We and the empire
In this second installment of Stanislav Kulchytsky’s study of world empires and their role in Ukraine’s history, the historian focuses on the Russian Empire.
5. RUSSIAN IMPERIAL EXPANSION
The concept of Russian history should be called Moscow-centric. It was Moscow-centric from the very outset, even though the earliest mention of Muscovy appears in a chronicle only in 1147. The works of the outstanding Russian historians Tatishchev, Karamzin, Kliuchevsky, and Solovev draw an equal sign between the history of the Russian Empire and Russian national history. Together with the tsars these four did everything possible to distort the historical memory of the Ukrainian nation and dissolve Ukraine among the five dozen gubernias of European Russia.
Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s multivolume History of Ukraine-Rus’ revived national history for the Ukrainians. However, neither Hrushevsky nor other pre-revolutionary Ukrainian historians moved beyond the bounds of national history. Meanwhile, for all Soviet historians the history of the USSR had become their national history with the concept of Russian history inherited from the works of Tatishchev and his followers and amended insignificantly (Kyivan Rus’ as the cradle of three fraternal nations). Only in the past decade have we started to gain a new perspective on the problems of the formation of the Russian Empire, which has become possible owing to the works of the German researcher Andreas Kappeler and Harvard University scholars, primarily Edward Keenan and Roman Szporluk.
Russia was proclaimed an empire in 1721, but became one much later. Those who share the widespread belief that the Russian state should be considered an imperial one from the moment it annexed Ukraine in 1654 do not take into account the events of the preceding centuries. Finally, there are not enough grounds to say that the empire’s age should be reckoned from the moment that great prince Ivan IV was formally proclaimed tsar in 1547.
The word “tsar” is etymologically related to the Russian term “kesar,” which is derived from the name of Ancient Rome’s first emperor Gaius Julius Caesar. The Latin word “rex” is also translated as “tsar” in Russian. “Rex” was the name of the legendary Roman rulers in the pre-republican period, while its translation is a matter of habit. We should look for the roots of Russian imperialism not in etymology but in real historical circumstances. Andreas Kappeler dates the origins of the formation of the Russian Empire to the 15th century.
A favorable historical condition for the emergence in Eastern Europe of a new imperial state formation was created in the process of the gradual disintegration of the Mongolian Empire of the Chinggisids and its separate part, the Golden Horde. The Muscovite princes took the first steps toward creating an empire of their own while they were still part of the Horde. They did so by adopting a slogan that called for “gathering the lands of Rus’.” The possibility for such an expansion was provided by the khans of the Golden Horde, who from the time of Ivan I Kalita entrusted Muscovy with collecting tributes from all the Rus’ lands that were under the rule of the Golden Horde. The biggest success of the Muscovite princes was the annexation of the lands of Great Novgorod, which stretched from the Baltic and White Seas to the Ural Mountains. The conquest of “fraternal” Novgorod by Ivan III was accompanied by atrocious acts of genocide.
The Golden Horde broke up into six independent states: the Khanates of the Crimea, Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberia (these four were ruled by the Chinggisids), the Nogai Horde, and the Great Muscovite Principality. After securing independence in 1480, Ivan III continued his policy of “gathering the lands of Rus’,” this time targeting the lands that were part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Muscovite-Lithuanian wars started in the late 15th century. Lithuania’s inability to withstand Muscovite expansion forced it to unite with the Polish Kingdom and create the Rzeczpospolita, a federation in which the political positions of the Lithuanian gentry were subordinated to those of the Polish nobility.
One of the most enduring historical myths is a belief that since the times of Ivan III Muscovy had pursued a policy of reviving the Orthodox Byzantine Empire, which had collapsed under pressure from the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Those who attempt to substantiate this foreign policy of Ivan III cite his marriage in 1472 to Sofia Paleolog, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and the adoption of the Byzantine double eagle as the emblem of the Muscovite state. However, it was not until the 18th and 19th centuries that the return of the Byzantine emperors’ heritage began to be used by the Russian Empire as an ideological justification for its policy aimed at absorbing an already weakened Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, in the 15th and 16th centuries Muscovy’s goal was first and foremost to take over the heritage of another empire — the Golden Horde.
Facts confirm that from the days of Muscovite Prince Ivan I (1325 — 1340) the statehood of future Russia had been forming along the lines of the Golden Horde. Feudal relations involving the dependence of vassals in a feudal hierarchy and certain obligations of the sovereign with respect to his vassals had not formed in the Great Muscovite Principality. The great prince, and later the tsar and emperor, drew his support from nobility. Nobles received land to use and later on to own, along with the enserfed peasants inhabiting it. Each owner of such land and of the peasants living there was essentially a kholop, a feudal serf of the great prince, regardless of the size of his estate and the position he occupied in the official hierarchy. The Asian- style socioeconomic system enabled the tsar to maintain a powerful army and use it in his aggressive policies along the entire perimeter of the state borders.
Pre-revolutionary Russian and Soviet historiography uses exclusively negative expressions (“Tatar yoke”) to convey the impact of the Mongolian Empire on conquered Rus’ and the life of the Rus’ principalities under the Golden Horde. Horrible portrayals of the Mongol-Tatar conquest span the entire period during which Muscovy was part of the Golden Horde until the Muscovite Principality obtained its independence. There is no doubt that the tribute paid to conquerors for nearly two and a half centuries took a heavy toll on the peasants, who were forced to pay double taxes. Nonetheless, autonomous existence within the Horde reinforced the state machinery of the Great Muscovite Principality. As Kappeler rightly notes, Muscovy took full advantage of the Mongol-Tatars’ accomplishments in the sphere of military and administrative organization, taxation system, communications, international trade, and cultural exchange.
The Russian Empire had been expanding for four centuries. In the mid-16th century it conquered the Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, after which the Great Muscovite Principality turned into a polyethnic Russian state. In the mid-17th century the tsar established control of Left-Bank Ukraine and Kyiv, after which the western vector became the dominant one in the further expansion of the empire’s borders. Understanding the West’s technical and economic superiority over Russia, the 18th-century rulers of Russia adopted a policy of Westernization. This helped them defeat Sweden in the long-lasting Northern War, seize the coasts of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov from the Ottoman Empire, and stop Napoleon Bonaparte’s aggressive forays. By the early 19th century Russia had almost entirely absorbed the colossal territory of the former Rzeczpospolita.
The defeat of the Siberian Khanate in the late 16th century marked the beginning of the empire’s unstoppable eastward expansion. In the mid-17th century Russian pioneers reached the Pacific Ocean and founded settlements in Alaska, moving along the western coast of the North American continent toward California. The pioneers were followed by troops, collectors of taxes for the “white tsar,” and merchants.
Russia’s own population settled Northern Asia in the same way as the Western European colonists settled the sparsely populated lands of North America, Australia, and New Zealand. With greater or lesser success (and failure in America: in 1867 Russia had to sell its North American lands to the USA as they were too far removed from the empire’s centers), these sparsely populated expanses became the continuation of the Russian Empire. The process of settling new lands was portrayed in heroic terms, but the reality was often far from that. Equipped with firearms, units of Cossacks and sharpshooters mercilessly exterminated the indigenous population.
From the early 19th century Russia launched its expansion in the direction of the densely populated countries of Transcaucasia and Central Asia, with their centuries-long history and culture that were different from Europe’s. The absorption of these countries turned Russia into a colonial empire.
In the mid-19th century Nicholas I made a decisive attempt to take over the Byzantine heritage and put an end to the Ottoman Empire. The military defeat of the Turkish army was a foregone conclusion. Large European countries faced the prospect of an emerging super-empire that could stretch from the Californian coast of North America across Northern Asia and Eastern Europe to the Ottoman Sultan’s African territories. For this reason they joined forces and defeated Russia in the Crimean War. The ruling Russian elite realized that they could no longer limit themselves to superficial Westernization. The country had to carry out profound modernization and, first and foremost, abolish serfdom.
Reforms implemented in the 1860s-1870s helped the Russian Empire preserve its status as a superpower. However, the country was not competitive in the international arena. The empire could not withstand the strain of World War I and collapsed in March 1917.
6. UKRAINIAN LANDS WITHIN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
The systemic characteristics of an empire include the presence of a politically dominant ethnos, a state region, ideology, and language. In Russia all these characteristics were combined in one: membership in the Orthodox faith. A German, Jew, or Tatar could occupy higher official posts if he adopted the state religion. All other subjects of the autocratic tsar were classed as “foreigners”—second-rate people. They suffered because of their different language, religion, and national traditions. The empire treated them with tolerance but did not trust them.
When scholars or columnists attempt to define the status of Ukrainians within the Russian Empire, they most often forget about this main peculiarity of the social system in the autocratic Orthodox empire. By overlooking it, we risk invalidating our own statements about the oppressed status of Ukrainians, which are based on objective, empirical evidence.
First of all, Ukrainians, unlike Germans, Jews, or Tatars, did not have to prove their devotion to the empire by converting to Orthodoxy. They were Orthodox from birth. Second, the empire did not view Ukrainians as people of another nationality. It considered itself an heir not only of the Riuryk dynasty, which turned the small Muscovite Principality into a superpower, but of the entire historical heritage of Kyivan Rus’, including the population of the gubernias on both banks of the Dnipro. This population was even deprived of its own ethnic name. To nominally distance itself from the empire’s dominant nation, in the 19th century the Ukrainian intelligentsia was forced to change the ancient Rus’ toponym “Ukraina” into an ethno-toponym.
It seems that the nature of the Ukrainians’ status in the empire was most accurately defined by the famous Russian scholar Aleksandr Miller. In his book entitled “The Ukrainian Question” in the Policy of the Authorities and Russian Public Opinion (second half of the 19th century), published in St. Petersburg in 2000, he writes: “The attitude of the empire’s authorities and Great Russians toward Little Russians and Belarusians envisioned integration founded on the principle of equality of individuals with the simultaneous refusal to institutionalize these groups as national minorities, whereas with respect to non-Slavs and western Slavs (Poles) the principle of individual equality was rejected, but their national minority status was not questioned.” Translated into ordinary language, this scholarly formula means: if a Little Russian adopted Ukrainian identity, which ruled out his membership in the Russian nation, unlike the representatives of other ethnic groups he was seen as a traitor and separatist in the eyes of imperial officials and Russian patriots.
It follows from this that the Ukrainian intelligentsia could not expect to be treated with tolerance, as it defended its nation’s right to its own literary language, national history, and culture, which were different from Russia’s. If it had not done this, it would have stopped being a Ukrainian intelligentsia. By its mere existence it asserted Little Russians as a nation separate from the Russians, thereby challenging the imperial elite. An educated person who did not switch to Russian in his speech evoked suspicion as a separatist and a “Mazepite,” i.e., a separatist. Although Little Russians were not foreigners, they nevertheless had no right to have an intelligentsia of their own.
Nonetheless, Ukrainians did not remain an ethnographic mass. The nation-building process was objective and irreversible. Among the Little Russians there had always been people who had excelled economically or spiritually, but had refused to give up their national identity. Those who followed the path of Taras Shevchenko were outnumbered by those who chose the path of Mykola Hohol. However, quantity was not a decisive factor.
If Russia was simultaneously a traditional and colonial empire, this prompts a question about the status of the Ukrainian lands: Were they part of the metropolis or should they be considered a colony? This is not a formal question. In our days it has become the subject of debate, even though no subject for scholarly debate exists here.
In Ukrainian books and journalistic works Ukraine is often portrayed as Russia’s colony. But before we make this statement, two questions must be answered. First, did the imperial elite consider Ukraine a geographic entity, i.e., a territory with defined borders? Second, if the imperial elite did not recognize the existence of the Ukrainian nation on a certain territory, how could they formulate their policy toward it? For the reasons mentioned above, it is quite clear that only the Ukrainian intelligentsia could be in the imperial elite’s field of vision.
Thoughts about the country’s colonial status emerged only after the revolution, when Ukraine became a geopolitical concept for the first time. The historian Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky rightfully questioned this concept. In his article “Ukraine’s Role in Modern History,” published in the journal Suchasnist in 1966, he wrote: “Some historians and economists, who worked in the early Soviet period (Slabchenko, Yavorsky, Ohloblyn, Volobuyev), used the term ‘colonialism’ to define Ukraine’s status in the former tsarist empire. The choice of this notion borrowed from the Marxist arsenal was not entirely successful. Tsarist Russia had real colonies, such as Transcaucasia and Turkistan, but Ukraine can hardly be considered one of them. The administration viewed Ukraine rather as belonging to the nucleus of indigenous provinces of European Russia.”
Indeed, attempts to prove the thesis about Ukraine’s colonial status clash with the facts. After the peasant reform of 1861 the empire’s most powerful economic region, Donetsk-Dnipro, emerged in a matter of decades. Two waves of railroad construction in the 1860s- 1870s and in the 1890s had an especially significant impact on Ukraine. The prewar economic upturn of 1910-1914 was also felt especially strongly in Ukrainian cities (alongside the industrial areas of St. Petersburg and Moscow).
The imperial elite did not view the nine gubernias and Kuban oblast, in which Russia’s first census in 1897 revealed a predominance of Ukrainians, as a region different from the central gubernias, in which a certain nationality policy had to be conducted. In fact, the census did not even include a question about nationality. In defining Ukraine’s borders in 1917, the Central Rada was guided by statistics on native language and confessional affiliation, which were collected during this census. When the Provisional Government was forced to face the reality of the Ukrainian liberation movement and Ukraine itself, it defined its borders according to the historical, not ethnographic, principle: based on the territory of Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s Cossack state that had joined the Russian Empire. According to the 1897 census, after several centuries of colonization of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov steppes Ukraine’s ethnographic territory was nearly twice as large as the original territory.
The refutation of the statement about Ukraine’s colonial status means only one thing: the Ukrainians’ oppressed status in the empire should be proved in a different way. All available facts indicate that the empire did not notice the presence of Ukrainians. Poles or Jews were foreigners unless they converted to Orthodoxy, and numerous discriminatory norms were used against them in administrative practice and at the legislative level. However, these very norms were proof that the imperial administration recognized the existence of Poles and Jews as national minorities, i.e., it recognized their right to their own language and culture. Discriminatory norms did not apply to Ukrainians only because the authorities did not recognize their existence.
The revolution of 1905-1907 made it possible for all the nations to assert their right to their own language and culture. When the Ukrainian political forces attempted to implement the declarative provisions of the tsarist manifesto of Oct. 17, 1905, this immediately revealed the painstakingly hidden norms of the imperial elite’s policy toward Ukraine. In May 1908, when several State Duma deputies from the Ukrainian gubernias proposed a bill to introduce Ukrainian language in public schools, the Kyiv Club of Russian Nationalists was outraged. Its statement read: “The introduction of Ukrainized schools is about destroying the popular belief in the unity of the Russian people, about implanting in the minds of Little Russians the idea of a totally separate Russian people, about instilling in them spiritual discord with Great Russians, national and political separatism.”
Ukrainians responded no less sharply to statements by such “patriots,” who were thus voicing the tacit policy of the authorities. Mykola Mikhnovsky’s programmatic brochure Samostiina Ukraina [Independent Ukraine] contains a harsh response to similar statements: “Even if it had been proven that we are only a different version of the Russian nation, even then the Russians’ inhuman treatment of us sanctifies our hatred for them and our moral right to kill the perpetrator of violence in self — defense.”
Discrimination against Ukrainians was especially pronounced during World War I. After entering Galicia and Bukovyna in 1914, Russian troops in a matter of weeks destroyed the entire cultural infrastructure that had taken the Ukrainians decades to build. German and Polish schools continued to function, but Ukrainian schools were immediately converted into Russian schools, even though the children did not speak Russian. All Ukrainian periodicals were abolished. During the retreat of the tsarist army in 1915 gendarmes deported Ukrainian intellectuals and Greek Catholic priests to remote areas in Russia.
To be continued
