(Conclusion; for Part 1, see previous issue)
Before I continue discussing Volodymyr Vernadsky’s article “The Ukrainian Question and Russian Society,” I would like to draw the reader’s attention to a very important circumstance. Vernadsky, whose political persuasions placed him in the left wing of the Party of Constitutional Democrats of Russia was not (at least in 1915-16, when he was writing this article), an outspoken champion of Ukraine’s state independence.
Nevertheless, in the fall of 1918 Vernadsky became the head of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, which was established as a higher scholarly institution of the Ukrainian state, the Hetmanate. There is no doubt that it was the scholar’s conscious choice, and this fact cannot be overlooked.
There is, however, another circumstance that seems to be even more important: Vernadsky’s absolutely well-argued calls to the ruling circles of what was imperial Russia to allow the Ukrainian nation all legitimate opportunities for free national, cultural, and spiritual development (within a single state!) remained a “voice crying in the wilderness” because the “Ukrainian question” (the attitude to the inalienable right of our people to state self-determination) was then, and 100 years after Vernadsky, the best indicator of the “democracy,” “liberalism,” and “internationalism” (under the Soviets) of the rulers of the “single and indivisible” Russia and their current legal successors. So let us continue to read Vernadsky.
“The attitude of broad circles of Russian society to the Ukrainian movement has undergone considerable evolution. At first it was calmly indifferent, with a certain interest in the literature that was being born and some ideological sympathy for the Ukrainians’ national rebirth on the part of individual representatives of Slavophile thought, but in time it became differentiated. Nationalistic tendencies were applied to Ukrainians in a suspicious and hostile manner, thereby siding with the official policy. Cultural importance was ignored; the social aspect was regarded warily, and the national one was rejected.
“Progressive circles were sympathetic in an abstract way but remained practically passive, without investigating the movement’s positive aspects or dwelling on the fundamental inadmissibility of creating obstacles in the cultural sphere. The large-scale development of Ukrainian belles-lettres, the achievements of Ukrainian scholarship in Halychyna, and the cultural and economic growth of Ukrainian population in this land, as graphic proof of the fertile nature of national principles in public education — all this passed unnoticed by Russian circles.
“Against this background of public indifference there sometimes emerged individual cases of keen understanding of this question and an actively sympathetic attitude motivated by the extensively interpreted interests of Russia’s national unity and integrity. One manifestation of this positive attitude to the Ukrainian question was a 1905 memorandum drawn up by the Academy of Sciences. (Signed by Academicians A. Shakhmatov, F. Korsh, S. Oldenburg, and others, this document convincingly proved the futility of great-power chauvinistic views on Ukrainian language and literature, and was grounded in the inadmissibility of any obstacles “to their free development in general human interests — I. S.).
“In the past decade, with the strengthening of nationalistic moods in society, there has emerged a negative attitude to the Ukrainian movement even in the well-known part of those progressive elements in society that view the movement’s main threat as precisely its cultural role, which threatens Russia with a national and cultural rift. These elements consciously support the government’s anti-Ukrainian policies; from this milieu emerge harbingers of Great Russian imperialism, who recognize only great nations’ right to create culture and on these grounds condemn the culture of the 30-million-strong Ukrainian people to dilution in the large Russian sea.
“Russia’s successes on the Austrian front in the early months of the war in 1914 made it possible for its government, aided by nationalists, to extinguish the detestable ‘fire of the Mazepist movement.’ This plan was carried out with purely German consistency and cruelty through the complete destruction of the Ukrainian community and culture in Halychyna and the forcible elimination of its intellectual forces.
“The period of failures that led to the retreat from Lviv sobered up the excited nationalists and forced the government to soften its intolerance toward the Ukrainian national group in the occupied parts of Halychyna. But the overall attitude to the Ukrainian movement remained unchanged, as evidenced by the difficult situation of the Galician deportees and the ongoing oppressive censorship of the Ukrainian press and literature in Russia, which in recent times, perhaps, has had a tendency to revive the preconstitutional order in relation to the Ukrainian language.
“At the same time, the ‘liberation of enslaved Rus’ in 1914-15 initially took the form of the destruction of Ukrainian culture in the name of Russian unity, and then — the abandonment of the Ukrainian population in Bukovyna and Halychyna to Romanization and Polonization. This was nothing new for the Ukrainian people. In the past, too, the state had sacrificed their interests to those of more powerful neighbors or those who were needed more at a given time, most often the Poles, despite the age-old Russian-Polish enmity. In the 17th century the Treaty of Andrusovo (1667 — I. S.) divided the Ukrainian territory between Russia and Poland. In the 18th century Catherine of Russia helped the Poles suppress a Ukrainian peasant rebellion against the Polish government even though the rebels believed they were acting in Russia’s interests.
“The voice of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, given the engrained prejudices against the Ukrainian movement, cannot be convincing for the government and broad public circles, which know little about the essence of civic circles. It is not the Ukrainian movement as such that threatens Russia but the prejudicial treatment of this movement as a harmful and alien phenomenon within the state and national organism. Given such a view, this movement, which is essentially natural, organic, and one that has equal right to exist alongside all other similar movements, is shoved back to the ranks of disfranchised phenomena and hence hostile to the given state order. If this traditional policy is refuted (this never happened — I. S.) the broad development of Ukrainian culture is perfectly compatible with the state unity of Russia, even under the circumstances that Ukrainians are striving to carry out a reform of the internal order (regrettably, these are the great scholar’s illusions — I. S.).
“The antagonists of the Ukrainian people refuse to allow freedom for the Ukrainian movement, fearing this will cause Russia political and cultural damage, whereas Ukrainians see harm precisely in the absence of this freedom and the possibility of doubts and vacillations concerning this clear and simple question. The best of those who are hesitating are not certain that it is necessary to allow the Ukrainian movement; Ukrainians, on the other hand, believe that counteracting educational and cultural work in any kind of living national form is a crime against universal human rights. This leads to the growing chasm of mutual distrust that is turning into animosity.
“Since the Ukrainian movement is organic and is nourished by the roots national life, it will never be extinguished. Therefore, a positive solution to the Ukrainian question for a state that does not reject the basic principles of lawful governance is inevitable, and any delays and procrastination in finding such a solution only deepens the internal disarray in the state, society, and people. I am referring to the protection of the interests of genuine culture, which is capable of getting through to the masses on a much deeper and broader scale than that general Russian culture in the name of which enemies of the Ukrainian movement are active.
“Representatives of Russian circles who have a sympathetic attitude to the Ukrainian movement should take up this issue. It is necessary to recognize that neither persecutions by the government nor the absence of public support can stop the work that the Ukrainian intelligentsia has taken on its shoulders in the interests of its people. However, public indifference (in Russia — I. S.) to this national lawlessness may convince Ukrainians of the hopelessness of a normal evolutionary path for achieving the conditions that will facilitate their national work.”
Dear reader, you have just familiarized yourself with Volodymyr Vernadsky’s analysis. Although this concrete action plan (the 1916 “agenda) which was suggested by the author was by no means radical (“the assertion of a correct view of the Ukrainian movement in special publications by a group of Russian scholars and public figures,” “facilitating the quickest solution to the school problem by elucidating the role of the native language in public schools, and measures aimed at freeing the Ukrainian language from restrictions that still weigh upon it,” “facilitating the introduction of special disciplines in the field of Ukrainian studies in higher schools and appropriate subjects in secondary schools,” measures to abolish all restrictions imposed on Ukrainians in the sphere of literature, the press, and cultural work”), history followed its own radical, ruthless, horrible, and righteous, and just road.
This road of the bloody 20th century has no analogs in human history. It is not so easy to find analogies to the fierce repressions that the Kremlin rulers brought down on the national liberation movement of the nations that were united in the “unbreakable union,” which was “forever reunited by great Russia.”
Well, not “forever.” The peoples of the former USSR, among them the Ukrainians, have won their freedom. If we Ukrainians act as one, it will be for always.
