Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  Pogodin’s letter appeared in print in 1856, the first full year of the rule of the new emperor, Alexander II, a student of Vasilii Zhukovsky known for his liberal leanings. Alexander’s rule would begin in an atmosphere of great expectations and bring major political, social, and cultural changes, creating new opportunities for a Russo-Ukrainian intellectual encounter. A few years later, the members of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius were allowed to return from internal exile. They now moved their activities from Kyiv to St. Petersburg. Shevchenko went there after his release from military service and exile, as did Kostomarov, who in 1859 became a professor of Russian history at St. Petersburg University. Ironically, that was a position that had once been held by the father of the “reunification of Rus’” paradigm, Nikolai Ustrialov.

  If Ustrialov was the favorite court historian, Kostomarov now became the favorite of the radical students and liberal public of St. Petersburg. After his inaugural lecture, “he was carried out on their arms,” recalled a contemporary. “The great hall of the university was so crowded that listeners sat on the windowsills or two to a seat.” In the lecture, Kostomarov set new terms for the debate on nationality, shifting attention to the popular masses, whom he regarded as the main object of historical study. “No law, no institution will be important to us in themselves, but only their application to the people’s lives,” argued Kostomarov. “Features unimportant to the historian who puts the life of the state first will be a matter of the first importance to us.” The debate was clearly entering a new stage.

  8

  GREAT, LITTLE, AND WHITE

  SEPTEMBER 11, 1854, BECAME A DAY OF HUMILIATION FOR THE Russian navy, later to be recast as a day of Russian glory and sacrifice. On that late summer day, the commanders of the Russian Black Sea Fleet were ordered to sink five battleships and two frigates in Sevastopol harbor, their home base. That was just the beginning. In August 1855, all the remaining Russian ships went to the bottom of the harbor. The Russian army soon left Sevastopol, marking the empire’s defeat in the Crimean War of 1853–1856.

  The Russian fleet was sunk because it turned out to be of little use in stopping the joint French-British-Ottoman invasion of the Crimea—sails were no match for the steam engines of the British and French battleships, and the empire had no steam-powered battleships on the Black Sea. On the day of the allied landing there in September 1854, there was no wind to fill the sails, and the Russian ships could not move. All that remained was to sink them in order to block the access of the allied fleet to Sevastopol harbor. To the embarrassment of the rulers of the empire and the amazement of future historians, the occupying powers got around that problem by building the first railroad in the Crimea, so that they could bring supplies from the port of Balaklava to the town of Sevastopol.

  The peace treaty signed in Paris in 1856 was viewed in Russia as humiliation at the hands of the West. The conquerors of Paris in 1814, the Russians returned to that city forty years later to sign an arrangement that violated the territorial integrity of their empire. St. Petersburg was forced to abandon imperial possessions in the Caucasus and the Danube area, and eleven years later, the cash-strapped government sold Alaska to the United States, lacking the resources to defend it. It kept the Crimea but was banned from maintaining a fleet or fortifications on the Black Sea littoral. Even more significant was the empire’s loss of face as a great power.

  Something had to be done to restore Russia’s international status. The government’s priorities were building a new navy and reforming the army, but those tasks required large-scale social reforms. The new emperor, Alexander II, believed that this vast undertaking could be achieved without relinquishing much of his autocratic power. Nevertheless, he and his advisers understood that some liberalization of the previous regime’s policies was inevitable. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the case of the Polish question—the empire’s relations with its most mobilized and independently minded nationality.

  Russia’s loss of the Crimean War and the worsening of its international position, coupled with the uncertainty and internal turmoil caused by the emancipation of the serfs in February 1861, emboldened Polish society in its demands for the return of previously lost freedoms. In the former Kingdom of Poland and among the Polish nobility in the western provinces of the empire, hopes ran high that Alexander II would return to the policies of Alexander I, his uncle and namesake, by restoring liberties and the constitution. The kingdom, which had lost its sovereignty after the November Uprising of 1830, retained a degree of autonomy. But the government had no such plans, and the disillusioned Poles rebelled once again.

  The new Polish revolt, which began in January 1863, became known as the January Uprising. Young Poles attacked Russian military units in the cities of the Kingdom of Poland, and the revolt soon spread to the Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian provinces of the empire. It took more than a year for the Russian army to crush it. The fighting was followed by repression of the leaders and participants in the uprising, as well as a new campaign to Russify the borderlands. It soon occurred to the government that solving the Polish question was all but impossible without reimagining the Russian nation itself. It was during the public debate of the first years of Alexander II’s rule that Russia first began to take on the character of a tripartite nation of Great, Little, and White Russians.

  FROM THE VERY BEGINNING OF THE POLISH CRISIS, THE FUTURE of the former Polish territories outside the Kingdom of Poland was the principal concern of the imperial government and the general public. Alexander II had begun his rule with concessions to Polish public opinion, canceling his father’s directives requiring Polish officials to serve in the Russian provinces before they could take government offices in the former Polish lands. Alexander II also lifted restrictions on the employment of non-Orthodox officials in the former Polish lands of the empire. But the question of “de-Polonizing” the region did not disappear from the government’s agenda.

  With the start of Alexander’s reforms in the late 1850s, the supporters of Metropolitan Iosif Semashko—who had finally managed to bring most of the Uniates in the empire under the umbrella of Russian Orthodoxy, and believed in one indivisible Russian nation as a bulwark against Polish domination—spotted a new threat from the Polish side. A group of khlopomany, or “peasant-lovers,” appeared among the young nobles of the Right-Bank Ukraine, causing a split in the Polish camp and threatening an even greater one in imperial Russia. The khlopomany renounced their Polish Catholic upbringing and embraced the Orthodox faith of the peasants. This would have been good news for the authorities if the khlopomany had declared themselves Russian, but they chose to identify themselves as South Russians, or Ukrainians. Among them was Włodzimierz Antonowicz, who changed his name to Volodymyr Antonovych: in time, he would become a prominent Ukrainian historian.

  Semashko’s supporters claimed that Ukrainophilism was nothing but a Polish intrigue. In 1859, Sylvestr Gogotsky, a professor at Kyiv University and one of the leading lights of the pan-Russian movement, put forward a program to stop the advance of the Ukrainian movement. Gogotsky’s program was as follows:

  a) We should immediately take measures to educate the people on both sides of the Dnieper; b) From now on we should support the idea of the unity of the three Russian tribes; without that unity, we shall perish very quickly; c) The Russian literary language should be the same for all in primers. Faith and language should be binding elements. But it will do no harm to add something in our simple language as well; d) By no means should we promote discord between Great Russia and ourselves. The desire for change can be expressed in other ways. Do not forget that our enemies are the Poles and Rome!

  The three Russian tribes that Gogotsky had in mind were the Great Russians, Little Russians, and White Russians. This tripartite model of the Russian nation had deep historical roots. Its origins could be traced back to 1656–1721, when the tsars had been called the sovereigns of Great, Little, and White Russia. By the time Peter I
changed his title in 1721, becoming all-Russian emperor, only Great Russia and parts of Little Russia remained under Russian control—White Russia, or Belarus, had been lost to the Poles more than fifty years earlier under the terms of the Truce of Andrusovo (1667). When Russia regained eastern Belarus after the first partition of Poland in 1772, there was no change in the emperor’s title or in official discourse, and in the second and third partitions of Poland, the new “Russian” lands, including Right-Bank Ukraine, Volhynia, Podolia, and western or Black Belarus, were annexed to the empire. There were simply too many Rus’ nationalities to count. In 1823, when the leader of the Decembrist movement, Pavel Pestel, sat down to write his rebel constitution, he counted five rather than three groups of Russians to be merged into one Russian nation.

  The rise of interest in local folklore and language that began in the western borderlands of the empire in the 1820s and developed in the 1830s did not make it any easier to answer the question of how many distinct groups Russia contained. There were numerous dialects of what imperial scholars considered to be the Russian language, even among the Great Russians themselves. Ivan Sakharov, a medical doctor and an alumnus of Moscow University, counted four major Great Russian dialects, divided into numerous subdialects, in his Sayings of the Russian People About the Family Life of Their Ancestors (1836). The Little Russian dialect was said to consist of three subdialects. Numerous dialects would also be recorded in Belarus, where in the 1850s Russian military officers found, apart from Belarusian, a Black Russian dialect and identified southern Belarusian groups speaking the Little Russian dialect. Few participants in this ethnographic study of the imperial borderlands had any doubt that all those dialects were Russian and that their speakers constituted one Russian nation. But the newly discovered linguistic diversity of the “Russian tribe” raised the question of how many dialects there were, and—as the early ethnographers believed that every language corresponded to a nationality—how many Russian nationalities and subnationalities in fact existed.

  The first to suggest that the Russian nation consisted of three subgroups was probably Nikolai Nadezhdin, a strong believer in both the diversity and the unity of the Russian nation. In 1841, fresh from internal exile after publishing the explosive Philosophical Letters of Petr Chaadaev (1836), and on his way to becoming editor of the journal of the Ministry of the Interior, Nadezhdin published a review of a work by the Vienna Slavist Jernej Kopitar. In the review he presented a historical scheme of the development of the Russian dialects and identified three of them: Pontic Slavic, or Little Russian; Baltic Slavic, or Belarusian; and Great Russian. According to Nadezhdin, the first two dialects were the oldest. The third, the Great Russian dialect, was a mixture of the first two and had developed in newly colonized areas east of the original settlements where the first two dialects were spoken.

  Nadezhdin’s brief review, published in German, and outside of the Russian Empire, remained largely unknown at home, but the same tripartite division of the Russian language and people would soon be introduced to a Russian readership. In 1842, the forty-seven-year-old Slovak censor Pavol Jozef Šafárik published a book titled Slovanský národopis (Slavic Ethnography) in Prague. Šafárik, reputed to be the foremost Slavist of his era, presented, in meticulous detail, a scheme of Russian dialects very similar to what Nadezhdin had proposed; in fact, Nadezhdin, in one of his own articles, identified himself as one of Šafárik’s consultants. These mentions of a tripartite division of what was then considered a single “Russian world” were the first shocks of a linguistic earthquake that would eventually change the political map of Eastern Europe.

  Šafárik’s three dialects included Great Russian, which he said included the Novgorodian subdialect; Little Russian, which encompassed not only the population of Russian-ruled Ukraine but also the populations of Austrian Galicia and Hungarian Transcarpathia; and White Russian, spoken in eastern and western Belarus. Šafárik believed language and nationality were closely connected, so he wrote not only about linguistic groups but also about the Great, Little, and White Russians. Although Šafárik never conducted ethnographic or linguistic research on the “Russian” dialects, he closely followed the literature coming from the Russian Empire and was in touch with some of the leading Russian Slavists of the era. He met Mikhail Pogodin in Prague in 1835, and Pogodin subsequently gave him financial support.

  Šafárik was also acquainted with Osyp Bodiansky, the Ukrainian-born professor of Slavic studies at Moscow University who had published History of the Rus’. Bodiansky supplied Šafárik with linguistic materials and in 1837 sent him a copy of the Belarusian “remake” of Kotliarevsky’s Eneïda. He also provided Šafárik with a map of Ukrainian and Belarusian dialects. In November 1842, Bodiansky wrote to one of his colleagues, the Kharkiv professor Izmail Sreznevsky, “I have always been of the opinion that the latter river (the Prypiat) is the natural boundary between the White Russians and the Little Russians, especially as the so-called Black Russians or Pinchuks live on both sides of the river and constitute a transition from the Khokhols [Ukrainians] to the Belarusians, and if I indicated our boundary differently to Šafárik in this instance, then I did so as a result of accounts given by Belarusians themselves who had earlier become Polonized.” Šafárik enjoyed unquestioned authority as a linguist among the Moscow-based Slavophiles, and as soon as Slovanský národopis appeared in print, Bodiansky, who had just returned to Moscow from trips abroad—he spent some time in Prague, where he consulted with Šafárik—sat down to produce a Russian translation of the book.

  A year later, in 1843, Bodiansky’s translation was published in the journal Moskvitianin (The Muscovite), edited by Pogodin. Šafárik’s tripartite division of the Russian language—and consequently, of the Russian nation—became the basis of Pogodin’s reinterpretation of Russian history. In the 1850s, he employed the division of the Russian people into Great, Little, and White Russians in his polemics with his Kyivan friend and intellectual opponent Mykhailo Maksymovych. But despite the broad popularity of Šafárik’s tripartite model, its acceptance in the empire was by no means assured. It was easy to see in it an attempt to undermine the notion of the unity of the Russian nation and state that was so cherished by the government and its supporters. Yet surprisingly, resistance to the model came not from the Great Russians, but from the Little Russian and White Russian sides.

  At Kharkiv University, Izmail Sreznevsky, Bodiansky’s correspondent and the empire’s most respected linguistic authority of the period, came up with his own division of “Russian” languages. In 1843, the year in which the translation of Šafárik’s work was published—and one year after returning from his own extensive journey to the Slavic lands—Sreznevsky postulated a division of Russian into two groups: Southern Russian (or Little Russian) and Northern Russian (or Great Russian). He was following in the footsteps of Mykhailo Maksymovych, who had made a similar division of the Russian nation in 1837. Yurii Venelin, a native of Transcarpathia who was an expert on the Bulgarian language and culture, suggested the same division around the same time. Sreznevsky admitted the existence of the Belarusian dialect, but he considered it a variant of Great Russian.

  Translated into the language of ethnography, labeling the Belarusian dialect a variant of Great Russian meant that the Belarusians were a subgroup of the Great Russians, not a distinct nationality. According to police records, that was exactly what some members of the Cyrillo-Methodian Brotherhood in Kyiv also thought. More importantly, on the eve of the Polish uprising some of the former members of the brotherhood began to talk about the Ukrainians, also known as Little or South Russians, as a nationality separate from the Great Russians.

  THE RETURN OF THE “POLISH QUESTION” IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE gave new urgency to the “Ukrainian question” in imperial politics and culture. Aleksandr Herzen, a writer and intellectual known today as the father of Russian populism and socialism, introduced the notion of Ukraine as an independent factor in the contest for the territories between Russ
ia and Poland. In the January 1859 issue of his Russian-language journal, Kolokol (The Bell), which was published in London, Herzen wrote: “Well, and what if, after all our considerations, Ukraine, remembering all the oppressions of the Muscovites, and the condition of serfdom, and the draft, and the lawlessness, and the pillage, and the knout on the one side, and not forgetting, on the other, how it fared under the Commonwealth with the soldiers, lords, and Crown officials, should not wish to be either Polish or Russian? As I see it, the question is to be decided very simply. In that case, Ukraine should be recognized as a free and independent country.”

  The genie was out of the bottle. In writing openly about the possibility of Ukrainian independence, which had so alarmed the authorities when they investigated the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, Herzen said what Mykola Kostomarov had never dared to say in his Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People, where he had been the first to address the question. And yet Herzen’s suggestion of Ukrainian independence was only a rhetorical tool—a point in the heat of argument over the future of the Russo-Polish borderlands, and an assertion of the right of the region’s inhabitants to decide their fate as they pleased. When it came to practical politics, both Herzen and Kostomarov preferred a federal solution to the nationality problem, and Herzen wrote as much in his article in Kolokol.

  Kostomarov was very appreciative of Herzen’s position and wrote to Kolokol endorsing the position its publisher had taken. His contribution, titled “Ukraine,” appeared anonymously in Kolokol in January 1860. Kostomarov began with an expression of gratitude to Herzen: “You have expressed an opinion about Ukraine that the thinking part of the South Russian people has long treasured as a precious and sacred possession of its heart.” He referred to his homeland as Ukraine, called its people Ukrainians, or the South Russian nation (narod), and expressed reservations about the term “Little Russians.” Kostomarov’s article was in many ways a development of his earlier ideas. By emphasizing the democratic nature of Ukraine’s Cossack past, he provided historical justification for treating the Ukrainians as a distinct people.