Lost Kingdom

by Serhii Plokhy

  With the support of the Orthodox authorities and the backing of the civil administration, Semashko convoked a Uniate Church council to consider the issue. The synod was supposed to issue an appeal to the tsar drafted by Semashko. “With Lithuania’s detachment of Russian provinces in troubled times and their subsequent annexation to Poland, their Russian Orthodox inhabitants were subjected [to persecution],” Semashko wrote. “Since then, those people, separated from the broad Russian masses, have constantly been subjected to all the devices of a policy of fanaticism intended to make them alien to Russia.” Semashko continued: “A million and a half Uniates, Russian by language and origin… would have remained somewhat alien to the broad mass of their actual brethren, the Russians.”

  The synod took place in February 1839 in the Belarusian town of Polatsk, the home of the seventeenth-century Westernizer of Muscovy Simeon of Polatsk. In preparation for the event, with the help of the authorities, Semashko collected 1,305 statements from Uniate priests indicating their readiness to join the Orthodox Church. Despite pressure, arrests, and exile of opponents of the “reverse Union,” 593 priests refused to sign the statement. To forestall possible peasant riots, the authorities sent a Cossack regiment to Vitsebsk province. On February 12, 1839, the Polatsk synod adopted the Act of Union and issued an appeal to the tsar prepared by Semashko, asking him to accept close to 1,600 Uniate parishes and close to 1.5 million parishioners into the body of imperial Orthodoxy. Semashko served an Orthodox liturgy in the St. Sophia Cathedral in Polatsk before taking the document to the imperial capital. The St. Petersburg Synod—the ruling body of the Orthodox Church—was glad to approve the request. The imperial hierarchs celebrated not only the adherence of the Uniates but also the return of part of the Russian tribe to its brethren. The Synod welcomed “the reconsolidation of the ancient interrupted union and the reestablishment of perfect unity” with the Uniates, who had been “united with us for ages by unity of kin, fatherland, language, faith, liturgy, and church hierarchy.”

  Nicholas I offered a token of approval in the spirit of Catherine II by having a special medal struck for the occasion. Its inscription echoed the one on the medal that she had issued upon the second partition of Poland: “Torn away by force (1596), reunited by love (1839).” Like Catherine, Nicholas was reacting to a Polish insurrection and trying to prevent Ukrainian and Belarusian peasants from joining it by converting them to Orthodoxy. But there was also an important new element in Nicholas’s policy. He was not just returning what he believed historically belonged to the Romanov dynasty, but also striving to restore the broken unity of the Russian nation. Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality were to be mutually reinforcing elements of an attempt to integrate the western provinces into the empire. But the fait accompli of 1839 contained the seeds of future problems. The provinces reunited “by love” with the Orthodox Church and the Russian nation under the tsarist scepter would soon challenge the model of nationality promoted by the authors of the Polatsk synod.

  III

  THE TRIPARTITE NATION

  7

  THE ADVENT OF UKRAINE

  THEY PLANNED THE WEDDING FOR SUNDAY, MARCH 30, 1847, but two days earlier police officials unexpectedly showed up at the groom’s apartment and arrested him, postponing the wedding for twenty-eight long years. The arrested man was a twenty-nine-year-old professor of history at Kyiv University, Mykola (Nikolai) Kostomarov. On the evening of March 31, a day after his wedding was supposed to take place, Kostomarov was sent under police escort to St. Petersburg: the order for his arrest had come from the very top of the imperial hierarchy.

  It was given by Count Aleksei Orlov, head of the Third Section of the Imperial Chancellery—the body responsible for political surveillance. The heir to the throne, the future Tsar Alexander II, was briefed on the case, which involved a number of Kyivan intellectuals—government officials, teachers, and students. One of them, Taras Shevchenko, an artist and popular poet who wrote in Ukrainian, was arrested on April 5, upon his arrival in Kyiv, and also escorted to St. Petersburg. There were further arrests and more deportations to the capital, where the liberal public was at a loss to explain the authorities’ actions.

  The governor general of Kyiv, Podolia, and Volhynia, Dmitrii Bibikov, was then in St. Petersburg, reporting on, among other things, a proclamation that had been found on the wall of a building in Kyiv. It read: “Brothers! A great hour is upon us, an hour in which you are being given the opportunity to wash off the dishonor inflicted on the dust of our ancestors, on our native Ukraine, by the base hand of our eternal foes. Who among you will not lend a hand to this great undertaking? God and good people are with us! The ever loyal sons of Ukraine, foes of the katsapy [derogatory term for Russians].”

  The appeal was as anti-Russian as could be imagined, but it was written in Russian, not Polish, and not addressed to the Polish nobles who then dominated Kyiv society. It was directed to “the faithful sons of Ukraine”—people whom the imperial government considered Russian by nationality. Bibikov was sent back to Kyiv with orders to take over supervision of the Kyiv educational district. At a meeting with faculty and students of the university, he warned them against “loose thinking,” threatening, “If I managed to bring 5 million people to heel, then I will do it to you as well: either I will burst, or all of you will explode!” The reference was to the millions of the inhabitants of Right-Bank Ukraine, entrusted to Bibikov but claimed as followers by the Polish insurgents.

  There was no doubt that this manifestation of disloyalty came from the very institutions that had been created to ensure the loyalty of the region’s inhabitants to tsar and empire. Mykola Kostomarov taught at the university, while Taras Shevchenko, who had just been appointed instructor of drawing there, had earlier been employed by the Archeographic Commission, which aimed to document the Russian identity of Right-Bank Ukraine. Official policy appeared to have backfired. Instead of solidifying a common front between the government and the “Russian” population of the western provinces against the Polish threat, it had contributed to dividing the imperial Russian nation and promoted the development of a separate nation that would claim equal rights with the Great Russians in the core areas of the empire in the course of the next few decades. A new Ukrainian nation was emerging from the cocoon of the old Little Russian identity. The imperial government would do everything in its power to stop its development and put the Ukrainian genie back into the Little Russian bottle.

  THE THIRD SECTION’S INVESTIGATION INTO THE ACTIVITIES OF Kostomarov, Shevchenko, and others uncovered the existence of a clandestine organization, the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. Its goal was the creation of a voluntary federation of Slavic nations, with Ukraine at its core. The brotherhood became known in government circles as the Slavic Society, later renamed the Ukrainian Slavic Society.

  There was reason for the authorities’ initial view of the case as part of a broad intellectual movement. As employed by government officials of the 1840s, the designation “Slavophiles” was applied to a group of intellectuals, located mainly in Moscow, who took the issue of nationality—Slavic in general, and Russian in particular—very seriously. Their views coincided only in part with the government’s understanding of the principle of nationality as presented in Count Sergei Uvarov’s triad of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. The Slavophiles held Orthodoxy in great esteem but were much less enthusiastic about the government. Moreover, they believed that with the introduction of Western practices by Peter I, Russia had almost lost its unique character.

  The Slavophile movement emerged in opposition to the “Westernizers” among the Russian intellectual and political elite, who saw Western Europe as a model for Russia’s development. Their viewpoint was first fully articulated in the Philosophical Letters of Petr Chaadaev, who criticized the Russian social and intellectual scene, claiming that his country was lagging behind the West. Written in the years following the Decembrist Uprising, the letters were first published in 1836 an
d provoked a negative reaction not only from the government, which closed the journal that published the letters, but also from the nascent Slavophile movement, led by the prominent theologian, philosopher, and poet Aleksei Khomiakov. Khomiakov’s followers were influenced by the ideas of Friedrich Schelling, a friend and later rival of G. W. F. Hegel, whose vision of society as a living organism appealed to them. Their texts emphasized the Russian historical tradition, the importance of the church, and differences between Russia and the West.

  Among the key figures of the Slavophile movement mentioned by investigators of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius in their reports were two Moscow University professors, Mikhail Pogodin and Stepan Shevyrev. Pogodin, whom Uvarov had rejected as the prospective author of a Russian history textbook integrating the western provinces into the empire, taught history at Moscow University; Shevyrev lectured there on philology and literature. The two also served as copublishers of the journal Moskvitianin (The Muscovite), which became a mouthpiece of the Slavophile movement in the 1840s. Pogodin was a leading figure in the emerging pan-Slavic movement, which regarded all Slavs as a single family. By stressing the uniqueness (samobytnost’) and self-awareness (samosoznanie) of the Russian nation, the Slavophiles, for all their pan-Slavic ecumenism, set an example to non-Russian Slavs who wished to celebrate the distinctiveness of their own peoples and, consequently, their right to autonomy and independence.

  Early on, Ukraine took a special place in the Slavophile imagination. Pogodin and Shevyrev in particular showed great interest in the culture and history of Ukraine, or, as they called it, Little Russia. In the 1830s, Mykola Kostomarov, then a student at Kharkiv University in eastern Ukraine, had been strongly influenced by Stepan Shevyrev, whose lectures he attended. Shevyrev, who referred to Little Russia as Great Russia’s elder sister, put a strong emphasis on nationality and encouraged the study of popular culture. But there was a problem, since “nationality” meant different things in Moscow and Kharkiv. When Kostomarov went to the people to collect their lore, he had to speak to them in Ukrainian, and by 1839 he was already writing in that language. Kostomarov was not the first admirer of nationality to bring back texts from his field trips that were written in a language difficult to understand, if not entirely foreign, to enthusiasts of nationality in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

  The first major literary work in vernacular Ukrainian was published in 1798. It appeared in St. Petersburg, where a printshop issued the first three parts of a six-part travesty of Virgil’s Aeneid, titled Eneïda. The Greek characters of the original epic were turned into Ukrainian-speaking Zaporozhian Cossacks. The author, Ivan Kotliarevsky, was descended from a Cossack officer family residing in the former Hetmanate. Employed as a schoolteacher and military officer, he also served as artistic director of a Poltava theater between 1812 and 1821. During that time, he wrote the first modern Ukrainian-language play, Natalka from Poltava. By then the Ukrainian language had already acquired its first grammar, and the first collection of Ukrainian folk songs had seen the light of day.

  In the 1830s, Kharkiv became the center of the Ukrainian Romantic movement, with a promising Russian philologist, Izmail Sreznevsky, and the descendant of a local noble family, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, among others, writing on Ukrainian topics and trying their hand at expressing themselves in Ukrainian. In 1833, Kvitka-Osnovianenko produced the first Ukrainian-language short story. Five years later, Kostomarov made his contribution by writing a Ukrainian-language drama on a subject from the Cossack past and then publishing collections of his Ukrainian poems.

  But the most important contribution to Ukrainian literature in the late 1830s was made by Kostomarov’s future co-conspirator, Taras Shevchenko. Like Kostomarov, Shevchenko was born a serf, but whereas Kostomarov was recognized as a free man at the age of fifteen—his mother was a serf, but his father had been a nobleman—Shevchenko had to wait for his freedom until he was twenty-four. He owed it to the Russian artistic community and, improbably enough, to the generosity of the imperial court. Shevchenko was brought to St. Petersburg by his landlord in the early 1830s, where his artistic talent was noted by the most prominent figures in the Russian artistic and intellectual world. They wanted to set the young artist free and eventually achieved their goal. Kirill Briullov, one of the best painters of the Russian Empire, produced a portrait of Vasilii Zhukovsky, one of the most prominent Russian poets of the era and a tutor of the future Tsar Alexander II. At an auction held in 1838, the portrait went to a member of the imperial family who knew that the proceeds would buy the freedom of a twenty-four-year-old artist born into serfdom.

  It was Shevchenko’s aptitude for drawing and painting that was recognized at the time. In 1838, after becoming a free man, Shevchenko entered the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts and joined the class of his savior, Briullov. But Shevchenko’s real talent lay in poetry and writing. He wrote prose in Russian and poetry in Ukrainian, and it was the latter that both made him famous and got him into trouble, first with the Russian critics and then with the imperial authorities. His collection of Ukrainian-language poetry was first published in 1840 under the title Kobzar (Minstrel). It was widely reviewed in Russian literary journals and newspapers: while some critics welcomed the appearance of a collection of Ukrainian poetry, others questioned the legitimacy of such an enterprise, expressing regret over the decision of a gifted poet to waste his talent by writing in Ukrainian.

  “It seems to us,” wrote one of the critics in a popular journal, Biblioteka dlia chteniia (Library for Reading), “that the Little Russian poets pay insufficient attention to the fact that they often write in such a dialect as does not exist even in Russia: they unceremoniously rework Great Russian words and phrases in Little Russian fashion, creating a language for themselves that has never existed, that none of all possible Russias—neither great, nor middle, nor little, nor white, nor black, nor red—could call its own.” Another critic proposed that Shevchenko switch to Russian. “We would advise him,” wrote this contributor to Severnaia pchela (Northern Bee), “to convey his exquisite feelings in Russian. Then his little flowers, as he calls his verses, would be richer and more fragrant and, above all, longer-lasting.”

  Shevchenko was not the only author attacked by Russian reviewers for his use of Ukrainian as opposed to Russian. When Kotliarevsky’s Eneïda was first fully published in 1842, it met with a similar reaction. “For Russian readers who have not had the opportunity to live in Little Russia or its neighboring lands,” wrote a contributor to Biblioteka dlia chteniia, “Mr. Kotliarevsky’s poem is incomprehensible, even with the help of a dictionary.” Not all Russian critics shared that view, but those who did were not inventing difficulties: the Ukrainian language was indeed hard for Russian readers to understand. Even Gogol’s Russian-language writings on Ukrainian subjects were supplied with glossaries.

  The differences between the Russian and Ukrainian nationalities did not manifest themselves in language alone. History became another point of contention. After Nikolai Polevoi, the author of a multivolume history of the Russian people, had criticized one of the imperial historians, Dmitrii Bantysh-Kamensky, for failing to take account of a distinct Ukrainian identity in his History of Little Russia (1822), the Ukrainian Mykola Markevych embarked on the writing of a new kind of Ukrainian history. His History of Little Russia was published in five volumes in 1842–1843. As a template for his work, Markevych used the anonymous manuscript “History of the Rus’” (ca. 1818), which treated Cossack history as the annals of a separate nation. The anonymous work was popularized by Izmail Sreznevsky in Kharkiv and widely read by Kostomarov and his circle, shaping their perception of the Ukrainian past as distinct from the Russian.

  In 1846, the 1818 manuscript was published in Moscow by Osyp Bodiansky, a Ukrainian-born professor of Slavic studies at Moscow University who was also a member of the Slavophile circle mentioned in the investigation of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. Another potential suspect, Mikhail Pogodin, saw
cultural differences between Russians and Ukrainians that went beyond language and history. He wrote in 1845, “The Great Russians live side by side with the Little Russians, profess one faith, have shared one fate and, for many years, one history. But how many differences there are between the Great Russians and the Little Russians!”

  By the mid-nineteenth century, the Slavophiles’ belief in the unity of Great and Little Russia and their treatment of the latter as the fountainhead of Russian culture was being challenged by the Little Russians’ search for a nationality of their own. Encouraged by like-minded individuals in Moscow and St. Petersburg to investigate and embrace issues of nationality, the Ukrainians brought to the salons of St. Petersburg and Moscow not only a language quite different from Russian but also a history distinct from that of the Russian people and state. It would soon become clear that language, history, and culture could be used not only to construct a past separate from that of the Great Russians but also a different future. In that new vision, Little Russia would turn into Ukraine, an entity still close to Russia but also very different and quite separate from it.

  THE INVESTIGATION INTO THE ACTIVITIES OF THE BROTHERHOOD of Saints Cyril and Methodius was complete in May 1847, when the chief of gendarmes and head of the Third Section of the Imperial Chancellery, Count Aleksei Orlov, reported his findings to the tsar. “The uncovering of a Slavic, or, more correctly, a Ukrainian-Slavic, society began with a student at Kyiv University, Aleksei Petrov,” wrote Orlov. Petrov was the impoverished son of a former police official. He rented a room in the same building as one of the active participants in the brotherhood, overheard its members’ discussions, and was invited to attend some of their meetings. What he heard at those meetings made him to go to the authorities and denounce his neighbors. According to Petrov, the members were discussing preparations for a popular revolt against the imperial authorities with the goal of uniting all of the Slavic nations and establishing a government based on popular representation. To achieve their goal, he said, they were prepared to do away with the imperial family.