That turbulent period taught Ukrainians that the
ideals of national freedom and solidarity must not be squandered on attractive
slogans about social equality, “land and freedom” or “land to peasants”
At the end of the 18th century, following the abolition of the
autonomy for the Zaporizhian Host by Catherine II of Russia and the liquidation
of the Cossack Hetmanate, Ukraine was integrated into the Russian pan-imperial
state system with its unified methods of rule and a government that combined
the powers of autocracy and police. Russian tsarism brutally broke the terms of
the Pereyaslav Treaty signed in 1654 which made Ukraine recognize the
protectorate of the Russian tsar but allowed it to preserve its authentic
social system. As a result, the “state of the Cossacks” lost the last remaining
fragments of its statehood.
“To be or not to be” a la Ukraine
Shortly after, Ukrainians faced one crucial question: will their country
continue to exist as a separate national organism, or will be it swallowed by
the greedy northern neighbour? The latter did not simply entail a change of the
model of relations between Ukraine and Russia that had existed until then; it
would have de facto put an end to
national existence of Ukrainians.
This was the aim of the Russian Empire, and the key message of the “common history of the two nations”,
something the Russian politicians and the likeminded Ukrainians like to talk
about today. However, historical background makes the debate on whether Ukraine
had been a colony to Russia or had been dependent on it in any other way
pointless, even if it still is a stumbling block for some researchers into
social relations. The nature of Ukraine’s relations with Russia has nothing in
common with the conventional relations of colonial states like England, France,
Spain or Holland, with their colonies. Russia had been pursuing a task that no
other colony in the world cared for: it had been taking every effort to
completely Russify Ukraine and abolish its national organism. For more than 300
years, Russia tried to gradually destroy Ukraine’s national and cultural
individuality and to barbarize it by imposing its own social system and
lifestyle on Ukraine.
For a long time, Ukraine had two main names: Rus and Ukraine. Subsequently, “Rus” turned into a historical one while “Ukraine”
firmly entrenched itself as the national name (many other European nations had
gone through similar changes). Conscious or not, reluctance to understand this
results in mistaken definitions of the time when Ukrainians emerged as an
ethnos, or is used as an argument in blatant xenophobic speculations.
Moscow, in turn, cynically tried to appropriate the name “Rus” when
establishing its statehood, even if it had no territorial prerequisites for
that. The name later turned into “Russia”, the Greek equivalent of the name
“Rus”. In the following centuries, Russia manipulated the stolen name in an
attempt to appropriate the rich cultural and socio-political heritage of the
Old Kyiv State which had never been Russia’s.
Peter the Great, widely regarded as Russia’s “modernizer”, realized that
he needed to rely on a powerful socio-cultural foundation to “Europeanize”
Muscovy. He did not have one in his own country, but Ukraine had it and was
under his control. Lacking national statehood and cultural accomplishments that
were common with Europe, Moscow tried to “borrow” Ukraine’s civilization
accomplishments, Old Kyiv statehood tradition, its culture and European
recognition. It was in the time of Peter the Great that Russia’s diplomacy
began to ardently promote the new term “Russia” and “Russians” in the West to
replace the commonly known “Muscovy” and “muscovites”. Thus, Peter the Great
ordered his associate, Duke Aleksandr Menshikov, to send a circular to the
Russian diplomat, Prince Dolgorukiy: “In all newspapers our state is written as
Muscovy, not Russia. Therefore, please specify that it [the state] should be
named Russian. All other courts have been sent the same notice.” The
identification of the Russian Empire with the political and cultural heritage
of the old Rus-Ukraine was ultimately embraced in the course of the 18th century
when the Russian Empire was on the rise. The formula of a “united undivided
Russia” was integrated as the foundation into the imperial ideology and became
a tool separating Ukrainians from the Old Kyiv statehood they had created. This
separation was implemented through merciless Russification.
Rural Ukraine as a fortress of identity
Despite the assimilation campaign of the Russian Empire and a wide range
of tools it used to crush national identity, Ukrainians preserved their
individuality and the memory of their historical past. Rural Ukraine played a
crucial role in this, relying on authentic aspects of physical and mental life
that developed over many generations. It gave birth to one of the oldest
agricultural civilizations in the world, developed firm and long-standing
foundations for national existence, and kept them alive and present up until
modern times despite all historic hindrances.
Rural Ukraine was very different from rural Russian in the way it cultivated
land, was part of the European cultural values and law, and organized labour
and everyday life more effectively, and in terms of social psychology. An
important socio-economic ground for Ukrainian individuality was the dominating
ownership of land by families in Ukraine compared to almost nationwide
community ownership in Russia.
Excessive centralism in the Russian Empire prevented it from overcoming
the gap between the community-dominated Russia and the individual
property-dominated Ukraine. Bolshevism accomplished more by pushing Ukrainian
peasants into kolkhozs and
launching the Holodomor as an unprecedented genocide to crush the active and
passive resistance Ukrainians posed to the assimilation offensive of the
empire. Nevertheless, Ukrainian peasants managed to preserve their typical
lifestyle and unstoppable urge to cultivate new lands almost intact. As a
result, Ukrainians ultimately settled down on the coasts of the Black Sea and
the Sea of Azov, and began to cultivate those.
Ukrainians used a wide range of tools in their organic resistance to
Russian centralism, including occasional insurgencies, killings of landlords
and officials, and mass rallies that occasionally took a distinct national
tone. One such event was the Kyiv Cossack Campaign in 1885 involving 500
villages in Kyiv Oblast. It proved that Ukrainian peasants unconsciously
preserved their historic memory and national consciousness.
The mindset preserved in the rural environment later served as important
ground for the national revival of the 19th and
early 20th centuries.
Despite difficult socio-economic conditions, conservatism, spirituality and
respect for national historic traditions helped Ukrainian peasants preserve the
crucial complex of values that inspired Ukrainian elites and their struggle for
national identification. This rural factor was a permanent source of human
resources, as well as spiritual and material power for the Ukrainian movement.
Many observers of the time noted complete rejection of imperialistic
order by Ukraine amidst generally loyal attitude to the institute of the
Russian monarchy. “I did not find a single person out of all people I spoke to
in Malorossiya who were favourable towards Russia; everyone was obviously
dominated by the spirit of opposition,” General Aleksandr Mikhailovski-Danilevski
wrote in 1824 after his visit to Ukraine.
Many other observers of Ukrainian life echoed this, including German
geographer and traveler Johann Georg Kohl who came to Ukraine in 1841. “The
dislike that the people of Malorossiya have about the people of the Great
Russia is so strong that it can simply be described as national hatred,” he
wrote. He also observed that the Ukrainian nobility preserved “many features of
their golden era of independence. You can spot portraits of Bohdan Khmelnytsky,
Ivan Mazepa, Pavlo Skoropadskyi and Kyrylo Rozumovskyi, who had been hetmans in
different times, in many houses. Handwritten scripts that tell of those days
are carefully stored in trunks.” Kohl noticed how important the influence of
the nobility on the social life of Ukrainians was in the 19th century.
He noted that Ukrainians “have their own language, their own historic memories,
rarely mix with or marry Moscow rulers… One can say that their national roots
go back to provincial nobility that dwells in villages and has generated all
great political movements.” The German traveler managed to see what the Narodniki* missed
in the 19th century when they dominated social activity in
Ukraine.
“Provincial nobility”
Ukrainian noble class and with peasants chaotically (and organically)
preserved the language, religion, traditions and conventional family and social
life. The process continued throughout the 19th century,
all the way through the 1917-1921 Revolution. In the first decades of the 19th century,
Ukrainian Cossack elites faced the loss of common forms of social and cultural
life, so they accepted external elements of Russian lifestyle, yet preserved
many elements of the old traditional life. It was this class that turned out to
be the most proactive participant of the national revival process, determining
its social content and forms of expression. The ancestors of the Cossack
nobility were the crucial part of numerous opposition clubs where participants
discussed urgent political issues, including the revival of the hetmanate,
reanimation of the Cossack status and traditional social institutions. The
clubs mushroomed in Novhorod-Siversk, Chernihiv, Poltava and Kyiv, all in
Northern and Central Ukraine. Very often, they would emerge in noble mansions,
such as the house of the Kapnists in Obukhiv, Kyiv Oblast, or the Myklashevskys
in Ponurivka (a village in Bryansk Oblast, today’s Russia). The descendants of
the ruling class in the Hetmanate also gathered around Prince and Malorossiya
Governor Nikolai Repnin, a supporter of Ukrainian traditions married to the
granddaughter of Kyrylo Rozumovskyi, the last Hetman of the Zaporizhian Host, a
Duke of the Russian Empire and President of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
These people included Vasyl Tarnovskyi, Vasyl Lukashevych, Semen Kochubei and
Petro Kapnist. Mykola Repnin was friends with academics and writers Vasyl
Poletyka, Hryhoriy Kvitka-Osnovianenko and Petro Hulak-Artemovskyi. It was in
that group that the idea of Prince Repnin as a possible candidate for the
Hetman of Ukraine emerged. As the elites participated in the all-Russian
opposition entities (quite a few were in the Society of United Slavs, a secret
revolutionary organization of officers and local officials, as well as among
the Decembrists), they added a particular Ukrainian autonomous ferment to the
views of the oppositioners on the future structure of Russia.
Ukrainian nobility was the crucial party to the evolution of Ukrainian
literature. The Romanticism novelists of the 1820-1840s were the ones to
express Ukrainian spirituality. They most often descended from well-known
Cossack elite families that had played an important role in the history of the
Hetmanate. They became the carriers of Romanticism, a trend that affected the
formation of national consciousness in European countries. This served as the
ground for opposition sentiments against the new rules introduced in Ukraine by
the Russian centralist system.
Objective observation of Ukrainian national life in the 19th century,
and the role of the Ukrainian nobility in it, resembled what Viacheslav
Lypynsky, political thinker and historian known as the father of Ukrainian
conservatism, later described as the contribution of the “class of family
landowners” to the socio-political and cultural movement in Ukraine. He
criticized local national democrats for their attempts to push aristocrats to
the sidelines of the national process. He also stressed on the crucial creative
role of Ukrainian landowners who laid “the foundation of modern political and
cultural revival of the Ukrainian nation” in the 19th century.
These landowners, as listed by Lypynsky, included Yevhen Hrebinka, both
Gogol brothers, Mykola Markovych, Oleksa Storozhenko, Hryhoriy
Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Amvrosiy Metlynsky, Panteleymon Kulish, Mykola Kostomarov,
Lesia Ukrayinka and many more. He claimed that aristocratic landowners funded
the foundation of the Ukrainian Scientific Society on Lviv, the Department of
Geographic Society and Commission of Archeology in Kyiv, the History Museum of
Bohdan Khanenko in Kyiv, the National Museum of Metropolitan Sheptytsky
Foundation in Lviv, and a number of other scientific and cultural institutions.
Ukrainian aristocrats had long-standing and close contacts with the
rural population and abundant experience of commercial cooperation with them,
plus a number of common elements in everyday life and household routines. This
inspired hope for potential nationwide solidarity in the Ukrainian society.
The brethren of St. Cyril and Methodius
In January 1846, the Brotherhood of St. Cyril and Methodius emerged in
Kyiv as a secret community that, for the first time in the history of Ukrainian
social movement, offered a list of political priorities focusing on the
liberation of Ukraine and profound reform of the social hierarchy. The fact
that it did not involve big landlords and aristocrats, but was dominated by
small and middle landowners, government officials, students and intelligentsia
signaled a significant change in the liberation movement, an expansion of its
social platform.
The Brotherhood viewed historical process from the perspective of Christian
principles of justice, equality and goodness - by contrast to the despotic
regime of Russia. The goal of the Brotherhood was to eliminate serfdom,
autocracy, social classes and privileges for the nobility, and to guarantee
civil liberties to everyone. Its members suggested that Ukraine would play the
central role in creating the future free community of Slavic peoples, with Kyiv
as the capital of the future federation where the “general Slavic assembly”
would convene.
The Brotherhood initiated the movement of Narodniks in
Ukraine, and the respective school of political thought. Its most outstanding
representative was historian and activist Mykola Kostomarov who led the Narodnik school
of Ukrainian historiography. The Brotherhood members were obviously influenced
by West European ideas of Romanticism, as well as the idea of the Slavic
national revival. One source of inspiration was The Books and The
Pilgrimage of the Polish Nation by Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. As they
strived for Ukraine’s individual historical process and national development,
most of the brothers were skeptical about statehood efforts of their aristocratic
elites. Instead, they preferred to focus on cultural and education missions.
This was, for instance, part of the writer Panteleimon Kulish’s worldview where
the notion of “power” was subordinate to the notion of “truth”. Ukrainian noble
landlords, hetmans and senior rulers, as well as their statehood aspirations,
were seen exclusively as “untruth”. Despite Kulish’s huge cultural and
spiritual contribution to the national revival, the drawback of his social
stance was the inability to see a social class in the past or in his
contemporary world that would prove willing and capable of creating separate
statehood.
Taras Shevchenko
The socio-political stance and worldview of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s
most well-known poet, was different. He realized that all classes of society
had to unite for national liberation of the entire Ukraine not just one social
class or group.
When Russian “reformers” abolished Ukraine’s autonomy, they were seeking
to assimilate Ukraine with Russia and to break the connections between the
national elite and religious leaders and the average people. Many descendants
of the Cossack seniors and nobility thus switched to Russian aristocracy,
turning into “slaves with a cockade in the forehead” as Taras Shevchenko
described them. However, this transformation was far from absolute or
irreversible for many of Ukraine’s aristocratic families. In fact, Shevchenko’s
close ties to Ukrainian aristocrats largely shaped his worldview and social
perspective. As he traveled around Ukraine, he established fruitful contacts
with the descendants of prominent Cossack and noble families who, both
intentionally and not, were the carriers of the long-standing national and
cultural traditions and the diverse memory of Ukraine from the time when it was
ruled by Cossack hetmans. Many of his contacts with the left-bank nobility of
the 1840s, including father and son Tarnavsky, Hryhoriy Halahan or Andriy
Lyzohub, signficiantly contributed to the formation of Shevchenko’s social
stance. His famous line, “Will we see our Washington, with the law new and
just; we sure will someday”, was based on the concept of “American separatism”
from England pursued by the Ukrainian opposition led by Vasyl Kapnist, a poet,
playwright and activist, a descendant of a well-known landlord family. American
aristocratic opposition had gained independence through an armed rebellion
against the rule of the metropolis, while preserving its social position at the
same time. At some point, Ukrainian aristocrats, too, thought that they could
repeat this in Ukraine with the support of Prussia. Taras Shevchenko was
probably aware of the earlier campaign by Vasyl Kapnist, initiated in the late
18th century,
to implement this idea. He was a close friend of Vasyl’s son, Oleksiy, and
could have heard of his father’s political concept.
Shevchenko’s contacts with Ukrainian aristocrats stem from St.
Petersburg. In 1840, Petro Martos, the landlord of Lokhvytsia and Lubny povits (counties)
in Poltava Oblast, a descendant of an old Cossack elite family whom Shevchenko
met in winter of 1839-1840, published Kobzar, the most famous collection of Shevchenko’s
poems, at his own expense. He introduced Shevchenko to Hryhoriy Tarnavsky, a
well-known philanthropist and art expert, the founder of the famous collection
of Ukrainian antiquities in the Kachanivka park that helped strengthen national
consciousness of many figures in Ukrainian Renaissance. Shevchenko’s dreams of
a Ukraine liberated from the Russian rule were closely intertwined with the
urge to revive the hetmanate, a widespread idea among Ukrainian aristocrats at
the time. “The gold-clad hetmans will come to life”, his characters would say.
On the one hand, his contacts with Ukrainian aristocrats largely shaped
his national position which encompassed prospects of national revival, not just
interests of peasants. On the other hand, his poems encouraged patriotic
sentiments among Ukrainian aristocrats, created the nationwide spiritual
upsurge badly needed by all participants of the Ukrainian movement regardless
of their social class. His poems blurred the lines between the elites of
Ukrainian society and the rest, something that Russian autocrats had long
striven for.
Despite all transformations of Ukrainian aristocrats caused by Russia’s
assimilation policy that resulted in the integration into the imperial system,
many of them naturally rejected an alien regime and tried to preserve
traditional ties to the lifestyle developed by the previous generations.
Despite sharp dislike of the antihuman conduct of many Ukrainian aristocrats
Shevchenko often observed, he still realized their social role and meaning in
the liberation struggle. Unfortunately, the activists of the Ukrainian narodnik movement
failed to realize this later and pushed what they saw as “the class of
exploiters” to the sidelines. Shevchenko did not break contacts with
aristocrats. Quite on the contrary, he stayed among them and tried to make them
understand national goals and the need to restrain their negative
class-dictated instincts. “Embrace, my brothers, the youngest brothers,” he
wrote. “Bless your children with a firm hand, and kiss them with your lips
free”.
Shevchenko’s urge to reach national unity and reconciliation between
Ukrainian nobility and peasants in society was based, among other things, on
distinct socio-cultural ground shaped by history. This certain proximity of the
two segments of society stemmed from the socio-economic affinity of the land
ownership models for Cossacks and peasants that evolved from the 1648-1654
Khmelnytsky Uprising. The Cossacks were an open society, absorbing both the
nobility and the peasants, their social, economic and cultural traditions
included.
The flow of history in Ukraine proved that the ideals of national
freedom and solidarity cannot be substituted by any other slogans, even the
most appealing ones like the Narodniks’ “land and freedom” or the subsequent
Bolshevik “land to peasants”. These ideals must be protected and cherished by
all classes and segments of a nation. The generations of various stages of the
Ukrainian liberation movement, including modern Ukrainian socialist parties,
failed – or did not want – to understand this.
*The Narodniks was a social opposition movement of
patriotic intelligentsia and students, as well as peasants and workers, who
united based on their democratic worldview and shared ethical, social and
political ideals of democracy and socialism that could be used to build a new
life of people. The term emerged in the early 1860s among Russian democrats,
i.e. democracy- and reform-oriented people who supported the “people’s cause”
and the people
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