kinship among themselves. At first they were declared “two Russian nationalities” (Kostomarov), then - two different Slavic peoples, and later theories arose according to which Slavic origin was reserved only for Ukrainians, while Russians were classified as Mongols, Turks, and Asians. Yu. Shcherbakivsky and F. Vovk knew for certain that the Russians are the descendants of people of the Ice Age, related to the Lapps, Samoyeds and Voguls, while the Ukrainians are representatives of the Central Asian round-headed race that came from across the Black Sea and settled in the places liberated by the Russians, who went north following the retreating glacier and mammoth. An assumption has been made that sees in the Ukrainians the remnant of the population of the drowned Atlantis. And this abundance of theories, and the feverish cultural isolation from Russia, and the development of a new literary language cannot but be striking and not give rise to suspicions of the artificiality of the national doctrine.

In Russian, especially emigrant, literature, there is a long-standing tendency to explain Ukrainian nationalism solely by the influence of external forces. It became especially widespread after the First World War, when a picture emerged of the extensive activities of the Austro-Germans in financing organizations such as the “Union for the Liberation of Ukraine”, in organizing fighting squads (“Sichev Streltsy”), who fought on the side of the Germans, in organizing camps-schools for captured Ukrainians. D. A. Odinets, who immersed himself in this topic and collected abundant material, was overwhelmed by the grandeur of German plans, the persistence and scope of propaganda in order to instill independence. The Second World War revealed an even broader canvas in this sense.

But for a long time, historians, and among them such an authoritative as prof. I. I. Lappo, drew attention to the Poles, attributing to them the main role in the creation of the autonomist movement.

The Poles, in fact, can rightfully be considered the fathers of Ukrainian doctrine. It was laid down by them back in the era of the hetmanate. But even in modern times their creativity is very great. So, the very use of the words “Ukraine” and “Ukrainians” for the first time in literature began to be implanted by them. It is already found in the works of Count Jan Potocki. Another Pole, c. Thaddeus Chatsky, then embarks on the path of racial interpretation of the term “Ukrainian”. If ancient Polish annalists, like Samuil Grondsky, back in the 17th century, derived this term from the geographical location of Little Rus', located on the edge of the Polish possessions (“Margo enim polonice kraj; inde Ukraina quasi provincial ad fines Regni posita”), then Chatsky derived it from some unknown horde of “ukrov”, unknown to anyone except him, who supposedly emerged from beyond the Volga in the 7th century.

The Poles were not satisfied with either “Little Russia” or “Little Rus'”. They could have come to terms with them if the word “Rus” did not apply to “Muscovites.” The introduction of “Ukraine” began under Alexander I, when, having Polished Kyiv, covered the entire right-bank south-west of Russia with a dense network of their povet schools, founded the Polish university in Vilna and took control of the Kharkov university that opened in 1804, the Poles felt themselves masters of intellectual life Little Russian region.

The role of the Polish circle at Kharkov University is well known in the sense of promoting the Little Russian dialect as a literary language. Ukrainian youth were instilled with the idea of the alienness of the all-Russian literary language, all-Russian culture, and, of course, the idea of the non-Russian origin of Ukrainians was not forgotten.

Gulak and Kostomarov, who were students at Kharkov University in the 30s, were fully exposed to this propaganda. It also suggested the idea of an all-Slavic federal state, which they proclaimed in the late 40s. The famous “Pan-Slavism,” which caused furious abuse against Russia throughout Europe, was in fact not of Russian, but of Polish origin. Book Adam Czartoryski, as head of Russian foreign policy, openly proclaimed Pan-Slavism as one of the means of reviving Poland.

Polish interest in Ukrainian separatism is best summed up by the historian Valerian Kalinka, who understood the futility of dreams of returning southern Russia to Polish rule. This region is lost for Poland, but we must make sure that it is lost for Russia as well. There is no better way for this than settlement of discord between southern and northern Russia and propaganda of the idea of their national isolation. The program of Ludwig Mierosławski was drawn up in the same spirit on the eve of the Polish uprising of 1863.

“Let all the agitation of Little Russianism be transferred beyond the Dnieper; there is a vast Pugachev field for our belated Khmelnytsky region. This is what our entire pan-Slavic and communist school consists of!... This is all Polish Herzenism!”

An equally interesting document was published by V.L. Burtsev on September 27, 1917, in the newspaper “Obshchee Delo” in Petrograd. He presents a note found among the papers of the secret archive of the primate of the Uniate Church A. Sheptytsky, after the occupation of Lvov by Russian troops. The note was compiled at the beginning of the First World War, in anticipation of the victorious entry of the Austro-Hungarian army into the territory of Russian Ukraine. It contained several proposals to the Austrian government regarding the development and separation of this region from Russia. A broad program of military, legal, and ecclesiastical measures was outlined; advice was given regarding the establishment of the hetmanate, the formation of separatist-minded elements among the Ukrainians, giving local nationalism a Cossack form and “the possible complete separation of the Ukrainian Church from the Russian.”

The piquancy of the note lies in its authorship. Andrei Sheptytsky, whose name it is signed, was a Polish count, the younger brother of the future Minister of War in Pilsudski's government. Having begun his career as an Austrian cavalry officer, he subsequently became a monk, became a Jesuit, and from 1901 to 1944 occupied the see of the Lviv Metropolitan. Throughout his tenure in this post, he tirelessly served the cause of separating Ukraine from Russia under the guise of its national autonomy. His activities, in this sense, are one of the examples of the implementation of the Polish program in the east.

This program began to take shape immediately after the sections. The Poles took on the role of midwife during the birth of Ukrainian nationalism and nanny during its upbringing. They achieved that the Little Russian nationalists, despite their long-standing antipathies towards Poland, became their zealous students. Polish nationalism became a model for the most petty imitation, to the point that the anthem “Ukraine Has Not Yet Died” composed by P. P. Chubinsky was an open imitation of the Polish one: “Poland has not yet perished.”

The picture of these more than a century of efforts is full of such tenacity in energy that one is not surprised at the temptation of some historians and publicists to explain Ukrainian separatism solely by the influence of the Poles.

But this is unlikely to be correct. The Poles could nourish and nurture the embryo of separatism, while the very same embryo existed in the depths of Ukrainian society. To discover and trace its transformation into a prominent political phenomenon is the task of this work...

The contents of the book cannot be summarized in a short post. Therefore, I will try to list the main works on which Ukrainianism is based, and the authors who tried to lay the foundation of Ukrainianism. Some of these authors later renounced what they had created and became the most ardent defenders of the Russian world. The reason is simple - they became better acquainted with history, which refuted the fairy tales they had completely learned in their early youth.

As a preface, let’s give the floor to Nikolai Ulyanov.

The peculiarity of Ukrainian independence is that it does not fit any of the existing teachings about national movements and cannot be explained by any “iron” laws. It does not even have national oppression, as the first and most necessary justification for its emergence. The only example of “oppression” - the decrees of 1863 and 1876, which limited the freedom of the press in a new, artificially created literary language - was not perceived by the population as national persecution. Not only the common people, who had no involvement in the creation of this language, but also ninety-nine percent of the enlightened Little Russian society consisted of opponents of its legalization. Only an insignificant group of intellectuals, who never expressed the aspirations of the majority of the people, made it their political banner. For all 300 years of being part of the Russian State, Little Russia-Ukraine was neither a colony nor an “enslaved people.”

It is no coincidence that the title of this work uses the word “separatism” instead of “nationalism”. It was precisely the national base that Ukrainian independence lacked at all times. It has always looked like a non-popular, non-national movement, as a result of which it suffered from an inferiority complex and still cannot get out of the stage of self-affirmation. If for Georgians, Armenians, and Uzbeks this problem does not exist, due to their clearly expressed national image, then for Ukrainian independentists the main concern is still to prove the difference between a Ukrainian and a Russian. Separatist thought is still working on the creation of anthropological, ethnographic and linguistic theories that should deprive Russians and Ukrainians of any degree of kinship among themselves. At first they were declared “two Russian nationalities” (Kostomarov), then - two different Slavic peoples, and later theories arose according to which Slavic origin was reserved only for Ukrainians, while Russians were classified as Mongols, Turks, and Asians. Yu. Shcherbakivsky and F. Vovk knew for certain that the Russians are the descendants of people of the Ice Age, related to the Lapps, Samoyeds and Voguls, while the Ukrainians are representatives of the Central Asian round-headed race that came from across the Black Sea and settled in the places liberated by the Russians, who went north following the retreating glacier and mammoth. An assumption has been made that sees the Ukrainians as the remnant of the population of the drowned Atlantis.
And this abundance of theories, and the feverish cultural isolation from Russia, and the development of a new literary language cannot but be striking and not give rise to suspicions of the artificiality of the national doctrine.

The main parties that gave rise to Ukrainian separatism:
1. Cossack elite. It was not by chance that I put it in first place. No matter how much the Poles and Austro-Hungarians wanted to tear Ukraine away from Russia, they would not have been able to do anything on this path if not for the Cossack elite.
2. Poland
3. Austria-Hungary.

We will leave the influence of Poland and Austria-Hungary outside the brackets of this summary. But it’s worth talking about the Cossacks.

Kostomarov in his youth, a conductor of ideas about the oppression of Ukrainians and independence, while digging in the archives, found two Turkish letters from Mehmet Sultan to Khmelnitsky, from which it is clear that the hetman, having surrendered himself to the hand of the Tsar of Moscow, was at the same time a subject of the Turkish Sultan. He also accepted Turkish citizenship in 1650, when they sent him from Constantinople a “golden-headed piece” and a caftan, “so that you can confidently take on this caftan, in the sense that you have now become our faithful tributary”
It is necessary to recall that the Zemsky Sobor, at the request of Bogdan Khmelnitsky, accepted the Zaporozhye Army with cities and lands into Russia in 1653
Going to the Rada in Pereyaslavl in 1654, Khmelnitsky did not renounce his former citizenship and did not take off his Turkish caftan, putting on a Moscow fur coat over it.

Kostomarov Nikolay Ivanovich

The main reason for the reunification was the will of the people. All the Cossack elite needed was equal noble rights. There was no way she could achieve this in Poland, but she didn’t really want to go to Russia either, but the people living on the lands of the Zaporozhian Army felt an inextricable connection with Russia by faith and language. The elite only led the uprising against the Poles.

Let's look further at the actions of the first reconnector:
More than a year and a half after swearing allegiance to Moscow, the Sultan sent a new letter, from which it is clear that Bogdan did not even think of breaking with the Porte, but tried in every possible way to present to her in the wrong light his connection with Moscow. He hid the fact of his new citizenship from Constantinople, explaining the whole matter as a temporary alliance caused by difficult circumstances. He still asked the Sultan to consider him his faithful vassal, for which he was awarded a gracious word and assurance of high patronage.

Such double-mindedness subsequently manifested itself constantly. Mazepa was no exception. And the lands of the Zaporozhye Army were far away. The Cossack elite asked (they always asked for something) that taxes from their lands remain with them for some time, for which they themselves will support the army. Moscow went for it. The Cossack elite did not just collect taxes, but robbed the people. When the Moscow arrivals tried to restore order, complaints of harassment were written against them. Although they tried to oppress only the local hetmans who had become completely unruly.

Mazepa is the flesh and blood of this elite. There was nothing surprising or extraordinary in his action. This is what some Cossack governors did before him.

There was a legend that the Cossack way of life was democratic. The development and spread of this legend was facilitated by Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, founded in 1847 in Kyiv by Kostomarov, Belozersky, Gulak, Shevchenko.

In general, the formation of the point of view about the heroes and democrats of the Cossacks, who were always oppressed, was greatly influenced by the famous "History of the Rus" , written in the late 18th early 19th centuries. This the richest collection of propaganda material that flooded Ukraine after its annexation to Russia... the most educated turned out to be defenseless against it. No one was able to comprehend the fact of such a colossal falsification. Without any resistance, she captured the minds, transferring into them the poison of Cossack independence

This book shaped the views of both Kostomarov and Kulisha, and Shevchenko.

Kulish Panteleimon Alexandrovich

Panteleimon Kulish - The creator of “Kulishovka” - one of the early versions of the Ukrainian alphabet, the main author of the first Ukrainian translation of the Bible.
in 1857 Panteleimon Aleksandrovich published a grammar, later nicknamed “Kulishovka”, the main principle of which was “as it is heard, so it is written”, And a decade later, Kulish would publicly renounce his brainchild. “I swear,” Kulish wrote to the Galician Omelyan Partitsky, “that if the Poles print in my spelling to commemorate our discord with Great Russia, if our phonetic spelling is presented not as helping the people to enlightenment, but as a banner of our Russian discord, then I, having written in my own way, in Ukrainian, I will print with etymological old-world spelling. That is, we don’t live at home, talk and sing songs in the same way, and if it comes down to it, we won’t allow anyone to separate us. A dashing fate separated us for a long time, and we moved towards Russian unity along a bloody road, and now human attempts to separate us are useless

Mikhail Petrovich Drahomanov

M. P. Drahomanov I saw a communal principle in Cossack life and was even inclined to call the Sich a “commune”. Drahomanov is one of those who were much more imbued with socialist ideas than with Ukrainians. He simply mistakenly believed that the experience of the Sich was the experience of a somewhat just society. Drahomanov considered one of the direct tasks of the participants in the Ukrainophile movement to be “to look for memories of former freedom and equality in different places and classes of the population of Ukraine.” It was his socialist views that were rejected by Ukrainian supporters. He noted with bitterness that his aspirations for a fair society in Russia were shared much more.

Taras Grigorievich Shevchenko is a very significant figure for Ukrainian separatism.

It is much less interesting than the mentioned authors. If both Kostomarov and Kulish were able to outgrow the “History of the Rus,” then for Shevchenko it was the bible. According to contemporaries, he was an unimportant poet. This is what Belinsky writes about him
“If gentlemen Kobzari think with their poems to benefit the lower class of their compatriots, then they are very mistaken; their poems, despite the abundance of the most vulgar and vulgar words and expressions, lack the simplicity of fiction and storytelling, are filled with frills and manners characteristic of all bad poems, and are often not at all folk, although they are supported by references to history, songs and legends, therefore, according to all these signs are incomprehensible to the common people and have nothing in them that sympathizes with them.”
This is also confirmed by Drahomanov
who believed that “Kobzar” “cannot become a completely popular book, nor one that would fully serve the preaching of the “new truth” among the people.”
The same Drahomanov testifies to the complete failure of attempts to bring Shevchenko to the grassroots of the people. All attempts to read his poems to men ended in failure. The men remained cold.

Despite his poor education, a small number of poems worthy of reading by Shevchenko entered both Ukrainian and Soviet mythology.
With all the abundance of legends that have surrounded the name and distorted its true appearance, Shevchenko can be considered the most striking embodiment of all the characteristic features of the phenomenon called “Ukrainian national revival.” Two camps, outwardly hostile to each other, still consider him “one of their own.” For some, he is a “national prophet”, almost canonized; the days of his birth and death (February 25 and 26) were declared church holidays by the Ukrainian clergy. Even in exile, monuments to him are erected with the assistance of the parties and governments of Canada and the United States. For others, he is the subject of the same idolatry, and this other camp began to erect monuments to him much earlier. As soon as the Bolsheviks came to power and established the cult of their forerunners and heroes, the statue of Shevchenko was one of the first to appear in St. Petersburg. Later, in Kharkov and over the Dnieper, gigantic monuments arose, second only in size to the statues of Stalin.

Oddly enough, Russian enlightened society played a huge role in the formation of Ukrainianness. It not only brought out talented people from the lower classes throughout the Russian Empire (Shevchenko, Tropinin), but also welcomed Ukrainians as expressing the ideas of freedom and a fair life. Knowledge of history has always not been a strong point of most of the Russian intelligentsia.

Nikolai Ivanovich Ulyanov (1905-1985) Russian and Soviet historian, engaged in scientific activities in the USSR and the USA, and lived an amazing life in the most difficult era for his homeland, going through arrest, camps and foreign lands. There - in Germany and Morocco - he had to work in factories, because he did not want to give up his intellect and knowledge to the enemies of Russia, until, with the help of Russian emigrants, he moved overseas and began teaching at American universities. Nikolai Ulyanov went down in history, however, not as a professor, but as the author of just one - but what a one! - books: "The Origin of Ukrainian Separatism."

Apparently, this question worried him more than anything else, since he understood its significance for the future of Russia and wanted to honestly understand what gave rise to this phenomenon, how viable it is and, accordingly, what could await it. That is why we are turning now to this book - the coming 2017 will, of course, be very important, fateful for Ukraine, which, having turned away from Russia and not accepted by the West, will have to think hard about how to live on and why continue to live the way it is she still lived.

By the way, this scientific work, published half a century ago, also has an amazing fate. The historical writer wrote it at the call of his heart, as a hobby, in his free time from work. Not by order - he never took on such work, for which he was declared a “Trotskyist” in the USSR and sent to the Gulag. Nevertheless, he rejected anti-USSR work in Western propaganda centers after the war, quickly realizing that the fight against “communism” was in fact a fight against Russia, which was and will be. In the USA, the historical writer was unable to publish his work - the press simply refused to publish it. This was done in Madrid in 1966. Most likely, the White Guards who settled there since the Spanish Civil War - Great Russians, Little Russians and others who considered themselves Russians - helped. And then another “miracle” happened, or rather, two. Almost the entire circulation was bought up by someone and... destroyed: Ulyanov only had a few original copies left. It could be both American and ... Soviet intelligence services interested in maintaining the Ukrainian myth, and the “independents” themselves. And yet, years after the death of the author, who died in 1985, one of the miraculously surviving copies broke through the information blockade. In 1996, the book was published by the Vagrius publishing house, anyone can read it on the Internet - the detective story of the book is over. Thus, after his death, Ulyanov realized the goal of his life: to tell the truth about one of the most mythologized phenomena in world history.

In the preface to his life’s work, the author explains why he became so interested in “Ukrainian independence.” Because this phenomenon has one unique feature - “it does not fit any of the existing teachings about national movements and cannot be explained by any “iron” laws.”

Why is Ukrainianism separatism and not nationalism?

Ulyanov emphasizes that this separatist ideology, firstly, does not have “the most necessary justification for its emergence” - “national oppression”, since “for all 300 years of being part of the Russian State, Little Russia-Ukraine was neither a colony nor “enslaved” nationality." And secondly, independence strikingly contradicts the basic principle of any true national movement - that the "national essence of the people" is best expressed by the party that leads it. However, instead we have the following: "Nowadays Ukrainian independence provides an example of the greatest hatred towards all the most revered and most ancient traditions and cultural values of the Little Russian people: it persecuted the Church Slavonic language, which had been established in Rus' since the adoption of Christianity, and even more severe persecution was brought against the all-Russian literary language, which for a thousand years underlay the writing of all parts of the Kievan State , during and after its existence. Independents are changing cultural and historical terminology, changing the traditional assessments of heroes of past events."

Indeed, all this happened when Ulyanov wrote his book, it is happening on a colossal scale now, and all with the same goal: “All this does not mean understanding and not affirmation, but the eradication of the national soul. A truly national feeling is being sacrificed invented party nationalism."

Therefore, Ulyanov proposes calling Ukrainian nationalism “separatism”: “The development scheme of any separatism is as follows: first, a “national feeling” supposedly awakens, then it grows and strengthens until it leads to the idea of separation from the previous state and the creation of a new one. In Ukraine, this cycle took place in the opposite direction. There, first a desire for separation was revealed, and only then an ideological basis began to be created as a justification for such a desire... It was precisely the national basis that Ukrainian independence lacked at all times. It always looked like a non-popular, non-national movement, as a result of which it suffered from an inferiority complex and to still cannot get out of the stage of self-affirmation. If for Georgians, Armenians, Uzbeks this problem does not exist, due to their clearly expressed national image, then for Ukrainian independentists the main concern is still to prove the difference between a Ukrainian and a Russian. Separatist thought is still working over the creation of anthropological, ethnographic and linguistic theories that should deprive Russians and Ukrainians of any degree of kinship among themselves."

And indeed, Ukrainian historians, writers and politicians are still doing this, and on a scale completely unimaginable in Ulyanov’s time - they write books like “Ukraine is not Russia”, talk about the “great Ukrainians”, talk about the “proto-Ukrainians” Jesus Christ and Buddha... But this only speaks of the correctness of his concept, since even this fits into it.

“And this abundance of theories, and the feverish cultural isolation from Russia, and the development of a new literary language cannot but be striking and not give rise to suspicions of the artificiality of the national doctrine,” concludes the author of “The History of Ukrainian Separatism.”

Progenitors of Ukrainian separatism

And Ulyanov sets out to trace who gave the population of Little Rus' such ideas that contradict common sense, and why and how they found their supporters among the “Ukrainians.”

In the preface to his work, the author notes “the long-standing tendency to explain Ukrainian nationalism solely by the influence of external forces.” And he admits that this factor did play a huge role. Rich food for thought was provided by the events of the First World War, when “a picture was revealed of the broad activities of the Austro-Germans in financing organizations such as the “Union for the Liberation of Ukraine”, the organization of military squads (“Sichev Streltsy”), who fought on the side of the Germans, and the establishment of camps and schools for captured Ukrainians." He admits that the German plans for imposing independence were grandiose, carried out with persistence and scope, but all the preparatory work was not done by them.

In this sense, Ulyanov emphasizes, no one can compare with the Poles: “The Poles, in fact, can rightfully be considered the fathers of the Ukrainian doctrine. It was laid down by them back in the era of the hetman. But even in modern times, their creativity is very great. So, the use of the words "Ukraine" and "Ukrainians" for the first time in literature began to be implanted by them. It is already found in the works of Count Jan Potocki. Another Pole, Count Thaddeus Chatsky, then embarked on the path of racial interpretation of the term "Ukrainian". If the ancient Polish annalists, like Samuel of Grondsky, back in the 17th century they derived this term from the geographical location of Little Rus', located on the edge of the Polish possessions (“Margo enim polonice kraj; inde Ukgaina quasi provincia ad fines Regni posita”), then Chatsky derived it from some one except to the unknown horde of “Ukrs” that allegedly emerged from beyond the Volga in the 7th century. The Poles were not satisfied with either “Little Russia” or “Little Rus'.” They could have come to terms with them if the word “Rus” had not been spread to "Muscovites".

Yes, it was the Poles, despite the divisions of Poland and disappearance from the political map for the time being of this state, “having covered the entire right-bank south-west of Russia with a dense network of their povet schools, founding the Polish university in Vilna and taking over the Kharkov university that opened in 1804, ... felt like masters of the mental life of the Little Russian region." It was the Polish intelligentsia that began to propagate “the Little Russian dialect as a literary language; Ukrainian youth were instilled with the idea of the alienness of the all-Russian literary language, all-Russian culture, and, of course, the idea of the non-Russian origin of Ukrainians was not forgotten.”

“Polish interest in Ukrainian separatism,” continues Ulyanov, referring to the works of other researchers of this phenomenon, “is best expressed by the historian Valerian Kalinka, who understood the meaninglessness of dreams of returning the south of Russia to Polish rule. This region is lost to Poland, but this must be done. "so that it would be lost for Russia too. There is no better way for this than creating discord between southern and northern Russia and promoting the idea of their national isolation."

Ulyanov states: “The Poles took on the role of midwife during the birth of Ukrainian nationalism and nanny during its upbringing. They achieved that Little Russian nationalists, despite their long-standing antipathies towards Poland, became their zealous students. Polish nationalism became a model for the most petty imitation, even so much so that the anthem “Ukraine Has Not Yet Died” composed by P.P. Chubinsky was an undisguised imitation of the Polish one: “Jeszcze Polska ne zgineea”...

This is how the Poles acted not only in the 19th century, unwittingly also preparing the ground for intense rivalry and enmity, which culminated in the Volyn massacre, in the 20th century. As an example of a very characteristic figure of the “Ukrainian nationalist” of this era, the historian cites Andrei Sheptytsky, the primate of the Uniate Church, who was also a Polish count and - before taking monasticism - an Austrian cavalry officer, the younger brother of the Minister of Defense in the Pilsudski government. Occupying the chair of Lvov Metropolitan in 1901-1944, “he tirelessly served the cause of separating Ukraine from Russia under the guise of its national autonomy,” and “his activities, in this sense, are one of the examples of the implementation of the Polish program in the east.”

It would seem that everything has already been said. But Ulyanov “dug” even deeper, concluding his preface: “The picture of these more than century-old efforts is full of such tenacity and energy that one should not be surprised at the temptation of some historians and publicists to explain Ukrainian separatism solely by the influence of the Poles. But this is unlikely to be correct. Poles "could nourish and nurture the embryo of separatism, but the very embryo existed in the depths of Ukrainian society. To discover and trace its transformation into a prominent political phenomenon is the task of this work."

Where did the embryo of separatism come from?

This embryo was, as Ulyanov brilliantly proves, the Zaporozhye Cossacks, whose appearance as free people, zealots of Orthodoxy, fighting for justice and truth, formed from “historical novels, songs, legends and all kinds of works of art,” bears little resemblance to its real historical appearance. In fact, it was a predatory band of bandits, in modern terms, an organized criminal group of mixed ethnic origin, nominally Orthodox, but quite indifferent to any religion, but very fond of material wealth, money and honors, and ready to fight for this under any banners, change allies and patrons, based on their own interests. During the uprising of the Little Russians against the Polish yoke and expulsion by the rebels, who, seeing opportunities to enrich themselves and improve their status, were joined by the Cossacks, the Polish administration and landowners from the vast regions of Little Rus', the Cossack elders imposed themselves on its population as new lords.

And when the Little Russian peasants, disillusioned with this outcome of the uprising, lost their enthusiasm and the anti-Polish forces began to suffer defeats, Bogdan Khmelnitsky, who led the uprising, had no choice but to seek Moscow’s intercession against the Poles in order to preserve the privileges gained by the Cossacks and the control they received over the population of the territories that had fallen away from Poland. For the hetman, who was also a tributary of the Ottoman port (the corresponding letters were discovered by the historian Kostomarov), and his entourage, the alliance with Russia was a temporary measure caused by special circumstances, and therefore neither Khmelnytsky himself nor the other hetmans seriously considered it, and were always ready to postpone , which almost everyone did, one way or another. Before Catherine II, they did whatever they wanted in their patrimony; the Russian government, often brutal with its own subjects, in such cases always demonstrated unsurpassed tact and respect for local customs, and therefore did not interfere in Little Russian affairs. But it was precisely Russia, which established cruel oppression over the Little Russians, bought magnificent fake coats of arms and titles in Berdichev by the Cossack foreman, that was blamed for its own selfishness, mediocrity and cruelty. Therefore, Ulyanov notes, “perhaps the first separatist was Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky himself, with whose name the reunification of the two halves of the ancient Russian state is associated.”

Ulyanov reveals and gives countless examples of the fact that having lost Little Russia, the Poles launched a real ideological war against Russia, in which the Cossack foreman gladly acted on their side, increasing his worth in the eyes of Moscow: “When Vygovsky betrayed the tsar and gathered the Rada in Gadyach, there the Polish envoy Benevsky arrived. His speech to the Cossacks is a magnificent example of eloquence, designed for listeners who know that every word of the speaker is a lie, but accept it as a revelation. “The tsar takes all income from Ukraine, established new duties, established taverns, the poor Cossack can no longer drink vodka, honey or beer, and they no longer even remember about wine. But to what extent, fellows, has Moscow’s greed come? They tell you to wear Moscow zipuns and put on Moscow bast shoes!

This is unheard of tyranny!.. Before you chose your own elders, but now the Muscovite gives you whoever he wants; and whoever pleases you, but he doesn’t like it, he will order to kill him. And now you are already living in contempt with them; They barely consider you human, they are ready to cut out your tongues so that you don’t speak, and gouge out your eyes so that they don’t look... and they keep you here only until they conquer us Poles with your blood, and Afterwards they will resettle you beyond Beloozero, and Ukraine will be populated with their Moscow slaves.”

“The Cossacks, of course, knew better whether they were ordered to wear zipuns and put on bast shoes, but some kind of “ideological basis” had to be brought under treason,” the historian continues. “Therefore, when they were asked: “What! Did you, gentlemen, thank you for his favor, Mr. Commissar?" followed by an enthusiastic cry: "I'm glad to speak!" The entire second half of the 17th century was full of libels, slander, anonymous letters, and rumors. Generations grew up in an atmosphere of hostility and nightmarish stories about the Moscow horrors. Knowing from experience the power of propaganda, we can only attribute to a miracle that the Little Russian people for the most part did not become Russophobes. The writing of anti-Russian pamphlets continued until the abolition of the Hetmanate in 1780. It is now quite well established that the military chancellery was the hotbed of this creativity in Ukraine - the bureaucratic center of the Cossack order. The officials of this institution were remembered in the 20th century by Grushevsky as selfless patriots who worked “in honor, glory and in defense of all of Little Russia.” They carried, so to speak, to the masses the entire “fund of jokes and sarcasms” originally created by Polish propaganda , jokes, legends, anti-Moscow inventions that independence uses to this day."

Exposing a black legend

Ulyanov leaves no stone unturned from one of the most poisonous myths of the Ukrainian nationalists, in which they convinced many others: the Muscovites turned the “Ukrainians” who trusted Russia into slavery!

The “bright, happy, free” era (remember the speech of the Polish commissar!) is gone; after Catherine’s decree of 1783, the era of “slavery, tears and lamentations” began: “Katerina is an enemy woman. What have you done! The steppe is wide, the rich land has been given away to Panam.” In historical reference books we read: “1783. On May 14 (May 3, Old Style), by decree of Catherine II, the free peasants of the Little Russian regions were enslaved.”

Meanwhile, an elementary analysis of the test of this document shows that serfdom de facto existed in Little Russia before the adoption of this decree. We are talking about the legalization of a practice that the Cossacks, who turned into “landowners” and “nobles,” started long ago - soon after the expulsion of the Poles and the establishment of their power over the peasants of Little Russia, which was perceived by contemporaries as “worse than Lyadskaya”. Moreover, in conditions when Russia did not interfere in the internal affairs of the Hetmanate. The queen’s decree, which allegedly turned the life of the “Ukrainians” into hell, was not noticed by the people, since nothing actually changed. Moreover, it had positive consequences.

“The decree was one of a series of legalizations generated by another, more important and general reform announced in 1780,” the historian points out. “This reform is the abolition of the hetmanate and all Cossack orders in Little Russia. In 1781, the Little Russian Collegium, the General Court, and the central military and regimental institutions, the territory of the hetmanate was divided into the governorships of Kiev, Chernigov and Novgorod-Seversk, where all administration, court and management were to be carried out from then on according to the all-Russian model. This was the complete end of the Cossack order, which had existed for about 130 years. They regretted it few, more those who fed from him; the "Mots" Cossacks, for the most part, had long ago turned into the "noble Russian nobility", no different from their Great Russian brothers. Serving in the capitals, sitting in the Senate and Synod, becoming generals , ministers, chancellors of the empire, having achieved everything that their ancestors dreamed of, they no longer had any reason to regret the Cossack privileges.From a breeding ground of unrest they turned into a support of order and the throne. Only a small handful continued to grieve for the bunchuks and zhupans."

The historian continues: “The process of merging the Little Russian gentry with the Great Russian gentry proceeded so quickly that the final abolition of the hetmanate under Catherine did not cause any regret. All other changes were met just as easily, even with sympathy. If a small handful continued to talk about the previous “rights,” then very soon the “desire for rank, and especially for salary” took precedence over the “mindsets of old times." As soon as the question of checking the title of nobility was resolved in a favorable direction, the southern Russian gentry finally merged with the northern one and became a factor in all-Russian life. The oblivion of the recent autonomist past was like this It is great that, in the words of the same Grushevsky, “the creation of national life” had to begin “anew from scratch.”

Well, as a result of this, there was only more order and stability in the life of the people: state laws now applied equally to Little Russia and Great Russia. Only from this period did St. Petersburg really take responsibility for what was happening in Southern Rus', where “national life” in the first half of the 19th century was represented by “lovers of folk poetry and folklore collectors, a good half of whom consisted of “Katsaps,” like Vadim Passek , I.I. Sreznevsky, A. Pavlovsky." Gogol well expressed the feelings of 99.9% of educated and uneducated people of Southern Rus': “I’ll tell you that I myself don’t know what kind of soul I have, Khokhlatsky or Russian. I only know that I would never give an advantage to either a Little Russian over a Russian or "to the Russian before the Little Russian. Both natures are generously endowed by God and, as if on purpose, each of them separately contains something that is not in the other."

Centers of Ukrainian Literature - St. Petersburg and Moscow

“The centers of new Ukrainian literature in the 19th century,” the historian testifies, “were not so much Kiev and Poltava as St. Petersburg and Moscow. The first “Grammar of the Little Russian dialect,” compiled by the Great Russian A. Pavlovsky, was published in St. Petersburg in 1818... The first a collection of ancient Little Russian songs compiled by Prince M.A. Tsertelev, published in St. Petersburg in 1812. The following “Little Russian Songs”, collected by M.A. Maksimovich, were published in Moscow in 1827. In 1834, in the same place, their second edition was published. Kotlyarevsky, Grebenka, Shevchenko were published in St. Petersburg...

However, politics gradually begins to interfere with this idyll: the Decembrists and the Polish gentry in the lands annexed to Russia, hatching plans for anti-government revolts and raising them, the Polish intelligentsia in Little Russia, receptive to revolutionary, liberal and nationalist ideas coming from Europe, begin to use the minor differences between two main parts of the Russian people, preserved at the level of language and mentality, in their own interests. The “progressive” Russian intelligentsia begins to actively help them in this, for whom the violent Cossacks become a symbol of freedom and the fight against autocracy. The common people are not captivated by these trends, but they force the imperial authorities to begin to look with suspicion at books and articles in the “language”, which they themselves initially promoted as evidence of the rich regional characteristics of the great and mighty Russian language. When it becomes known that the Polish rebels are counting on help from the “Ukrainians” and deliberately pitting them against the Russians.

Ukrainianism and revolution

“The Decembrists were the first to identify their cause with Ukrainianism and created a tradition for the entire subsequent Russian revolutionary movement. Herzen and Ogarev imitated them, Bakunin proclaimed to the whole world the demand for an independent Poland, Finland and Little Russia, and the Petrashevites, with all the ambiguity and uncertainty of their plan for the transformation of Russia, also managed to emphasize their alliance with separatisms, including the Little Russian one. This is one of the laws of any revolutionary movement," the historian points out, further citing a completely anecdotal case.

“In 1861, the idea arose of printing official state documents in Little Russian, and the first such experiment was to be the February 19 manifesto on the liberation of the peasants,” writes Ulyanov. “The initiative came from P. Kulish and was positively received at the top. March 15, 1861 the highest permission for the translation followed. But when the translation was made and a month later submitted for approval by the State Council, it was not considered possible to accept it. Even before this, Kulish had a scandalous case of translating the Bible with his famous “Hai dufae Srul na Pan” (May he trust Israel to the Lord). Now, when translating the manifesto, the complete absence of state-political terminology in the Little Russian language affected. The Ukrainophile elite had to hastily compose it. They composed it by introducing Polonisms or distorting Russian words. The result was not only a linguistic ugliness, but also completely incomprehensible to the Little Russian For a peasant, the text was at least less understandable than ordinary Russian. Later published in Kievskaya Starina, it served as material for humor. But when in 1862 the St. Petersburg Literacy Committee filed a petition for the introduction of teaching in the local dialect in the People's Schools of Little Russia, it was accepted for consideration, and the Minister of Public Education A.V. Golovnin himself supported it. In all likelihood, this project would have been approved if it had not been for the outbreak of the Polish uprising, which alarmed the government and public circles. It turned out that the rebels relied on Little Russian separatism and inciting peasant agrarian unrest in the south of Russia, through propaganda brochures and proclamations in the vernacular. And then it was noticed that some Ukrainophiles willingly collaborated with the Poles on the basis of distributing such brochures. Papers found during searches of Polish leaders revealed direct connections between Ukrainian nationalists and the uprising."

Naturally, St. Petersburg decided to “stop” sedition: “The project of teaching in the Little Russian language was not allowed to proceed, and they decided to limit the printing of Little Russian books.” Although formally and officially all restrictions on the Ukrainian press were lifted only in 1905, in fact they were not observed from the very beginning. This also applies to the famous prohibitive Emsky Decree of 1876 by Alexander II, which did not bring harm to anyone except the autocracy itself: “For the Ukrainian movement, it turned out to be manna from heaven. Without causing any real damage, it gave it the long-awaited crown of martyrdom.”

Thus, the love of the Little Russians for their land, their “small homeland,” which was clear to both the government and the Great Russians and was shared by them, turned out to be fraught with very unpleasant consequences.

How the “Ukrainians” beat the Celts

The author very appropriately compares Ukrainians with other ethnographic quirks of the time, and makes a striking conclusion: “A hundred years ago there was a new Celtic movement that set out to revive the Celtic world as part of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and French Brittany. The stimulus was ancient poetry and legends But born not of life, but of imagination, this movement did not go beyond some literary revival, philological and archaeological research. There would have been no shoots on the basis of a passion for Cossack literature, if the gardener-history had not grafted this branch cut from a fallen tree , to a plant that had roots in the soil of the 19th century. The Cossack ideology was grafted onto the tree of the Russian revolution and only from it received true life. What the independentists call their “national revival” was nothing more than a revolutionary movement dressed in Cossack trousers." . It was thanks to this that the student of the Decembrist Ryleev, a second-rate Ukrainian poet-Russophobe, who picked up primitively understood revolutionary ideas in St. Petersburg and therefore promoted by revolutionaries, Taras Shevchenko, made his poetic career. Alas, the revolutionaries did not like not only Russia, its political system, religion and church, but also everything Russian, as it was too closely connected with all this, so his poems came in handy - giant monuments were erected to the “great kobzar” in the USSR, they were named after him streets, squares and ships. Here it is - a “political order” in its purest form, but what disgusting things he wrote: “Fuck off the black-browed ones, they are not with the Muscovites, because the Muscovites are strangers, it’s daring to bother with you.” Or: “The Poles took everything, drank the blood, and the Muscovites and the retinue of God were wrapped in shackles.”

By the way, Ukrainian nationalists abroad who hated Russia and the USSR offered him laudatory articles and speeches, and they also erected monuments. What Soviet and anti-Soviet fans of Shevchenko had in common was his hatred of historical Russia and the false glorification of the Cossack freemen.

Ukrainians are defeated in Russia and go to Galicia

Meanwhile, the rapid economic development of Russia, the growth of the people's well-being, and the suppression of the revolutionary movement under Alexander III led to the oblivion of Ukrainianness on the territory of the Russian Empire - the “Ukrainians” considered themselves Little Russians and were proud of it. Therefore, the apologists of this ideology, which was tending towards complete decline and never had a mass character, had to move to Austrian Galicia, where the Austro-Hungarian intelligence services began to support it - both for the purposes of internal politics, in order to contrast the local “Russians” with the Poles who made up the upper ranks of society and dreamed of restoration of Polish independence, and Russians, but as “Ukrainians”.

This was not possible immediately, far from immediately, since a strong “Russian party” had long existed in Galicia, and they knew nothing about any “Ukrainians.” Thanks to World War I, however, this geopolitical intrigue worked. Galician supporters of Russia, who warmly welcomed Nicholas II in Lvov after its occupation by the Russian army, rotted in concentration camps, and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia destroyed its remaining supporters in Galicia morally. Thus, the Galicians, who had long been separated historically from the main Russian tree, not only became Ukrainians, but also received a kind of “patent” for Ukrainianness. So Lvov gradually ideologically subjugated Kiev, and continued to burn with hatred of Russia even when the Russians/Ukrainians between the two world wars found themselves in the hands of the Poles, who treated them as second-class citizens and subjected them to all kinds of repression.

After World War II...

The Second World War led to the inclusion of Galicia, Bukovina, Carpathian Ruthenia, and Russian Crimea into Soviet Ukraine. And Ulyanov describes how this was done both then and in the first decades of Soviet power: “Everything was done through sheer violence and intrigue. Residents of vast territories were not even asked about their desire or unwillingness to stay in conciliar Ukraine. The fate of the Carpatho-Russians, for example, is simply tragic. This people, who for centuries languished under the Magyar yoke, who endured a heroic struggle to preserve their Russianness and dreamed of nothing but reunification with Russia and a return to the fold of Russian culture, are even deprived of the rights of a national minority in the Ukrainian republic - they are declared the Ukrainian people. world democracy, which raises a fuss at the slightest infringement of any cannibalistic tribe in Africa, has passed over in complete silence the fact of the forced Ukrainization of the Carpatho-Russians. However, was it not with the same silence that the forced Ukrainization of the Little Russian people took place about forty-five years ago? This fact has been erased and hushed up in journalism and history.Neither the common people nor the intelligentsia were asked in what language they wished to study and write. It was prescribed by the supreme authority. The intelligentsia, accustomed to speaking, writing and thinking in Russian and forced in a short time to relearn and switch to a hastily cobbled together new language, experienced a lot of torment. Thousands of people have lost their jobs due to their inability to master the “sovereign language”...

Why was this book written?

The book of life of the historian Nikolai Ulyanov ends with the Bolshevik period in the history of Ukraine, from which this country is now striving in every possible way to free itself, destroying the memory of the past: overthrowing monuments to its creator - Vladimir Lenin and his associates, renaming streets and cities, destroying the science and economy inherited from Russia/USSR. And since Europe is showing Ukraine the door, and it has quarreled with Russia itself, Ukrainians who have forgotten about their Russianness will have to look into themselves and decide who they are - the inhabitants of Little, primordial Rus', “where the Russian land came from,” or the mannequin into which they breathed life or something similar to the life of an evil wizard. But for this insight to take place, Ukrainians need to understand what was wrong in the history of the southern Russian region, what needs to be done to correct mistakes and in order to become Russian again. This is why this book was written.

Nikolay Ulyanov

Origin of Ukrainian separatism

Introduction

The peculiarity of Ukrainian independence is that it does not fit any of the existing teachings about national movements and cannot be explained by any “iron” laws. It does not even have national oppression, as the first and most necessary justification for its emergence. The only example of “oppression” - the decrees of 1863 and 1876, which limited the freedom of the press in a new, artificially created literary language - was not perceived by the population as national persecution. Not only the common people, who had no involvement in the creation of this language, but also 99 percent of the enlightened Little Russian society consisted of opponents of its legalization. Only an insignificant group of intellectuals, who never expressed the aspirations of the majority of the people, made it their political banner. For all 300 years of being part of the Russian state, Little Russia-Ukraine was neither a colony nor an “enslaved people.”

It was once taken for granted that the national essence of a people is best expressed by the party that stands at the head of the nationalist movement. Nowadays, Ukrainian independence provides an example of the greatest hatred for all the most revered and most ancient traditions and cultural values of the Little Russian people: it persecuted the Church Slavonic language, which had been established in Rus' since the adoption of Christianity, and an even more severe persecution was erected against the all-Russian literary language, which had been lying dormant for a thousand years. years at the basis of the writing of all parts of the Kyiv state, during and after its existence. Independents change cultural and historical terminology, change traditional assessments of heroes of past events. All this does not mean understanding or affirmation, but the eradication of the national soul. Truly national feeling is sacrificed to invented party nationalism.

The development scheme of any separatism is as follows: first, a “national feeling” supposedly awakens, then it grows and strengthens until it leads to the idea of separating from the previous state and creating a new one. In Ukraine, this cycle occurred in the opposite direction. There, a desire for separation was first revealed, and only then an ideological basis began to be created as a justification for such a desire.

It is no coincidence that the title of this work uses the word “separatism” instead of “nationalism”. It was precisely the national base that Ukrainian independence lacked at all times. It has always looked like a non-popular, non-national movement, as a result of which it suffered from an inferiority complex and still cannot get out of the stage of self-affirmation. If for Georgians, Armenians, and Uzbeks this problem does not exist, due to their clearly expressed national image, then for Ukrainian independentists the main concern is still to prove the difference between a Ukrainian and a Russian. Separatist thought is still working on the creation of anthropological, ethnographic and linguistic theories that should deprive Russians and Ukrainians of any degree of kinship among themselves. At first they were declared “two Russian nationalities” (Kostomarov), then - two different Slavic peoples, and later theories arose according to which Slavic origin was reserved only for Ukrainians, while Russians were classified as Mongols, Turks, and Asians. Yu. Shcherbakivsky and F. Vovk knew for certain that the Russians are the descendants of people of the Ice Age, related to the Lapps, Samoyeds and Voguls, while the Ukrainians are representatives of the Central Asian round-headed race that came from across the Black Sea and settled in the places liberated by the Russians, who went north following the retreating glacier and the mammoth. An assumption has been made that sees the Ukrainians as the remnant of the population of the drowned Atlantis.

And this abundance of theories, and the feverish cultural isolation from Russia, and the development of a new literary language cannot but be striking and not give rise to suspicions of the artificiality of the national doctrine.

D. A. Odinets, who immersed himself in this topic and collected abundant material, was overwhelmed by the grandeur of German plans, the persistence and scope of propaganda in order to instill independence. The Second World War revealed an even broader canvas in this sense.

But for a long time, historians, and among them such an authority as Professor I. I. Lappo, paid attention to the Poles, attributing to them the main role in the creation of the autonomist movement.

Another Pole, Count Thaddeus Chatsky, then embarks on the path of racial interpretation of the term “Ukrainian.” If ancient Polish annalists, like Samuel of Grondsky, back in the 17th century. derived this term from the geographical location of Little Rus', located on the edge of the Polish possessions (“Margo enim polonice kraj; inde Ukraina quasi provincia ad fines Regni posita”), then Chatsky derived it from some unknown horde of “ukrov” to anyone except him ”, which supposedly came out from beyond the Volga in the 7th century.

The Poles were not satisfied with either “Little Russia” or “Little Rus'”. They could have come to terms with them if the word “Rus” did not apply to “Muscovites.”

The introduction of “Ukraine” began under Alexander I, when, having Polished Kyiv, covered the entire right bank south-west of Russia with a dense network of their povet schools, founded the Polish university in Vilna and took over the Kharkov University, which opened in 1804, the Poles felt themselves masters of the mental life of the Little Russian region.

Gulak and Kostomarov, who were in the 1830s. students of Kharkov University were fully exposed to this propaganda. It also suggested the idea of an all-Slavic federal state, which they proclaimed in the late 1940s. The famous “Pan-Slavism,” which caused furious abuse against Russia throughout Europe, was in fact not of Russian, but of Polish origin. Prince Adam Czartoryski, as head of Russian foreign policy, openly proclaimed Pan-Slavism as one of the means of reviving Poland.

Polish interest in Ukrainian separatism is best summed up by the historian Valerian Kalinka, who understood the futility of dreams of returning southern Russia to Polish rule. This region is lost for Poland, but we must make sure that it is lost for Russia too. There is no better way for this than creating discord between southern and northern Russia and promoting the idea of their national isolation. The program of Ludwig Mierosławski on the eve of the Polish uprising of 1863 was drawn up in the same spirit.

An equally interesting document was published by V.L. Burtsev on September 27, 1917 in the newspaper “Common Deal” in Petrograd. He presents a note found among the papers of the secret archive of the Primate of the Uniate Church A. Sheptytsky after the occupation of Lvov by Russian troops. The note was compiled at the beginning of the First World War, in anticipation of the victorious entry of the Austro-Hungarian army into the territory of Russian Ukraine. It contained several proposals to the Austrian government regarding the development and separation of this region from Russia. A broad program of military, legal, and ecclesiastical measures was outlined, advice was given regarding the establishment of the hetmanate, the formation of separatist-minded elements among the Ukrainians, giving local nationalism a Cossack form and “the possible complete separation of the Ukrainian Church from the Russian.”

This program began to take shape immediately after the sections. The Poles took on the role of midwife during the birth of Ukrainian nationalism and nanny during its upbringing.

They achieved that the Little Russian nationalists, despite their long-standing antipathies towards Poland, became zealous...

Selected quotes from the book by N.I. are given. Ulyanov “The origin of Ukrainian separatism”

“The peculiarity of Ukrainian independence is that it does not fit any of the existing teachings about national movements and cannot be explained by any “iron” laws. It does not even have national oppression, as the first and most necessary justification for its emergence. The only example of “oppression” - the decrees of 1863 and 1876, which limited the freedom of the press in a new, artificially created literary language, were not perceived by the population as national persecution. Not only the common people, who had no involvement in the creation of this language, but also ninety-nine percent of the enlightened Little Russian society consisted of opponents of its legalization. Only an insignificant group of intellectuals, who never expressed the aspirations of the majority of the people, made it their political banner. For all three hundred years of being part of the Russian state, Little Russia-Ukraine was neither a colony nor an “enslaved people”

It was precisely the national base that Ukrainian independence lacked at all times. It has always looked like a non-popular, non-national movement, as a result of which it suffered from an inferiority complex and still cannot get out of the stage of self-affirmation. If this problem does not exist for Georgians, Armenians, Uzbeks, due to their clearly expressed national image, then for Ukrainian independentists, the main concern is still to prove the difference between a Ukrainian and a Russian. Separatist thought is still working on the creation of anthropological, ethnographic and linguistic theories that should deprive Russians and Ukrainians of any degree of kinship among themselves. At first they were declared “two Russian nationalities” (Kostomarov), then - two different Slavic peoples, and later theories arose according to which Slavic origin was reserved only for Ukrainians, while Russians were classified as Mongols, Turks, and Asians. Yu. Shcherbakivsky and F. Vovk knew for certain that the Russians are the descendants of people of the Ice Age, related to the Lapps, Samoyeds and Voguls, while the Ukrainians are representatives of the Central Asian round-headed race that came from across the Black Sea and settled in the places liberated by the Russians, who went north following the retreating glacier and mammoth. An assumption has been made that sees the Ukrainians as the remnant of the population of the drowned Atlantis.

“In June 1658, when governor V.B. Sheremetev went to Kyiv, residents along the entire route greeted him, came out to meet him with icons, and asked him to send royal governors to other cities. But among the hetman and the foreman, the news of the arrival of the tsarist troops caused panic and angry vigilance. It intensified when it became known that steward Kikin, on the way, made explanations to the Cossacks regarding the non-payment of their salaries. The tsarist government did not demand any taxes from Little Russia for four years. Even now it did not insist on immediate payment, but it was alarmed by rumors about the discontent of the ordinary Cossacks, who systematically did not receive salaries. Fearing that this discontent might turn on Moscow, it ordered Kikin to inform the people that all levies from Ukraine go not to the tsar’s treasury, but to the hetman’s treasury, and are collected and spent by the Cossack authorities.

Vygovsky sensed considerable danger for himself in such explanations. We already know that Moscow, having agreed to Bogdan’s request to pay salaries to the Cossacks, linked this issue with taxation; she wanted the salary to come from the amounts of Little Russian fees.

Neither Khmelnitsky, nor his messengers Samoilo Bogdanov and Pavel Teterya, made any objections to this matter, and it is difficult to imagine any objections, but Bogdana’s petition, which he sent to Moscow in March 1654, containing a clause on salary, turned out to be hidden from the entire Cossacks, even from the elders. Only a few people, including the military clerk Vygovsky, knew about the requests stated there. The old hetman, apparently, did not want to attract anyone’s attention to the issue of collecting taxes and to the financial issue in general. No one except the hetman's order should have been assigned to the “budget” of Little Russia. One cannot help but see in this new evidence of the baseness of the goals with which power over Southern Russia was seized. For the first time, Khmelnytsky’s articles were announced in 1659 during the election of his son Yuri to hetman, but in 1657 Vygovsky had as little interest in their publicity as Bohdan. Kikin's explanations accelerated his break with Moscow. He arrived in Korsun, called the colonels there and laid down the mace. “I don’t want to be your hetman; the tsar is taking away our former liberties, and I don’t want to be in captivity.” The colonels returned the mace to him and promised to stand together for his liberties. Then the hetman uttered a phrase that meant formal treason: “You colonels must swear allegiance to me, but I did not swear allegiance to the sovereign, Khmelnytsky swore allegiance.” This, apparently, even for a Cossack foreman was not a completely decent statement, so Poltava Colonel Martyn Pushkar responded: “The entire Zaporozhye army swore allegiance to the great sovereign, and what did you swear to, a saber or a squeak?” In Crimea, the Moscow envoy Yakushkin managed to find out that Vygovsky was testing the waters in case of transferring citizenship to Khan Megmet Giray. The reason is also known: “the tsar sends governors to them in the Cherkassy cities, but he the hetman does not want to be under their command, but wants to own the cities himself, as Khmelnytsky owned them.”

“Meanwhile, Martyn Pushkar, a Poltava colonel, rebelled against the hetman. Among the other initial people, unsteadiness was also noticed, so Vygovsky executed some of them in Gadyach, and went on a campaign against Pushkar, calling on the Crimean Tatars to help him. Moscow was alarmed. Ivan Apukhtin was sent to the hetman with an order not to arbitrarily deal with his opponents and not to bring the Tatars, but to wait for the tsar’s army. Apukhtin wanted to go to Pushkar to persuade him, but Vygovsky did not let him. At this time he was already rude and unceremonious with the royal envoys. He besieged Poltava, took Pushkar by treachery and handed the city over to a horrific pogrom Tatars. Moscow, meanwhile, managed to fully learn about his intentions. From the words of the Metropolitan of Kyiv, clergy, relatives of the late Khmelnitsky, Kyiv townspeople and all kinds of people, it became known about Vygovsky’s relations with the Poles with a view to switching to them. On August 16, 1658, workers from the forests came running to Kyiv with the news that the Cossacks and Tatars were marching towards the city, and on August 23, Danilo Vygovsky, the hetman’s brother, came to Kiev with a twenty-thousand-strong Cossack-Tatar army. Voivode Sheremetev did not allow himself to be taken by surprise and repelled the attack with great damage to Vygovsky. The Cossacks thus declared real war on Moscow. On September 6, 1658, Hetman Vygovsky concluded an agreement in Gadyach with the Polish ambassador Benevsky, according to which the Zaporozhye army renounced royal citizenship and pledged it to the king. According to this agreement, Ukraine was united with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on the rights of an allegedly distinctive state called the “Grand Duchy of Russia”

“Vygovsky’s betrayal showed how difficult it is to tear Ukraine away from the Moscow State. Some four years have passed since the annexation, and the people have already become so accustomed to their new citizenship that they did not want to hear about anything else. Moreover, he dreamed of nothing more than strengthening this citizenship. He clearly did not like the broad rights and privileges that the Cossacks had acquired for themselves to the detriment of the common people. Some of the letters sent to Moscow contained a threat: if the tsar does not stop the Cossack tyranny and does not establish his governors and military men, then the men and townspeople will run away from their places and leave, either to the Great Russian borders or beyond the Dnieper. This voice of the peasant and urban people was heard throughout all the Cossack unrest of the second half of the 17th century. Archpriest Simeon Adamovich wrote in 1669: “Your will; If you order your military men to be withdrawn from Nezhin, Pereyaslavl, Chernigov and Ostra, then do not think that it will be good. The whole people is screaming and crying: just like the Israelis under Egyptian labor, they don’t want to live under Cossack work; Raising their hands, they pray to God to continue to live under your sovereign power and authority; everyone says: they are tenacious behind the light of the sovereign, in ten years they would not have seen that now in one year behind the Cossacks»

“Mazepa asked the Moscow government for streltsy to protect his person, so one foreign observer remarked: “ The hetman is strong with archers. Without them, the crests would have left him long ago, but they are afraid of the Streltsy»

The "rabble", on both sides of the Dnieper, gravitated, as before, towards Moscow. Feeling behind him the power of the grassroots Cossacks, peasantry and townspeople, Bryukhovetsky immediately understood what position he should take in relation to Moscow. In 1665, he expressed the desire to “see the sovereign’s bright eyes” and on September 11 he came to Moscow at the head of a magnificent retinue of 535 people. His behavior in Moscow is so unusual that it deserves special attention. He himself asks the tsar to send governors and military men to Ukrainian cities and himself expresses the wish that taxes from the burghers and villagers, all levies from mills, taverns, as well as customs duties go to the benefit of the sovereign. He also asks that the Metropolitan of Kiev depend on Moscow, and not on Constantinople. It seemed that a hetman had finally appeared who wanted to seriously respect the sovereign rights of Moscow and understood his citizenship not formally, but in reality. Wanting to give as much evidence of good intentions as possible, Bryukhovetsky expresses his desire to marry a girl from a respectable Russian family. They woo Princess Dolgorukaya for him and he himself is given the boyar rank.

Bryukhovetsky's enemies, important Cossacks who were in the camp of P. Teteri and P. Doroshenko, declared him a traitor and traitor to the Cossacks, but, quite obviously, Bryukhovetsky's behavior is explained by the desire to be popular among the people. From the hetman chosen by the “rabble” the people expected a policy consistent with their aspirations. It is known that when the governors began to arrive in the Little Russian cities, the residents said to the Cossack elders to their faces: “At last God is delivering us; henceforth you will not rob us or destroy our houses.”

However, after a certain time, the “boyar-hetman”, following the example of Vygovsky and Khmelnitsky, betrayed Moscow. The reasons were the same. Feeling secure, establishing strong ties in Moscow, assuring it of his devotion and at the same time gaining the favor of the ordinary Ukrainian people, the hetman embarked on the path of his predecessors - on the path of shameless enrichment and fleecing of the population.”

“In Moscow, having learned about the vacillation that had begun, they decided to make a last effort to keep the foreman from betraying - on February 6, 1668 they sent a letter of admonition to the hetman: “And if the faint-hearted are worried that our governors do not know the grain and monetary taxes, they want to take these fees are taken upon ourselves, then let there be a clear petition from all Little Russian residents to us, we will accept it graciously and judge how it is easier for the people and more pleasing to God.” But perhaps it was this letter that accelerated the explosion. It shows that the tsar was not averse to reconsidering the issue of voivodeship functions, subject to petitions from all Little Russians. He wanted to hear the voice of the whole earth, and not just one elder, not just one Cossack. This was what the sergeant-major feared most.

The break with Moscow occurred on February 8. The governor and commanders of the Moscow army in Gadyach, who came to the hetman that day to hit him with their foreheads, were not received. Then the hetman called a German, Colonel Yagan Gultz, who commanded the Moscow detachment, and demanded that he immediately leave the city. Gultz made him swear that when he left, nothing bad would be done to him. Voivode Ogarev was told with shouting and abuse: “If you don’t leave the city, the Cossacks will beat you all.” There were only 200 Moscow people in Gadyach, there was no fortress in the city, the governor had no choice but to give the order to march. But when they approached the gate, it was locked. Gultz and his initial people were released, but the archers, soldiers and governor were stopped. The Cossacks rushed at them. Only a few managed to escape from the city, but they were overtaken and killed. They caught up and killed the German Gultz and his comrades. Ogarev, wounded in the head, was taken by the local archpriest and placed in his home, and his wife was led around the city in disgrace, committing the greatest atrocity. Her breasts were cut off. After this, the hetman sent out sheets of paper all over the place with a call to clear the rest of the cities from Moscow military men.”

“It is impossible not to say a few words about Doroshenko, who to this day remains one of the idols of the independence movement and is remembered as a fighter for Independence.” This man caused almost more misfortune to the Ukrainian people than all the other hetmans combined. His story is like this. After Vygovsky’s betrayal, only Kyiv continued to remain in Moscow’s hands; the rest of right-bank Ukraine was given to the Poles. With the election of Yuri Khmelnitsky, she returned to the tsar for a short time in order to again fall into Polish hands with his betrayal. Teterya, during his short hetmanship, kept her in royal citizenship, and when Peter Doroshenko came to replace him in 1665, he pledged himself to the Turkish Sultan as the head of a vast slave-owning empire. The Turks had a view of the southeast of Europe as a reservoir of slave power, drawn with the help of the Crimean, Azov and Belgorod (Ackerman) Tatars. Their raids on Rus' and Poland were expeditions for live goods. Tens and hundreds of thousands of Slavs entered the slave markets in Constantinople and Asia Minor. But until now this yasyr was obtained through wars and raids; Now, with the approval of Doroshenko's hetmanship, the Tatars received the opportunity to administratively rule the region. The period from 1665 to 1676, during which Doroshenko remained in power, was a time of such devastation for right-bank Ukraine, which can only be compared with the raids of Devlet Giray in the middle of the 16th century. The Tatars, who came at Doroshenko’s call and without him, grabbed people right and left. The right bank turned into a continuous slave market. Trade in Chigirin took place almost right under the windows of the hetman’s house. Residents began to “walk separately”, some fled to Poland, others to the left bank, and others - wherever they looked. In 1672, Doroshenko led a Turkish army of three hundred thousand to Little Russia and destroyed Kamenets Podolsky, in which all the churches were converted into mosques. “Here all the people see oppression from the Turks, they curse Doroshenko and us and think all kinds of evil,” Kanev Colonel Lizogub wrote about the right bank. In the end, famine began there, as people did not sow anything for years due to Tatar predation. According to Hetman Samoilovich, Doroshenko himself, in the end, saw that he “had no one to rule over, because from the Dniester to the Dnieper there is no human spirit anywhere, except where the Polish fortress stands.” Maneuvering between Poland, Moscow and Crimea, Doroshenko made many enemies among even the leading Cossacks. Not only the left bank hetmans acted against him, but Sukhovey, Khanenko and others elected by the Cossacks also rose up. Having become mischievous and intrigued, he ended up surrendering to the mercy of Hetman Samoilovich, who promised him shelter and safety on behalf of Moscow. Having moved to Moscow, Doroshenko was appointed Vyatka governor, in which position he died. Thus, the word once spoken by Demyan Mnogohreshny, Bryukhovetsky’s successor, came true: “And no matter how self-willed they turn, they have nowhere to go except the great sovereign.” Mnogohreshny apparently understood that as long as the entire thickness of the Ukrainian people spontaneously gravitated towards Moscow, Cossack sedition was doomed to failure.”

“As soon as she managed to conclude a more or less lasting peace with the Poles and unite the rest of Ukraine under one hetman Samoilovich, she reduced her administration to nothing, and actually handed over the region to the hetman’s, senior administration.

Until the establishment of the “Little Russian Collegium” in 1722, the government was content with the nominal presence of Little Russia within the Russian State. It maintained military garrisons in some cities, but actually withdrew from governing the region. All income from the cities and villages of Little Russia remained in the hetman’s treasury. The propaganda fabrications of independentists about the robbery of Ukraine by the tsarist government are designed for ignorant people and do not withstand contact with a serious study of this issue. Even during the short stay of the governors in some Ukrainian cities, the government did not profit from a single ruble from local taxes - everything went to the military needs of Little Russia. It was often necessary to send some of the Moscow sums there, because the Cossack authorities did not care at all about the condition of the fortresses.

The sergeant major went so far as to use these sendings as a precedent to beg the tsar for cash handouts. When Mazepa, with his predation, brought the region to financial exhaustion, the General Chancellery turned to Moscow for money to pay the hunting army. They were quite surprised and replied that if there had been subsidies before, it was due to wartime, but now there is no war. Moscow reminded that “all income in Little Russia belongs to the hetman, the foreman and the colonels, and it’s a shame to beat your forehead about money.” Peter the Great, later, said: “We can shamelessly declare that no people under the sun can boast of such freedoms and privileges and ease, as by our royal majesty of mercy, the Little Russians, for not a single penalty is taken from them into our treasury in the entire Little Russian region.” We do not command." It was true.

Half a century later, in 1764, a secret instruction was developed for N.A. Rumyantsev, when he was appointed Little Russian Governor-General, which among other things said: “From this vast, populous and abundant province with many useful plants, to the state treasury (to which Hardly anyone can believe it) there is no income. This, however, is so genuine that, on the contrary, forty eight thousand rubles are sold there from here.”

“The entire first fifty years after the annexation of Little Russia seem to be a diligent taming of the steppe beast. Many government officials in Moscow lost patience with this game and came to the idea of abandoning Ukraine. Such was the famous A. L. Ordin-Nashchokin, the arbiter of foreign policy under Alexei Mikhailovich. With their constant betrayals and putches, the Cossacks became so disgusted with him that he openly spoke out for depriving Ukraine of Russian citizenship. Only the deep religiosity of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, who was horrified at the thought of handing over the Orthodox people to Catholics or Mohammedans, did not allow the spread of such tendencies at court.”

“The less plausible and less popular the motives for treason were, the greater the number of Moscow “tyrannies” that had to be justified. Mazepa's betrayal generated the largest amount of propaganda material and anti-Moscow legends. The Mazepa emigrants, like Orlik, the military clerk - Mazepa's most trusted man, especially tried. Reading his letters, proclamations, memoranda, one might think that the Muscovites, during the reign of Peter, established some kind of Egyptian slavery in Ukraine - they beat the Cossacks on the head with sticks, cut off their ears with swords, they certainly raped their wives and daughters, cattle, horses, property they took away, even the foreman was beaten “to the death”

“We have already had to say that Poland has long been a factory of pamphlets, books, and speeches directed against Russia.

In the 16th century these were predominantly theological and polemical works. After the Livonian War and the Time of Troubles, political pamphlets began to be mixed in with them, full of boasts about how “we often overcame them, beat them and subjugated the best part of their land to our power.” This literature caused diplomatic conflicts in the 17th century and demands from Moscow for the destruction of “dishonest” books and the punishment of their authors and publishers.

But Polish agitation began with particular energy after the annexation of Little Russia to the Moscow State. Boyarin A.S. Matveev, who at one time managed the Little Russian Prikaz, later wrote how he requested samples of this agitation to be sent to him in Moscow.

“And from the Cherkassy cities they brought many capital sheets that turned out to be contrary to the Andrusov Treaties and the Moscow Decree and the book Pashkvil, a Slavic saying: ridicule or reproach, printed, which was printed in Poland. This book contains the advice of their wickedness: the time has come to deal with Moscow in this way, and the time has come to forge the chain and the Trojan horse, and the rest is clearer in that book.

The entire fund of anecdotes, sarcasms, jokes, legends, anti-Moscow inventions that independence uses to this day was created by the Poles...

... The entire second half of the 17th century is full of libels, slander, anonymous letters, and rumors. Generations grew up in an atmosphere of hostility and nightmarish stories about Moscow horrors.

Knowing from experience the power of propaganda, we can only attribute it to a miracle that the Little Russian people for the most part did not become Russophobes.”

“We have reached a conversation between King Charles XII and his Quartermaster General Gillenkrok near Poltava during its siege.

“I think,” said Gillenkrok, “that the Russians will defend themselves to the last extremity and your Majesty’s infantry will suffer greatly from the siege work.”

Karl: “I do not intend to use my infantry for this; and what about Mazepin’s Cossacks?”

Gillenkrok: “But is it really possible to employ people for siege work who have no idea about it, with whom one must communicate through interpreters and who will run away as soon as the work seems difficult to them and their comrades begin to fall from Russian bullets.”

The steppe Polovtsian character of military art doomed the Cossacks to a minor service role in all the armies in which they had to participate - in the Polish, Russian, Turkish, Crimean, Swedish. Everywhere they appeared as light auxiliary troops.

The compilers of the “History of the Rus” knew this and tried with all their might to present the military history of their ancestors in a different form. This was also important from the point of view of the restoration of the Cossacks.

But how to explain the all too well-known facts of defeats? In these cases, all sorts of “betrayals” and “betrayals” certainly come to the rescue.

“No matter how poor the Little Russian nobility became, or whined, constantly talking about some kind of “shackles,” they enjoyed much greater liberties and benefits, in the sense of public service, than their Great Russian brothers. In this respect, it stood closer to the Polish lordship. He did not really want to merge with the Great Russian noble class on the basis of his strict and rigorous service to the state. Only when Peter III and Catherine, with their famous letters, freed the Russian nobility from the obligation to serve, preserving for them, at the same time, all the rights and benefits of the landowner class, did the Little Russians no longer have any reasons for isolation. From now on, they quickly move toward complete assimilation. Subsequently, A. Chepa, one of V. Poletika’s friends and, apparently, the inspirer of the “History of the Rus”, who supplied its author with the necessary materials and points of view, wrote to his friend: while “the rights of the Russian nobles were limited until 1762, then The Little Russian nobility considered it better to be in chains than to agree to new laws. But when they were treated wisely and the decree of the sovereign Emperor Peter III was issued on the liberties of the nobles (1762) and the highest charter on the nobility (1787), when these two eras equalized the Russian nobles in advantages with the Little Russian nobility, then the Little Russians began to boldly enter into Russian service, took off their Tatar and Polish dresses, began to speak, sing and dance in Russian"

“It’s worth talking to any independent activist, and it immediately becomes clear that the baggage of his “national” ideology consists of fables from the “History of the Rus”, from indignation at the “damned” Catherine II, who “grabbed our Ukrainian Cossacks by the ribs with hooks and hung them on the shibenitsa.” Cossack ideology has been made a national Ukrainian ideology. In contrast to European and American separatisms, which most often developed under the sign of religious and racial differences or socio-economic contradictions, the Ukrainian one cannot be based on any of these principles. The Cossacks suggested to him an argument from history, creating an independent scheme of the Ukrainian past, built entirely on lies, forgeries, and contradictions with facts and documents. And this is now declared “a masterpiece of Ukrainian historiography”

“There is a Moroccan legend according to which the entire male Jewish population was exterminated one day by the Arabs. Then the wives of the murdered asked permission to visit the graves of their husbands. They were allowed to do this. After sitting in the cemetery, they became pregnant by the dead and in this way continued the Jewish people in Morocco.

Ukrainian nationalism of the 19th century also received life not from the living, but from the dead - from kobzar “thoughts”, legends, chronicles and, above all, from the “History of the Rus”.

This is not the only case. There was a hundred years ago a New Celtic movement, which set the goal of reviving the Celtic world as part of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and French Brittany. The stimulus was ancient poetry and legends. But born not of life, but of imagination, this movement did not go beyond some literary revival, philological and archaeological research.

There would not have been any shoots from the passion for Cossack literature if the historical gardener had not grafted this branch, cut from a fallen tree, to a plant that had roots in the soil of the 19th century.

Cossack ideology was grafted onto the tree of the Russian revolution and only from it received true life.

What the independentists call their “national revival” was nothing more than a revolutionary movement dressed in Cossack trousers. This was noticed by contemporaries. N. M. Katkov wrote in 1863: “Two or three years ago, for some reason, Ukrainophilism suddenly broke out. It went in parallel with all the other negative trends that suddenly took hold of our literature, our youth, our progressive bureaucrats and various wandering elements of our society.” Ukrainophilism of the 19th century, indeed, represents a bizarre amalgam of sentiments and aspirations of the era of the hetmanate with the revolutionary programs of the then intelligentsia.

Neither Gogol, nor Maksimovich, nor any of the other Little Russians, alien to the revolutionary ferment, were seduced by the “History of the Rus,” while it found a response in the hearts of revolutionaries and liberals. And even more curious: the warmest and earliest response came not from the Ukrainians, but from the Great Russians. M.P. Drahomanov, subsequently, noted with some bitterness that “the first attempt in poetry to connect European liberalism with Ukrainian historical traditions was made not by Ukrainians, but by the Great Russian Ryleev.

Kondraty Fedorovich Ryleev, the “frantic Vissarion” of the Decembrist movement, was one of those obsessed people who got drunk on the words “freedom” and “feat.” They honored them regardless of the context. Hence the diversity of heroes sung by Ryleev: Vladimir the Holy, Mikhail Tverskoy, Ermak, Susanin, Peter the Great, Volynsky, Artamon Matveev, Tsarevich Alexei. He awarded all the figures of Russian history whom the chronicle or rumor declared to have suffered for “truth,” for their homeland, for a high ideal, with poems and “thoughts.”

When taking on historical subjects, he never became familiar with them in any detail; he trusted the first book he came across or just a fable. It is not difficult to imagine what a treasure the “History of the Rus” and the Cossack chronicles turned out to be for him, where no matter the name, there is a hero, no matter the betrayal, there is certainly a fight for freedom, for “rights”

Shevchenko followed the path laid by Ryleev and was his direct student. Even the Russophobia with which his poetry is saturated is not original, it is found in Ryleev

As far as we know, none of the literary scholars who studied Ryleev’s work attached national significance to the Cossack themes of his poems. They were seen only as examples of the “civil lyre”. If something similar had come across from Tatar or Turkish history, it would have been sung with equal fervor. Indeed, our poet’s Ukrainophilia is so bookish and well-read that one cannot believe in any political significance. And yet, there is reason to think that it is not accidental.

We must not forget that Ryleev is a Decembrist, and the Decembrist conspiracy, to a large extent, and perhaps to a greater extent than we assume, was a Ukrainian-Polish conspiracy. This side of him is the least studied, but it cannot be ignored.

It is well known that in Poland, long before the Decembrists, there were secret patriotic organizations and that these organizations were preparing for an uprising against the Russian government. Count Soltyk and Colonel Kryzhanovsky testified at the investigation that the idea of the need to get in touch with Russian secret societies arose in them in 1820. From the testimony of M.P. Bestuzhev-Ryumin before the investigative commission, it is clear that a formal agreement was concluded between the Directory of the Southern Decembrist Society and the Polish society in 1824, according to which the Poles pledged to “rise up at the same time as us” and coordinate their actions with Russian rebels. But this reflected only one side of Polish interest in the Russian rebellion. The Poles worked hard to kindle the embers of Cossack sedition that were barely smoldering under the ashes and to unite it with the Decembrist putsch. The bet was placed on the return of Poland, if not all of Little Russia, then, in the first case, a significant part of it. According to the agreement of 1824, the Southern Society encouraged them by receiving the Volyn, Minsk, Grodno and part of the Vilna provinces. But the main Polish aspirations were associated with the Ukrainian autonomist movement. According to S.G. Volkonsky, the Poles had “great hope for the assistance of the Little Russian nobles, offering them the separation of “Little Russia from Russia”.” More was expected from an alliance with the Little Russian nobility than from an officer uprising, but for the most part, the southern landowners turned out to be quite loyal to the autocracy. Only a very small handful took the path of Decembrism and the associated Ukrainian separatism.

Be that as it may, we can be sure of one thing: Ryleev was a long-time Polonophile, who had literary and ideological connections with Polish nationalists, and it would hardly be a mistake to say that he owes his Cossack stories more to the Poles than to the Ukrainians. There is also no doubt that the Decembrist environment adopted the view of Little Russia as a victim of tsarist tyranny, and of the Cossack leaders as fighters and martyrs for freedom. The names Doroshenok, Mazep, Polubotkov were associated with the cause of people's liberation.

Only a few managed to resist this logic, and the first among them must be called Pushkin. He, too, was a “Decembrist” and only by chance did not end up on Senate Square. “The History of the Rus” was very familiar to him. He published an excerpt from it in his Sovremennik, but he did not put Mazepa’s cause above Peter’s cause and did not praise a single Cossack as a freedom fighter. This happened not due to a retreat from the hobbies of his youth and a change of views, but because Pushkin from the very beginning turned out to be more insightful than Ryleev and his entire generation. He felt the true spirit of the “History of the Rus,” its not national Ukrainian, but class-landowner essence. Thinking that its author was indeed Archbishop G. Konissky, Pushkin remarked: “It is clear that the nobleman’s heart is still beating under the monastic cassock.”

In the language of liberalism, “the heart of a nobleman” sounded like “the heart of a serf owner.” Now that we know the completely selfish interests that caused the relapse of the Cossack passions that gave birth to the “History of the Rus,” one can only be surprised at Pushkin’s foresight.

The revolutionary Russian intelligentsia, in its attitude towards separatism, followed the path not of Pushkin, but of Ryleev. “Ukrainophilism,” which meant love not for the Little Russian people, but for the Cossack Fronde, became an obligatory feature of the Russian liberation movement. It was more interested in the development of Ukrainian separatism than the separatists themselves. Shevchenko was revered more among the Great Russian revolutionaries than in Ukraine. His embittered Cossack mania was more to the heart of the Russian “underground” than Drahomanov’s European socialism.

It was in vain that Kulish and Kostomarov tried to convince the Russian public that Shevchenko’s “concepts and feelings were never, even in the most difficult moments of his life, defiled either by a narrow, crude hostility towards the Great Russian people, or by quixotic dreams of local political independence, or by the slightest shadow of anything like that.” did not appear in his poetic works." They disputed a completely obvious fact. There is no number of hostile and malicious attacks in his poems against Muscovites. And it is impossible to interpret this as hatred of the ruling Tsarist Russia alone. All Muscovites, the entire Russian people are hated by him. Even in purely love stories, where a Ukrainian girl suffers after being deceived, the deceiver is always a Muscovite.

Complaining to Osnovyanenko about his life in St. Petersburg (“there are strangers all around”), he [Shevchenko] sighs: “It’s hard, dad, living behind the gates.” This is about St. Petersburg, which bought him out of captivity, gave him an education, introduced him to the cultural environment and subsequently rescued him from exile...

...He was declared a “national poet” not because he wrote in Little Russian and not because he expressed the depths of the people’s spirit. This is exactly what we don’t see. Many before and after Shevchenko wrote in Ukrainian, often better than him, but only he is recognized as a “prophet”. Reason: - he was the first to resurrect Cossack hatred of Moscow and the first to sing about Cossack times as national ones. Kostomarov fails to convince us that “Shevchenko said what every people’s person would say if his people’s feeling could rise to the ability to express what was stored at the bottom of his soul.” His poetry is intellectual, urban and directional. Belinsky, immediately after the publication of “Kobzar”, noted the falseness of its nationality:

“If gentlemen Kobzari think with their poems to benefit the lower class of their compatriots, then they are very mistaken; their poems, despite the abundance of the most vulgar and vulgar words and expressions, lack the simplicity of fiction and storytelling, are filled with frills and manners characteristic of all bad poems, and are often not at all folk, although they are supported by references to history, songs and legends, therefore, according to all these signs are incomprehensible to the common people and have nothing in them that sympathizes with them.”

Forty years later, Drahomanov repeated the same thing, believing that “Kobzar” “cannot become a completely popular book, nor one that would fully serve the preaching of the “new truth” among the people.”

The same Drahomanov testifies to the complete failure of attempts to bring Shevchenko to the grassroots of the people. All attempts to read his poems to men ended in failure. The men remained cold.

Just as the Cossacks who captured Ukraine were not a popular phenomenon, so any attempt to resurrect them, be it politics or poetry, is not popular to the same extent.

Despite all the propaganda efforts of the independent clique, coupled with the Soviet regime, Shevchenko was and will remain not a national Ukrainian poet, but a poet of the nationalist movement.”

“According to Kostomarov, in the 60s Kulish “was considered a fanatic of Little Russia, a fan of the Cossacks; his name was inseparably attached to the so-called Ukrainophilism.” After this, metamorphosis occurs. For about ten years he fell silent, disappeared from the pages of print, and only in 1874 did he appear again. This year the first book of his three-volume work, “The History of the Reunification of Rus',” was published. The long silence was explained by classes on the history of Little Russia. Kulish examined the most important event in its fate - the Khmelnitsky uprising and annexation to Moscow. He raised a mountain of material, went through and changed his mind about the past of his region and, according to the same Kostomarov, “completely changed his views on everything Little Russian, both on the past and on the modern.” Wide acquaintance with sources, a critical attitude towards falsifications, presented the Cossacks to him in an unexpected light. Knightly armor and democratic togas were stripped from this robber anti-state gathering. Friends, including Kostomarov, were dissatisfied with this too open crushing of the idols they had served all their lives, but they did not make serious objections to the data cited by Kulish. Having debunked the Cossacks, he assessed the poetry of his friend Shevchenko differently.

In Ukrainophile homes, portraits of Kulish and Shevchenko always hung together, like two apostles of the “national revival.” Now one of them calls the muse of his late friend “half-drunk and dissolute.” The poet’s shadow, in his words, “must mourn on the banks of Acheron for its former insanity.” Insanity meant national hatred, mainly Russophobia, poured out in Shevchenko’s poems. Here is the defamation of the names of Peter, Catherine and all the attacks against Muscovites. Only when he himself freed himself from the seductions of Cossack lies and falsehood did Kulish understand how these lies spoil the poetry of the “kobzar,” whom he once compared with Shakespeare and Walter Scott. According to him, rejecting much that Shevchenko wrote in his worst time would be an “act of mercy for the poet’s shadow” on the part of society.

There was a poetic rebuttal to him regarding the glory of Ukraine. The creator of “Zapovit” considered it Cossack glory, which would never be “more than the field.” Kulish insisted that she was “more polite”, that the Cossacks were not an adornment, but a disgrace to Ukrainian history.

Kulish also condemned his previous literary activities. About “The Tale of the Ukrainian People,” where his nationalist views were clearly revealed for the first time, he expressed himself sternly, calling it “a compilation of those inventions that are harmful to our minds, which our chroniclers invented about the Poles, and those that our kobzars composed about the Jews, to excite or for the amusement of drunken Cossacks, and those who are sorted out according to the apocrypha of supposedly ancient legends and according to historical documents forged during the time of our great-grandfathers. It was one of those utopian and fantastic works without criticism, from which the entire history of Poland’s struggle with Moscow is sewn together.” You need to know the reverence with which Kulish pronounced the words “kobzar” and “dumas” in his early years in order to understand the depth of the revolution that took place in him.

It was caused not only by his own research, but also by the appearance of works, such as “A critical review of the development of the main Russian sources relating to the history of Little Russia” by prof. G. Karpova. The Ukrainophiles themselves have done a lot to expose the fakes. It became known, for example, that “The Thought about the Gifts of Batory,” “The Thought about the Chigirin victory won by Nalivaika over Zholkiewski,” “The Song about the Burning of Mogilev,” “The Song about Loboda,” “The Song about Churai” and many others were forged in the 18th century. and in the 19th centuries. According to the conclusion of Kostomarov, who specially dealt with this issue, there is not a single Little Russian “duma” or song related to the struggle of the Cossacks with Poland, before Bogdan Khmelnitsky, the authenticity of which can be confident.

It has been noted that Ukrainian forgeries are not generated by a love of poetry or a passion for stylization. This is not like Macpherson's Ossian or Mérimée's Songs of the Western Slavs. They pursue political goals. They were fabricated by the same circles that fabricated false documents from the history of the Cossacks, composed historical legends, included them in the Cossack chronicles and created the “History of the Rus”. It is very possible that some songs were forged to justify and reinforce the corresponding pages of the “History of the Rus”.

Having learned all this, Kulish began to take up arms against his former idols with the same fervor with which he had once served them. Lack of education, lack of scientific knowledge in the field of national history became in his eyes the greatest vice and crime, which he did not forgive the nationalist-minded intelligentsia of his time. The tone of his statements about this intelligentsia becomes sarcastic and irritated. Having arrived in Galicia in the early 80s, he is horrified by the Ukrainophiles there, seeing the same false patriotism based on pseudoscience, on falsified history, even more so than in Ukraine itself. The figures of the Galician national movement shocked him with their spiritual and intellectual appearance. In the book “Krashanka,” published in 1882 in Lvov, he frankly writes about these people who are unable to “rise to the point of self-condemnation, being a people systematically suppressed by squalor, the last people in civilization among the Slavic peoples.” He appeals to the local Polish intelligentsia with a call to “save dark people from gullibility and pseudo-enlightened people from Haidamak philosophy.”

The modern Russian reader is so little informed about this important episode that much connected with it will be incomprehensible to him without some necessary information.

From the previous chapters it is clear that not only did the ruling Russia’s hostility towards the Little Russian language not exist, but there was a certain benevolence. St. Petersburg and Moscow publications in Ukrainian are the best evidence of this. This benevolence intensified during the reign of Emperor Alexander II.

In 1861, the idea arose of printing official state documents in Little Russian, and the first such experiment was to be the February 19 manifesto on the emancipation of the peasants. The initiative came from P. Kulish and was positively received at the top. On March 15, 1861, the highest permission for the transfer followed. But when the translation was made and a month later submitted for approval by the State Council, it was not considered possible to accept it. Kulish even before this had a scandalous case of translating the Bible with his famous “Hai dufae Srul na Pana” (Let Israel trust in the Lord). Now, when translating the manifesto, the complete absence of state-political terminology in the Little Russian language was reflected. The Ukrainophile elite had to quickly compose it. They were composed by introducing Polonisms or distorting Russian words. The result was not only a linguistic deformity, but also a text completely incomprehensible to the Little Russian peasant, at least less understandable than ordinary Russian. Subsequently published in Kievskaya Starina, it served as material for humor.

But when, in 1862, the St. Petersburg Literacy Committee filed a petition for the introduction of teaching in the local dialect in the People's Schools of Little Russia, it was accepted for consideration and the Minister of Public Education A.V. Golovnin himself supported it. In all likelihood, this project would have been approved if it had not been for the outbreak of the Polish uprising, which alarmed the government and public circles.

It turned out that the rebels relied on Little Russian separatism and inciting peasant agrarian unrest in the south of Russia, through propaganda brochures and proclamations in the vernacular. And then it was noticed that some Ukrainophiles willingly collaborated with the Poles on the basis of distributing such brochures. Papers found during searches of Polish leaders revealed direct connections between Ukrainian nationalists and the uprising. There is a well-known case of Potebnya, the cousin of the famous linguist, who joined the rebels. Perhaps the main informants who opened the government's eyes to the connection between Ukrainian nationalism and the uprising were the Poles themselves, only not those who were preparing the uprising, but others - the landowners of the right bank of the Dnieper. Sympathizing with the uprising and establishing connections between its leaders and Ukrainophiles (with Sunday school teachers, with students of the “Provisional Pedagogical School”), they were in great dismay when they learned that the rebels were heading for inciting peasant revolts in Ukraine. General Maroslavsky’s slogan about the awakening of “our belated Khmelnytsky region” was a real blow for them. I had to choose between the liberation of Poland and the integrity of my estates. They chose the latter.

Having collected information about the nature of Ukrainophilism in this way, St. Petersburg decided to “stop” sedition. If this were in some European country rich in political experience, like France, the administration would have settled the matter quietly, without giving rise to talk and without causing unnecessary discontent. But the Russian ruling environment was not distinguished by such subtlety of techniques. Apart from circulars, orders, menacing shouts, and police repression, there were no other means in her toolkit. The project of teaching in the Little Russian language was not allowed to proceed, and the printing of Little Russian books was decided to be limited.

On July 18, 1863, the Minister of Internal Affairs P. A. Valuev addressed the “attitude” to the Minister of Public Education A. V. Golovnin, notifying him that, with royal approval, he considered it necessary, temporarily, “pending an agreement with the Minister of Public Education, Chief -prosecutor of the Holy Synod and chief of gendarmes" to allow for publication only such works in the Little Russian language, "which belong to the field of fine literature", but not to allow any books of spiritual content, nor textbooks, nor "generally intended for the initial reading of the people." This first restriction was called “temporary” by the minister himself and did not have any serious consequences - it disappeared the next year. But it gained great fame because of the words: “there was no Little Russian language, there is no and there cannot be,” used by Valuev. These words, snatched from the text of the document and spread by propaganda all over the world, served as proof of official Russia’s contempt and hatred for the Ukrainian language as such. The majority of not only readers, but also those who wrote about this episode, knew nothing about it except this odious phrase, and did not read the text of the document.

Meanwhile, Valuev not only shows no contempt for the Little Russian language, but he recognizes a number of Little Russian writers in this language, “distinguished by more or less remarkable talent.” He is well aware of the debate going on in the press regarding the possibility of the existence of independent Little Russian literature, but immediately declares that he is not interested in this side of the problem, but exclusively in considerations of state security.

“Recently, the question of Little Russian literature has acquired a different character, due to purely political circumstances that have nothing to do with literary interests proper.” The former Little Russian writing was the property of only one educated layer, “now the adherents of the Little Russian people have turned their attention to the unenlightened masses, and those of them who strive to realize their political plans have begun, under the pretext of spreading literacy and education, to publish books for basic reading, primers, grammars, geographies, etc. Among such figures were many persons whose criminal actions were investigated by a special commission.

The minister is worried not about the spread of the Little Russian word as such, but about the fear of anti-government propaganda in this language among the peasants. It should not be forgotten that Valuev’s speech was undertaken at the very height of peasant unrest throughout Russia and the Polish uprising. What frightens him most of all is the activity of the Poles:

“This phenomenon is all the more regrettable and deserves attention because it coincides with the political plans of the Poles and almost owes its origin to them, judging by the manuscripts received by the censor, and because most of the Little Russian works actually come from the Poles.

Neither in the “attitude” of Valuev, nor in any other statements by members of the government, it is possible to find hostile feelings towards the Little Russian language. A.V. Golovnin, the Minister of Public Education, openly objected to the Valuev ban. Subsequently, during the era of the second decree, the Ministry of Agriculture printed agricultural brochures in Little Russian, regardless of the prohibitions.

As for the famous words about the fate of the Little Russian language, it is necessary to cite in full the entire part of the document in which they appear. Then it will turn out that they belong not so much to Valuev as to the Little Russians themselves. The minister refers to the difficulties experienced by the St. Petersburg and Kyiv censorship committees, which receive most of the books “for the people” and textbooks he lists. The committees are afraid to let them pass for the reason that all instruction in Little Russian schools is conducted in the general Russian language and there is still no permission to allow teaching in the local dialect in schools.

“The very question of the benefits and possibility of using this dialect in schools has not only not been resolved, but even the raising of this issue has been accepted by the majority of Little Russians with indignation, often expressed in the press. They very thoroughly prove that there was, is not, and cannot be any special Little Russian language, and that their dialect, used by the common people, is the same Russian language, only spoiled by the influence of Poland on it; that the all-Russian language is just as understandable for Little Russians as it is for Great Russians, and even much more understandable than the so-called Ukrainian language now composed for them by some Little Russians and especially Poles. The majority of the Little Russians themselves reproach the people of that circle, which is trying to prove the opposite, for separatist plans, hostile to Russia and disastrous for Little Russia.”

From this passage it is clear that the judgment expressed in it about the Little Russian language does not belong to Valuev himself, but represents a summary of the corresponding statements of “the majority of Little Russians.” Obviously, this “majority” did not perceive government prohibitions as “national oppression.

The decree of 1876 did not bring harm to anyone except the autocracy. For the Ukrainian movement it turned out to be manna from heaven. Without causing any real damage, it gave him the long-awaited crown of martyrdom. You need to listen to the stories of old Ukrainians who remember the nineties and nine hundred years in order to understand all the thirst for persecution that the independence of that time felt. Having gathered on a holiday in the city garden, or in the market square, dressed in national costumes, the “suspilniks” with a conspiratorial look began to sing “Oh, on the mountain that reaper will reap”; then they looked around with feigned fear, waiting for the police. The police didn't show up. Then someone's keen eye could discern in the distance the figure of a bored policeman at his post - a fellow Ukrainian and, perhaps, a great lover of folk songs. "Police! Police!". Blue trousers and colorful plakhtas rushed to flight, “pursued by no one.” This game of pursuit signified an unsatisfied need for real pursuits."

“Shortly before Drahomanov’s departure, an event occurred that was a real blow to him. Like the Cyril-Methodians, he was a follower of the idea of a Slavic federation. And now the time has come to serve this idea for real. A Slavic uprising against the Turks broke out in the Balkans. It is known how Russian society reacted to this. From all over Russia, including Little Russia, thousands of volunteers rushed to help the rebels. The community became agitated. A meeting was held at Drahomanov’s apartment, where it was decided to send a detachment to the Balkans, which, without mixing with other volunteers, would come there under the Ukrainian flag.

We set about organizing. Debagoriy-Mokrievich went to Odessa for this purpose, the rest began recruiting hunters in Kyiv. The result was this: Debagoriy managed to “capture” only one volunteer, and in Kyiv six people stood under the Ukrainian flag, and even then these were “illegal” people who were looking for a way to escape abroad.

Knowing that the cause to which you dedicated your life is unpopular in your own country is one of the most difficult experiences. Drahomanov’s departure did not mean the impossibility of working in his homeland, but a tacit recognition of the failure of Ukrainophilism in Russia and an attempt to achieve its success in Austria.”

“Ukraine studied in all-Russian schools, read Russian books and absorbed Russian education, Galicia studied in Polish, and then, in the 19th century, in German. Despite the strong development of Russophilism, in the second half of the 19th century, every educated Galician had much less understanding of Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Goncharov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky than of Mickiewicz, Slovacki, Wyspiansky, Sienkiewicz. It has been noted that even information about Russia and Ukraine was gleaned by Galicians, most often from the German press. Is it surprising that Ukrainians and Galicians treated and treat many issues of cardinal importance differently? It is difficult, for example, to find an educated Ukrainian who would condemn Prince. Vladimir the Saint for planting Byzantine culture in Rus'. For Galicians, this is an odious person. For them, first of all, he is not a “saint,” but only a “great one,” and his historical mission is condemned in every possible way: he gave Rus' the wrong faith and the wrong culture that it should have.

“In all Austro-Hungarian possessions inhabited by fragments of the Russian tribe - in Galicia, in Bukovina, in Ugric Rus' - national revival was understood as a return to the common Russian language and to the common Russian culture. Overrun by Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, and Germans, the population of these lands spontaneously gravitated towards Russia as their metropolis. The movement of Paskevich's army of one hundred thousand in 1849, which marched to suppress the Hungarian uprising, had a completely hypnotizing effect on him. She not only blinded him with her power and surrounded the image of Russia with a halo of invincibility, but the common people living in villages and towns were deeply moved by the fact that this entire armada spoke a completely understandable, almost local language. For the Ugric Rusyns, the coming of the Russians was the greatest triumph.

The reasons for such attraction to Russia in a country where Polish education and the Polish language have made such progress and where the intelligent stratum of people is represented exclusively by the Uniate clergy would be inexplicable if not for the Church Slavonic language. The Uniate Church served in this language, and it was this language that saved the Galicians from final Polonization. He constantly reminded us of a single Russian root, of the direct continuity of the Russian literary language with the language of Kievan Rus. That is why the leaders of Ukrainianism hated and continue to hate “Church Slavism.”

The Poles, however, soon realized that the Polonization of Galicians under the conditions of the Austrian Empire was not an easy matter. There were people who proved that it was unnecessary. Ukrainization promised more benefits; it is not as odious as Polishization, people are more susceptible to it, and having become Ukrainian, they will no longer be Russian.

In this spirit, the treatment of the Viennese government began, which liked the idea of Ukrainization because it allowed them to move from a defensive position to an offensive one.

The Russification of the Galicians was fraught with the danger of secession of the region; Ukrainization not only did not carry such a danger, but could itself serve as a weapon for separating Ukraine from Russia and its annexation to Galicia.

It is possible and desirable to defend a peasant against the master and set him against the master in Russian Ukraine, but in Polish Galicia it meant “nihilism,” “cosmopolitanism,” and high treason.

The West, according to him, knew only the face of nationally oppressed Poland turned towards it, but did not notice its oppressive face to the East, where it acted as an enslaver of foreign nationalities. The slogan “for our and your freedom!” will remain a lie, according to Drahomanov, until the Poles refuse to consider Lithuanian, Latvian, Belarusian and Ukrainian lands “theirs”.

If in Kyiv they were running around with the idea of unifying all Slavs, including Russians, then in Lvov this meant a state crime that threatened the collapse of the Tsar's empire. Instead of a Slavic federation, they talked about an all-Ukrainian unification. In practice, this meant the union of Ukraine with Galicia. It was not conceived on a republican basis; The people were good subjects of their emperor and did not want any other power. Believing that the constitution of 1868 had opened an era of prosperity for them, they wanted to extend it to their “abroad” brothers, the Ukrainians.

The People’s People began to call themselves Ukrainians, and call Galicia Ukraine, in order to assert their right to care and have their hearts ache for these brothers who groaned under the boot of tsarism. Galicians and Little Russians were declared a single people, speaking the same language, having a common ethnography. They began to popularize Little Russian poets and writers hitherto unknown in Galicia - Kotlyarevsky, Kvitka, Marko Vovchka, Shevchenko. The episode of 1876 only temporarily shook the tripod of the “Great Kobzar”. As soon as it was possible to dress him up in the Polish manner and hide somewhere the verses that were “inconsonant” with the people, he was restored to his prophecy and apostolate.

Having accepted the Cossack name of Ukraine and Ukrainians, the People’s People could not help but recognize the Cossack past as their family. His “republicanism” and “democracy” were not admired, but his Russophobia, his songs and “thoughts” in which Moscow was vilified were quite to their liking. They began to create fashion for everything Cossack. Like any fashion, it was expressed in appearance. Suddenly, young people dressed as either coachmen or haiduks began to walk along the Lviv streets, causing curiosity and bewilderment among Galicians who had never known the Cossacks. Later, “Sichs” began to emerge in rural areas. This was the name of the volunteer fire brigade. Each such Sich had its own “koshevoy ataman”, “esaul”, “scribe”, “treasurer”, “cornet”, etc. Putting out fires was a secondary matter; The main occupation consisted in ceremonies, in marching, when at the head of a detachment of such fine fellows in blue trousers there was an “ataman” with a mace, the “surmach” trumpeted, and the “cornet” carried the banner. This achieved education in the conciliar-Ukrainian spirit.

It is worthy of attention that even today Galician pan-Ukrainians, who speak with such malice about old Russia, do not mention Austria at all among the historical enemies of Ukrainian culture and independence. In popular histories of their region, such as “History of Ukraine with Illustrations,” the Tsar’s government is even praised for the establishment of schools “based on German learning.” Thanks to these schools, education in the region made such great strides that “all of them poured (influenced) the culture of our people, and so our national birth began.” And on the same page - furious abuse against the Russian tsars, who “started a Moscow language, Moscow schools, and tried to start a Russian language instead of a Ukrainian one.” There is no end to the indignant outcry about Valuev’s decree on the Ukrainian language, but not a single Galician responded accordingly to the conclusion of the Austrian government commission, which spoke in 1816 about the Galician dialect as completely unsuitable for teaching it in schools, “where people should be trained educated."

The picture that emerged was: people were fighting not for their own national liberation and not against the state that oppressed them, but against a foreign state that oppressed their “abroad brothers.” “Glorious Ukraine has disappeared - the damned Muscovite is wielding.

Of all the haters of Russia and the Russian people, the Galician pan-Ukrainians currently deserve the palm. There is no abuse, dirt and slander that they would be ashamed to throw at Russia and the Russians. They definitely set out to concentrate and square all the bad things that have been said about Russia at all times by its enemies. That Russians are not Slavs and not Aryans, but representatives of the Mongol-Finnish tribe, among which they constitute the most backward bestial group, that they are dirty, lousy, lazy, cowardly and have the basest spiritual qualities - every Galician independentist knows this from childhood.

“When they say “anti-Bolshevik bloc of oppressed peoples,” they think of an anti-Russian bloc.”

“For a thousand years, the Little Russians and all Slavs, with the exception of the Catholicized Poles and Czechs, used the Cyrillic alphabet. Linguists have long recognized that this is the best alphabet in the world, most perfectly conveying the phonetics of Slavic speech. It never occurred to any Little Russian to complain about the discrepancy between its letters and the sounds of the Little Russian dialect. There were no complaints about the typographical “civilian” font, which came into use since the time of Peter the Great. But from the middle of the 19th century, the abandonment of this alphabet began. The founder was Kulish, during the period of his frantic Ukrainophilism. “Kuleshovka,” named after him, represented the same old Russian alphabet, from which, only, the letter “y” was expelled, replacing it with the sign “and”, and to fill the resulting void, the function “and” was expanded and the sign “unknown to the previous alphabet” was introduced. And". This is the alphabet that is now legalized in the USSR. But in old Russia it was banned in the 90s, and for Galicia it was unacceptable from the very beginning due to its too timid departure from the Russian alphabet.

The Russian government and the Russian public, who did not understand the national question and had never dealt with it, did not delve into such “little things” as the alphabet; but in more sophisticated Austria, the political significance of spelling among the Slavs subordinate and non-subordinate to it had long been appreciated. Not a single written reform in the Balkans took place without her careful observation and participation. It was considered a great achievement to achieve modification of at least one or two letters and make them different from the letters of the Russian alphabet. To achieve this, they resorted to all types of influence, from bribery to diplomatic pressure.

If already in the 17th and 18th centuries there was no difference between Ukrainian and Moscow, as O. Ogonovsky claims, then doesn’t this mean the existence of linguistic unity? Throwing overboard the Moscow one, was it possible not to throw away the Ukrainian one? The Polonophile people were ready to throw away anything so as not to use the same language as Russia, and the Ukrainians “from the start” suffered too much from a national inferiority complex not to succumb to this temptation. They were not sobered even by the examples of Germany and Austria, France and Belgium, Spain and South America, whose independent states existed and exist despite their common languages.

“Russian writing, whatever it may be, is still its own, native to all enlightened Ukrainians, while Ukrainian exists among them for a narrow circle, for “household use,” as Yves said. Aksakov and Kostomarov"

“The difficulty of Ogonovsky, like all other scientists of his type, lies in the complete gap between the new Ukrainian literature, and the literature of the Kyiv times, declared by the independentists to also be Ukrainian. These two different writing systems have nothing in common either in spirit, or in motives, or in tradition. To unite them, to establish continuity between them, to draw any thread from “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” to Kvitka-Osnovyanenko, to Marko Vovchk or from Abbot Daniel, from Metropolitan Hilarion and Kirill of Turov to Taras Shevchenko is completely impossible. At the same time, it is impossible not to notice the direct genetic connection, accessible even to the unscientific eye, between the writing of the Kievan state and later all-Russian literature. How to resolve these two major troubles? To completely abandon the ancient Kiev literary heritage means to give it completely to the Muscovites. This would mean giving up the magnificent pedigree, the great power, Vladimir, Yaroslav, Monomakh would have to be crossed out from the number of their ancestors and left with only Horseshoes, Cats and Nalivayki. But accepting the Kiev legacy and extolling it is also dangerous. Then the question would certainly arise: where did the Ukrainian literary language of the 19th century come from and why is it in such contradiction with the evolution of the ancient language?”

“Ogonovsky’s historical and literary method was a great success and was transferred to the study of all other branches of Ukrainian culture. The search began for any outstanding painters, engravers, musicians among the Poles, Germans or Russians of Little Russian origin. All of them, even those who were born and raised in Vienna, Krakow or Moscow, were included in the register of figures of Ukrainian culture. This was done on the basis that, as one independent newspaper in Canada recently put it, “friends of the people knocked out, outperformed, outbought, re-sold, or even after their death stole Ukrainian great people to enrich their culture.” Now these “vidbited” and “vidperty” have begun to be returned to the Ukrainian fold. Levitsky, Borovikovsky, Bortnyansky, Bogdanovich, Gnedich were quite successfully taken away from the Russians, and there is a danger that Gogol will be taken away.

In the same way, Ukrainian mathematics, physics, and natural science arose. Having become the head of the Scientific Partnership named after. Shevchenko and reorganizing it in 1898 on the model of the academy, Grushevsky set the task of creating Ukrainian science. A few years later he announced to the whole world that it had been created. The Partnership found works written at different times in Polish, Russian, and German by people who were supposed to be of Ukrainian or Galician origin; all of this was translated into Ukrainian, published in the “Notes” of the Partnership and declared a Ukrainian national treasure. At the same time, the Partnership encouraged all kinds of measurements of skulls with the aim of discovering the anthropological “type of Ukrainian”.

Finally, the “Short Geography of Ukraine”, a work by Lvov professor S. Rudnitsky, appeared, thanks to which the world became acquainted with the lands and waters of the cathedral Ukraine. The book created a sensation with its outlines of the borders of the new state. It turned out that it is larger than all European countries, with the possible exception of Russia; it included, in addition to Russian Ukraine, Galicia, Carpathian Rus' and Bukovina, also Crimea, Kuban, and part of the Caucasus. The Black and Azov Seas were declared “Ukrainian” and the same name was extended to a good part of the western coast of the Caspian Sea. In the illustrations depicting “Ukrainian” landscapes one can see Ayu-Dag, Ai-Petri in the Crimea, the Georgian Military Road and Elbrus in the Caucasus. The author even managed to establish the distinctive features of the Ukrainian climate, independent and independent. Judging by the fact that the editor of the book was Grushevsky himself, it followed his policy of creating Ukrainian science.

The lower culture of the northern and northeastern lands in comparison with Kiev is constantly emphasized, but this is explained not by their provincial position in relation to Kyiv, but by some much greater differences. From the entire sum of statements it is clear that these differences are racial. In full agreement with Dukhinsky's point of view, the future Great Russian regions were considered inhabited not by Slavs, but only by Slavicized foreigners, mainly by Finno-Ugric tribes - racially inferior. Neither cyclopean shifts in the destinies of peoples under the influence of invasions, such as the Hunnic or Tatar, nor changes of names, nor mixing of blood and cultures, nor natural and forced migrations, nor cultural evolution, nor new ethnic formations exist for him. The Ukrainian nation has gone through all the storms and floods without getting its feet wet, maintaining its racial virginity, almost from the Stone Age. As you know, the Tatar invasion was especially devastating for the Russian south. Plano Carpini, who was traveling through the territory of present-day Ukraine five years later, did not see a living soul there, only bones. Grushevsky devoted an extensive volume, about 600 pages, to proving the incorrectness of the version about the desolation of Ukraine under Batu. Historical science does not highly value this research, but in this case it is not of interest whether it is right or wrong, but rather the tendency that gave rise to it, dictated by separatist schemes and theories. Grushevsky cannot be considered their creator; they were created before him in Cossack Ukraine and in partitioned Poland.

Having spent so much effort to declare the Kiev State Ukrainian, Grushevsky leaves it almost unconnected with the subsequent history of Ukraine.

“There is no doubt that under normal conditions, with the free, unconstrained will of the people, all independent tricks and inventions would remain circus tricks. There was no basis for their implementation either among the intelligentsia or among the common people. The separatists knew this very well. One of them, Sriblyansky, wrote in 1911: “The Ukrainian movement cannot be based on the balance of social forces, but only on its moral right: if it listens to the majority of voices, it will have to close up shop - the majority is against it.”

Formal Ukrainian nationalism won with the support of external forces and circumstances that lay outside the independent movement and outside Ukrainian life in general. The First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution are the magic elephants on which he managed to ride into history. All the wildest wishes came true, as in a fairy tale: a national-state territory, a national government, national schools, universities, academies, its own press, and that literary language, against which there were so many objections in Ukraine, was made not only book and school, but state .

The Second World War completed the building of the Ukrainian Cathedral. Galicia, Bukovina, Carpathian Rus', which had not been annexed until then, were included in its composition. Under Khrushchev, Crimea was given to her. If the Caucasus is given up under Brezhnev, then Rudnitsky’s geographical dream will come true.

Everything was done through sheer violence and intrigue. Residents of vast territories were not even asked about their desire or unwillingness to stay in conciliar Ukraine. The fate of the Carpatho-Russians, for example, is simply tragic. This people, who for centuries languished under the Magyar yoke, who endured a heroic struggle to preserve their Russianness and dreamed of nothing but reunification with Russia and a return to the bosom of Russian culture, was even deprived of the rights of a national minority in the Ukrainian republic - they were declared the Ukrainian people. Russian and world democracy, which raises a fuss at the slightest infringement of any cannibalistic tribe in Africa, has passed over in complete silence the fact of the forced Ukrainization of the Carpatho-Russians.

However, wasn’t it with the same silence that the forced Ukrainization of the Little Russian people took place about forty-five years ago? This fact has been erased and silenced in journalism and history. Neither the common people nor the intelligentsia were asked in what language they wished to study and write. It was prescribed by the supreme authority."

“Russian “society” never condemned, and the authorities did not punish, independent people for collaborating with external enemies. Grushevsky, who left for Lvov and for twenty years forged a conspiracy against Russia there, conducting open propaganda for its destruction, calmly came when he needed to both Kiev and St. Petersburg, published his books there and enjoyed extraordinary favor in all public circles. In those very years when he reviled Russia to the whole world for clamping down on the “Ukrainian word,” his articles, written in Ukrainian, were published in the holy of holies of Russian Slavic studies - in the second department of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and not just somehow, but in phonetic transcription.

When he finally, in 1914, fell into the hands of the Russian military authorities on Austrian territory and, as an obvious traitor, was to be exiled to Siberia, intensified efforts began in Moscow and St. Petersburg to alleviate his fate. They arranged it so that Siberia was replaced by Nizhny Novgorod, and then they found this too “cruel” - they got him exiled to Moscow.

Providing support and patronage to Ukrainophilism has been considered a direct public duty for a long time.

And this despite the blatant ignorance of the Russian intelligentsia on the Ukrainian issue. N.G. Chernyshevsky can be considered an example. Knowing nothing about Little Russia except what can be read from Shevchenko, and knowing absolutely nothing about Galicia, he makes categorical and very harsh judgments about Galician affairs. His articles “National Tactlessness” and “People’s Stupidity,” which appeared in Sovremennik in 1861, reveal his complete unfamiliarity with the local situation. Reproaching the Galicians for replacing the social issue with a national one, he apparently did not even think about the fact that both of these issues in Galicia are merged together, that there are no other peasants there except the Rusyns, just as there are no other landowners except Polish ones, with isolated exceptions , also no"

“The academic world was also absolutely tolerant of Ukrainian propaganda. He pretended not to notice her. In both capitals, close to academies and universities, books were published that developed fantastic Cossack theories, without encountering objections from pundits. One word from such giants as M.A. Dyakonov, S.F. Platonov, A.S. Lappo-Danilevsky was enough to turn all the intricacies of Grushevsky into dust. Instead, Grushevsky calmly published his political pamphlets in St. Petersburg under the name of histories of Ukraine. The criticism of such an expert on Cossack Ukraine as V. A. Myakotin could have completely exposed the falsification that underlay them, but Myakotin raised his voice only after the Russian catastrophe, having gone into exile. Until then, he was the best friend of the independents.

It is impossible for scientists to not notice their lies. There was an unwritten law according to which the right to lie was recognized for independent people. To expose them was considered a sign of bad taste, a “reactionary” act, for which a person risked receiving the title of “learned gendarme” or “general from history.” This title was awarded, for example, to the greatest Slavist, professor at Kyiv University, natural Ukrainian T. D. Florinsky. Apparently, he paid with his life for his anti-independence statements. At the very beginning of the revolution, he was killed, according to one version - by the Bolsheviks, according to another - by independents."

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