The question of the origin of the Ukrainian nation is one of the most controversial and controversial. Historians of “Independence” prove that the roots of the Ukrainian ethnic group are the most ancient in Europe, scientists from other countries are trying to refute them.
"Autochthonous" Ukrainians
Today, in the Ukrainian community, hypotheses are increasingly being expressed more and more boldly, according to which the history of the Ukrainian ethnic group should date back almost to primitive tribes. At least our southern neighbors are seriously considering the version according to which it was the Ukrainian ethnic group that became the basis for the emergence of the Great Russian and Belarusian peoples. Kiev journalist Oles Buzina was ironic about this hypothesis: “That is, according to the logic of its followers, a certain Pithecanthropus, hatching from a monkey in Africa, came to the banks of the Dnieper, and then slowly degenerated into a Ukrainian, from whom Russians, Belarusians and other peoples descended to the Hindus." Ukrainian historians, trying to make their roots ancient in defiance of Moscow, forget that for more than a thousand years, the lands from the Don to the Carpathians, subject to invasion by the Sarmatians, Huns, Goths, Pechenegs, Polovtsians, Tatars, repeatedly changed their ethnic appearance. Thus, the devastating Mongol conquest of the second quarter of the 13th century significantly reduced the number of inhabitants of the Dnieper region. “Most of the people of Russia were killed or taken captive,” wrote the Franciscan Giovanni del Plano Carpini, who visited these lands. For a long time, the former territories of the Principality of Kyiv were plunged into social and political turmoil. Until 1300 they were part of the Nogai ulus, from the 14th century they fell under the rule of the Principality of Lithuania, and two centuries later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth came here. Until recently, the strong element of the ancient Russian ethnos turned out to be thoroughly eroded. In the mid-17th century, Cossack uprisings broke out against Polish rule, which were the first attempts to restore national identity. Their result was the “Hetmanate,” which became an example of southern Russian autonomy under Cossack control.
First self-names
Until the middle of the 17th century, the term “Ukrainian” was not used as an ethnic designation. Even the most ideological historians of Independence recognize this. But in the documents of that time there are other words - Russians, Rusyns, Little Russians, and even Russians. In the “Protestation” of 1622 by the Kyiv Metropolitan Job Boretsky there are the following lines: “to every pious people of the Russian people... to all the pious Eastern Church, to the well-behaved great-famous people of the Russian people of every spiritual and spiritual dignity, to the pious people.” And here is a fragment of a 1651 letter from Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky to the Turkish Sultan Mehmed IV: “... and all Rus' that lives here, which is of the same faith with the Greeks and has its origins from them...”. By the way, in a thought recorded from the kobzar from the Chernihiv region, Andrei Shuta, it is said: “Why is Hetman Khmelnitsky, a Rusyn, in us.” Nezhinsky archpriest Simeon Adamovich in a letter to Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich is more specific: “... and because of those my labors, from your royal mercy, I did not want to leave Moscow at all, knowing the inconstancy of my brotherhood of Little Russian residents...”. The phrase “Little Rus'”, as the name of the Dnieper lands, was first recorded in 1347 in the message of the Byzantine emperor John Cantacuzene.
Outlying people
We first encountered the term “Ukraine” in 1213. This is the date of the chronicle message about the return of Russian cities bordering Poland by Prince Daniil of Galicia. There, in particular, it says: “Daniil rode with his brother and took Beresty, and Ugrovesk, and Stolpie, Komov and all of Ukraine.” Such an early mention of a controversial term is often used as evidence of the antiquity of the Ukrainian nation. However, in the chronicle context, in fact, as in the context of that era, various border, outlying lands in the Muscovite kingdom (“Siberian Ukraine”) and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (“Polish Ukraine”) were called “Ukraines”. Writer Vladimir Anishchenkov says: “The science of ethnology does not mark such a people as “Ukrainian” until the 19th century. Moreover, first by “Ukrainians” local residents Poles began to call it, then Austrians and Germans. This name was introduced into the consciousness of Little Russians for several centuries. Since the 15th century." However, in the minds of the Cossack elites, a single ethnic group living on the territory of Little Russia began to be isolated and opposed to its neighbors already in the second half of the 17th century. Zaporozhye ataman Ivan Bryukhovetsky wrote in an appeal to Hetman Petro Doroshenko: “Taking God to help, near our enemies before the Moscow ones, behold, there are Muscovites, who no longer have friendship with them... so that we know about such a Moscow and Lyak unprofitable intention for us and Ukraine, prepared to expect destruction, but they were not willing to bring themselves and the entire Ukrainian people to the point of known decline.” The term “Ukrainians” came to the residents of the Western regions of Ukraine, which were part of Austria-Hungary, the latest – at the beginning of the 20th century. The “Westerners” traditionally called themselves Rusyns (in the German version “Ruthens”).
“Mogholi! Mogoli!
It is curious that the pride of the Ukrainian nation, the poet Taras Shevchenko, did not use the ethnonym “Ukrainian” in any of his works. But in his message to his fellow countrymen there are the following lines: “The German will say: “You can.” “Mogholi! Mogoli! They teach the golden Tamerlane.” In the brochure “Ukrainian Movement” published in Berlin in 1925, the Russian emigrant and publicist Andrei Storozhenko wrote: “Observations on the mixing of races show that in subsequent generations, when crossing occurs within the same people, individuals can nevertheless be born that reproduce in pure form an ancestor of someone else's blood. Getting to know the leaders of the Ukrainian movement, starting from 1875, not from books, but in living images, we came away with the impression that “Ukrainians” are precisely individuals who have deviated from the all-Russian type in the direction of reproducing the ancestors of foreign Turkic blood.” But one of the most popular images of Ukrainian folklore – “Cossack knight Mamai” – is a clear confirmation of such an assumption. Where did the character in folk pictures get a purely Tatar nickname? Is he not the personification of the beklyarbek Mamai, whose descendants took part in the formation of the Cossacks in Ukraine? Translated from Turkic languages, “Cossack” means “robber”, “exile”. This is what they called the fugitives from Genghis Khan’s army who did not want to obey the despot and settled in the steppe regions of what is now Ukraine. The medieval Polish chronicler Jan Dlugosz wrote about the Crimean Tatars who attacked Volyn in 1469: “The Tatar army is made up of fugitives, miners and exiles, whom they call Cossacks in their language.” The idea of the Tatar roots of the current Ukrainian nation is also suggested by the results of archaeological excavations at the site of the battle of Berestechko (1651): it turns out that the Zaporozhye Cossacks did not wear crosses. Archaeologist Igor Svechnikov argued that the idea of the Zaporozhye Sich as a stronghold of Christianity is greatly exaggerated. It is no coincidence that the first church in the Zaporozhye freemen appeared only in the 18th century, after the Cossacks accepted Russian citizenship.
What geneticists say
One cannot help but pay attention to the ethnic diversity of the population of modern Ukraine. Ethnographers claim that the Pechenegs, Cumans and Tatars played no less a role in shaping the appearance of the “broad” Ukrainian than the Rusyns, Poles or Jews. Genetics generally confirms such assumptions. Similar studies were carried out by the Laboratory of Population Genetics of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, using genetic markers of the Y chromosome (transmitted through the male line) and mitochondrial DNA (pedigree of the female line). The results of the study, on the one hand, revealed significant genetic similarities between Ukrainians and Belarusians, Poles and residents of Western Russia, but on the other hand, they showed a noticeable difference between the three intra-Ukrainian clusters - western, central and eastern. In another study, this time by American scientists at Harvard University, the distribution of Ukrainians by haplogroup was analyzed more deeply. It turned out that 65-70% of Ukrainians belong to haplogroup R1a, which is characteristic of steppe peoples. For example, among the Kyrgyz it occurs in 70% of cases, among the Uzbeks - in 60%, among the Bashkirs and Kazan Tatars - in 50%. For comparison, in the Russian regions of the north-west - Novgorod, Pskov, Arkhangelsk, Vologda region– group R1a belongs to 30-35% of the population. Other haplogroups of Ukrainians were distributed as follows: three of them - R1b (Western European), I2 (Balkan), and N (Finno-Ugric) each have approximately 10% of representatives, another one - E (Africa, Western Asia) has approximately 5%. As for the “autochthonous” inhabitants of the territory of Ukraine, genetics is powerless here. “The genotypes of modern Ukrainians cannot tell us anything about ancient history population of Ukraine,” admits American geneticist Peter Forster.
The Great Anti-Russian Project of the West to create a separate Ukrainian people and state has two fundamental parts. This is the creation of a false history of the non-existent Ukrainian nation and endowing it with its own language, different from the historically inherent Russian one.
Let's see how and by whom the myth about the existence of the Ukrainian nation was born and what sophistications in relation to their own past they had to resort to for this.
Let’s ask ourselves: when and how did such concepts as “Ukraine” and “Ukrainian” first appear? How and where was the new “Ukrainian nation” “forged”?
Let us use historical facts for our analysis.
Consideration historical facts will lead us, as we will see below, to very interesting conclusions and will allow us to understand the nature of today's relations between Russia and Ukraine, as well as to predict their further development.
First, let us turn to the ancient history of Rus' from the 9th to the 13th centuries.
Well-known chronicle sources on the history of the 9th-13th centuries, i.e. For 5 centuries, a number of terms have been used as ethnonyms to name the population of Rus': “Rus”, “Russian clan”, “Russians”, “Russies”, “Russians”, “Russian people”. But all of them are based on two key words - “Rus” and “Russian”. This is exactly how the inhabitants of Rus' defined themselves in that distant time. They did not call themselves “Little Russians”, “Great Russians”, “Eastern Slavs”, “South Russian people” or “North Russian people”, “Russians”, and even less so “Ukrainians”. All these terms are the invention of modern times and, from a scientific point of view, have no right to be retroactively introduced into previous eras. Therefore, in order to restore an objective picture of the past, we must once and for all reject the terminological speculations on this topic of liberal communist and Ukrainian historiography as pseudoscientific and ahistorical. The term “Ukraine” is also found in chronicles, but always in the meaning of “border”, “border region”, “outskirts”. There is no toponym “Ukraine” in the sources of ancient Rus'! The attempts of the “Ukrainians” to retroactively attach it to them are a deliberate fabrication and falsification of real historical facts. Those. Neither ethnically nor culturally, Ancient Rus' contained anything “Ukrainian” in itself, much less there was any mention of “Ukrainians” as a certain ethnic group.
At this time, the names “Little Rus'” and “ White Rus'", as well as "Great Rus'". This division of territories, and not the Russian people, into some “ethnic groups” with the allocation of “Ukrainians” and “Belarusians” was supported by political events. From the 14th to the 18th centuries, the Russian people were divided between two states: the eastern Muscovite kingdom and the western one, ruled by Poles and Lithuanians. It was to designate the territories under the rule of the Poles and Lithuania that the names “Little Rus'” and “White Rus'” were used. Neither in the chronicles, nor in the historical documents of that time, not a single line is mentioned either “Ukraine”, or “Ukrainians”, or “Belarus”, or “Belarusians”.
The Polish-Lithuanian occupation of Little and White Rus', inhabited by Russians, affected the Russian language, culture and customs. The Russian language has been Polonized to a certain extent: quite a lot of Polish words have entered it and it is increasingly beginning to turn into a “language”, and Russian education is beginning to be supplanted. The upper classes of Little Russia are increasingly beginning to become related to Poles, speak Polish, some of them are converting to the Catholic faith, sending their children to Polish educational institutions, “turning” into Poles, and increasingly reorienting themselves to the West.
However, in the second half of the 16th century, the “Polishing” of the Slavic Russian language had not yet gone too far - “Ruska Mova” and the Russian language differed very little. Both in Kyiv and in Moscow the language was taught at that time using the same textbook - “Grammar” by Meletiy Smotritsky.
Those. the assimilation of the “tops” of Little Russia did not lead to the assimilation of the “bottoms,” although tangible losses were suffered here, primarily in cultural terms. However, the people as an integral organism did not lose their “Russianness”, retained the Orthodox faith, native language, and paternal traditions, which predetermined the national liberation war against Poland in 1648-1654. and the historical decision of the Pereyaslav Rada on the reunification of Little and Great Rus'.
After the reunification of southern and northern Rus' in 1654, when the influence of the Polish language ceased, the reverse process of gradual displacement of all kinds of Polonisms began under the general influence of the all-Russian literary language, in the creation of which, by the way, immigrants from Little Russia played a decisive role: Melety Smotrytsky, Epiphany Slavinetsky, Arseny Satanovsky, Semion Polotsky, Feofan Prokopovich and others, which indicates their fundamental disregard for “language” as an artificial and unviable phenomenon. By the way, in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania itself, until 1697, Russian was used as the official state language.
Dismembered by state borders, the Russian people not only retained the consciousness of their national unity, but also prepared the spiritual, material, and military prerequisites for the elimination of foreign rule over Little Russia and the reunification of the nation in a single state. Russians - this is how the people living on the territory of Little Rus' continued to define themselves.
It was not the “Ukrainians”, but the Russians who fought against lordly Poland for six years, covering themselves with unfading glory. It was not “Ukrainians”, but Russians who defended faith, freedom, the right to be themselves, and not forced Polish “claps”. Let us refer to Bohdan Khmelnytsky: in June 1648, moving to Lviv, the hetman sent a station wagon to the residents of the city: “I come to you as a liberator of the Russian people; I am coming to the capital city of the Chervono-Russian land to free you from Lyash (Polish) captivity.”
And here is the testimony of another contemporary, from the opposing camp - the Polish Hetman Sapieha: “Against us is not a gang of self-willed people, but the great power of the whole Rus'. The entire Russian people from villages, hamlets, towns, cities, bound by bonds of faith and blood with the Cossacks, threatens to eradicate the gentry tribe and raze the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the face of the earth.” As you can see, we are talking only about the Russian people. The struggle was not for “independent Ukraine,” but for the reunification of the two parts of Russia, the unification of Russians in one state.
As for the “Ukrains” (i.e., the outskirts), this term, as before, is applied in sources to a variety of territories. In Polish sources of the 16th century, the word “Ukraine” is often found (with an emphasis on the second syllable and with a small letter), from which two centuries later the Little Russian independentists would lead their fantastic country “Ukraine”, inhabited by the same fantastic “Ukrainian people”. Although the Poles, at first, by “Ukraine” meant the same borderland, outskirts, and did not tie it to any specific territory. It is not without reason that synonyms for “Ukrainian” in Polish were the words “ugraniche” and “border”.
The Polish king Stefan Batory, for example, wrote in his universals: “To the elders, sub-elders, rulers, princes, lords and knighthood, living in Russian Ukraine, Kyiv, Volyn, Podolsk and Bratslav” or “to all in general and to each individual of our Ukrainian elders " From the Polish historian Maciej Stryjkowski (d. 1582), author of the “Chronicles of Polish, Lithuanian, Zhmud and All Rus'” we find the following passages: “Albrecht, the royal nephew, caused losses in Ukraine (i.e. on the border) of the Polish and Zhmud lands.” . “Money was issued from the treasury to cavalry and foot captains in Moscow and Tatar Ukraine,” i.e. on the border with Russia and the steppe.
The terms “Ukraine” and “Ukrainian” also do not appear in the chronicles and documents of this era. The people inhabiting Little Rus' have never even heard of such names as “Ukraine” and “Ukrainian”.
In the mid-17th century, only part of the territories of Little and White Rus' were annexed to the Muscovite kingdom; the other part of the territories became part of it only at the end of the 18th century, during the partition of Poland.
Let's move on, the 18th century. Catherine the Great sought to decide the fate of Western Russian lands, most of which belonged to Poland in the 18th century. The Polish question was connected primarily with the rights of the Orthodox population in Poland and Lithuania - their rights were infringed in favor of the Uniate Church. The Prussian king Frederick "protected the rights of Protestants in Poland." Since the Polish Sejm refused to recognize the rights of the non-Catholic part of the population (i.e. Orthodox and Protestants, and in Poland itself there was a confrontation between various parties of the Polish nobility), Russia, Prussia and Austria intervened, and the matter ended in 1772 with the first partition of Poland. Prussia received Western Poland, which was populated mainly by Poles, Austria took possession of Galicia, populated by Poles and Russians, Russia received Polotsk, Vitebsk and Mogilev, populated by Russians. At the same time, it would be completely fair to note that those Russians who inhabited Galicia at that time spoke the Russian-Polish dialect of the Russian language, and those inhabiting the regions ceded to Russia spoke the Russian-Polish-Lithuanian dialect (the years of occupation of Russian lands had an impact).
In 1791, the Polish Sejm approved a new constitution, which transformed the former weak Polish state into a centralized one. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was formally included in Poland, which for Lithuania and Western Russia meant the strengthening of the policy of polonization. The publication of this constitution provoked a civil war in Poland. Conservative circles of the Polish nobility, dissatisfied with her, demanded Catherine's intervention. Russia sent troops and occupied Warsaw. The second partition of Poland took place in 1793. Russia received a significant part of present-day Belarus and Ukraine - Minsk, part of Volyn and Podolia. Prussia occupied Poznan.
In 1974, an uprising broke out in Warsaw, organized by Polish patriots led by Tadeusz Kosciuszko. A Polish revolutionary government was formed, which declared war on Russia and Prussia.
Catherine sent the best troops led by Suvorov, after which Poland ceased to exist as an independent state. In 1795, the third partition of Poland took place, as a result of which Prussia received Mazovia along with Warsaw, Austria took Lesser Poland with Krakow, Russia took Courland, Lithuania and the western part of Volhynia (these territories were inhabited by ethnic Russians, Lithuanians and Latvians).
As a result of the partitions of Poland, Russia regained its possessions in the southwestern Russian lands, excluding Kholm, Galicia, Carpathian Rus' and Bukovina. Thus, until the 19th century, the Russians were not reunited into a single state, but they continued to remain Russian.
At that time there was no mention of the existence of new ethnic groups - “Ukrainians” and “Belarusians” - such words were not known or used.
Even the “History of the Russians”, written at the end of the 18th century, does not know any “Ukrainians”, and yet the position of its author is one hundred percent Ukrainian. And if he knows nothing about the existence of “Ukrainians,” we should not even try to discover their presence in the era before the 19th century, in the forties of which they already loudly declared themselves. But if we do not exaggerate the hype raised around these first conscious (i.e., self-aware) “Ukrainians”, but resort to a purely arithmetic calculation of the available Ukrainian forces, then it turns out that we are talking about several hundred, at most a thousand people!
The period of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.
The exact date of the appearance of the first “Ukrainians” is the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. It was at this time that Count Jan Potocki first used the name “Ukrainians” in one of his works. The next ideologist of Ukrainianism, also a Pole, Count Thaddeus Chatsky, developed and deepened this Russophobic myth, declaring that “Ukrainians descended from the Ukrainians, a special horde that came to the place of Ukraine from across the Volga in the 7th century.” In reality, such a horde never existed. From the ukrov - Ukraine, from the Ukraine - “Ukrainians” - this is the scheme of the ethnogenesis of the “Ukrainian people” proposed by Chatsky. The thoughts of Yan Pototsky and Thaddeus Chatsky about the non-Russian origin of the “Ukrainians” were transferred through these individuals to the soil of the left bank of Little Russia and Sloboda Ukraine and found significant distribution here. That’s when Russians disappeared in Little Russia and “Ukrainians” appeared, supposedly as a special nationality.
However, this phenomenon was of a purely speculative, theoretical nature. In reality, the number of “Ukrainians” at that time amounted to several hundred Russophobic Little Russian outcasts, and a dozen mediocre writers of works in the Russian-Polish surzhik. It took two hundred years of tireless subversive work of this community of ethnic mutants, supported by generous financial, moral and political support from the world's largest powers, the catastrophe of several revolutions and wars with merciless anti-Russian terror in Little Russia, to produce from these several hundred a couple of million individuals, with a certain degree of certainty who can be classified as “Ukrainians”. But today, like two hundred years ago, this community is not a nation, but a political party.
Nikolai Ulyanov writes: “The Poles, in fact, can rightfully be considered the fathers of the Ukrainian doctrine... Thus, the very use of the words “Ukraine” and “Ukrainians” for the first time in literature began to be implanted by them... The Poles were not satisfied with either “Little Russia” or “Little Rus'”... The introduction of “Ukraine” began under Alexander I, when, having “Polished” Kyiv, covered the entire 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. The famous historian Kostomarov, who was a student at Kharkov University in the 30s, was fully exposed to this propaganda.
None other than the historian N.I. Kostomarov (1817-1885) introduced the concept of “Great Russian people” in the mid-19th century. It is Kostomarov who announces the residents Great Russia and Little Russia “two Russian nationalities”. The name of the people is not a trifle, and by replacing Russians with “Great Russians,” Kostomarov, like other founders of “Ukrainianism,” was doing nothing more than an application for the transition of Ancient Rus' to the inheritance of the “Ukrainians,” emphasizing the fact that the “Great Russians” were formed much later 9-12 centuries.
It is from this category of later inventions that the notorious “three branches” of the Russian people come: “Little Russians”, “Great Russians”, “Belarussians” - “nationalities” that did not leave any traces of their activities in historical sources. The reason is very banal: such ethnic groups never existed. The names from which the names of each “branch” were derived - Little, Great, White Rus' - never carried any ethnic or national content, serving only to designate the territories inhabited by the Russian people, who ended up in different states after the Tatar invasion and Polish conquest .
The concept of “three Russias”, which appeared in the 14th century - Great, Little and White - was in use for a long time, until 1917. But only in the 19th century. they began to be “populated” by three different nationalities, and exclusively among educated people. The people had no idea about this. Simple people, as in the times of Kievan Rus, they used one single ethnonym for their national identification - “Russians”. Moreover, this was typical for all Russians, no matter where they lived: in Little, White or Great Russia.
Even at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the concept of “Russians” meant Great Russians, Little Russians and Belarusians combined. In this sense, it was used by both representatives of the Russian intelligentsia (for example, P. Struve) and the “Ukrainian” (P.A. Kulish).
N.I. Ulyanov, a researcher of Ukrainian separatism, writes: “...“Great Russians” are a product of the mentality of the 19th-20th centuries.” He also points out the forces interested in the dissemination of this artificial, ahistorical terminology: Ukrainian separatism and the liberal revolutionary movement: “Both of these forces together began to propagate the term “Great Russian” in the 19th century press. In geography textbooks, a type of “Great Russian” appeared - bearded, wearing bast shoes, a homemade army coat and a sheepskin coat, and women in colorful sundresses, kokoshniks, and warriors.” The ethnography of the “Little Russians” and “Belarusians” was built on the same common folk types. Attention was focused, first of all, on differences in life, customs, and regional dialects. And these regional differences proved the presence of several nationalities, the notorious three branches.” What attracted people was not what united, but what separated.
The famous Little Russian falsifier of history, Mikhail Grushevsky (now considered the founder of “Ukrainian” history) introduces the adjective “eastern” in relation to the word “Slavs”. Subsequently, he himself abandoned the “Eastern Slavs”, replacing them, of course, with “Ukrainians”. From 1897 to 1901, the first 4 volumes of his future 10-volume “History of Ukraine - Rus'” were published.
At the end of the 19th century, movements were founded by the "Ukrainian" and "Belarusian" intelligentsia to protect their particular languages from Russian pressure. Moreover, the development of these movements was facilitated by... the Russians themselves. The academic world was also absolutely tolerant of Ukrainian propaganda. He pretended not to notice her. There was a 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.” 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 title “history of Ukraine.” Liberals, such as Mordovtsev in the St. Petersburg Gazette and Pypin in the Vestnik Evropy, defended independence more than the separatists themselves. “Vestnik Evropy” looked like a Ukrainophile magazine...Ukrainophilism seemed not only completely innocent, but also a respectable phenomenon, thinking only about cultural and economic development South Russian people...
Meanwhile, this phenomenon could not be called innocent. Grushevsky’s “works” played a huge role for “Ukrainian historiography.” This is what Sergei Rodin writes in his book “Renouncing the Russian Name”: “From the host of “Ukrainian historians,” Grushevsky, perhaps like no one else, corresponds to Gogol’s character Nozdryov. And not in some subtle way, but in the most literal similarity, because he also lied. He lied recklessly and without any embarrassment, although, unlike the owner of a pink mare and an unprecedented size of fish, he was far from disinterested... He began modestly. Having attached the Polish nickname “Ukraine” to the original name of ancient Rus' and thus obtaining the fantastic country “Ukraine-Rus,” Grushevsky populated it with the equally fantastic “Ukrainian-Russian people” (what a combination!). But unlike Kostomarov, he did not stop there, did not want to come to terms with the stamp of “Russianness” that the people he invented bore. As one of the means of expelling Russians from Rus' and Little Russia, he seized on the term “East Slavic peoples” in order to avoid, by his own admission, “confusion in the use of the concepts “Russian” in the meaning of Great Russian, “Russian” in the meaning of “East Slavic” and, finally, “Russian” in the meaning of Ukrainian(!).
Juggling with terms did not help much: the “Ukrainians” did not stand out in any way from the mass of Russians and did not show themselves in any way on the territory allocated for them in the designated era, with devilish cunning masquerading as ... Russians! The idea was becoming hopeless, but here the “father of Ukrainian historiography” came up with a solution that was brilliant in its simplicity: now, when encountering the terms “Russian”, “Rus”, “Little Russia”, he automatically replaced them with the words “Ukrainian”, “Ukrainian” and “Ukraine” "… . As a result of this simple operation, a Ukrainian professor concocted a “thousand-year Ukrainian history” over the course of several years, providing the independents with those very “historical roots”, without which they looked not just impostors, but also people a little crazy. Grushevsky himself expressed the essence of his “discovery” very briefly and clearly: confusion in terms forced the “Ukrainians” to southern Russia and its Russian population “firmly and decisively accept the name “Ukraine”, “Ukrainian” ...”
Like this in a simple way the Russians were “expelled” from Kyiv and Little Rus', and the “Ukrainians” were turned into its undivided masters. The technology of the deception is strikingly primitive: all the illustrative material in his popular “Illustrated History of Ukraine” is equipped with inscriptions in “movie”, designed to create in the readers’ subconscious a certain Ukrainian background, to suggest that the cathedrals, church paintings, hats, coins, and miniatures he observed are from the chronicle , excerpts from epics represent different periods of development of “Ukrainian culture”. The trick is designed to assume that the reader is a dense idiot, a simpleton, hopelessly stupid and lazy, or at least short-sighted and unable to make out the Greek and Slavic inscriptions on the coins, seals, and charters presented to his attention. Here on page 77 is an image of coins, under it is Grushevsky’s text: “Collect the coins of Volodymyr with his portrait,” and on the coin itself is minted: “Vladimir is on the table, and this is his silver”, i.e. the Russian inscription in the Ukrainian version, according to the author, gives the right to consider Prince Vladimir not Russian, but “Ukrainian”! The daughter of Yaroslav the Wise, being the queen of France, signs “Ana” in accordance with her Russian name - Anna, and the author’s text under the facsimile assures that this is the signature of “the Ukrainian princess Hanna” (p. 89). Under the facsimile of the agreement between Lubart and Casimir, concluded in 1366 and written in the purest Russian language, there is Grushevsky’s signature, explaining that the agreement was written in “Old Ukrainian language” (p. 145), etc. and so on. throughout the entire book: impudent, shameless lies, capable of convincing only complete idiots. The “Ukrainian historian” is least interested in the truth; he is a creator of myths, not a seeker of truth, an ideologist, not a scientist, a representative of a movement that has nothing to do with science.
And it is precisely these “works” that underlie all “Ukrainian” historiography.
The Great Anti-Russian Project of the West to create a separate Ukrainian people and state has two fundamental parts. This is the creation of a false history of the non-existent Ukrainian nation and endowing it with its own language, different from the historically inherent Russian one.
Let's see how and by whom the myth about the existence of the Ukrainian nation was born and what sophistications in relation to their own past they had to resort to for this.
Let us ask ourselves: when and how did such concepts first appear - “Ukraine” and “Ukrainian”? How and where was the new “Ukrainian nation” “forged”?
Let us use historical facts for our analysis.
Consideration of historical facts will lead us, as we will see below, to very interesting conclusions and will allow us to understand the nature of today's relations between Russia and Ukraine, as well as to predict their further development.
First, let us turn to the ancient history of Rus' from the 9th to the 13th centuries.
Well-known chronicle sources on the history of the 9th-13th centuries, i.e. For 5 centuries, a number of terms have been used as ethnonyms to name the population of Rus': “Rus”, “Russian clan”, “Russians”, “Russies”, “Russians”, “Russian people”. But all of them are based on two key words - “Rus” and “Russian”. This is exactly how the inhabitants of Rus' defined themselves in that distant time. They did not call themselves “Little Russians”, “Great Russians”, “Eastern Slavs”, “South Russian people” or “North Russian people”, “Russians”, and even less so “Ukrainians”. All these terms are the invention of modern times and, from a scientific point of view, have no right to be retroactively introduced into previous eras. Therefore, in order to restore an objective picture of the past, we must once and for all reject the terminological speculations on this topic of liberal communist and Ukrainian historiography as pseudoscientific and ahistorical. The term “Ukraine” is also found in chronicles, but always in the meaning of “border”, “border region”, “outskirts”. There is no toponym “Ukraine” in the sources of ancient Rus'! The attempts of the “Ukrainians” to retroactively attach it to them are a deliberate fabrication and falsification of real historical facts. Those. Neither ethnically nor culturally, Ancient Rus' contained anything “Ukrainian” in itself, much less there was any mention of “Ukrainians” as a certain ethnic group.
At this time, the names “Little Rus'” and “White Rus'”, as well as “Great Rus'” appeared. This division of territories, and not the Russian people, into some “ethnic groups” with the allocation of “Ukrainians” and “Belarusians” was supported by political events. From the 14th to the 18th centuries, the Russian people were divided between two states: the eastern Muscovite kingdom and the western one, ruled by Poles and Lithuanians. It was to designate the territories under the rule of the Poles and Lithuania that the names “Little Rus'” and “White Rus'” were used. Neither in the chronicles, nor in the historical documents of that time, not a single line is mentioned either “Ukraine”, or “Ukrainians”, or “Belarus”, or “Belarusians”.
The Polish-Lithuanian occupation of Little and White Rus', inhabited by Russians, affected the Russian language, culture and customs. The Russian language has been Polonized to a certain extent: quite a lot of Polish words have entered it and it is increasingly beginning to turn into a “language”, and Russian education is beginning to be supplanted. The upper classes of Little Russia are increasingly beginning to become related to Poles, speak Polish, some of them are converting to the Catholic faith, sending their children to Polish educational institutions, “turning” into Poles, and increasingly reorienting themselves to the West.
However, in the second half of the 16th century, the “Polishing” of the Slavic Russian language had not yet gone too far - “Ruska Mova” and the Russian language differed very little. Both in Kyiv and in Moscow the language was taught at that time using the same textbook - “Grammar” by Meletiy Smotritsky.
Those. the assimilation of the “tops” of Little Russia did not lead to the assimilation of the “bottoms,” although tangible losses were suffered here, primarily in cultural terms. However, the people as an integral organism did not lose their “Russianness”, retained the Orthodox faith, native language, and paternal traditions, which predetermined the national liberation war against Poland in 1648-1654. and the historical decision of the Pereyaslav Rada on the reunification of Little and Great Rus'.
After the reunification of southern and northern Rus' in 1654, when the influence of the Polish language ceased, the reverse process of gradual displacement of all kinds of Polonisms began under the general influence of the all-Russian literary language, in the creation of which, by the way, immigrants from Little Russia played a decisive role: Melety Smotrytsky, Epiphany Slavinetsky, Arseny Satanovsky, Semion Polotsky, Feofan Prokopovich and others, which indicates their fundamental disregard for “language” as an artificial and unviable phenomenon. By the way, in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania itself, until 1697, Russian was used as the official state language.
Dismembered by state borders, the Russian people not only retained the consciousness of their national unity, but also prepared the spiritual, material, and military prerequisites for the elimination of foreign rule over Little Russia and the reunification of the nation in a single state. Russians - this is how the people living on the territory of Little Rus' continued to define themselves.
It was not the “Ukrainians”, but the Russians who fought against lordly Poland for six years, covering themselves with unfading glory. It was not “Ukrainians”, but Russians who defended faith, freedom, the right to be themselves, and not forced Polish “claps”. Let us refer to Bohdan Khmelnytsky: in June 1648, moving to Lviv, the hetman sent a station wagon to the residents of the city: “I come to you as a liberator of the Russian people; I am coming to the capital city of the Chervono-Russian land to free you from Lyash (Polish) captivity.”
And here is the testimony of another contemporary, from the opposing camp - the Polish Hetman Sapieha: “Against us is not a gang of self-willed people, but the great power of the whole Rus'. The entire Russian people from villages, hamlets, towns, cities, bound by bonds of faith and blood with the Cossacks, threatens to eradicate the gentry tribe and raze the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the face of the earth.” As you can see, we are talking only about the Russian people. The struggle was not for “independent Ukraine,” but for the reunification of the two parts of Russia, the unification of Russians in one state.
As for the “Ukrains” (i.e., the outskirts), this term, as before, is applied in sources to a variety of territories. In Polish sources of the 16th century, the word “Ukraine” is often found (with an emphasis on the second syllable and with a small letter), from which two centuries later the Little Russian independentists would lead their fantastic country “Ukraine”, inhabited by the same fantastic “Ukrainian people”. Although the Poles, at first, by “Ukraine” meant the same borderland, outskirts, and did not tie it to any specific territory. It is not without reason that synonyms for “Ukrainian” in Polish were the words “ugraniche” and “border”.
The Polish king Stefan Batory, for example, wrote in his universals: “To the elders, sub-elders, rulers, princes, lords and knighthood, living in Russian Ukraine, Kyiv, Volyn, Podolsk and Bratslav” or “to all in general and to each individual of our Ukrainian elders " From the Polish historian Maciej Stryjkowski (d. 1582), author of the “Chronicles of Polish, Lithuanian, Zhmud and All Rus'” we find the following passages: “Albrecht, the royal nephew, caused losses in Ukraine (i.e. on the border) of the Polish and Zhmud lands.” . “Money was issued from the treasury to cavalry and foot captains in Moscow and Tatar Ukraine,” i.e. on the border with Russia and the steppe.
The terms “Ukraine” and “Ukrainian” also do not appear in the chronicles and documents of this era. The people inhabiting Little Rus' have never even heard of such names as “Ukraine” and “Ukrainian”.
In the mid-17th century, only part of the territories of Little and White Rus' were annexed to the Muscovite kingdom; the other part of the territories became part of it only at the end of the 18th century, during the partition of Poland.
Let's move on, the 18th century. Catherine the Great sought to decide the fate of Western Russian lands, most of which belonged to Poland in the 18th century. The Polish question was connected primarily with the rights of the Orthodox population in Poland and Lithuania - their rights were infringed in favor of the Uniate Church. The Prussian king Frederick "protected the rights of Protestants in Poland." Since the Polish Sejm refused to recognize the rights of the non-Catholic part of the population (i.e. Orthodox and Protestants, and in Poland itself there was a confrontation between various parties of the Polish nobility), Russia, Prussia and Austria intervened, and the matter ended in 1772 with the first partition of Poland. Prussia received Western Poland, which was populated mainly by Poles, Austria took possession of Galicia, populated by Poles and Russians, Russia received Polotsk, Vitebsk and Mogilev, populated by Russians. At the same time, it would be completely fair to note that those Russians who inhabited Galicia at that time spoke the Russian-Polish dialect of the Russian language, and those inhabiting the regions ceded to Russia spoke the Russian-Polish-Lithuanian dialect (the years of occupation of Russian lands had an impact).
In 1791, the Polish Sejm approved a new constitution, which transformed the former weak Polish state into a centralized one. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was formally included in Poland, which for Lithuania and Western Russia meant the strengthening of the policy of polonization. The publication of this constitution provoked a civil war in Poland. Conservative circles of the Polish nobility, dissatisfied with her, demanded Catherine's intervention. Russia sent troops and occupied Warsaw. The second partition of Poland took place in 1793. Russia received a significant part of present-day Belarus and Ukraine - Minsk, part of Volyn and Podolia. Prussia occupied Poznan.
In 1974, an uprising broke out in Warsaw, organized by Polish patriots led by Tadeusz Kosciuszko. A Polish revolutionary government was formed, which declared war on Russia and Prussia.
Catherine sent the best troops led by Suvorov, after which Poland ceased to exist as an independent state. In 1795, the third partition of Poland took place, as a result of which Prussia received Mazovia along with Warsaw, Austria took Lesser Poland with Krakow, Russia took Courland, Lithuania and the western part of Volhynia (these territories were inhabited by ethnic Russians, Lithuanians and Latvians).
As a result of the partitions of Poland, Russia regained its possessions in the southwestern Russian lands, excluding Kholm, Galicia, Carpathian Rus' and Bukovina. Thus, until the 19th century, the Russians were not reunited into a single state, but they continued to remain Russian.
At that time there was no mention of the existence of new ethnic groups - “Ukrainians” and “Belarusians” - such words were not known or used.
Even the “History of the Russians”, written at the end of the 18th century, does not know any “Ukrainians”, and yet the position of its author is one hundred percent Ukrainian. And if he knows nothing about the existence of “Ukrainians,” we should not even try to discover their presence in the era before the 19th century, in the forties of which they already loudly declared themselves. But if we do not exaggerate the hype raised around these first conscious (i.e., self-aware) “Ukrainians”, but resort to a purely arithmetic calculation of the available Ukrainian forces, then it turns out that we are talking about several hundred, at most a thousand people!
The period of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.
The exact date of the appearance of the first “Ukrainians” is the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. It was at this time that Count Jan Potocki first used the name “Ukrainians” in one of his works. The next ideologist of Ukrainianism, also a Pole, Count Thaddeus Chatsky, developed and deepened this Russophobic myth, declaring that “Ukrainians descended from the Ukrainians, a special horde that came to the place of Ukraine from across the Volga in the 7th century.” In reality, such a horde never existed. From ukrov - Ukraine, from Ukraine - “Ukrainians” - this is the scheme of the ethnogenesis of the “Ukrainian people” proposed by Chatsky. The thoughts of Yan Pototsky and Thaddeus Chatsky about the non-Russian origin of the “Ukrainians” were transferred through these individuals to the soil of the left bank of Little Russia and Sloboda Ukraine and found significant distribution here. That’s when Russians disappeared in Little Russia and “Ukrainians” appeared, supposedly as a special nationality.
However, this phenomenon was of a purely speculative, theoretical nature. In reality, the number of “Ukrainians” at that time amounted to several hundred Russophobic Little Russian outcasts, and a dozen mediocre writers of works in the Russian-Polish surzhik. It took two hundred years of tireless subversive work of this community of ethnic mutants, supported by generous financial, moral and political support from the world's largest powers, the catastrophe of several revolutions and wars with merciless anti-Russian terror in Little Russia, to produce from these several hundred a couple of million individuals, with a certain degree of certainty who can be classified as “Ukrainians”. But today, like two hundred years ago, this community is not a nation, but a political party.
Nikolai Ulyanov writes: “The Poles, in fact, can rightfully be considered the fathers of the Ukrainian doctrine... Thus, the very use of the words “Ukraine” and “Ukrainians” for the first time in literature began to be implanted by them... The Poles were not satisfied with either “Little Russia” or “Little Rus'”... The introduction of “Ukraine” began under Alexander I, when, having “Polished” Kyiv, covered the entire 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. The famous historian Kostomarov, who was a student at Kharkov University in the 30s, was fully exposed to this propaganda.
None other than the historian N.I. Kostomarov (1817-1885) introduced the concept of “Great Russian people” in the mid-19th century. It is Kostomarov who declares the inhabitants of Great Russia and Little Russia “two Russian nationalities.” The name of the people is not a trifle, and by replacing Russians with “Great Russians,” Kostomarov, like other founders of “Ukrainianism,” was doing nothing more than an application for the transition of Ancient Rus' to the inheritance of the “Ukrainians,” emphasizing the fact that the “Great Russians” were formed much later 9-12 centuries.
It is from this category of later inventions that the notorious “three branches” of the Russian people come: “Little Russians”, “Great Russians”, “Belarussians” - “nationalities” that did not leave any traces of their activities in historical sources. The reason is very banal: such ethnic groups never existed. The names from which the names of each “branch” were derived - Little, Great, White Rus' - never carried ethnic or national content, serving only to designate the territories inhabited by the Russian people, who ended up in different states after the Tatar invasion and Polish conquest .
The concept of “three Russias”, which appeared in the 14th century - Great, Little and White - was in use for a long time, until 1917. But only in the 19th century. they began to be “populated” by three different nationalities, and exclusively among educated people. The people had no idea about this. Ordinary people, as in the times of Kievan Rus, used one single ethnonym for their national identification - “Russians”. Moreover, this was typical for all Russians, no matter where they lived: in Little, White or Great Russia.
Even at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the concept of “Russians” meant Great Russians, Little Russians and Belarusians combined. In this sense, it was used by both representatives of the Russian intelligentsia (for example, P. Struve) and the “Ukrainian” (P.A. Kulish).
N.I. Ulyanov, a researcher of Ukrainian separatism, writes: “...“Great Russians” are a product of the mentality of the 19th-20th centuries.” He also points out the forces interested in the dissemination of this artificial, ahistorical terminology: Ukrainian separatism and the liberal revolutionary movement: “Both of these forces together began to propagate the term “Great Russian” in the 19th century press. In geography textbooks, a type of “Great Russian” appeared - bearded, wearing bast shoes, a homemade army coat and a sheepskin coat, and women in colorful sundresses, kokoshniks, and warriors.” The ethnography of the “Little Russians” and “Belarusians” was built on the same common folk types. Attention was focused, first of all, on differences in life, customs, and regional dialects. And these regional differences proved the presence of several nationalities, the notorious three branches.” What attracted people was not what united, but what separated.
The famous Little Russian falsifier of history, Mikhail Grushevsky (now considered the founder of “Ukrainian” history) introduces the adjective “eastern” in relation to the word “Slavs”. Subsequently, he himself abandoned the “Eastern Slavs”, replacing them, of course, with “Ukrainians”. From 1897 to 1901, the first 4 volumes of his future 10-volume “History of Ukraine - Rus'” were published.
At the end of the 19th century, movements were founded by the "Ukrainian" and "Belarusian" intelligentsia to protect their particular languages from Russian pressure. Moreover, the development of these movements was facilitated by... the Russians themselves. The academic world was also absolutely tolerant of Ukrainian propaganda. He pretended not to notice her. There was a 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.” 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 title “history of Ukraine.” Liberals - such as Mordovtsev in the St. Petersburg Gazette, Pypin in the Bulletin of Europe - defended independence more than the separatists themselves. “Vestnik Evropy” looked like a Ukrainophile magazine...Ukrainophilism seemed not only completely innocent, but also a respectable phenomenon, thinking only about the cultural and economic development of the southern Russian people...
Meanwhile, this phenomenon could not be called innocent. Grushevsky’s “works” played a huge role for “Ukrainian historiography.” This is what Sergei Rodin writes in his book “Renouncing the Russian Name”: “From the host of “Ukrainian historians,” Grushevsky, perhaps like no one else, corresponds to Gogol’s character Nozdryov. And not in some subtle way, but in the most literal similarity, because he also lied. He lied recklessly and without any embarrassment, although, unlike the owner of a pink mare and an unprecedented size of fish, he was far from disinterested... He began modestly. Having attached the Polish nickname “Ukraine” to the original name of ancient Rus' and thus obtaining the fantastic country “Ukraine-Rus,” Grushevsky populated it with the equally fantastic “Ukrainian-Russian people” (what a combination!). But unlike Kostomarov, he did not stop there, did not want to come to terms with the stamp of “Russianness” that the people he invented bore. As one of the means of expelling Russians from Rus' and Little Russia, he seized on the term “East Slavic peoples” in order to avoid, by his own admission, “confusion in the use of the concepts “Russian” in the meaning of Great Russian, “Russian” in the meaning of “East Slavic” and, finally, “Russian” in the meaning of Ukrainian(!).
Juggling with terms did not help much: the “Ukrainians” did not stand out in any way from the mass of Russians and did not show themselves in any way on the territory allocated for them in the designated era, with devilish cunning masquerading as ... Russians! The idea was becoming hopeless, but here the “father of Ukrainian historiography” came up with a solution that was brilliant in its simplicity: now, when encountering the terms “Russian”, “Rus”, “Little Russia”, he automatically replaced them with the words “Ukrainian”, “Ukrainian” and “Ukraine” "… . As a result of this simple operation, a Ukrainian professor concocted a “thousand-year Ukrainian history” over the course of several years, providing the independents with those very “historical roots”, without which they looked not just impostors, but also people a little crazy. Grushevsky himself expressed the essence of his “discovery” very briefly and clearly: the confusion in terms forced the “Ukrainians” in relation to southern Russia and its Russian population to “firmly and decisively accept the name “Ukraine”, “Ukrainian” ...”
In this simple way, the Russians were “expelled” from Kyiv and Little Rus', and the “Ukrainians” were turned into its undivided masters. The technology of the deception is strikingly primitive: all the illustrative material in his popular “Illustrated History of Ukraine” is equipped with inscriptions in “movie”, designed to create in the readers’ subconscious a certain Ukrainian background, to suggest that the cathedrals, church paintings, hats, coins, and miniatures he observed are from the chronicle , excerpts from epics represent different periods of development of “Ukrainian culture”. The trick is designed to assume that the reader is a dense idiot, a simpleton, hopelessly stupid and lazy, or at least short-sighted and unable to make out the Greek and Slavic inscriptions on the coins, seals, and charters presented to his attention. Here on page 77 is an image of coins, under it is Grushevsky’s text: “Collect the coins of Volodymyr with his portrait,” and on the coin itself is minted: “Vladimir is on the table, and this is his silver”, i.e. the Russian inscription in the Ukrainian version, according to the author, gives the right to consider Prince Vladimir not Russian, but “Ukrainian”! The daughter of Yaroslav the Wise, being the queen of France, signs “Ana” in accordance with her Russian name - Anna, and the author’s text under the facsimile assures that this is the signature of “the Ukrainian princess Hanna” (p. 89). Under the facsimile of the agreement between Lubart and Casimir, concluded in 1366 and written in the purest Russian language, there is Grushevsky’s signature, explaining that the agreement was written in “Old Ukrainian language” (p. 145), etc. and so on. throughout the entire book: impudent, shameless lies, capable of convincing only complete idiots. The “Ukrainian historian” is least interested in the truth; he is a creator of myths, not a seeker of truth, an ideologist, not a scientist, a representative of a movement that has nothing to do with science.
And it is precisely these “works” that underlie all “Ukrainian” historiography.
Shirokorad Alexander 02/01/2015 at 14:00
Ukrainians, who, according to Kyiv, trace their history almost back to the Flood, are, in essence, an artificially created nationality. Ukrainian is not a nationality, but a party affiliation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, dozens of historians, politicians and philosophers wrote about this. Yes, there were Little Russians, Russians, crests, Poleshuks, but there were no Ukrainians as such.
Ukrainianness is an ideology
For half a century, Soviet historians lied to us about the three stages of the formation of the Ukrainian nation, dating back to the 13th century. In all Ukrainian school atlases on history from the 8th to the 11th grade, the “Ukrainian state” is shown with almost modern borders. In 2012, I took the time to go to the book market on the outskirts of Kyiv and bought a whole collection of similar atlases.
But then there was one honest person, President Poroshenko, who on January 25, 2015 publicly stated: “We will revive Ukrainianness in Donbass.” Thank you, Pyotr Alekseevich, you have finally dotted the i’s. Ukrainianness is an ideology, and a Ukrainian is not a nationality, but a party affiliation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, dozens of Russian historians, politicians and philosophers wrote about this.
The first Ukrainian state formation - the Ukrainian SSR - was created by Lenin in 1918. And before that, there had never been any mythical Ukrainian state. And centurion Bogdan Khmelnitsky raised an uprising in the voivodeship of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and it was called “Russian voivodeship.” And Pan Jeremiah Vishnevetsky, with whom Bogdan fought, had the title of “Russian governor.”
By the way, Jeremiah was 80 percent Russian, and 20 percent Lithuanian from the Gediminovich family. But, having completed a course of study at a Jesuit college, he exchanged Orthodoxy for Catholicism and began to consider himself not a Russian prince, but a Polish lord. And so much so that his son Mikhail Vishnevetsky was elected Polish king by the Sejm in 1669.
The Ukrainian language did not exist in nature
In Lviv, on Podvalnaya Street near the Powder Tower, there is a large monument to the “Ukrainian pioneer printer Ivan Fedorov.” And in Lviv, the Museum of Ancient Ukrainian Books named after. Ivan Fedorov.
In Moscow, on Okhotny Ryad, since 1909, there has also been a monument to the pioneer printer Ivan Fedorov. Are they namesakes or relatives?
Alas, he was one person, and he published books in only one language. Guess three times which one?
In 1566, the famous “first printer” Ivan Fedorov left Moscow for Lithuania. He comes to Western Belarus and Western Ukraine and begins to print in Russian the same books that he printed in Moscow. The same Russian font, the same Russian language -
By the way, the Russian typeface with which Ivan Fedorov began printing books in Moscow was not his invention. In 1491, the German student Rudolf Borsdorff produced a “Russian type” by order of the Krakow printer Schweipolt Fiel. In the same year 1491, the first two printed books in Russian were published - “Osmoglasnik” and “Book of Hours”. They spread both in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and in the Grand Duchy of Moscow.
Little Rus' became a Russian voivodeship after the Union of Lublin in 1569. But even before that, Russians, Poles and Lithuanians called it “outskirts”. Indeed, it was a suburb at the junction of three states - the Kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Moscow State. For example, back in the 15th century, Prince Vitovt gave the status (privileges) of Ukrainian cities to Kyiv and... Smolensk.
The Cossacks sent letters to Ivan III “from your Ryazan Ukraine,” and to Tsar Alexei, accordingly, the Siberian Cossacks wrote: “... from your Amur Ukraine,” and the Cossacks: “... from your Little Russian Ukraine.”
Professional "Ukrainians"
Professional “Ukrainians,” that is, ultranationalists, appeared only at the end of the 19th century.
I note that neither Bogdan Khmelnitsky nor Taras Shevchenko ever called themselves or anyone else Ukrainians.
By 1914, in the Russian Empire there were no more than five hundred people who considered themselves Ukrainians.
There is a funny episode in the memoirs of Petlyura’s general-horaner Yurk Tyutyunnik, how in 1917 he decided to form a “conscious” Ukrainian unit, for which he selected conscripts from the Poltava, Kyiv, Chernigov, Volyn, Kholm, Podolsk, Kherson, Yekaterinoslav and Kharkov provinces.
They gathered up to 7 thousand people, and Tyuryunnik shouted: “Whoever is Ukrainian among you, raise your hands.” No more than 300 hands went up. "Little Russians, raise your hands!" - Almost half raised their hands. "Khokhols, raise your hands!" - a third of the hands went up.
Ukrainian writer Oles Buzina summed it up: “So, out of 7 thousand people who came to Ukrainize (this is a very decent sociological sample!) in 1917, only three hundred self-identified as Ukrainians! A pitiful 4.28 percent! The rest considered themselves crests, Little Russians - whatever, but not by Ukrainians. This is the real picture of what we call the national consciousness of the masses."
I’m sure that a Moscow Ukrainophile will exclaim: “What about Shevchenko?! After all, he wrote in pure Ukrainian.”
I don’t want to argue with an educated man, let Buzina answer him the same: “Until the second half of the 19th century, Ukrainian spelling was no different from all-Russian... Three quarters of Shevchenko’s works are also in Russian. And his Ukrainian-language works were partially falsified by the “would-be-Ukrainizers” of the 20th century For example, Shevchenko does not have a book “Kobzar”. All publications during his lifetime were called “Kobzar” - with a soft sign at the end, just like in the Russian language.”
Canadian nationalist Orest Subtelny answers this question a little differently: “Shevchenko’s language is a bold synthesis of the speech potential of Ukrainian dialects, rural and urban vernacular, vocabulary and forms of the Church Slavonic language.”
If we translate Subtelny into simple Russian, then Taras Grigorievich collected a bunch of Little Russian dialects and added elements of the Church Slavonic language, that is, Shevchenko tried to create a new language that no one spoke either in the countryside or in the city.
In 1914–1916, Ukrainians committed genocide of Rusyns in Galicia. Who are the Rusyns? They are the same as the Ukrainians, the descendants of the inhabitants of the Old Russian state. And they differed not by nationality, but by party affiliation. Ukrainians were Russophobes, and Rusyns were Russophiles, of course, there were other political differences.
Few people here know that the Ukrainians (“party members”) began the war against monuments not in 2014, but 110 years earlier. So, on October 31, 1904, a group of Ukrainians - followers of Mikhnovsky tried to blow up a monument to Pushkin in Kharkov. Professional Ukrainians don’t care about Pushkin, Lenin, or Kutuzov. The main thing is that they are all Muscovites. And with them everything is clear: “Moskalyak to Gilyak.”
The February 2014 coup was carried out under the slogan: “Ukraine is Europe.” But who prevented the first President Kravchuk from giving Ukraine a federal structure, like in Germany or Russia? In Europe, everyone is free to speak their own language. For large groups population is made second official language , as in Belgium, Switzerland, etc., and in Finland, even for 3 percent of Swedes, their language was made the second state language. In almost all countries Western Europe
However, in Kyiv in 1991, citizens of Ukraine were divided into two categories: real Ukrainians and inferior citizens, who must change their language, change their names and surnames into the Ukrainian way. For 23 years now, textbooks with an “anti-colonial orientation” have been published in Ukraine, in which children are instilled with zoological hatred of Russians.
The history of Ukraine is askew
The first to commit genocide of the Ukrainian people was Yuri Dolgoruky, who took Kyiv in 1151. Founded Moscow and four years later began genocide. Well, then all the Moscow rulers on the list were involved in genocide - Ivan the Terrible, Alexei Mikhailovich, Peter I, Catherine II, Lenin, Stalin, etc.
I myself saw a portrait of Hetman Khmelnytsky in a Ukrainian school in 2013. But, alas, not Bogdan, but Yurka, who declared Little Russia part of the Ottoman Empire and invited Turkish troops there. He destroyed tens of thousands of lives. The Cossacks drove Yurk away, and the Turks quietly strangled him as unnecessary. And now schoolchildren are forced to honor the Turkish hero along with Bandera, Shushkevich and others.
In 1991, no more than 10 percent of residents of the Ukrainian SSR spoke the official Ukrainian language in everyday life. As was the case in 1914, in the cities they spoke Russian, and in the villages they spoke local dialects: Dnieper, Poltava, Polesie. Russian speakers perfectly understood the dialect of the villagers, and vice versa.
Since 1991, the persecution of the Russian language began.
The number of schools where Russian was taught at least 2-3 hours a week decreased sharply. In universities, teaching in Russian was categorically prohibited, and in a number of universities even communication between students and teachers in Russian was prohibited.
Little Russian dialects, spoken by many generations of villagers, were subjected to even greater persecution. They were all contemptuously called “Surzhik”; a solemn funeral for Surzhik was held in Kyiv.
Our Slavists, politicians and journalists kept us in the dark about the fact that since 1991, thousands of new words have appeared in the Ukrainian language every year. I can now give a long list of Russian-Ukrainian dictionaries of 300-800 pages, in which there is not a single Ukrainian word used before 1991. They are all made up! We are talking about dictionaries: medical, mathematical, welding, naval terminology, etc. And all this creativity of crazy people had to be memorized by the population.
Kyiv forced Donbass, Odessa region, Crimea and other regions of Novorossiya contain the western regions of Ukraine. It is not for nothing that at the end of 2013, posters “Do not feed lions” appeared in zoos in Novorossiya; naturally, they were talking about two-legged animals.
It's not surprising that Civil War in Ukraine began in the spring of 2014, but the fact that the population of Novorossiya tolerated Ukrainianness for so long.
Ukrainians can come to Donbass only through tens of thousands of corpses and the complete destruction of cities already destroyed by bombs and shells.
And in Kyiv and European capitals, politicians, like parrots, talk about “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.” They want to force the relatives of the killed and deprived of housing of Donetsk residents to shout “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the heroes!”
It was not Russia, but the United States and NATO that forcibly separated Kosovo from Serbia. Again, the United States attacked Iraq and destroyed the stable regime of Saddam Hussein. They also helped the Kurds create their own state within a seemingly united Iraq.
So, the Yankees managed, without affecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq, to create a Kurdish state there with a government, parliament, police and army. The volume of US trade with Kurdistan is growing steadily, the Yankees are even supplying weapons there. And Iraqi sovereignty somehow manages to remain intact.
As we see, there are many ways to “preserve innocence” and save the population of the former Ukrainian SSR from physical destruction.
I think that the DPR and LPR will not abandon the American project “a la Kurdistan”, although American weapons they clearly don't need to.
The question of the origin of the Ukrainian nation is one of the most controversial and controversial. Historians of “Independence” prove that the roots of the Ukrainian ethnic group are the most ancient in Europe, scientists from other countries are trying to refute them.
"Autochthonous" Ukrainians
Today, in the Ukrainian community, hypotheses are increasingly being expressed more and more boldly, according to which the history of the Ukrainian ethnic group should date back almost to primitive tribes. At least our southern neighbors are seriously considering the version according to which it was the Ukrainian ethnic group that became the basis for the emergence of the Great Russian and Belarusian peoples.
Kiev journalist Oles Buzina was ironic about this hypothesis: “That is, according to the logic of its followers, a certain Pithecanthropus, hatching from a monkey in Africa, came to the banks of the Dnieper, and then slowly degenerated into a Ukrainian, from whom Russians, Belarusians and other peoples descended to the Hindus." [C-BLOCK]
Ukrainian historians, trying to make their roots ancient in defiance of Moscow, forget that for more than a thousand years, the lands from the Don to the Carpathians, subject to invasion by the Sarmatians, Huns, Goths, Pechenegs, Polovtsians, Tatars, repeatedly changed their ethnic appearance. Thus, the devastating Mongol conquest of the second quarter of the 13th century significantly reduced the number of inhabitants of the Dnieper region. “Most of the people of Russia were killed or taken captive,” wrote the Franciscan Giovanni del Plano Carpini, who visited these lands.
For a long time, the former territories of the Principality of Kyiv were plunged into social and political turmoil. Until 1300 they were part of the Nogai ulus, from the 14th century they fell under the rule of the Principality of Lithuania, and two centuries later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth came here. Until recently, the strong element of the ancient Russian ethnos turned out to be thoroughly eroded.
In the mid-17th century, Cossack uprisings broke out against Polish rule, which were the first attempts to restore national identity. Their result was the “Hetmanate,” which became an example of southern Russian autonomy under Cossack control.
First self-names
Until the middle of the 17th century, the term “Ukrainian” was not used as an ethnic designation. Even the most ideological historians of Independence recognize this. But in the documents of that time there are other words - Russians, Ruthenians, Little Russians, and even Russians.
In the “Protestation” of 1622 of the Kyiv Metropolitan Job Boretsky there are the following lines: “to every pious people of the Russian people who are emerging... to all the pious Eastern Church, to the well-behaved, great to the Russian people of every spiritual and spiritual dignity, to the pious people.” [C-BLOCK]
And here is a fragment of a 1651 letter from Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky to the Turkish Sultan Mehmed IV: “... and all Rus' that lives here, which is of the same faith with the Greeks and has its origins from them...”. By the way, in a thought recorded from the kobzar from the Chernihiv region, Andrei Shuta, it is said: “Why is Hetman Khmelnitsky, a Rusyn, in us.”
Nezhinsky archpriest Simeon Adamovich in a letter to Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich is more specific: “... and because of those my labors, from your royal mercy, I did not want to leave Moscow at all, knowing the inconstancy of my brotherhood of the Little Russian inhabitants...”.
The phrase “Little Rus'”, as the name of the Dnieper lands, was first recorded in 1347 in the message of the Byzantine emperor John Cantacuzene.
Outlying people
We first encountered the term “Ukraine” in 1213. This is the date of the chronicle message about the return of Russian cities bordering Poland by Prince Daniil of Galicia. There, in particular, it says: “Daniil rode with his brother and took Beresty, and Ugrovesk, and Stolpie, Komov and all of Ukraine.”
Such an early mention of a controversial term is often used as evidence of the antiquity of the Ukrainian nation. However, in the chronicle context, in fact, as in the context of that era, various border, outlying lands in the Muscovite kingdom (“Siberian Ukraine”) and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (“Polish Ukraine”) were called “Ukraines”. [C-BLOCK]
Writer Vladimir Anishchenkov says: “The science of ethnology does not mark such a people as “Ukrainian” until the 19th century. Moreover, at first the Poles began to call local residents “Ukrainians,” then the Austrians and Germans. This name was introduced into the consciousness of Little Russians for several centuries. Since the 15th century."
However, in the minds of the Cossack elites, a single ethnic group living on the territory of Little Russia began to be isolated and opposed to its neighbors already in the second half of the 17th century. Zaporozhye ataman Ivan Bryukhovetsky wrote in an appeal to Hetman Petro Doroshenko: “Taking God to help, near our enemies before the Moscow ones, behold, there are Muscovites, who no longer have friendship with them... so that we know about such a Moscow and Lyak unprofitable intention for us and Ukraine, prepared to expect destruction, but they were not willing to bring themselves and the entire Ukrainian people to the point of known decline.”
The term “Ukrainians” came to the residents of the Western regions of Ukraine, which were part of Austria-Hungary, the latest - at the beginning of the 20th century. The “Westerners” traditionally called themselves Rusyns (in the German version “Ruthens”).
“Mogholi! Mogoli!
It is curious that the pride of the Ukrainian nation, the poet Taras Shevchenko, did not use the ethnonym “Ukrainian” in any of his works. But in his message to his fellow countrymen there are the following lines: “The German will say: “You mogoli.” “Mogholi!” Mogoli! “They teach the Golden Tamerlane Goli.”
In the brochure “Ukrainian Movement” published in Berlin in 1925, the Russian emigrant and publicist Andrei Storozhenko wrote: “Observations on the mixing of races show that in subsequent generations, when crossing occurs within the same people, individuals can nevertheless be born that reproduce in pure form an ancestor of someone else's blood. Getting to know the leaders of the Ukrainian movement, starting from 1875, not from books, but in living images, we came away with the impression that “Ukrainians” are precisely individuals who have deviated from the all-Russian type in the direction of reproducing the ancestors of foreign Turkic blood.”
But one of the most popular images of Ukrainian folklore - “Cossack knight Mamai” - is a clear confirmation of such an assumption. Where did the character in folk pictures get a purely Tatar nickname? Is he not the personification of the beklyarbek Mamai, whose descendants took part in the formation of the Cossacks in Ukraine? [C-BLOCK]
Translated from Turkic languages, “Cossack” means “robber”, “exile”. This is what they called the fugitives from Genghis Khan’s army who did not want to obey the despot and settled in the steppe regions of what is now Ukraine. The medieval Polish chronicler Jan Dlugosz wrote about the Crimean Tatars who attacked Volyn in 1469: “The Tatar army is made up of fugitives, miners and exiles, whom they call Cossacks in their language.”
The idea of the Tatar roots of the current Ukrainian nation is also suggested by the results of archaeological excavations at the site of the battle of Berestechko (1651): it turns out that the Zaporozhye Cossacks did not wear crosses. Archaeologist Igor Svechnikov argued that the idea of the Zaporozhye Sich as a stronghold of Christianity is greatly exaggerated. It is no coincidence that the first church in the Zaporozhye freemen appeared only in the 18th century, after the Cossacks accepted Russian citizenship.
What geneticists say
One cannot help but pay attention to the ethnic diversity of the population of modern Ukraine. Ethnographers claim that the Pechenegs, Cumans and Tatars played no less a role in shaping the appearance of the “broad” Ukrainian than the Rusyns, Poles or Jews.
Genetics generally confirms such assumptions. Similar studies were carried out by the Laboratory of Population Genetics of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, using genetic markers of the Y chromosome (transmitted through the male line) and mitochondrial DNA (pedigree of the female line).
The results of the study, on the one hand, revealed significant genetic similarities between Ukrainians and Belarusians, Poles and residents of Western Russia, but on the other hand, they showed a noticeable difference between the three intra-Ukrainian clusters - western, central and eastern. [C-BLOCK]
In another study, this time by American scientists at Harvard University, the distribution of Ukrainians by haplogroup was analyzed more deeply. It turned out that 65-70% of Ukrainians belong to haplogroup R1a, which is characteristic of steppe peoples. For example, among the Kyrgyz it occurs in 70% of cases, among the Uzbeks - in 60%, among the Bashkirs and Kazan Tatars - in 50%. For comparison, in the Russian regions of the north-west - Novgorod, Pskov, Arkhangelsk, Vologda regions - group R1a belongs to 30-35% of the population. Other haplogroups of Ukrainians were distributed as follows: three of them - R1b (Western European), I2 (Balkan), and N (Finno-Ugric) each have approximately 10% of representatives, another one - E (Africa, Western Asia) has approximately 5% .
