Svitlana Potapenko
Russia insists that Kharkiv does not belong to Ukraine. Meanwhile, even
several waves of Russification failed to make it truly Russian
In May 1917,
the delegation of the Ukrainian Central Council (Centralna Rada), the then
parliament, negotiated with representatives of the Russian Provisional
Government in Petrograd. The Provisional Government was brushing off any
attempts to include Kharkiv and the oblast into the jurisdiction of the Central
Council. Volodymyr Vynnychenko, its authorized representative in negotiations,
later recalled: “As they measured the territory of the future autonomous
Ukraine, they mentioned the Black Sea, Odesa, Donetsk region, Katerynoslav
region (today Dnipropetrovsk – Ed.), Kherson and Kharkiv regions. The mere
thought of the Donetsk and Kherson coal, Katerynoslav iron and Kharkiv industry
taken away from them made them so concerned that they forgot their professorial
status, their academism and their high Founding Assembly, and started
fidgeting, fell into disarray, and showed all the essence of Russian fat,
greedy nationalism.”
Russian
appetites have barely changed over the past century. This article reminds us
who founded Kharkiv, why Baiky kharkivski (Kharkiv Stories) by
Hryhoriy Skovoroda, one of the best-known Ukrainian philosophers, are the gem
in the crown of the Ukrainian baroque literature, and how the Kharkiv
University became one of the earliest centers for Ukrainian studies.
Dating back to Cossacks
1645 is
considered to be the official year when Kharkiv was founded. A group of
migrants from the Dnieper Ukraine (also known as Great Ukraine) settled down
along the banks of the Lopan, a river that flows through Kharkiv. Shortly
after, they built a fortress while the local Cossack garrison along with the
Cossacks from the villages around it (see map 1) formed the Kharkiv
Cossack Regiment that existed from 1660 till 1765.
According to
Kharkiv censuses conducted in 1655, 1660, 1667, and 1669, the migrants brought
to the terrain social structure similar to that later seen in the early modern
Ukraine in 1917-1920, the years of the national liberation campaign. The locals
were Cossacks, bourgeoisie and peasants, most of them with typical Ukrainian
surnames ending with –enko: Kondratenko, Fedorenko, Ivanenko, Panchenko. The
census of 16 regiments of the Hetmanate held in 1649 reflects this homogeneity:
56% out of 40,475 people recorded had -enko surnames.
The founding
of Kharkiv by the Cossacks is well-remembered in the oral tradition of Sloboda
Ukraine, the historic region covering parts of Sumy, Kharkiv and Luhansk
oblasts, as well as southern parts of Voronezh, Kursk and Belgorod oblasts in
today’s Russia. One of the stories recalls Cossack Kharko as the founder of
Kharkiv. In 2004, Kharkiv’s 350thanniversary, the city got a new
monument for this mythical Cossack. Another rumoured founder is a legendary
Cossack leader, Ivan Karkach. According to archive documents, the leader of the
group of migrants that arrived to the unsettled spot in 1654 was otaman Ivan
Kryvoshlyk. He is to be considered the founder of Kharkiv.
The Cossack
Kharkiv thrived from the 1650s through the mid-18th century. It
was the center of the Kharkiv Cossack Regiment, close to other four regiments
from Izium, Okhtyrka, Sumy, and Ostrohozk (now in Russia). They were not
formally subject to the Hetman’s rule but were closely tied to the early modern
Ukrainian state, the Hetmanate, primarily through their leaders and commanders.
The spine of
the Cossack elders (starshyna, the ruling class of in the Cossack state
– Ed.) was comprised of Ukrainian noble families who took over leadership
in Ukrainian society after the turbulent and dramatic Khmelnytsky Uprising in
the 1640-50s. It was further reinforced with descendants of non-aristocratic
social groups, the townspeople and peasants. Intertwined through marital and
family ties, the starshyna class accumulated power and wealth,
primarily land, and created – or, rather, modified – its own noble identity.
The
Donets-Zakharzhevskis were one such family. It started from Kharkiv colonel
Hryhoriy Yerofiyovych (?-1691) known for his participation in many battles
against the Tatars, expansion of the territory of his garrison, and the
construction of the magnificent Porkova (Protection of Our Most Holy Lady
Theotokos) Cathedral in Kharkiv, one of the earliest buildings in Cossack
Ukrainian baroque style. The Cossack elders regarded support of the Orthodox
Church and donations to the construction and decoration of churches an honorary
cause.
Coats of
arms were another element that helped the Cossack elites identify themselves as
nobles. Just like the Ukrainian Cossack nobles in general, those in Sloboda
Ukraine used coats of arms that demonstrated their ancestry in elites of the
earlier epochs. The Donets-Zakharzhevski family’s coat of arms was a
combination of Rose (Poraj or Róża), Column (Kolumna), Kytavrus (Centaur) and
Ursin – the symbols used in the coats of arms of old Polish, Lithuanian,
Belarusian and Czech noble and royal families dating back to the 10th century
and later. The Ktivtkys, another aristocratic Cossack family, used six elements
in their coat of arms (see Coats of arms).
The
Cossack-dominated Kharkiv is unthinkable without the Kharkiv Collegium
(1722-1817), the center of education and academics in Sloboda Ukraine. Founded
by Yepifaniy Tykhorsky, a graduate of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (founded in 1659, it
remains one of the top universities in Ukraine till present days – Ed.)
and Belgorod bishop, it was the most popular school among the children of the
Cossack elite. It offered the European-style seven liberal arts education,
placing the main accent on profound study of Latin, the rules of poetry and
oratory skills, and Ancient Greek literature. Philosophy and theology were the
highest levels of education. In the 1760s, French and German were included in
the curriculum, in addition to music, mathematics, geometry, history and geography.
In
1759-1794, Hryhoriy Skovoroda, son of a Cossack from the Lubny Regiment,
student of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, philosopher of the European tradition and
poet whose works were the peak of Ukrainian baroque literature, taught poetry,
syntax, Ancient Greek and ethics at the Kharkiv Collegium. He stayed in touch
with his students even after he left the Collegium, wandering around Sloboda
Ukraine and staying at their houses for long periods. In his
philosophical Kharkiv Stories Skovoroda described his wandering
around the “forests, fields, orchards, villages, hamlets and apiaries
surrounding Kharkiv”.
The verge of
the 18th and 19th centuries is seen by
historians as a tectonic shift in the history of Europe that drew a clear line
between pre-modern and modern epochs, with different worldviews, social
structure of societies, and economic systems. In Kharkiv, just like in Ukraine
overall, this was a line between the Cossack and the tsarist periods. In 1764,
Russia’s Catherine the Great abolished the position of the Hetman, the head of
the Cossack state. In 1765, Sloboda Cossack regiments were disrupted. In 1775,
she ordered violent demolition of the Zaporizhzhian Sich, the Cossack island
stronghold in what is today Zaporizhia Oblast. In 1783, Cossack regiments of
the Hetmanate seized to exist. Ukrainian territory ended up redrawn in
accordance with the imperial administrative system, and the local social order
was crushed.
Eventually,
Kharkiv became the capital of Sloboda-Ukrainian gubernia (administrative
unit in the Russian Empire – Ed.), and of Kharkiv viceroyalty in 1780.
From 1835 to 1856, it was part of the Malorosiya (Little Russian)
General-Governorate along with Chernihiv and Poltava oblasts. Kharkiv was the
administrative center.
UNIVERSITY VERSUS MILITARY COLLEGE
The
beginning of the 19th century was a landmark for Kharkiv: its
university opened there in 1805. The most proactive, and somewhat adventurous
role in this belonged to Vasyl Karazin (1773-1842), a small local nobleman of
Serbian origin and descendant of Ukrainian Cossack elite family on his mother’s
side. In fact, the local elite wanted to have a military college in the city.
They even began to collect donations to build it. Karazin managed to persuade
the central Russian government that the local nobility were actually collecting
financial support to start a university. It was opened eventually, leaving the
noblemen disappointed.
The founding
of the university was an important event. It launched transformations of the
entire city as foreign professors came visiting, the local intellectual
community emerged and civil servants mushroomed. Apart from traditional wooden
buildings, the city saw new stone houses and cobbled roads built. Kharkiv was
turning into a modern city.
Meanwhile,
the government of the Russian Empire then located in St. Petersburg had another
goal in mind: in addition to being the center of education and science, the
university was expected to serve as a tool of Russification. It also acted as
the supervisor over junior and middle school education in the region. The
records of evidence from eye-witnesses suggest that the local teachers were
forced to speak Russian to the students, and Russian teachers were generally
preferred.
This policy
was only partly successful. Descending from the local Cossack nobility, the
Sloboda elite spoke Ukrainian and cherished memories of the military glory of
their forefathers. Hryhoriy Kvitka-Osnovianenko (1778-1843), the father of the
new Ukrainian prose and a prominent figure in Ukrainian culture of the early 19th century,
emerged from that environment.
A descendant
of a Cossack elite family himself, he used Osnovianenko as his penname (Kvitka
was his real family name). His great-grandfather was Hryhoriy Kvitka, a Kharkiv
colonel who supported the construction of John the Baptist Church in the
family’s village, Osnovy, in 1713. The writer’s ancestors on his mother’s side
were too a family of Cossack colonels, the Shydlovskys. The Kvitkas kept
detailed family chronicles, some fragments have survived till present days.
Unsurprisingly,
Hryhoriy often mentioned historical episodes, true stories of Tatar attacks on
Slovoda villages, and the census of the Sloboda Ukraine residents conducted by
the Russian military in 1732. In his letters to Taras Shevchenko, one of the
greatest Ukrainian poets, Hryhoriy kept encouraging the young poet to write in
Ukrainian. Taras appreciated this preaching in one of his poems:
…Our thought
and our song
Will not
die. It will not perish
There,
people, is our glory
Glory of Ukraine!
Another key
figure in the new Ukrainian literature was the Cherkasy-born Petro
Hulak-Artemovsky (1790-1865), a graduate and later president of the Kharkiv
University. Just like Hryhoriy Kvitka-Osnovianenko, he is regarded as a
“Kharkiv romanticist”. These were intellectuals who wrote about or researched
Ukraine (Izmail Sreznevsky, Levko Borovykovsky, Amvrosiy Metlynskyi, Opanas
Shpyhotskyi).
This
environment shaped Mykola Kostomarov, a prominent historian and civil activist.
His work had a huge impact on the socio-political life in the 19th-century
Ukraine. His was mostly interested in the National Liberation Struggle of the
mid-17th century and the history of the early modern Ukrainian
State. He also researched historical paths of Eastern European peoples,
primarily Ukrainians and Russians, pointing at stark differences in their
worldview and mentality. HisBooks of Genesis of the Ukrainian People was
used as a foundation document by the Brotherhood of St. Cyril and Methodius
(1845-1847). It manifested the concept of social and national liberation of
Slavic peoples in which Ukrainians would play the central part.
The late 19th century
brought about noticeable social and national transformations of Kharkiv. The
changes were stirred by Alexander II’s “Great Reforms”, a set of liberal
reforms that took place in Russia in the 1860-1870s and included abolition of
serfdom as the pivotal change. This was when the economy was pushed to the
capitalistic model, the transition to new manufacturing technologies was
completed and industrialization started. Kharkiv was gradually becoming an
important railroad junction, and a crucial economic and industrial center.
New plants
required more and more workforce, boosting the city’s populace. In 1912, it had
238,466 people making it the third biggest city in Ukraine after Kyiv and
Odesa. The newcomers were mostly ethnic Russians from Kursk, Orel, Moscow and
Kaluga gubernias. A special privilege policy encouraged them to move to
Kharkiv. The share of local Ukrainians thus declined unstoppably. In the 1897
all-Russian census, 25.6% of Kharkiv residents listed Ukrainian as their mother
tongue, while 63.2% listed Russian. Not all of the latter were ethnic Russians.
This situation was partly the result of the Russification policy whereby
speaking Russian guaranteed professional and social success. Outside of
Kharkiv, however, the census found that the share of Ukrainian-speakers ranged
from 98.6% to 70.5%.
TRAPPED IN THE FIRE OF WAR AND RUSSIFICATION
1900 was yet
another landmark year in political history of both Kharkiv and the entire
Ukraine: activists of student communities founded the Revolutionary Ukrainian
Party (RUP), the first political party in the Dieper Ukraine. Headed by Dmytro
Antonovych, it took Samostiyna Ukrayina (Independent Ukraine),
a brochure by Mykola Mikhnovsky, as its political platform. Over the next
years, RUP went through a slew of divides. Eventually, it ended up a
social-democratic party known as the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party
in 1905.
After bans
on publishing in the Ukrainian language were canceled, Kharkiv saw the first
newspaper in Ukrainian in 1906, titled Slobozhanshchyna (the
Ukrainian word for Sloboda Ukraine). In 1920, Mykola Mikhnovsky launched Snip (Sheaf),
another newspaper. The Kvitka-Osnovianenko Ukrainian Literature,
Art and
Ethnographic Society emerged to conduct Ukrainian research and studies.
World War I
and Ukrainian National-Democratic Revolution in 1917-1921 redrew the political
map of Eastern Europe completely. Under the Third Universal of the Tsentralna
Rada (Central Council), adopted as the declaration of the Ukrainian People’s
Republic (UNR) in November 1917, Kharkiv Oblast along with most ethnic
Ukrainian territory would become part of the UNR. The Fourth Universal signed
in January 1918 declared independence of the UNR. The subsequent military
aggression of the Soviet Russia launched in 1917, unfavourable international
situation and internal political squabbles dealt a fatal blow to the Ukrainian
People’s Republic. It lost its struggle for the independent national state. The
result was Soviet government announced by the illegitimate First All-Ukrainian
Convention of Councils in Kharkiv in December 1917 with the support of the
Russian military. It lasted for the next 70 years.
Kharkiv
remained the capital of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic until 1934.
Initially, it had been reviving its Ukrainian face: Moscow was forced to
conduct “Ukrainization” because it would not have managed to keep Kharkiv under
control otherwise. In the process, it identified proactive Ukrainians whom it
later killed in mass repressions of the 1930-1940s. The undesirable yet
inevitable byproduct of “Ukrainization” was a temporarily more favourable
environment for ethnic Ukrainian culture compared to the tsarist times. Many
books and newspapers in Ukrainian were published, Ukrainian dominated in the
local government authorities, and at schools and universities. Writing and
artistic life flourished: writer Mykola Khvyliovyi and theater director and
playwright Les Kurbas worked in Kharkiv.
The
1932-1933 Famine, collectivization and repressions killed a huge part of the
population in Kharkiv Oblast, as well as all over Ukraine. “Ukrainization”
stopped. Kyiv became the capital of the Ukrainian SSR.
In the years
of World War II, Kharkiv Oblast alongside Chernihiv, Sumy, Donetsk and Luhansk
oblasts, was the borderline zone, so it saw the most violent regime of the Nazi
occupation. The tragic Barvinkove trap took place nearby in 1942 when the
mistake of Soviet commanders left nearly 200,000 troops encircled by the
Germans. Kharkiv celebrates August 23, 1943 as its liberation day but bloody
battles in fact continued around it until August 29.
The post-war
Kharkiv retained its status as a great education, industrial and commercial
center. Meanwhile, Soviet policies continued to crush its Ukrainian character
with creeping “internationalization”. The consequences are still felt today.
Author: Svitlana Potapenko, Junior Visiting
Fellow of Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna, Austria)
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