The history of the emergence of the state of Ukraine and the Ukrainians raises many questions, especially in light of the attempts of certain representatives of the Ukrainian elites to lead the historiography of Ukraine from Kievan Rus or to consider themselves descendants of the ancient Sumerians (attempts are completely anecdotal).
In this regard, it is interesting to understand why the primordially Russian land, which from ancient times was called Rus, suddenly began to be called Ukraine, and how it happened. As part of the ancient Russian principality, Kievan Rus, which flourished in the 9th-12th centuries, over time it was transformed into Ukraine, where the Ukrainians came from and who contributed to it. In the light of the recent events in Ukraine and in connection with the increased urgency of this issue, I consider it expedient to return to its consideration.
Attempts to change the Russian national identity on the territory of today's Ukraine took place under the influence of external forces, while a national ideology alien to the people was imposed and the basic values inherent in the Russian national community were destroyed.
With the help of ideas brought from outside, in the interests of other peoples, for many centuries they have been trying to reformat the national consciousness of a part of the Russian people. This was done with the aim of artificially creating a nation with an inherently hostile ideology that provokes confrontation between parts of the Russian people.
As an ideological basis for breaking the national self-consciousness of the southwestern branch of the Russian people, the ideology of Ukrainians was promoted and implemented, which was formed by external forces in various historical epochs.
There were several stages in promoting Ukrainian identity. Each of them solved specific tasks of that time, but they were all aimed at destroying Russian identity in these lands. As a result of the centuries-old evolution of Ukrainians in today's Ukraine, it has become a national-state ideology. Such pseudo-heroes as Bandera and Shukhevych became its national symbols.
Lithuanian-Polish stage
The first, the Lithuanian-Polish stage of imposing a different national identity on the Russian people (XIV-XVI centuries) began after the capture of Kiev by the Tatar-Mongols (1240), the pogrom of Kievan Rus and the division of Russian lands between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Moscow principality and Poland. It was caused by claims to the Russian spiritual heritage of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which annexed most of the Russian lands, and the Moscow principality, which became the administrative and spiritual center of the Russian people.
The confrontation that arose was especially aggravated in the XIV century, when the Russian princes declared themselves to be the collectors of the Russian lands and “All Russia” appeared in the princely title. It continued during the time of the first Tsar Ivan the Terrible and the Time of Troubles with the united Polish-Lithuanian state, when at the interstate level they argued more fiercely not on the question of who and what lands belonged to, but who and how it was called.
The unshakable position of the Russian grand dukes, and then of the tsars, on their succession in all Russian lands caused a reciprocal Lithuanian-Polish concept of the Moscow state as a non-Russian land. In its substantiation, Matvey Mekhovsky's "Treatise on the Two Sarmatias" (1517) appears, in which the state of "Muscovy" appears with the "Muscovites" living there without mentioning that they are Russian.
This concept spreads in the Polish-Lithuanian everyday life, but the strengthening of the power and influence of the Russian state forces them to look for forms of changing the identity of now Russians who, after the Union of Lublin (1569), found themselves in a single Polish-Lithuanian state.
The solution to this problem coincides with the intensifying offensive of Catholicism against Orthodoxy, and the main events unfold on the main ideological front of those times - the religious one. The authorities of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Catholic hierarchs make a decision, in order to undermine Russian unity, to strike a blow at the main spiritual value of Russia at that time - its Orthodox faith and are trying to force another faith in the form of the Union of Brest (1596).
The Orthodox clergy and the common people fiercely oppose it. Failing to achieve a change of faith among the Orthodox people, the Poles persuaded the Orthodox hierarchs and aristocracy to join the union, striving to join the Polish elite, thereby depriving Orthodoxy of material support, and relegating it to the “Khlop” level.
At the same time, an attack on the Russian language begins, it is expelled from office work, the Russian population is forced to use exclusively Polish in public places, which leads to the appearance in the Russian language of many Polish words, and by the middle of the 17th century it turns into an ugly Polish-Russian jargon - the prototype of the future Ukrainian language.
The next step of the Poles is to exclude from circulation the very concepts "Rus" and "Russian". At that time, in Polish and Russian societies at the household level, the outlying lands of the two states were called "ukraina", and the papal envoy Antonio Possevino proposed in 1581 to name the southwestern Russian lands by this name.
The Poles are introducing a new toponym into office work, and gradually, instead of the term “Rus”, “Ukraine” appears in the document circulation. So, from a purely geographical concept, this term acquires a political meaning, and the Polish authorities, through the Cossack foreman, who received mainly Polish education and strives to become a new gentry, are trying to introduce this concept into the masses.
The people do not accept the identity imposed on them, and oppression and persecution provoke a series of popular uprisings against the Polish oppressors, which modern Ukrainian ideologists are trying to present as the national liberation struggle of the “Ukrainian people” for their independence under the leadership of the Cossack elders.
This rigging has nothing to do with reality, since the Cossacks did not fight for the national liberation of the people, but en masse sought to become a registered part of the Cossacks, receive payment and privileges for serving the Polish king, and in order to obtain popular support they were forced to lead uprisings.
With the entry of the Left Bank after the Pereyaslav Rada into the Russian state, the process of imposing a “Ukrainian” identity on the people of southwestern Rus' on this territory practically stops, and gradually, over the course of the 18th century, “Ukrainian” terminology goes out of use. On the Right Bank, which did not go away from the power of Poland, this process continued and the establishment of Poles in educational structures became dominant.
Polish stage
The second, Polish stage of the imposition of "Ukrainian" identity begins at the end of the 18th century and continues until the defeat of the Polish uprising in 1863. It is due to the desire of the Polish elite to revive the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth within its former borders, which disappeared from the political map as a result of the second (1792) and third (1795) partitions of Poland and the incorporation of the Right Bank into the Russian Empire (Galicia became part of Austria-Hungary).
This stage is characterized by such a phenomenon as Ukrainophilism, which has two directions. The first is political Ukrainophilism, nurtured by the Poles with the aim of arousing in the population of the Southwestern Territory a desire to secede from Russia and involve them in the revival of Poland.
The second is ethnographic Ukrainophilism, which arose among the South Russian intelligentsia and substantiates the presence of the Little Russian nationality as part of the all-Russian people. Among the Russian intelligentsia, representatives of the political Ukrainophilism associated with “going to the people” were called “cotton-lovers”, and those who defend the “Ukrainian” roots of the Little Russian people were called “Mazepians”.
For such activities, the Poles had the broadest opportunities, since the Polish domination on the Right Bank did not undergo any changes, and the emperor Alexander I, who was not indifferent to them, not only surrounded his court with the Polish gentry, but also restored in full Polish rule in all lands of the Southwestern Territory. and completely placed the education system in their hands.
Taking advantage of this, the Poles create two of their ideological centers: Kharkov (1805) and Kiev universities (1833). In the first, the teaching staff of the corresponding orientation is selected by the university trustee Pole Severin Pototsky, from here the ideas of Ukrainians spread among a part of the South Russian intelligentsia and such a prominent figure of ethnographic Ukrainophilism as the historian Nikolai Kostomarov was brought up here.
Kiev University was generally founded on the basis of the Vilnius University and the Kremenets Lyceum, which were closed after the Polish uprising of 1830, and most of the teachers and students in it were Poles. It became the focus of the Polonophile intelligentsia and a hotbed of political Ukrainophilism, which in 1838 led to its temporary closure and the expulsion from the walls of the university of most of the teachers and students of Polish origin.
Political Ukrainophilism was based on the ideas of the Polish writer Jan Potocki, who wrote the book Historical and Geographical Fragments about Scythia, Sarmatia and the Slavs (1795) for propaganda purposes, in which he outlined an invented concept about a separate Ukrainian people, which has a completely independent origin.
These marginal ideas were developed by another Polish historian, Tadeusz Chatsky, who wrote the pseudoscientific work "On the name" Ukraine "and the origin of the Cossacks" (1801), in which he led the Ukrainians out of the horde of the Ukrainians that he had invented, who allegedly migrated from across the Volga in the 7th century.
On the basis of these opuses, a special “Ukrainian” school of Polish writers and scholars emerged, who further promoted the invented concept and laid the ideological foundation on which the Ukrainians were created. Then they somehow forgot about the ukrakh and remembered about them only after more than two hundred years, already in the time of Yushchenko.
Pole Franciszek Duchinski poured fresh blood into this doctrine. He tried to clothe his delusional ideas about the "chosenness" of the Polish and related "Ukrainian" people in the form of a scientific system, argued that the Russians (Muscovites) were not Slavs, but descended from the Tatars, and was the first to make a judgment that the name "Rus "Stolen by the Muscovites from the Ukrainians, who are the only ones entitled to it. This is how the legend still living today about the bad Muscovites who stole the name of Rus was born.
Around the end of the 18th century, an anonymous pseudoscientific work of ideological orientation “History of the Rus” (published in 1846) appeared in handwritten form, concocted from speculation, cynical falsification of historical facts and permeated with zoological hatred of everything Russian. The main lines of this opus were the initial isolation of the Little Russians from the Great Russians, the separation of their states and the happy life of the Little Russians in the Commonwealth.
According to the author, the history of Little Russia was created by the great dukes, and the Cossack chieftains. Little Russia is a Cossack country, the Cossacks are not bandits from the high road, who traded mainly in robbery, robbery and the slave trade, but people of knightly dignity. And, finally, the great Cossack state was never conquered by anyone, but only voluntarily united with others on an equal footing.
Nevertheless, all this nonsense called "The History of the Rus" was well known in the circles of the Russian intelligentsia and made a strong impression on the future Ukrainophiles - Kostomarov and Kulish, and Shevchenko, amazed by the tales of the golden age of the free Cossacks and vile Muscovites, tirelessly drew from it material for their literary works.
This lie-based mixture of historical fiction about the great Cossack past and deep-seated feelings of self-inferiority became the basis for all subsequent Ukrainian historiography and the national ideology of Ukrainians.
The marginal ideas of Ukrainism by Pototsky and Chatsky, in a slightly modified form, found support among some representatives of the South Russian intelligentsia, who founded ethnographic Ukrainophilism.
The Ukrainianophile Nikolai Kostomarov proposed his own concept of the existence of two Russian nationalities - the Great Russian and the Little Russian, while he did not put into it the meaning of a separate, non-Russian "Ukrainian people". Later, the Ukrainian theorist Hrushevsky defended the concept of a “Ukrainian” people separate from the Russian.
Another Ukrainianophile, Panteleimon Kulish, to teach the common people to read and write, proposed in 1856 his own system of simplified spelling (kulishovka), which in Austrian Galicia, against the will of Kulish, was used in 1893 to create a polonized Ukrainian language.
To promote the ideas of Ukrainophilism in Kiev, headed by Kostomarov, the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood (1845-1847) was created, which set itself the task of fighting for the creation of a Slavic federation with democratic institutions. Such an undertaking clearly did not fit into the existing system of power, and it was soon defeated.
Ethnographic Ukrainophilism did not receive any distribution in the mass consciousness, since the Ukrainian intelligentsia existed completely separately from the masses and was stewed in its own juice. What kind of influence on the masses could one speak if, for example, the Cyril and Methodius brotherhood included only 12 young intellectuals and the former serf Taras Shevchenko who joined them, who worked at the university as an artist, who by that time had lived with the Poles in Vilna and had heard legends there? about the "free Ukrainian people".
The “circulation” of Ukrainophiles among the people and their attempts to “educate” the peasants in order to awaken their “Ukrainian self-awareness” had no success. The word "Ukrainians" as an ethnonym did not spread either among the intelligentsia or among the peasants.
The Poles once again failed to organize a "Ukrainian" national movement for independence. The population of the Southwest Territory did not support the Polish uprising. After its failure in 1863 and the adoption by the Russian government of serious measures against Polish separatists, Ukrainophilism in Russia practically disappeared, and its center moved to Austrian Galicia, where many Polish activists of this movement moved.
