Let’s skip Honduras; it is on the other side of the world. But as for Switzerland or Germany and all of Europe in general, they seem not to need to do what we do at every step, in every word we say.
Or could it be the other way around? Maybe we have to convince ourselves time and again. Maybe we have to need something to be perfectly happy, the way we did under socialism, always struggling for bumper crops and five- year plans, so now we are struggling against some inner voice questioning our independence.
The whole thing is much more serious than meets the eye, because words, like everything else, fade, age, and become emotionally impotent when overused.
On those rare occasions when a military standard is ceremoniously brought out, people pull themselves up inwardly, feeling solemn, uplifted. Yet when this standard is brought out by a master sergeant for the daily drill it soon becomes about as valuable as a rag for cleaning one’s boots, which means that lofty words should be used with greater care.
Or let us consider the meaning of national . We apply the adjective to universities, opera houses, banks, academies, agencies, unions, associations, etc. We even had a national guard, later disbanded. The impression is that we can no longer distinguish between national and state . These are different notions. A nation has a specific name. Jews and Russians are said to be on the National Bank’s payroll, and the bank serves various – perhaps we should call them ethnic groups. What nation does it then belong to? If it were a Central or State Bank of Ukraine, it would be different. Ukraine is our country and I am its citizen, so whatever nation I belong to I consider that bank as belonging to my country. The same applies to an opera house, academy, educational establishments, and so on.
If national in the names of these and countless other institutions is meant to indicate, so to speak, the leading nation, millions of other citizens will not regard these structure as entirely theirs. Raising a country from its knees, raising its economy, culture, and science to the European level is possible only through a concerted action of all citizens. One of Andrei Platonov’s heroes says, “A people is incomplete without one individual.”
One can only wonder at some of our luminaries striving to regard every phenomenon in this country at what is probably best described as a mononational angle. One of them, speaking at the Writers’ Union, proposed to close the Bulgakov Museum. It was not closed, but Riepin Street was renamed. I don’t know which of the modern cultural figures has done more for Ukrainian national self- assertion than did Ilya Riepin. Suffice it to mention his famous paintings, Evening Party or Zaporozhzhian Cossacks (the latter being an amazing ethnographic study of the Cossacks).
If one were to regard what our young country has inherited at that angle, what are we supposed to do with Sergei Koroliov, Oleg Antonov, Viktor Glushkov, or Oleg Borisov with his undying movie hero Holokhvastov? Hundreds of other names could be cited; among them the world’s youngest chess champion Volodymyr Ponomariov.
Add here the so-called fire- spitting dragon syndrome. Remember that beast’s age-old concern [in Pushkin’s Ruslan and Ludmila ] about the Russian spirit felt everywhere? It is anyone’s guess why the latter-day flag-waving patriots or undereducated people try so hard to refute the fact that Old Rus’ is the foremother of our young country. Ukrainians are closer by blood to the people of Rus’ than are the Russians. Authors knew the Rus’ people in the sixth century. Tenth century chroniclers clearly distinguished between the Rus’ and the Slavs. Rus’ people shaved their heads, leaving a tuft on top. Slavs sported a Buster Brown haircut; the Rus’ lived in military settlements and on booty, selling part to Khazar Jews, while Slavs were typical tillers of the soil and animal breeders. Both peoples merged into a new ethnic group at the turn of the millennium, named for the Rus’ and adopted a language dominated by the tillers’ rather the warriors’ culture. The Zaporozhzhian Cossacks, rather than the boyar host of Muscovy, must have incorporated some of the Rus’ traditions.
So much for the historical background of the issue. It is thus surprising to hear people mention Old Rus’ and always add Ukraine. Authors describing the recent festivities by the monument to Prince Volodymyr always added that he “baptized Rus’-Ukraine.”
Gentlemen, there was no Ukraine at the time. Ukraine was a notion applied to territories far from cultural and political centers. There was Polish Ukraine that had nothing to do with Poland; it was part of Muscovy bordering on the Dyke Pole [pronounced Deekeh Poleh, meaning Wild Field or Steppe], currently in the vicinity of the Russian cities of Orel and Kursk. In fact, Ukraine was first mentioned after the baptism of Rus’, in the Chronicles of Hipatius. Pereyaslav, Chernihiv, and Novhorod-Siversky were considered ukrainian [i.e., borderland] cities of Kyiv Rus’. Kyiv was never on the list, being center. In the thirteenth century, even Muscovite territories, the whole area between the rivers Oka and upper Volga was known as Ukraine Zalesskaya [i.e., “remote lands beyond the forest”].
Our country was referred to as Rus’ even under Bohdan Khmelnytsky. During the talks with Moscow, he asked to “help the Cossacks and protect them and the whole of Rus’.”
But maybe he did this to curry favors with the Moscow tsar? No, he did not. Mykhailo Hrushevsky writes that when Khmelnytsky’s aide and Secretary of the Zaporozhzhian Host Vyhovsky became hetman he asked the Polish king to join to his crown “a separate and autonomous entity, the Grand Principality of Rus’...” and further on, “The hetman will be at the head of the Grand Principality of Rus’” to be appointed by the Polish king from among candidates submitted by the Cossacks.
In other words, we are direct descendants of Old Rus’, its great culture, and traditions, even its name. After all, “Kyiv is the mother of Rus’ cities” and the Kyiv Pecherska Lavra Monastery of the Caves remains the spiritual source of all the Eastern Slavs.
Old Rus’ perished as an ethnic entity but not before it gave birth to new nations, modern Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians. The latter, living in modern Ukraine, make up the populace of numerous territories, the way the Tatars do in the Crimea, Greeks in the area adjoining the Sea of Azov, Hungarians in Zakarpattia, each such ethnic group making its singular contribution to the state’s treasure-trove of culture, science, and the arts.
This author is aware that certain issues must be handled with care, so as not to hurt people’s innermost and extremely sensitive feelings. For this reason, I will cite historical examples that can help understand certain modern phenomena. My generation remembers the boisterous campaign launched by communist propaganda against cosmopolitanism. The Party told us that not Stephenson, but the brothers Cherepanov evented the first locomotive, the first radio-signaling system not by Marconi but by Popov, designed not by Stephenson but the first practical railroad locomotive; we even had the first electric light bulb of Ilyich [i.e., Vladimir Ilyich Lenin], not of Edison. That was overdoing it, definitely, as anecdotes promptly appeared about Soviet dwarves being the tallest and Soviet paralysis the most progressive in the world.
We also remember the frenzied propaganda campaign in commemoration of Lenin’s centennial. There were books, articles, plays, and films. City streets, enterprises, and collective farms were renamed for the leader of the world proletariat. Employees had to stay after hours to study his biography, lecturers traveling between farms. It was again overdone. Anecdotes quickly followed about a new brand of soap, “Visiting Lenin’s Parts,” cologne “The Smell of Ilyich,” candies called “Lenin in Chocolate,” etc.
When people strongly disagree with something and voice their disagreement with expletives, it is not so bad. Every phenomenon and personality has both its exponents and opponents. As they say, you cannot stand in a streetcar with your face turned to face everybody. However, ridiculing something is stronger than any propaganda – or black PR, as they call it now.
Getting back to where we started, I am convinced that lofty notions such as national or independence must not be abused. Now we see and hear them everywhere, in newspapers, television and radio programs, just as often as we used to read and hear Lenin, the Party, and Brezhnev.
Instead of rewriting history, adjusting it to someone’s personal likes or ambitions, scaring ourselves with Big Brother’s shadow the way Hamlet was first scared to see his father’s ghost, it is best to concentrate on the problems on hand, those standing in the way of developing our young state.
