MASTER AND MAN, UKRAINIAN STYLE
The history of the name of a territory now within the boundaries of the state of Ukraine is as follows, “the whole country was at first called simply the Zaporozhzhian Host. But soon after, people began to use the name Ukraine (Russian okraina, frontier — Ed.) which had long been applied to Southern Dnipro region to denote the wild steppe frontier. This name was also occasionally used by the Cossack government... But Kyiv bibliophiles invented the name Little Russia used long before that by a Greek patriarch to define the Galician metropolitan see. Muscovy was pleased with this term, as it could thus claim more easily its supremacy over Ukraine” (History of Ukrainian Culture, ed. Ivan Krypyakevych, Kyiv, Lybid, 2000, p. 154 in Ukrainian). The Kyiv bookworms seem to have invented the bicycle. In neighboring Poland, the territory in the basin of rivers Warta and Notiec is called Great Poland. It is here that the Polish state was formed in the tenth century. This trick does not work in the case of Great Russia, for it is not the Ukrainian nationalists who invented the phrase “Kiev is the mother of Russian cities.”
As Russia was increasing its grandeur in 1654, the artificial name of Great Russia was called upon to fix the new political realities, the vassalization of the Cossack people (called, incidentally, Zaporozhzhian Cherkasy by the Muscovites). It seems to be the hetman who offered Moscow deacons a new title for the tsar. As early as January 8, 1654, i.e., immediately after being sworn in, Bohdan Khmelnytsky addressed his new sovereign as autocrat of all Great and Little Rus’. The tsar himself continued for a month to bear the title of the autocrat of all Rus’. Great and Little Russia was mentioned for the first time (judging by The Reunification of Ukraine and Russia published in 1954) as part of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich’s title on February 7, 1654.
History abounds in examples of such accumulation of grandeur (gathering of the lands). For example, the ascension of King of Scots James VI Stuart to the English throne gave rise to Great Britain. Still, there is quite a fundamental difference: “Great Britain” does not mean the supremacy of a greater part over a smaller one; it means the juxtaposition of heterogeneous, albeit quantitatively different parts under the scepter of Greatness.
Describing the genealogy of ancient Rus’, the author of Istoriya Rusov (History of Rus’) divides the Slav lands into “Red Rus’, beyond the land grown with colored grass and flowers in a southern place, and White Rus’, beyond great snows falling in the northern side.” But the Tsardom of Muscovy pseudo-Konysky writes, “having reunited many Rus’ principalities..., assumed the name of Great Russia, while the aforesaid Rus’ territories were named Little Russia.” In his “geographic” research the author tries to prove “unambiguously” that “the historical concept of pseudo-Konysky proceeds from a united history of ‘Little’ and ‘all’ Russia” (this is the opinion of Myroslav Popovych in Essays on the History of Ukrainian Culture). Nevertheless, the stated essential equality of the parts of Rus’ united by the Muscovite tsar is denied by the words of Hetman Mazepa, “It is common knowledge that we used to be what the Muscovites are now: they have borrowed the government, the primacy, and the very name Rus’ from us.” In other words, here “Kyivan Rus’ was declared as an exceptionally Little Russian Rus.” This is the attitude toward the author’s position on the correlation between Little and Great Russia of Nikolai Ulianov (The Origins of Ukrainian Separatism). According to this Russian writer and philosopher, “ Istoriya Rusov rejects the existence of not only a unitary Rus’ state in the tenth to thirteenth centuries but also of a united Rus’ nation inhabiting this region. It is wrong to ascribe to M. S. Hrushevsky the authorship of a separatist scheme of Ukrainian history: its main features, the initial difference of Ukrainians from Great Russians and the existence of different states, were advanced almost a hundred years before Hrushevsky.” Let us forget the hurt hetman’s words that define the essence of this pattern and turn our eyes to the hoary past.
Magna Graecia was a string of polises that sprung up on the southern coast of Italy and Sicily following the Great Greek Colonization in the eighth and seventh centuries BC. The colonists in Tarentum, Sybaris and other Italian cities became Greeks proper, for the Romans began their acquaintance with Greek culture precisely in Magna (Greater) Graecia. It is a common assumption that the very word Greek was coined by the Romans (graeci). But what was really Great — in terms of not only geography but also culture — was the Hellenic, rather than Greek, world. This is quite an essential reservation. Firstly, the Greeks themselves — Achaeans, Spartans, Boeotians, etc. — called themselves Hellenes, and, secondly, the first step to hellenize the Oecumene was of a violent nature with respect to the Hellenes. The Macedonian Kingdom, which grew, as Hrushevsky said of the Vladimir-Suzdal and later Moscow state, demonstrated the primordial separation of Ukrainians from Great Russians, “by its very roots,” laid claim not only to political hegemony under Philip II and especially Alexander the Great: it appropriated primacy and the very name of Hellenes by uniting the Hellenic polises and opposing them to non- Hellenes, i.e., the barbarian Persians.
The full analogy can be completed by the complaints the offended Demosthenes expressed in his third philippic, “Not only was he (Philip — Author) not a Hellene and not even related to Hellenes, but he is not even a barbarian of decent origin. He is a wretched Macedonian, and in olden times you could not even buy a good slave in Macedonia. This notwithstanding, did he not hurl the most vicious insult at the Hellenes? In addition to destroying the state, he holds Pythian Games common to all Hellenes..., he has deprived us, Thessalonians, Dorians, and other Greeks, from consulting the oracle, a prerogative of even not all Hellenes “ (quoted from the Moscow edition of 1903 — Author).
Ulianov tells in striking terms of the impression made by Istoriya Rusov of both the Hellenes and Macedonians: “But among all these apocrypha (Cossack chronicles — Author), one has long stood out, so important and exclusive that it played the role of Koran (!) in the history of the separatist movement... This applies to the famed Istoriya Rusov... Its style is extremely lively and attractive... Going all over Russia in a great number of copies, it was known to Pushkin, Gogol, Ryleyev, Maksymovych, and later to Shevchenko, Kostomarov, and Kulish... Even the most educated readers remained defenseless before it.” Demosthenes’ eloquence failed to save Hellas. Nor could Russian cultural Ukrainophilia, widespread in broad, even the highest, circles, save Little Russia; Russian despotism proved to be not so defenseless before the “Koran” and the “prophets” of Ukrainian separatism. No other peoples of the empire suffered such defilement of their history and culture as did we.
Why, we ask, did the Russian Empire, while calmly preserving in its body the foreign principalities which it could, in principle, “let go” (as Alexander II said about Poland), deprive Ukraine even of its name and the Ukrainian people of its language, doing its utmost to dissolve all things Ukrainian into those Russian? Because a Great, in the despotic and imperial interpretation of the word, Russia cannot exist without a Little, in the same meaning, one (today we see this in the staunch resistance of the Moscow Patriarchate to Kyiv autocephaly, for what is the Russian Orthodox Church without Ukrainian parishes?) For any mentioning of a decisive cultural Little Russian influence strikes a mortal blow to imperial grandeur.
Following the first victories over the Spanish (the end of the sixteenth century), Dutch patriots rushed to seek a sovereign for their country. They were lucky enough not be able to find a monarch who would agree to extend his royal protection to the rebellious lands that had challenged the mighty Spain. But the Dutch fought on and finally proclaimed an independent republic of their own. Ukraine was less fortunate or, to more exact, later. But, having gained and striving not to lose political independence, Ukraine must win cultural independence, which begins with the awareness of its honor and dignity.
