Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  The circular directed the censors’ attention to the development of publications in Ukrainian (Little Russian), ranging from writings by and for a narrow circle of intellectuals to literature for the masses. Valuev sided with the Ukrainian officials of the all-Russian persuasion. “They show quite fundamentally,” wrote the minister, “that there has never been, is not, and cannot be any separate Little Russian language, and that their dialect, spoken by the common people, is the selfsame Russian language, only spoiled by the influence of Poland; that the all-Russian language is as comprehensible to Little Russians as to Great Russians, in fact much more comprehensible than the one now being devised for them by some Little Russians and, in particular, by the Poles—the so-called Ukrainian language.”

  The Valuev circular aimed to prevent the distribution of Ukrainian-language texts among the peasantry and common folk. It prohibited the publication of educational and religious texts in Ukrainian, with the sole exception of belles lettres. Although the circular was introduced as a temporary measure, it had profound effects on the development of the Ukrainian culture and identity. In 1863, when Valuev signed his circular, thirty-three Ukrainian-language publications had appeared in print; by 1868, when he stepped down as minister, their number had been reduced to one. The government had effectively arrested the development of the alternative Rus’ language, literature, and high culture in the western borderlands envisioned by Ukraine’s leading political thinker of the time, Mykola Kostomarov. Nor did any Belarusian-language publications appear after 1863.

  “IN OUR TIME, THE QUESTION OF WHETHER ONE CAN OR SHOULD write in South Russian, which is to say, in Ukrainian, is decided by practice itself,” argued the publishers of Osnova (Foundation), the Ukrainophile journal published in St. Petersburg in Russian in 1862. What they still found questionable was the “practical significance of the people’s speech in teaching and preaching.” This was an understatement. In fact, bringing the Ukrainian language into the church and school had become the main political goal of the Ukrainophile movement. The Russian socialist writer and critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky endorsed that program when he welcomed the appearance of the first issue of Osnova: “Teaching the Little Russian people in the Little Russian language and developing popular Little Russian literature is, in our view, the goal toward which it will be most convenient and useful for the Little Russians to strive initially.”

  The Ukrainophiles had been busy implementing that program long before it was formulated in print. By 1862, there were six Ukrainian primers on sale in the cities of the empire, one of them compiled by Taras Shevchenko, another by Panteleimon Kulish. Mykola Kostomarov was collecting funds among the Ukrainian and Russian public in St. Petersburg to publish more books in Ukrainian for the common folk, and a Ukrainian translation of Scripture was making its way through the Scylla and Charybdis of the Russian government and church censorship. The government was at a loss, lacking a clear idea of what to do with Ukrainian-language publications. The old restrictions on the activities of the Cyrillo-Methodian Brotherhood had been removed, and the peasants were being set free, but the question of how to educate the masses hung in the air. In 1859, the government had prohibited the publication or import of Latin-alphabet texts written in the Slavic languages, seeking to prevent Polish cultural expansion, but what to do with texts in the Russian “dialects,” which now also included White Russian (the first grammar of Belarusian appeared in 1862), was anyone’s guess.

  In 1861, when the Ukrainophiles approached Metropolitan Arsenii (Fedor Moskvin) of Kyiv for help in distributing Shevchenko’s primer, he turned to the government for advice. The Censorship Committee recommended that he turn down the request, arguing that publications in Little Russian could produce a schism between the two Slavic peoples and undermine the stability of the state. But generally, in the eyes of the censors, the Ukrainophile project was a pipe dream: they assumed that it would wither if they left it alone. No restrictions or prosecutions were needed, but one had to beware of providing it with government support. The change in government policy that led Valuev to issue his circular was set off by a letter sent to the Third Section of the Imperial Chancellery in March 1863, shortly after the start of the Polish uprising. It was unsigned but penned on behalf of a group of unidentified Little Russian Orthodox clerics who demanded a ban on the publication of a Ukrainian translation of the Gospels then being reviewed by the Holy Synod in St. Petersburg.

  The letter was forwarded to the governor general of Kyiv, Nikolai Annenkov, who supported the petitioners’ request. He was concerned that the translation would elevate Ukrainian from a dialect to the status of an independent language and produce political repercussions. Annenkov wrote: “Debate continues in the literature on the question of whether the Little Russian dialect is only a particular feature of the Russian language or an independent language. Having obtained the translation of Holy Scripture into the Little Russian dialect, the supporters of the Little Russian party will attain, so to speak, recognition of the independence of the Little Russian language, and then, of course, they will not stop at that but, basing themselves on the uniqueness of the language, will start making claims for the autonomy of Little Russia.”

  Annenkov’s opinion was reported to Emperor Alexander II, who instructed the head of the Third Section to contact the appropriate officials in the central government. This meant that the emperor himself considered the concerns expressed by the governor general of Kyiv legitimate and his proposal worth consideration. The matter was passed on to Valuev, who in turn contacted the Holy Synod. As a result, the plans to publish the Ukrainian translation of the Gospels, prepared by the Ukrainian cultural activist Pylyp Morachevsky, were canceled, and publications in Ukrainian intended for the popular masses were banned. The new policies were spelled out in the Valuev circular of July 18, 1863. In the months leading up to the circular, Valuev apparently underwent an evolution, turning from a reluctant executor of the tsar’s will into a strong supporter of the prohibitive measures the circular introduced. It took him three months to report to the Third Section that he fully agreed with the governor general’s proposal in Kyiv to ban the publication of the New Testament in Ukrainian. But once he made his decision, Valuev stood by it.

  In the Russian government of the 1860s, Petr Valuev was a liberal—a cautious reformer who wanted to strengthen the autocracy by creating a rudimentary system of popular representation on an ad hoc basis. Valuev’s hand on the question of Ukrainian publications was forced by a media campaign organized by the Third Section at the suggestion of Nikolai Annenkov, the same governor general of Kyiv who had proposed harsh measures against the Ukrainophiles. The key figure in that media campaign was an academic turned journalist, Mikhail Katkov. An intellectual who was at home with the conservative leaders of the Slavophile movement, Katkov had at first taken a condescending and even indulgent attitude toward the Ukrainian project, thinking that it was doomed to fail. But his position changed radically with the outbreak of the Polish uprising.

  On June 21, 1863, about a month before Valuev signed his circular, Katkov added his voice to the discussion on prohibiting Ukrainian-language publications in an article with a telling title, “The Coincidence of Ukrainophile Interests with Polish Interests.” In complete agreement with the adherents of pan-Russian Orthodoxy in Iosif Semashko’s camp, Katkov accused the Ukrainophiles of being instruments not only of Polish but also of Jesuit intrigue. In doing so, Katkov not only politicized the question of Ukrainian-language publications but in fact criminalized it, opening the door to the politically damaging treatment of the Polish-Ukrainian connection in Valuev’s circular. More importantly in the long run, Katkov provided intellectual foundations for the repressive policies vis-à-vis the Ukrainian cultural and political movement that would be adopted by the imperial government and last for decades. Katkov argued that “Ukraine has never had its own history, never been a separate state; the Ukrainian people are an authentic Russian people, an indigenous Russian people, an
essential part of the Russian people, without which it can hardly remain what it is now.” Although he recognized linguistic and cultural differences between the branches of the “Russian nation,” he considered them only locally significant. If the big Russian nation was to develop and prevail, the cultivation of local dialects would have to be arrested.

  Comparing the Russian Empire to France, Italy, and Germany, Katkov concluded that the differences between the local dialects of the “Russian” groups were slighter than those within the West European nations. Throughout the “Russian land,” he argued, the Russian traveler could understand local speech without much difficulty. As Katkov saw it, the unity of the one and indivisible Russian nation was based on the unity of its literary language. He attacked Kostomarov’s idea of two Rus’ nationalities: “Outrageous and ridiculous sophistry! As if there could be two Russian nationalities and two Russian languages; as if there could be two French nationalities and two French languages!” He attacked Kostomarov and the Ukrainophiles in the strongest possible terms: “Out of nothing there suddenly appeared heroes and demigods, objects of worship, great symbols of a nationality that is being newly created. New Cyrils and Methodiuses with the most outlandish alphabets made their appearance, and the phantasm of some nonexistent Little Russian language was loosed upon God’s creation.”

  The argument Katkov developed in the debate on the prohibition of Ukrainian publications would constitute the basis for the imperial authorities’ handling of the Ukrainian question for generations to come. He was the first public intellectual to establish a close bond between language, ethnicity, national unity, and the strategic interests of the Russian state. While continuing to blame differences between the Eastern Slavs on Polish and other foreign subjugation, as the creator of the pan-Russian historical narrative, Nikolai Ustrialov, had done in his historical writings of the 1830s and 1840s, Katkov brought ethnic and linguistic elements into the discussion. He did so not to distinguish Great and Little Russians from each other, as Mikhail Pogodin had done in his debate with Mykhailo Maksymovych on the ethnic identity of Kyiv in the 1850s, but to bring them together as one linguistic, ethnic, and cultural entity for the sake of the unity of the Russian state.

  Russian censors and political and cultural commentators such as Katkov placed their recommendation to ban Ukrainian-language publications in a broad international context, pointing to similar challenges facing the German, French, and British governments with regard to their own unofficial languages and dialects, including Occitan in France and Scottish Gaelic and Irish in Britain. But the comparison serves to emphasize the difference in the policies adopted by the Russian and West European governments. Whereas the British and French did not limit the development of “rival” languages with restrictive measures, instead relying on their school systems to promote the use of official languages, the Russian authorities resorted to repression, “forgetting” about any positive action that would have required the investment of major resources, such as developing a system of Russian-language elementary schools throughout the empire. They would maintain this cheap but one-sided policy, losing their battle on the same linguistic terrain as the one on which the Germans, French, and British had won theirs.

  THE FIRST VISIBLE CRACKS IN THE OFFICIAL POLICY OF SUPPRESSING the Ukrainian language appeared in the early 1870s, a decade after the Valuev circular had appeared. If they had been applied broadly, the strictures in the circular could have wiped out Ukrainian-language publications in the Russian Empire, as happened in 1868, when only one Ukrainian title appeared in print. But Valuev’s resignation that year allowed Ukrainian-language publications to make a comeback. It began slowly, but in 1874 alone thirty-two publications were approved by the censors, only one less than in 1862, the last “pre-circular” year. With Valuev gone, the censors were freer to decide whether Ukrainian-language books were literary works, which were allowed, or fell into the prohibited category of books for the common folk. Academic publications, which fit neither category, fell through the cracks. Besides, some censors could be persuaded to turn a blind eye to possible violations, sometimes with the help of bribes, as was the case with Ilia Puzyrevsky in the Kyiv office, which cleared the lion’s share of Ukrainian-language books proposed for publication in the 1870s.

  The Ukrainophiles were growing ever bolder, declaring that the entr’acte in the development of their movement was over. The key figure on the Ukrainophile side of the new debate was a young and ambitious historian, Mykhailo Drahomanov. A professor of ancient history at Kyiv University, Drahomanov spent the early 1870s in Europe, studying his subject and nationality problems on the continent. He celebrated the publication of a few Ukrainian-language titles in the Russian Empire as a sign of good things to come and believed that the reforms of Alexander II would promote public activism. Soon Drahomanov found himself a target of a new attack on the Ukrainophiles.

  As in 1863, Mikhail Katkov supported and endorsed the attack: in February 1875, he published in his Russian Herald a long article by Nikolai Rigelman, the head of the Kyiv Slavic Benevolent Society. Rigelman took particular issue with a recent article by Drahomanov that had appeared in Galicia under the title “Russian, Great Russian, Ukrainian, and Galician Literature,” where Drahomanov suggested that along with the common Russian literary language and high culture, their Great and Little Russian counterparts should also be developed, mainly to provide for the educational and cultural needs of the common folk. Rigelman smelled a rat.

  He accused Drahomanov of providing nothing but a smoke screen for the continuing development of a separate Little Russian language and culture. “You, Messrs. Ukrainophiles, are so concerned about your people, so afraid of its ignorance, and want to enlighten it. For that purpose you choose such a circuitous route: you want to forge its dialect into a learned literary language, to create a whole literature that would divide it from the Russian people of 60 million; that is, you want to create a spiritual particularism for it in the Russian world.” He concluded: “As for true Russians, as well as Slavs with any understanding of their true interests, they should fight you with all their might.”

  And fight they did. In May 1875, three months after Rigelman’s article appeared in Katkov’s Russian Herald, the deputy minister of education sent a letter to the head of the Kyiv educational district, attaching a copy of Drahomanov’s article and Rigelman’s criticism and asking for the names of Ukrainophile professors. This led to Drahomanov’s dismissal from the university. But the leader of the Kyivan proponents of Little Russian identity, a retired military officer and educational official named Mikhail Yuzefovich, and his supporters wanted total victory. Yuzefovich sent his complaints directly to the head of the Third Section, General Aleksandr Potapov. Whatever he said in his letter, which has not yet been found by researchers, it made a strong impression on the head of the secret police, who reported Yuzefovich’s concerns to the tsar. In August 1875, Alexander II ordered the creation of a Special Council to examine the continuing activities of the Ukrainophiles and the publication of Ukrainian literature. In addition to Potapov and the general procurator of the Holy Synod, the council included the ministers of the interior and education and, last but not least, Yuzefovich himself.

  The Special Council, which began its deliberations in April 1876, interpreted the continuing activities of the Ukrainophiles as an attack on the unity of the tripartite Russian nation. The journal of the council’s proceedings included the following passage:

  Also obvious is the ultimate goal toward which the efforts of the Ukrainophiles are directed: they are now attempting to separate the Little Russians by the gradual but to some extent accurate method of separating Little Russian speech and literature. Allowing the creation of a separate popular literature in the Ukrainian dialect would mean establishing a firm basis for the development of the conviction that the alienation of Ukraine from Russia might be possible in the future, however distant. If the government were to take an indulgent attitude to the currently devel
oping feeble impulse to separate the Ukrainian dialect by elevating it to the status of a literary language, then it would have no basis not to allow the same separation for the dialect of the Belarusians, who constitute a tribe as significant as that of the Little Russians. Ukraine, Little Russia, and Western Russia, inhabited by Belarusians… constitute one great political body inseparable from and united with Russia.

  The council’s position was informed by ideas first expressed in 1863 by Mikhail Katkov. They included the interpretation of the Ukrainophile movement as both a Polish intrigue and a threat to the unity of Russia, posed both directly and through the example offered to the Belarusians. Katkov’s thinking prevailed once again among the liberals and pragmatists in the imperial government. Not only Slavophile activists, such as Pogodin, or nationalist journalists, such as Katkov, but also key ministers were rallying to the defense of the indivisible Russian nation.

  On May 18, 1876, Alexander II, vacationing at the German spa of Bad Ems, signed a decree prepared by the Special Council that became known as the Edict of Ems. It began with a resolution to “put a stop to the activity of the Ukrainophiles, which is a danger to the state.” The prohibitions imposed by the Valuev circular were made permanent and new ones introduced. The edict banned the import of all Ukrainian-language publications into the empire and prohibited the publication not only of religious texts, grammars, and books for the common people, but also of belles lettres addressed to the upper strata. This measure was intended to arrest the development of Ukrainian literature on all levels. Existing Ukrainian-language publications were to be removed from school libraries. But the prohibition went beyond the written word: also banned were theatrical performances, songs, and poetry readings in Ukrainian, “which are in the nature of Ukrainophile manifestations at the present time.” The only exception was for the publication of folklore, but it had to be done in Russian orthography.