Vasilii Kliuchevsky

Any morally sound individual cannot be indifferent to his or her cultural origin and ancestors who hundreds of years back traveled the winding and thorny roads of life. Any such individual is inherently anxious to know their place in the great current of time, all the way from the misty past to the lightning instant of the present to the mysterious future. This is necessary because most of us are aware, even if intuitively, of the hidden cause-and-effect relation between these three great stations on the inscrutable road of time.

The same applies to the self-consciousness of an entire people, all the collisions in the development of the self-consciousness of two neighboring ethnic groups whose historical paths have repeatedly crossed, and whose ethnic roots have been investigated countless times — albeit more often than not in a politically biased manner which has, of course, obscured rather than resolved the issue, resulting in distortions and plain falsehood. The reader must have guessed that I have in mind the two largest Eastern Slavic nations, the Russians and the Ukrainians, and their actual position in the historical coordinate system — and this system isn’t common because the allegation of its being common only serves to further confuse the issue.

It seems worthwhile to discuss the factual (and documented) historical origin of the Russian nation (referred to as “Muscovite” before Peter I and as “Great Russian” before the [October] revolution). The problem is that Russia’s collective consciousness is dominated by the notion of that country’s “thousand-year history” (sometimes condescendingly described as one shared with Ukraine and Belarus). It is also true that this notion is accepted by a large number of scholars. No one there seems to realize that this is another political imperially oriented myth. Everyone appears to accept it as an established fact, counter to the historical truth. This notion results in a distorted view of the Ukrainian people as Moscow’s “younger brother” and in great-power nationalistic xenophobia.

I will now consider the ways in which all those “Great Russian” imperial ideologues are falsifying the history of Kyivan Rus’. I will refer to Vasilii Kliuchevsky (1841-1911), Russia’s most celebrated historian at the turn of the 20th century. His works help one get closer to the truth in this important matter. By the way, May 12 marked the centennial of this great scholar’s death, a good occasion for remembering his large creative heritage (particularly A Course in Russian History, 1903) and giving him credit for his meritorious contribution to European science (Kliuchevsky was perhaps the only democratic liberal among all the well-known Russian historians who would in their twilight years take an active part in the Kadet [Constitutional Democratic Party] activities.

The topic of import here is thoroughly dealt with in Lecture XVII (1887), under this long but detailed title: “Ethnographical results of the Russian colonization of the Upper Volga… Influence of the natural features of the region of the Upper Volga upon the industry of Great Rus’ and the racial character of the Great Russian stock.” In fact, the theme of this study is far broader. Kliuchevsky offers the hard facts on the origin of the “Great Russian” people and state, which makes this work even more important. He says the point is to study the ethnographic results of the Russian colonization of the Upper Volga and Rostov-Suzdal lands. These results boil down to one central fact in Russian history, namely the formation of the Great Russian stock as a different branch among the other Russian racial elements (sic). When studying the origin of the Great Russian stock, it is necessary to clearly determine the essence of the issue. Doubtlessly, there were certain local specificities before the 13th century, formed as a result of the regional division of the land of Rus’, or perhaps inherited from the old tribal practices of the Polianians, Drevlians, and other Old Slavs. Kliuchevsky says he doesn’t mean those ancient tribal or regional peculiarities but the division of these racial elements into two new branches, which began sometime in the 13th century when the populace of the central Middle Dnipro region, the progenitor of the early Russian peoples (a very meaningful remark on his part; weren’t those aborigines Ukrainians, considering that they never left their land and had lived there since time immemorial?) went separate ways, when the two branches lost their common unifying center, Kyiv, and exposed themselves to new and varying conditions, when they stopped living a communal life. The Great Russian stock was the result of such various influences that started having their effect after the two peoples had parted company, in a land outside Old Rus’ that was non-Rus’ rather than Rus’ in the 12th century (a very interesting observation).

So who were those non-Rus’ people who, following the logic of his study, would play an extremely important role in the formation of the “Great Russian” people? Kliuchevsky writes: “The native inhabitants of North-Eastern Rus’ were Finnish tribes — tribes of the race described in the Chronicle as neighbors of the Eastern Slavs from the moment of their first entry into the Russian plain. Nevertheless those Finnish aborigines had made their homes in the swamps and forests of Northern and Central Rus’ long before any Slavonic element becomes traceable there (e.g., in the 4th-7th cc. — Author)… The extensive area between the Oka and the White Sea furnishes us with thousands of non-Russian names derived from that aboriginal race — names of which the lingual uniformity makes it clear that the same tongue was spoken throughout the whole of that region, and that it was a tongue closely akin to the one now in use among the native population of Finland we find scores of names of rivers ending in va (va in Finnish means water) such as the Protva, the Moskva, the Silva, the Kokva, and so on, while the name of the Oka itself is of Finnish origin, since it is only a Russified form of the Finnish word joki, of which the general meaning is river we see that the north-eastward direction taken by the Russian immigrants brought them in contact with Finnish aborigines almost at the exact centre of what now constitutes Great Russia.”

Kliuchevsky believes that this contact was the crucial event that determined the creation of Great Russia. He believes that the colonists from Old Rus’, who would constitute the Slavic part of this Slavic-Finnish fusion, “were no more desirous of picking a quarrel than were the natives, seeing that the majority of the newcomers belonged to a peace-loving rural population which had fled from the South-West (in other words, Ukraine! — Author) only to escape from the ills which oppressed them there, and now sought among the wilds of the North not booty, but habitations where they might pursue their industrial and agricultural vocations in peace. Settlement, therefore, was what took place, not conquest.”

He has to admit, however, that this process “ended in the complete absorption of the one element by the other…in which regard the ethnographical point chiefly to be decided is the manner in which the fusion of the Finnish and Slavonic elements (the latter, of course, dominating) gave rise to the Great Russian stock.” And further on this meaningful statement: “Likewise there can be no doubt that the Finnish element played a part in the formation of the anthropological type of the Great Russian, since his physiognomy does not by any means reproduce every one of the features generally characteristic of the Slav. The high cheek-bones, the dark hair and skin, the squat nose of the Great Russian all bear credible witness to the influence of a Finnish admixture in his blood.”

Being a celebrated historian as well as a skilled philologist, Kliuchevsky notes the specifics of the language spoken by the “Great Russian stock,” particularly three peculiarities of the Kyivan Rus’ vernacular: (a) unstressed “o” pronounced as “oh”, (b) confusing the sounds “ts” and “tch”, (c) and the presence of a certain phonetic harmony in the combination of vowels and consonants. They combined the guttural “k” with the hard “i” [as in “pit”] and the dental “ts” or the palatal “tch” with a soft “i” [as in “teach”] or the soft sign. They would say “Kyiev,” not “Kiev” like the Russians do, and so on.

Kliuchevsky stresses that of all Great Russian vernaculars the one of Novgorod was the closest to the language spoken in Old Rus’ (The Day and this author have on more than one occasion commented on the manner in which autocratic Moscow dealt with the freedom-loving Novgorod) and provides a number of concrete examples. And then he arrives at a conclusion not likely to please everybody, namely that the Moscow dialect, adopted by a learned Russian society as standard, shows certain features that place it far from the language spoken in Kyivan Rus’; that using this dialect means breaching the rules of Old Rus’ phonetics as bad, if not worse, as it is done by the residents of Vladimir or Yaroslavl. In other words, the Great Russian dialects formed by a gradual spoiling of the original Rus’ language. The phonetics of Kyivan Rus changed especially noticeably in the northwestern direction — in the direction of Russian colonization that produced the “Great Russian stock” by merging Russians with Finns, and this leads one to the assumption that there was a connection between the two processes.

Kliuchevsky was also a learned ethnographer, as evidenced by his analysis of beliefs, rites, and customs practiced by the ancestors of the “Great Russian stock” in his Course in Russian History: “At the time of their first encounter with the Russians the Finnish tribes then inhabiting (and, to a certain insignificant extent, still inhabiting) the central and northeastern portions of European Russia seem to have been only in the primitive stage of religious growth… Though worshipping forces and objects of external nature, they did so without personifying them. That is to say, the Morduine or Tcheremissian deified rocks, trees, or the earth themselves, but recognized therein no symbol of superior beings… In fact, his cult was a sort of rude fetishism, and it was not until later, when Christianity had begun to assert its influence, that the elements became peopled with spirits. Among the Finns of the Volga in particular there flourished a cult of water and forest, of which certain features passed wholesale into the mythology of the Great Russians. On their Olympus, as on that of the Finns, appears the Forest God, who was the guardian of trees, roots, and herbage, and had a bad habit of bursting out into childish shouts and laughter — a proceeding which often scared or misled travelers… Finally, traditions concerning the lives of some Great Russian saints furnish us with traces of the survival of rock and tree worship even in their day, although that cult was concealed beneath Christian forms and is nowhere to be met with in southern or western Russia.”

Kliuchevsky analyzes economic problems and aspects of the “Great Russian stock,” stressing:

In Kyivan Rus’, the chief spring of a popular industry — namely, foreign trade — gave rise to a multitude of towns serving as larger or smaller centers of commerce, but on the Upper Volga — a region remote from the great maritime markets — it was impossible for foreign trade to resume its former role as the chief driving force of the industry of the people. That is why, in the 15th and 16th centuries, we see comparatively few towns in that part of Russia, and even those few are inhabited chiefly by a population engaged in agricultural pursuits. Moreover, not only did rural settlements dominate, but they differed sharply in character from those of old Kyivan Rus’. In the latter the never-ceasing pressure of external perils, added to an insufficient water supply in the open steppes, compelled the greater portion of the population to group itself into those large masses, those settlements numbering their thousands of inhabitants, which constituted the distinguishing feature of Southern Rus’. On the other hand, the first difficulty which confronted the Russian settler among the forests and marshes of the North was to find a spot dry enough to afford him a secure and suitable site for the erection of a hut.”

Hence a number of special features of the national character: “Everywhere the swamps and forests of Great Russia of the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries confronted the settler with a thousand unforeseen risks, difficulties, and hardships. Consequently he learnt to watch nature very closely (“to keep an eye open on both sides of him,” as the saying is), to scan and probe the ground on which he walked, and never to attempt the passage of a strange river where there was not a ford. All this bred in him resourcefulness in the face of minor perils and difficulties, and inured him to patient wrestling with hardships and misfortune. No people in Europe are so unspoiled, so handy, so taught not to wait upon nature or fortune, so long-suffering under adversity, as the Great Russian.” 

One can agree with or challenge the inferences made by this noted Russian historian. One thing is apparent: in the strict historical sense this “Great Russian stock” did not originate in Kyiv, the “mother of Rus’ (not Russian!) cities,” or in Chernihiv, Pereiaslav, Halych, not even in the old Novgorod. Its origin is to be found between the rivers Oka and Volga, in the forests of Suzdal once inhabited by Finns. This is apropos of the “sacred Slavic unity.” After reading Kliuchevsky, we Ukrainians who live in our land that was given us once and for all, do have the right to look at this unity at a somewhat different angle.