But, in Orlov’s view, the interrogation of participants in the brotherhood and the analysis of its programmatic documents showed only that the original fears and concerns had been exaggerated. The brotherhood consisted of only three members, including Kostomarov. Acquaintances, such as Shevchenko, occasionally participated in the discussions, but even those petered out after a few months. The members of the brotherhood and their circle of friends were not preparing an uprising, and they allegedly only wanted to achieve the unification of the Slavic tribes under the auspices of the Russian tsar. “The political evil per se, fortunately, had not managed to develop to the extent suggested by the preliminary reports,” wrote Orlov to the tsar.
Historians later claimed that Orlov either deliberately or inadvertently underestimated the threat presented by the brotherhood and thus misrepresented or misunderstood the nature of its program. The “political evil” that the authorities were concerned about was expressed in a number of texts, the most elaborate of which was The Law of God, or Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People. Orlov called it a reworking of a text by the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, while Kostomarov claimed at his interrogation that it had been composed by Poles in the early 1830s. In actual fact, Kostomarov was its main author, and the Books of the Genesis presented many of the ideas discussed by the members of the brotherhood.
The political goal put forward in the work was indeed, as the authorities had feared at the start of the investigation, the creation of a Slavic confederation based on the principle of popular representation, with no role envisioned for the tsar. The members of the imperial family were treated as German usurpers imposing their autocratic rule on the freedom-loving Slavs. The social order of the future Slavic state was supposed to be based on equality and Christian ethics. According to the text, there was no tsar but the ruler of the heavens. Kostomarov accepted only two elements of Uvarov’s tripartite formula, religion and nationality, rejecting autocracy. But religion was interpreted in non-autocratic form, and the nationality endorsed in the Books was Ukrainian, not Russian.
The Books characterized the Ukrainians as a people distinct from both the Russians and the Poles who were destined to lead the future Slavic federation. The Ukrainians had a special role because they were the most egalitarian and democratic of all the Slavs. If the Russians were ruled by an autocratic tsar and the Poles had an overbearing caste of noble landowners, the Ukrainians were a peasant nation that cherished its democratic Cossack traditions. What were the distinguishing characteristics of the Ukrainians, aside from their egalitarian social structure? According to Kostomarov’s friend and fellow suspect Panteleimon Kulish, those characteristics were language and customs. Another co-conspirator, Heorhii Andruzky, envisioned Ukraine as encompassing not only the lands settled by Ukrainians in the Russian Empire but also territory extending into Austrian Galicia. Kostomarov saw the future Ukrainian state as a republic in a union of equals with other Slavic states. He concluded the Books with the following statement: “Ukraine will become an independent republic in a Slavic union. Then all the peoples will say, indicating the place where Ukraine will be drawn on the map, ‘Here is the stone rejected by the builder: it will be the cornerstone.’”
Orlov recommended punishing the Ukrainophiles—a term that he invented to denote the core members of the brotherhood and their acquaintances—with imprisonment, internal exile, and, in the case of Taras Shevchenko, forced military service. The authorities did not believe that Shevchenko was a member of the society but were disturbed by his verses, in which he not only extolled Ukraine but also attacked the emperor and empress for exploiting his native land. They were appalled by his lack of gratitude to the ruling dynasty: Shevchenko had been born a serf and redeemed with money paid by a member of the royal family.
Orlov was also concerned about the impact that Shevchenko’s glorification of the Cossack past could have on readers. “Along with favorite poems, ideas may have been sown and subsequently have taken root in Little Russia about the supposedly happy times of the hetmans, the felicity of restoring those times, and Ukraine’s capacity to exist as a separate state,” Orlov wrote. The same applied to the prose of Panteleimon Kulish. Heorhii Andruzky entertained the idea of restoring the Hetmanate—one of the main concerns of the authorities, who, in the opinion of some scholars, mistook the new threat of cultural nationalism for the old one of Cossack separatism.
In order to avoid publicizing the brotherhood’s program, the authorities convinced Kostomarov and others to change their original testimonies in order to fit the official narrative of the case. According to that version, the brotherhood had wanted nothing more than to unite the Slavs under the scepter of the Russian tsar. But that did not mean absolving the members of their misdeeds: the authorities made public the fact of the brotherhood’s existence and the punishment meted out to its members. Orlov recommended a certain level of publicity “so that all may know the fate prepared for themselves by those who occupy themselves with Slavdom in a spirit contrary to our government, and even to divert other Slavophiles from such a path.” The sentences were not excessively harsh. Kostomarov, the key figure of the brotherhood, was given a one-year term in the prison of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, followed by internal exile in the provincial town of Saratov on the Volga River. Others received sentences of one to three years’ imprisonment and internal exile. Most of those involved were simply exiled from Ukraine or transferred to Russia.
The authorities viewed the brotherhood’s activities through the prism of their ongoing struggle with the Polish nobility for the loyalty of Right-Bank Ukraine. “Obviously the work of that general propaganda from Paris,” commented Nicholas I on the investigative reports. “For a long time we did not believe that such work was going on in Ukraine, but now there can be no doubt about it.” A memorandum prepared by an officer of the Third Section developed the same theme while arguing against harsh punishment of the suspects: “Harsh measures will make forbidden thoughts even dearer to them and may cause the hitherto submissive Little Russians to adopt the nervous attitude against our government in which the Kingdom of Poland finds itself after the revolt. It would be more expedient and just not even to give any appearance to the Little Russians that the government had any reason to suspect that harmful ideas had been sown among them.”
Not showing that the government was unduly concerned was one thing; dealing with the newly uncovered problem of Little Russian disloyalty was another. A memorandum prepared by officers of the Third Section suggested measures to curb the future spread of Ukrainophile ideas. It read: “Through the minister of popular education, to warn all those dealing with Slavdom, antiquity, and nationality, as well as professors, teachers, and censors, that in their books and lectures they sedulously avoid any mention of Little Russia, Poland, and other lands subject to Russia that may be understood in a sense dangerous to the integrity and peace of the empire, and that, on the contrary, they strive as much as possible to incline all lessons of scholarship and history toward the true loyalty of all those tribes to Russia.” In 1854, Uvarov, in turn, reminded the minister of the interior of an imperial decree suggesting that “writers should be most careful when handling the question of Little Russian ethnicity and language, lest love for Little Russia outweigh affection for the fatherland—the Empire.”
Faced with the Polish threat in the western provinces, and using the idea of Russian nationality as a weapon in the struggle for control of the region, the government had to be careful not to allow the idea of nationality to undermine the principle of autocracy and the unity of the empire. It was a difficult balancing act, but the authorities understood the complexity of the task.
ALTHOUGH THE PUBLIC WAS ALLOWED TO KNOW NOTHING ABOUT these and other “destructive ideas,” the rumor mill was doing its job. Aleksandr Nikitenko, a literary censor in St. Petersburg, recorded in his diary: “In the south, in Kyiv, a society has been uncovered whose goal was a confederal union of all Slavs in Europe on d
emocratic foundations, on the model of the North American States.… It is said that all this was brought to light by the representations of the Austrian government.”
The Russian Westernizers had a field day. They had always regarded the Little Russian project with suspicion, considering it an intrigue designed to force Russia off the road of European progress and drag it back into the pre-Petrine past, and were constantly polemicizing with the Slavophiles. One leading Westernizer, the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, in expressing his solidarity with the regime, wrote: “Shevchenko was sent to the Caucasus as a soldier. I have no pity for him: if I were his judge, I would do no less. I hold a personal grudge against liberals of that sort. They are the enemies of achievement of any kind. With their impertinent idiocies they irritate the government and make it suspicious, ready to see rebellion where there is nothing of the kind, and provoke harsh measures that are deadly to literature and education.”
Commenting on Panteleimon Kulish’s suggestion that Ukraine should separate from Russia, Belinsky continued his line of attack: “Oh, those topknots [khokhly, a derogatory term for Ukrainians]! They are just dumb sheep, but they liberalize in the name of dumplings with pig fat! And now that it is forbidden to write anything, they befoul everything. But on the other hand, how can one blame the government? What government would allow the advocacy in print of separating one of its provinces?”
The official investigation of the brotherhood exonerated the Moscow Slavophiles. The Slavophile writer and activist Fedor Chizhov, originally suspected of membership in the brotherhood, escaped persecution not only because he was found to have had no contacts with it, but also because, according to Orlov, he “turned out to be only a Slavophile, a champion of Russian nationality in the spirit of Moscow scholars.” According to a report filed by an agent of the Third Section, the Russian Slavophiles were united only by “some kind of murky and mystical premonitions of the intellectual victory of the East over the West, by attachment to antiquity, by love for Moscow, and, consequently, by some kind of malevolence toward Petersburg.” He continued: “No one suspects a political aim, although the desire and expectation is expressed that Russia, casting aside foreign elements of development, take an exclusively national path of development.” He was right. One of the leaders of the Slavophile movement, Aleksei Khomiakov, upon hearing about the goals of the brotherhood, wrote, “The Little Russians were eventually affected with political stupidity. It is sad and painful to see such nonsense and backwardness.… Moral struggle—this is what we have to think about today.”
The arrests and sentences made the Russian Slavophiles distance themselves from their Ukrainian brethren. This was true even of such “Ukrainophiles” among the Moscow intellectuals as Mikhail Pogodin. According to the report of a government informer, Pogodin began to speak differently about the Slavophile idea after the arrests. What that meant in practice was demonstrated by his review of the History of the Rus’, the anonymous text that Osyp Bodiansky had published in Moscow in 1846 presenting the exploits of the Ukrainian Cossacks as the history of a separate nation, which influenced the thinking of Kostomarov and his circle. In 1849, in a review that appeared in the journal Moskvitianin, of which he was a copublisher, Pogodin noted that the History “passed over in silence all the advantages that accrued to [Little Russia] from unification with mighty Great Rus’, the heart of the Russian state.” His earlier reading of the History, whose authorship was attributed at the time to Archbishop Heorhii Konysky, had been quite different. “I read Konysky with satisfaction,” wrote Pogodin in 1846, a year before the arrests. He went on to express his approval of the way in which the author of the History of the Rus’ portrayed the cruelty of Peter I and his assistants in Ukraine.
In 1851, Pogodin wrote a text styled as a letter to the distinguished philologist Izmail Sreznevsky, a former member of the circle of Kharkiv Romantics. There, Pogodin claimed for Great Russia the history of Kyivan Rus’, which he had earlier regarded as part of the history of Little Russia. This claim marked the beginning of a prolonged Russo-Ukrainian debate over the legacy of Kyivan Rus’, but for Pogodin it was a natural development of his earlier views on the Slavic nationalities and their histories. He believed that history was a product of the activities of nationalities, and each nationality had a history of its own. As long as the (Great) Russians and Ukrainians (Little Russians) were distinct Slavic nationalities (such as the Bulgarians, Serbs, and Czechs), the Kyivan past had to belong to one of them. Pogodin decided that it belonged to Great Russia.
Already in the mid-1830s, Pogodin had had trouble satisfying Uvarov’s request to combine the history of northeastern and southwestern Rus’ into a single narrative. In the mid-1840s, Pogodin suggested that there had been linguistic differences among the population as early as Kyivan times, and that they coincided with nineteenth-century distinctions between Great Russians, Little Russians, and White Russians. Thus the population of Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Halych spoke Little Russian, that of Minsk and Vitsebsk spoke White Russian (Belarusian), and that of Vladimir and Moscow spoke Great Russian. He considered the Kyivan princes, including even a major figure of Russian history, Andrei Bogoliubsky, to have been Little Russian. It was only Bogoliubsky’s descendants, argued Pogodin, who had “gone native” in the northeastern lands and become Great Russians. Bogoliubsky himself, like his father and the founder of Moscow, Yurii Dolgoruky, had been a Little Russian.
Pogodin’s account of Kyivan Rus’ history deprived the early Great Russian narrative of its most prized element—the Kyivan period. In his letter to Sreznevsky, Pogodin decided to correct that problem with another twist of his linguistic argument. He asserted that, in reading the early Kyivan chronicles, he had detected no trace of the Little Russian language, but that there were clear connections between the chronicle entries and the Great Russian language. Equating language with nation, Pogodin suggested that it was Great Russians, not Little Russians, who had inhabited Kyiv during its golden age and created its history and annals. The Little Russians, he went on to argue, had appeared in the region only after the Mongol invasion, which pushed the Great Russians farther north.
Pogodin published his letter in 1856, five years after writing it. It provoked an immediate critical response from his old acquaintance Mykhailo Maksymovych, who explained to his friend in a series of published letters that the language of the Kyivan chroniclers was Church Slavonic, based on South Slavic dialects. As such, it bore little relation to the spoken language of the population of Kyivan Rus’. Maksymovych acknowledged the existence of differences between the Great Russian and Little Russian languages prior to the Mongol invasion, but said they were closely related to each other. He also regarded the histories of northern and southern Rus’ before the Mongol invasion as being closely related. In effect, Maksymovych rebuffed Pogodin’s Great Russian claim to Kyiv and defended the Little Russian (Ukrainian) character of Kyivan Rus’ history. But Maksymovych was not a separatist: for him, the Little Russian ethnic group was part of a larger bipartite all-Russian nation. He wrote to Pogodin: “The fact that I love Kyiv, the city of our first throne, more than you is also natural, since, in cultivating an all-Russian love for it, and a closer Little Russian love for it as well, I also love it as the homeland of my kinsmen.”
With the members of the Cyrillo-Methodian Brotherhood in internal exile or lying low after the arrests, the impulse to separate the histories of the Great and Little Russians now began to originate from Moscow, not Kyiv. The bone of contention was no longer the Cossack past, as it had been for Kostomarov, but the Kyivan Rus’ past, which both sides considered their own. There is no indication that Maksymovych was able to convince Pogodin to change his opinion. Instead, Pogodin rejected his old view concerning the Little Russian nationality of the Kyivan princes and claimed them, along with Rus’ history as a whole, for the Great Russians. In his history of pre-Mongol Rus’, published in 1871, Pogodin wrote: “The supposed Little Russians moved north, to the Suzdal land, with Yurii Do
lgoruky and Andrei Bogoliubsky. It would seem that they should have left their Little Russian influence on something—in customs, in language. But no—we see no change in the north at that time; consequently, it was not Little Russians but the selfsame Great Russians who went there.”
Judging by his other works and the reports he made to the government on the results of his travels in the Slavic lands, Pogodin regarded the Great and Little Russians as separate nationalities (he wrote that the latter had “all the distinguishing marks of a separate tribe”) belonging to the same Russian group. Depending on circumstances, he considered the Galician inhabitants of Austria-Hungary as either a separate group or part of the Little Russian nationality, but he also considered them constituents of a larger Russian nation. In both word and deed, Pogodin supported the development of what he called the Little Russian dialect, but he objected to elevating it to a level equal to Russian. Arguing in the mid-1850s for autonomous status for Poland within the Russian Empire, Pogodin suggested that the boundary should recognize only two languages, Russian and Polish. “Language—that is the true boundary between peoples,” he wrote. “Poland is where Polish is spoken. Russia is where Russian is spoken. What principle could be more right or just?”
The Pogodin-Maksymovych debate opened the question of how to divide the historical narrative between Russia and Ukraine. It challenged the model that had dominated the thinking of Russian elites in the first half of the nineteenth century—a model in which Kyivan Rus’ was considered to belong to the all-Russian past. More clearly than any of his predecessors, Pogodin divided that past into Great Russian and Little Russian parts. Besides the Great and Little Russians, he recognized the White Russians (Belarusians) as a distinct group, while Maksymovych maintained the established division of the all-Russian nationality into Great (northern) Russians and Little (southern) Russians. Although this difference in the treatment of the all-Russian nationality was not contested in their debate, it would come to the fore in the next decade, the tumultuous 1860s.
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