Cartouche. Typus Generalis Vkrainæ Sive Palatinatum Podoliæ, Kioviensis et
Braczlawiensis Terras Nova Delineatione Exhibens (General Map of Ukraine, 1657)
http://baitsar.blogspot.com/2017/12/xvii-xviii.html
Russia claims that there had never been such a nation as the Ukrainians before the 20th century. The rise of the national movement at the beginning of the 20th century was the result of the special operation carried out by Austrian General Staff: they “artificially imposed the Ukrainian Language” and financed the work of Mykhaylo Hrushevsky along with the other Ukrainian politics perusing the aim of weakening Russia.
The existence of this stereotype reflects the Russian chauvinistic attitude to the Ukrainians and their role in the history.
The thing is that in the Russian Empire, the person identity was based on the religious affiliation until the 19th century. Since the Ukrainians and the Belarusians were the Orthodox, they were considered as the brethren. However, at the beginning of the 19th century, the European tendencies to identify the nationality by the language feature reached Russia. This practice was connected with the interest to the folklore studies, evoked by the folklorist scientific works of the Brothers Grimm. It was them who had the great response of discussions throughout Europe. In the 1820s, Ukraine saw the first folklore expeditions, which were treated leniently by the Russian Empire. The first collections of Mikhailo Maksymovych were published in Moscow: Little Russian Folksongs (Malorossijskije Pesni) in 1827 and The Ukrainian Folk Songs (Ukrainskije Narodnyje Pesni) in 1834.
Noteworthy, that the epicenter of the Ukrainian Renaissance in the first three decades of the 19th century was attributed not to Kyiv but to Kharkiv: Ukrainskyi Visnyk, the first Ukrainian Journal, appeared in this city. The Journal served as a workshop for Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, the Ukraininan sentimentalist author.
At the same time, on the grounds of the Austrian Empire, which embraced Halychyna (Halytsia, Galicia) and Bukovyna (Bukovina), everything was on the contrary: all the national efforts were restricted rigidly. Only after the revolutionary events known as the Springtime of the Peoples in 1848, held also at Halytsia and Bukovyna, the processes of liberalisation and national revival gradually started. At the period of the last three decades of the 19th century, when the Russian Empire created the conditions of forbidding the Ukrainian language, the intellectuals from Naddniprianshchyna found an optimal way out and started to publish their books within Halytsia.
It is also interesting to note that at this very period, the Russian Empire started to support the pro-Russian movement within that areas. In 1909, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Finance made the decision on regular funding for those Russians who lived around the pre-Carpathian territory. Annually, they allocated 60 000 rubles and 25 000 rubles. In 1911, prime minister P. Stolypin granted 15 000 rubles for the elections to the Austrian Parliament.
The next set of restrictions to the Ukrainians was trigged with the beginning of World War I: the press in the Ukrainian language could not be published legally, it made unfeasible the activities of the Ukrainian political, cooperative and educational organisations, the number of the Ukrainian activists were exiled, including Mykhaylo Hrushevsky, the historian and the national movement leader of that time. The Russian occupation of Halytsia in 1914 was accompanied by the terror towards all the Ukrainian so that the Ukrainian cultural base was destroyed. By the way, those pro-Moscow inhabitants who expressed that they were shocked with the predatory behaviour of their Russian co-religionists suffered from the occupation physically and their number was considerable.
It seems that the Ukrainian question was buried again by the Russian power.
In order to justify their actions and once again prove it to the world that there was no any Ukraine or the Ukrainian language (“have never been, does not exist, will never be”), the Russians launched the mythologeme that the Ukrainian nation was the product of the special operation carried out by the Austrian General Staff with the purpose to split Russia. This idea became very popular among the monarchists and anti-Ukrainian movements, and its popularity was prompted by the fact that the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen was fighting with Austria-Hungary.
The Austrian and the German commanders really relied on the Ukrainians from Bukovyna and Halytsia for their propaganda spreading among the captives originated from the Ukrainian governorates of the Russian Empire. They were constantly being persuaded that they were not the Russian subordinates but those of Ukraine, the country, which should be separated from Russia due to the assistance of the Germans. The Austrians did not limit their propaganda efforts by the work with the captives but were conducting it among the locals from the Volhynia Governorate (the Volyn Governorate), namely in Volodymyr-Volynsky (Volodymyr-Volynskyy), Lutsk and some other towns of Volodymyr-Volynsky powiat.
The Russian authorities were effective in preventing the rise and development of the Ukrainian movement until February 1917. However, as soon as 4 March, 1917, the Central Council of Ukraine (Ukrainska Tsentralna Rada) was established and in two weeks after it, the 100 000-people demonstration to support the ideas the Ukrainian statehood was held in Kyiv, which had 500 000 inhabitants at that time. It was a real shock after which it took a long time for the imperious world of Russia to recover. It turned out that Kyiv had not been the Russian city. The Kievlianin, a chauvinist Russian newspaper, addressed the Russians and called to manifest the just and irreversible rebukes against all the representatives of the Ukrainism of the day.
The time passed and these calls were forgotten as Ukraine was occupied again by Russia and it lasted until 1991. However, since after the Orange Revolution in 2005, the Russian rhetoric repeated again the claim that the Ukrainian nation was invented by the Austrian General Staff.
In 2012, the Russian journal Sotsionauki (Social Sciences) published the article titled “Ukrainian Doctrine in Austria-Hungarian politics and genesis of the Ukrainian nationalism”. One of its main conclusions was formulated as follows: “The considerable role in the character of the Ukrainian nationalism, which frequently acquired the extreme forms of chauvinism, was played by that image of Russia which was shaped and many times maintained by the Austrian state propaganda, the image of the eternal ill-wisher and opponent to Ukraine. In general, the Ukrainian nationalism was typical and had the characteristic feature of the public discourse of the middle and the second half of the 19th century, but had transformed in a quite aggressive ideology”.
This serves as one more prove to the idea that the Russian aggression against Ukraine had been prepared much earlier than 2014. As it was 100 years ago, the main reason for the untrue stereotypes about Ukraine to exist, including the one about the Austrian General Staff, is Russian’s attempts to reasonably explain the own imperial ambitions and the territorial claims for the Crimea and Ukraine.
Our Advice to Read:
1. Брехуненко В.А. Війна за свідомість. Російські міфи про Україну та її минуле. ‒ Київ, 2017 ‒ 280 с.
2. Горєлов М.Є. Українська етнічна нація / М. Горєлов, О. Моця, О. Рафальський.– Київ: Еко-продакшн, 2012.– 192 с.
3. Єкельчик С. Імперія пам'яті. Російсько-українські стосунки в радянській історичній уяві.– Київ: Критика, 2008.– 303 с.
4. Костів К. Книги буття українського народу.– Репр. вид.– Київ: Центр учбової літератури, 2021.– 190 с.
