Kostomarov developed his ideas further in an article titled “The Two Rus’ Nationalities,” which appeared in print in St. Petersburg in 1861 in the journal Osnova (Foundation), published by Panteleimon Kulish. In this piece, Kostomarov demolished the cocoon of the all-Russian nationality, declaring that in fact there were two separate Rus’ nationalities: “Besides the Rus’ nationality that holds sway in the outer world, another one now makes its appearance, claiming equal civil rights in the sphere of word and intellect.” He argued that the name “Rus’” had effectively been stolen from its original owners, the South (or Little) Russians, by their northern neighbors. Kostomarov maintained that the distinct histories of the two Rus’ nationalities had shaped their characters differently. Whereas the South Russians valued individual freedom and the principles of collegiality and federalism, the North Russians valued collectivism, the state, and authoritarian rule. In choosing between Polish and Russian orientations for the nascent South Russian nation, Kostomarov argued in favor of the latter. He believed that the South Russians had a better chance of establishing equal relations with the Great Russians than they did with the Poles.
This article would become a rallying point for the Ukrainian movement in the Russian Empire for generations to come. Since “The Two Rus’ Nationalities” was signed and published in the empire, Kostomarov did not use the terms “Ukraine” and “Ukrainians,” as he had done a year earlier in the anonymous Kolokol publication, leaving future generations of Ukrainian activists to sort out the confusion between the two Russias and the two Russian nations. But the article clearly declared, for the first time in the public press, the birth of a separate nationality on a par with the Great Russian nationality. Kostomarov was nominally following in the tradition established by Mykhailo Maksymovych in the 1830s. Maksymovych had divided Rus’ into two parts: northern and southern. Kostomarov’s scheme had two parts also, but unlike Maksymovych, Kostomarov did not consider them parts of the same entity. As far as Kostomarov was concerned, they were separate. Moreover, he argued that in some respects the South Russians were closer to the Poles than to the Russians. “If the South Russian nation is farther from the Poles than from the Great Russians in the structure of its language, it is nevertheless much closer to them in national traits and fundamentals of national character,” he wrote.
Kostomarov considered the Belarusians a branch of the Great Russian nation, but that proposition did not sit well with many of his readers, either in the imperial capitals or in Belarus itself.
THE TERM “BELARUS,” WHICH HAD FIGURED IN THE TSAR’S SHORT title in the second half of the seventeenth century and was dropped from it in the first decades of the eighteenth, returned to the official imperial vocabulary in the aftermath of the first partition of Poland in 1772, when the eastern Belarusian lands were annexed to the Russian Empire. The Belarusian eparchy of the Roman Catholic Church was also created at that time, and in 1797, after Catherine’s death, the Russian Orthodox Church established its Belarusian archbishopric. “Belarus” was considered a wholly legitimate term until the Polish uprising of 1830–1831.
In 1828, that name was given to the Uniate eparchy of the region, and in 1829 it was applied to the educational district that included both the eastern and the western lands of Belarus. But the uprising of 1830–1831 changed the political connotation of the term. Polish intellectuals who had earlier referred to their homeland as Lithuania, such as the poet Adam Mickiewicz, a native of the Brest region, adopted the name “Belarus” after the revolt. Spelled “Białoruś” in Polish, it was applied to the region east of the core Polish territory that was also considered historically, culturally, and lingustically Polish. The new interest in the language and customs of the simple folk no longer allowed culturally conscious Polish nationalists to refer to Belarus as “Lithuania,” whose inhabitants spoke a language profoundly different from Slavic.
This ethnographic turn was fully apparent in a talk on folk culture that Aleksander Rypiński, a native of the Vitsebsk region of Belarus, delivered in Paris in 1839. Rypiński had taken part in the uprising of 1830 and, like many of his compatriots, had found refuge in France. He defined the territory of Belarus as the part of Polish lands extending from the Prypiat River and the Pinsk marshes in the south to Pskov and Velikie Luki in the north. The language of the inhabitants of this region, he asserted, was different from the languages spoken in Russia, Russian-ruled Ukraine, and Austrian Galicia, and was closer to Polish than to any of those languages. According to Rypiński, speakers of Belarusian had been blood relatives of the Poles since time immemorial. The talk received such a warm response from Polish émigrés that Rypiński published an expanded version of it in Paris in the following year.
In 1840, the same year Rypiński published his brochure, Nicholas I banned the use of the words “Belarusian” and “Lithuanian” in government documents, but the measure could not be enforced outside official circles. It was too little, too late. In 1835, Roman Catholics issued a Belarusian-dialect catechism written in the Polish alphabet for the local peasantry. By the end of the decade, a Polish-alphabet Belarusian version of Ivan Kotliarevsky’s Eneïda began to circulate among the local nobility. In 1844–1846, a native of the Polatsk region of Belarus, Jan Barszczewski, published his four-volume collection of literary works, where he tried his hand at writing in Belarusian, employing the Polish alphabet. The 1850s witnessed a small explosion of similarly written texts when Wincenty Dunin-Marcinkiewicz, one of the Polish promoters (and creators) of a bilingual Belarusian culture, published prose works for the common people in Belarusian and prepared a translation into that language of Adam Mickiewicz’s classic poem Pan Tadeusz.
The Russian Orthodox hierarchs and some government officials became increasingly concerned about what they regarded as a “Polish intrigue” intended to corrupt the “Russian” peasantry. The Polish-inspired project of producing and distributing Belarusian-language literature in the Polish alphabet for the common reader faced a setback in 1859. There had been Austrian and Polish attempts to switch Ruthenian publications in Austrian Galicia from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet, and Russian authorities responded by banning the import of these texts. Similar publications in the empire were also stopped in their tracks, but Belarusian literature in Cyrillic did not fill the resulting vacuum. Back in 1846, the Russian Academy of Sciences had turned down the manuscript of a Cyrillic-alphabet Belarusian grammar prepared by the ethnographer Pavel Shpilevsky on grounds of poor academic quality. In 1862, the first grammar of Belarusian was finally published with the support of a local marshal of the nobility, but the Polish uprising of 1863 put an end to further Belarusian publications in the empire.
In 1862, there had been discussions among those in the inner circle of the governor general of Vilnius, Vladimir Nazimov, about publishing a journal in the local Belarusian dialect. Differences arose over the language to be used—Russian, slightly adapted to local usage, or the Belarusian dialect—with the governor backing the latter option. Nazimov petitioned the imperial minister of education, arguing that the religious education of Belarusian Catholics—former “Russian” Uniates who had converted to Roman Catholicism—should be conducted in the “local Belarusian language.” The journal, he wrote, should be published in a language that he defined as “Russian or, better, Belarusian, consisting of the writing of the local Ruthenian dialect on paper in Russian script.” The governor was desperate to overcome his Polish opponents, led by Wincenty Konstanty Kalinowski, who in their publication The Peasant Truth, addressed to the peasantry, were using local Belarusian dialects written in the Polish alphabet to appeal to the local peasant population.
Neither Nazimov and his advisers, who argued for the use of the Belarusian language, nor the Polish publishers of The Peasant Truth equated Belarusian with any particular nationality or considered the Belarusians a distinct ethnic group. Nazimov regarded the local peasants as members of the Russian nation, while Kalinowski called on them to fight for the Polish c
ause. Neither man appeared to take the Belarusians seriously as independent political actors, and both hoped to manipulate them by making effective use of the local Belarusian dialect. While Kalinowski managed to publish in Belarusian, Governor Nazimov’s proposal to establish a Cyrillic-alphabet Belarusian journal was never approved by St. Petersburg. Even so, Nazimov’s proposal indicated that the authorities could no longer ignore the rise of Belarusian cultural assertiveness.
How to handle that unexpected rise remained a highly controversial issue. No one contributed more to the debate than Mikhail Koialovich, a native of western Belarus and the son of a Uniate priest who had studied with Iosif Semashko. Mikhail Koialovich was eleven years old in 1839 when Semashko engineered the “reunification” of the Uniates. Educated in Orthodox schools, he became a professor of history at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy and took an active part in Russian debates before and during the Polish uprising of 1863. He believed in the unity of the Russian nation while recognizing the existence of a Belarusian “tribe” that spoke the Belarusian “dialect,” but he did not regard language and ethnicity as criteria for defining a separate group within the big Russian nation. In his opinion, nationality was defined in social terms and shaped by common historical experience. Thus, he divided the Russian nation into two parts, but unlike Kostomarov, who had divided Rus’ into northern and southern branches, Koialovich posited an east-west division.
Today, Koialovich is considered the father of a trend in Belarusian political thought that imagined Belarus as part of a broader entity called Western Rus’. This view had deep historical roots, as it was based on the division of the Rus’ lands in the decades and centuries following the Mongol invasion. By the fourteenth century, most of the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands had ended up within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and those were the territories that, for Koialovich, constituted Western Rus’. He defined its inhabitants in social terms, not in the ethnic or religious ones accepted by the other nation-builders of the era. Koialovich was an early populist who lumped together the lower classes of society irrespective of whether they were Slavs or Lithuanians.
Populism was an orientation that Koialovich shared with Kostomarov, but Kostomarov’s populism did not cross ethnonational boundaries. The two writers were at odds with regard to the definition of their respective nationalities, and they debated their views in the press before and during the Polish insurrection. On the one hand, Koialovich considered the Ukrainophiles the only true public activists of Western Rus’, given their readiness to work with the people. On the other, he was disappointed by what he considered their narrow-mindedness.
Koialovich wrote that the Ukrainophiles were “strong in numbers, popular education, and energy.… But it must be acknowledged with regret that one can hardly expect any great service from them for the people of all Western Rus’. To all appearances, they are great egoists (not all of them, of course): in actual fact, Little Rus’ does not suffer so much from Polonism and Jesuits, and the people there are able to stand up for themselves.” Kostomarov, who thought in ethnolinguistic terms, maintained that the Little Russians and Belarusians belonged to different nations. In fact, he argued that the Belarusians were descended from the North Russian or Great Russian tribe—an idea that can be traced back to the testimonies of members of the Cyrillo-Methodian Brotherhood in 1847. Koialovich was outraged and, in response to Kostomarov’s argument, wrote, with reference to the proto-Belarusian Krivichian tribe of the Kyivan Rus’ era, “The children of the old Krivichians cannot be represented by the young historical children of the Northern Rus’ tribe.”
Kostomarov’s Ukrainophilism was just one of the obstacles that Koialovich had to address in his struggle for the recognition of the Western Rus’ branch of the big Russian nation. The other front was represented by Russian Slavophiles, whom Koialovich accused of the mindless “Russification” of Western Rus’/Russia. He called on his Great Russian colleagues “to restrain all foolish Great Russian passions in encounters with the West Russian people and win their love with good humane deeds.” This appeal did not mollify his Russian opponents, who were alarmed by what they regarded as the rise of Belarusian separatism, a local counterpart of Ukrainophilism.
The Russian Slavophile Konstantin Aksakov wrote to Koialovich, “Russia is now saving Belarus from mortal danger: the point is to destroy Polonism, but Belarus, as if it were already safe from the threat, is concerned not with deliverance from the Polish yoke but with the preservation of local particularities! And yet those basic particularities are few in number.” Mikhail Katkov, a former professor of philosophy at Moscow University and editor of the influential newspaper Moskovskie vedomosti (Moscow News), was even more outspoken: “They write to us from St. Petersburg that some kind of Belarusophile party is being born. Petersburg is so overloaded with social forces that it wants to fertilize all our dialects at all costs and create as many Russian nationalities and languages as there are lands suitable for chopping off.” He envisioned the Polish “nationalists” rejoicing over “this new attempt to divide the Belarusian land mentally from Russia.”
Thus, Koialovich’s idea of a bipartite Russian nation divided into east and west was rejected on all fronts. Kostomarov maintained his concept of a north-south divide, while Aksakov and other Russian Slavophiles thought in terms of three branches, leaving Koialovich a Belarusian niche within the Russian nation. He would not settle for it but was unable to make his view prevail. The tripartite nationality advocated by Katkov was endorsed by the imperial authorities, providing justification for the empire’s eventual transformation into a nation-state.
THE TRIPARTITE RUSSIAN NATIONALITY EMERGED AS THE DOMINANT model of Russian nation-building in the wake of the Polish uprising of 1863–1864. In political terms, it was a means of dealing with Polish nationalism while accommodating the cultural demands of the growing Ukrainian national movement. In purely conceptual terms, it was a way of reconciling the principle of Russian nationality formulated by Uvarov back in 1832 with the growing realization that the big Russian nation was in fact diverse and could be imagined in a number of ways. Whereas Pavel Pestel counted five Russian nationalities to be merged in a pan-Russian entity, the Russian Slavophiles and imperial nationalists of the post-1863 era agreed on three. The vernacular languages spoken by the three branches were termed “dialects,” and there was to be one literary language, Russian or all-Russian, allegedly created by all three groups. The union of the three branches was justified by raison d’état: the Russian Empire had to be a politically viable unit like the nationalizing states of Europe.
In historical terms, the tripartite model harked back to the mid-seventeenth century, when, after attaching Cossack Ukraine and conquering eastern Belarus, the Muscovite tsar added the names of Great, Little, and White Rus’ to his title. This was a two-stage process. The terms “Great” and “Little” Rus’ were the first to come into use, reflecting Muscovite expansion into the Ukrainian-Belarusian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. “Little Rus’” was then divided into two parts: the “Little Rus’” that denoted the Ukrainian lands, and “White Rus’,” which included the lands of eastern Belarus. This nomenclature denoted the different statuses of the two territories—one, Ukrainian, taken under Muscovite protection on the basis of the agreement reached with Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1654; the other, Belarusian, conquered with no grant of special rights or privileges. Now, in the mid-nineteenth century, the tripartite division of Rus’/Russia was recognized once again, but this time on linguistic rather than political grounds. But the recognition of differences was not intended to prepare for a federal arrangement, with local autonomy for Russia’s constituent parts. The goal was to unite the three branches, not only in dynastic and religious terms but also under the cultural cloak of the Russian tsars.
9
KILLING THE LANGUAGE
ON JULY 18, 1863, THE MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR OF THE Russian Empire, Petr Valuev, spelled out the new imperial policy on t
he development of the East Slavic languages. He did so in a seemingly routine document—an instruction to the censors—whose significance was heightened by the sovereign’s approval. Known subsequently as the Valuev circular, the instruction would have a strong impact on Russian nation-building. The very fact that the minister of the interior was involved in defining the empire’s language policy indicated that by now, in the opinion of St. Petersburg officials, the development of non-Russian languages and cultures could pose a threat to the security of the tsarist realm.
Valuev’s circular was directed mainly against the Ukrainian intellectuals, whose efforts to introduce their language into churches and schools he regarded as part of a Polish intrigue to undermine the empire. “That phenomenon is all the more deplorable and deserving of attention,” stated the circular, “because it coincides with the designs of the Poles and is all but obliged to them for its origin, judging by the manuscripts received by the censors and by the fact that most of the Little Russian compositions actually come from the Poles.” Valuev claimed that the “adherents of the Little Russian nationality” were turning to the common people for political reasons. He noted that many of them had already been investigated by the government and were being accused by their own compatriots of “separatist designs hostile to Russia and fatal for Little Russia.”
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