The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  The key figure in the negotiations that led to the major shift of Ukrainian frontiers in the second half of the eighteenth century was none other than the “Cossack prince” Oleksandr Bezborodko. We know that in St. Petersburg he remained a loyal patriot of his Cossack homeland, which he called his fatherland. He helped publish a Cossack chronicle and himself wrote the history of the Hetmanate from the death of Hetman Danylo Apostol in 1734 to the start of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768. The chronicle was filled with descriptions of Cossack wars and battles with the Ottomans, Crimean Tatars, and Poles. We do not know, however, whether in his proposals to annex the Crimea, in his negotiations in Jassy over the fate of the northern Black Sea region, or, finally, in his talks with the Austrians and Prussians over the partitions of the commonwealth, Bezborodko ever felt the influence of his “Little Russian” upbringing and identity. By the time he helped erase the Crimea and the commonwealth from the map of Europe, his own fatherland had ceased to exist on that map as well. The eighteenth century was not only an age of enlightenment and reason. More than anything else, it was an age of empire.

  chapter 14

  The Books of the Genesis

  The Ukrainian national anthem begins with the words “Ukraine has not yet perished,” hardly an optimistic beginning for any kind of song. But this is not the only anthem whose words do not inspire optimism. The Polish national anthem starts with the familiar line “Poland has not yet perished.” The words of the Polish anthem were written in 1797 and those of the Ukrainian one were penned in 1862, so it is quite clear who influenced whom. But why such pessimism? In both cases, Polish and Ukrainian, the idea of the death of the nation stemmed from the experience of the late eighteenth century—the partitions of Poland and the liquidation of the Hetmanate.

  Like many other anthems, the Polish one was originally a marching song written for the Polish legions fighting under the command of the future emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, in his Italian campaigns. The song was originally known as the “Dąbrowski mazurka,” named for a commander of the Polish troops, Jan Henryk Dąbrowski. Many of the Polish legionnaires, including the commander himself, had taken part in the Kościuszko Uprising, and the lyrics were meant to lift their spirits after the destruction of their state by the partitioning powers. The song’s second line asserts that Poland will not perish “as long as we are alive.” By associating the nation not with the state but with those who considered themselves its members, the Polish anthem gave hope not just to the Poles but also to representatives of other stateless nations. A new generation of patriots in Poland and Ukraine refused to accept the disasters of the previous century as the final verdict on their nations. Both Polish and Ukrainian activists promoted a new understanding of a nation as a democratic polity made up of citizen patriots rather than a territorial state.

  In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Napoleon and his soldiers brought the ideas of nation and popular sovereignty to the rest of Europe in their songs and at the points of their bayonets. In 1807, the dream of the Polish legionnaires came a step closer to realization when, after defeating Prussia, the French emperor created the Duchy of Warsaw out of territories annexed by that country during the partitions of Poland. To the Poles, this offered the exciting prospect of the restoration of their homeland. In 1812, after Napoleon’s invasion of the Russian Empire, Poles under Russian rule rose in support of the French invader, whom they considered a liberator. Adam Mickiewicz, the foremost Polish poet of the era, reflected the Polish nobility’s excitement at the advance of the French army into today’s Belarus in his epic poem Sir Thaddeus, which is still required reading in today’s Polish (but not Belarusian) schools. “Glory is ours already,” says one of the poem’s Polish characters, “and so we shall soon have our Republic again.”

  In 1815, when entering the University of Vilnius, the fifteen-year-old Mickiewicz gave his name as Adam Napoleon Mickiewicz. By that time, Polish hopes of having “our Republic again” had been crushed. Napoleon, Dąbrowski, and their French and Polish troops had retreated from the Russian Empire in defeat. Slightly more than a year later, Russian troops took Paris, while Napoleon went into exile on the island of Elba. But not all was in vain. The Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), which decided the fate of post-Napoleonic Europe, restored Poland to the map of the continent. On the ruins of the Duchy of Warsaw created by Napoleon, with the addition of some territory previously annexed by Austria, the congress established the Kingdom of Poland. It was to have the same ruler as its mighty neighbor, the Russian Empire, and in Russian it was called a tsardom, not a kingdom. Tsar Alexander I granted it rights of autonomy and privileges that no other part of the empire could have dreamed of.

  Catherine’s Age of Reason, entailing imperial unification and the standardization of administrative and legal practices, was over; the era of special arrangements was back. Those who had lost their privileges regarded the Poles with envy. Among them were the elites of the former Hetmanate. But whereas modern Polish nationalism grew under Napoleon’s wing, its Ukrainian counterpart made its first steps under the anti-Bonaparte banner. During the Napoleonic Wars, Russian imperial journals began to publish the first patriotic poems written not in Russian but in Ukrainian. One of the first appeared in 1807 under the title “Aha! Have You Grabbed Enough, You Vicious Bastard Bonaparte?” One way or another, Napoleon was awakening local patriotism and national feelings. While the Poles, Germans, and Russians expressed those feelings in their native tongues, some Ukrainians decided that they could do so in their language as well. In Ukraine, as in the rest of Europe, language, folklore, literature, and, last but not least, history became building blocks of a modern national identity.

  Among the Ukrainians prepared to fight Napoleon with arms in hand was the founder of modern Ukrainian literature, Ivan Kotliarevsky. A native of the Poltava region in the former Hetmanate, he formed a Cossack detachment to join the struggle. The son of a minor official, Kotliarevsky studied in a theological seminary, worked as a tutor of children of the nobility, and served in the Russian imperial army, taking part in the 1806–1812 Russo-Turkish War. In 1798, while on military service, he published the first part of his poem Eneïda, a travesty based on Virgil’s Aeneid, whose main characters were not Greeks but Zaporozhian Cossacks. As one would expect of true Zaporozhians, they spoke vernacular Ukrainian. But the choice of language for the poem seems logical only in retrospect. In late eighteenth century Ukraine, Kotliarevsky was a pioneer—the first to write a major poetical work in the vernacular.

  Why did he do so? We have no indication that he was trying to make a political statement of any kind. In fact, his choice of the genre of travesty indicates that he was playing with the language and subject rather than attempting to produce a work of high seriousness. Kotliarevsky clearly had literary talent and an impeccable sense of zeitgeist. In the late eighteenth century, intellectuals all over Europe were busy imagining the nation not only as a polity with sovereignty invested in its people but also as a cultural entity, a sleeping beauty to be awakened by a national renaissance. In Germany, Johann Gottfried Herder based his new understanding of the nation on language and culture. In other countries of western and central Europe as well, enthusiasts who would later be called folklorists were collecting tales and songs of the people or inventing them when no “good” samples were to be found. In Britain, James Macpherson, the “discoverer” of the ancient bard Ossian, successfully turned Irish folklore into Scottish national myth.

  Kotliarevsky wrote the first part of Eneïda when the shell of Church Slavonic, which had dominated Russian imperial literature of the previous era, was crumbling and falling apart, allowing literatures based in one way or another on the vernacular to make their way into the public sphere. Russia found its first truly great poet in Alexander Pushkin; Ukraine got its own in the person of Kotliarevsky. Whatever his original motives for using Ukrainian, Kotliarevsky never regretted his choice. There would be five more parts of
Eneïda. He would also author the first plays written in Ukrainian, among them Natalka-Poltavka (Natalka from Poltava), a love story set in a Ukrainian village. The language of Kotliarevsky’s homeland, the Poltava region of the former Hetmanate, would become the basis of standard Ukrainian for speakers of numerous Ukrainian dialects from the Dnieper to the Don in the east and to the Carpathians in the west. With Kotliarevsky, a new literature was born. The language received its first grammar in 1818 with the publication of the Grammar of the Little Russian Dialect by Oleksii Pavlovsky. A year later, the first collection of Ukrainian folk songs by Mykola (Nikolai) Tsertelev appeared in print.

  Kotliarevsky and his writings might have remained a footnote to literary history, a mere curiosity, if not for the work of dozens and then hundreds of talented authors. Not all of them wrote in Ukrainian, but most of them were romantics, sharing the early nineteenth-century fascination with folklore and tradition and its emphasis on emotion rather than the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The birthplace of Ukrainian romanticism was the city of Kharkiv, where the imperial government opened a university in 1805, inviting professors from all over the empire to fill vacant positions. Being a professor at that time often meant taking an interest in local history and folklore, and Kharkiv had a rich tradition. It served as the administrative and cultural center of Sloboda Ukraine, settled by Ukrainian Cossacks and runaway peasants in the times of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this land was often referred to as “Ukraine.” Not surprisingly, the first literary almanac that began to appear there in 1816 was titled the Ukrainian Herald. Though published in Russian, it also accepted texts in Ukrainian, and many of its authors discussed themes in Ukrainian history and culture.

  The centrality of the Cossack past to romantic literary interests, already manifested by Kotliarevsky’s Eneïda, was further evidenced by the Kharkiv romantics’ readiness to embrace and popularize by far the most influential Ukrainian historical text of the period, Istoriia rusov (The History of the Rus’). Authorship of this history of the Ukrainian Cossacks was attributed to eighteenth-century Orthodox archbishop Heorhii Konysky, but the real author (or authors) came from the ranks of descendants of Cossack officers in the Starodub region of the former Hetmanate. Whoever wrote the History was concerned about the inequality among the Cossack officers and the Russian nobility and argued more broadly for the equality of Little and Great Russia—an old theme sounded in Cossack writings of the eighteenth century but now presented in a way that fitted the sensibilities of the romantic age.

  The History portrayed the Cossacks as a distinct nation and glorified its past with descriptions of the heroic deeds of the Ukrainian hetmans, their battles, and their deaths at the hands of their enemies. Those enemies, and the villains of the narrative, were generally representatives of other nationalities—Poles, Jews, and Russians. The History of the Rus’ ignited the imagination of romantic writers and poets all over the empire. In St. Petersburg, these included Kondratii Ryleev, Alexander Pushkin, and Nikolai Gogol; in Kharkiv, the main promoter of the mysterious text was a professor at the local university, Izmail Sreznevsky. Like Macpherson before him, he was not above creating his own folklore. But whereas Macpherson used Irish myths for that purpose, Sreznevsky found inspiration in the History of the Rus’. The work, which became extremely popular in the former Hetmanate in the 1830s and 1840s, made an all-important step toward the creation of a modern Ukrainian nation, turning a history of the Cossack social order into an account of a rising national community.

  The former Hetmanate provided a key historical myth, a cultural tradition, and a language as building blocks of the modern Ukrainian nation. It supplied the architects as well. Ivan Kotliarevsky, author of Eneïda, Mykola Tsertelev, publisher of the first collection of Ukrainian folk songs, and Oleksii Pavlovsky, author of the first grammar of Ukrainian, all came from the Hetmanate. The reason for such prominence or even dominance of Hetmanate elites in the early stages of Ukrainian nation building was quite simple: the territory of the former Cossack state was the only region of nineteenth-century Ukraine where the landowning elites shared the culture of the local population. Catholic Poles or Polonized Ukrainian nobles dominated the political and cultural scene in Austrian Galicia and Russian Volhynia, Podolia, and Right-Bank Ukraine. In the southern steppes, colonized during the era of Catherine II, the ruling elite was either ethnically or culturally Russian. The scions of the old Cossack nation of the Hetmanate ended up in the forefront of battles for the new nation almost by default. Not surprisingly, the Cossack lands gave that nation not only its language but also its name, Ukraine.

  While the beginnings of modern Ukrainian nation building—some scholars call it the heritage-gathering stage—came during and immediately after the Napoleonic Wars, the Polish uprising of 1830 influenced the next stage, which led to the formulation of the political program of the nascent national movement.

  The uprising was long in the making. According to the resolutions of the 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna, Alexander I, the liberal ruler of Russia who had now added to his title of emperor of Russia that of tsar of Poland, provided his new possession with one of the most liberal constitutions in Europe. But the tsar soon proved that he was an emperor not only in name. Alexander’s liberalism ran its course soon after the European powers recognized his sovereignty over the kingdom. His representatives often ignored the Polish parliament, curtailed freedom of the press, and disregarded other civic liberties the tsar had originally granted. When dissatisfied young Poles formed clandestine organizations, the police began hunting them down.

  The situation only worsened after the Decembrist Uprising of 1825, which saw Russian military officers, some of them descendants of prominent Cossack families, lead their troops in revolt, demanding the adoption of a constitution. The revolt was crushed, inaugurating thirty years of conservative rule by Emperor Nicholas I. In November 1830, a mutiny of young Polish officers in Warsaw soon turned into an uprising that engulfed the rest of the kingdom as well as former Polish territories in today’s Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. A Polish military corps was sent to Volhynia, and Polish nobles rebelled in Volhynia, Podolia, and Right-Bank Ukraine. They called on the Ukrainian peasants to join them, sometimes promising emancipation from serfdom. The empire used its military superiority to put down the uprising. Many of its leaders, participants, and supporters, including Adam Mickiewicz, fled Poland, most of them to France. Less fortunate ones ended up in Russian prisons or in exile.

  The November Uprising not only mobilized Polish patriotism and nationalism but also prompted a strong nationalist reaction from the Russian side. Russian imperial patriotism, which had developed clear anti-French overtones during the Napoleonic Wars, now became fiercely anti-Polish. People of the caliber of Alexander Pushkin led the ideological assault on the Polish rebels and their French backers. One of his poems, “To the Maligners of Russia,” called on the French defenders of the Polish cause to leave the solution of the Russo-Polish conflict to the Slavs themselves. In the Polish insurrection, Pushkin saw a threat to Russian possessions far beyond the Kingdom of Poland. In his view, it was a contest for Ukraine as well. In a poem on the Russian takeover of rebellious Warsaw, Pushkin wrote,

  Where shall we shift the line of forts?

  Beyond the Buh, to the Vorskla, to the [Dnieper] Estuary?

  Whose will Volhynia be?

  And Bohdan [Khmelnytsky’s] legacy?

  Right of rebellion recognized,

  Will Lithuania spurn our rule?

  And Kiev, decrepit, golden-domed,

  This ancestor of Russian towns—

  Will it conjoin its sainted graves

  With reckless Warsaw?

  During the November Uprising, Pushkin even contemplated writing a history of “Little Russia.”

  The defense of Ukraine and other former Polish possessions against Western and, in particular, Polish influenc
e became the leitmotif of Russian policy in the region in the decades following the uprising. The empire of the Romanovs was now ready to “go native” and employ Russian patriotism and nascent nationalism to defend its territorial acquisitions. At that point the imperial minister of education, Count Sergei Uvarov, formulated the foundations of the new Russian imperial identity: autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality. If the first two elements of Uvarov’s triad were traditional markers of imperial Russian ideology, the third was a concession to the new era of rising nationalism. Uvarov’s “nationality” was not general but specifically Russian. He wrote that his three principles formed “the distinctive character of Russia, and belong only to Russia.” They “gather into one whole the sacred remnants of Russian nationality.” That nationality included Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians.