Now about a different manifestation of the “hearsay logic:” Ukrainians allegedly consider the Russian people guilty of and responsible for the Holodomor. Who has ever heard something of the kind from the mouth of the president, ministers, and high-profile political, cultural or scientific figures? And even if some obscure riffraff politicos have been saying something in this sprit, is there no this kind of riffraff in Russia or in any other country? Is this really Ukraine, is this really Russia? After all, if you have no opportunity to read some reputable articles of Ukrainian historians, turn to the ruling of a high Ukrainian court which has studied a huge number of documentary evidence and personally named the inspirers and organizers of the Holodomor. It is also quite easy to see the political goal of their heinous crime – suffice it to read Stalin’s letters to KP(b)U leaders (whom he in fact had appointed). You should also take into account that the Holodomor was preceded by the pogrom of Ukrainian intellectuals and a radical purge of the KP(b)U itself, for it was, to quote Stalin, “permeated with Petlurite elements.” In general, one should not discuss the Holodomor issue in isolation from geopolitical, international, domestic economic and political, and other aspects factors, including internecine struggle in the Communist Party itself, Stalin’s thesis on peasantry as bearer of nationalism, etc. The fact that Kuban, the Volga region, and Kazakhstan were also stricken which the famine caused, above all, by the failure of Stalin’s agrarian policies does not at all erase the woeful specifics of the Ukrainian Holodomor, which proceed from Stalin’s overall policy towards Ukraine.
And now about something that was achieved through enormous personal suffering rather than by hearsay. I mean politically and ethically bold utterances about imperial bliss (in the Russian Empire, of course). This nice and cherished idea sounds especially great in the words of our fellow countryman Aleksandr Tsipko: “In my view, the peoples that were part of the Russian Empire only benefited from this.” They really did! Especially the Ukrainian people. Many thanks indeed. Destroying the Hetmanate; subordinating the democratic Ukrainian church to Moscow ecclesiastic bosses (either the Patriarchate or the Holy Synod); “progress” in national education (suffice it to compare the evidence of foreign travelers about the almost complete literacy of Ukrainian peasants in the 17th century and their almost complete illiteracy in the 19th century); destroying the Zaporozhian Sich; imposing serfdom on the peasantry (the people thus thanked the great empress: “Catherine, wicked woman, what have you done? You have devastated the vast steppe and a merry land.”); Count Arakcheyev’s settlements; military conscription for life; incalculable sacrifices to the altar of immeasurable exploits by tsarist military geniuses; the bloody suppression of peasants’ uprisings throughout the 19th century; exiles, arrests, and prisons for the Ukrainian intelligentsia; the Valuev and Emsk ukases “for the benefit” of the Ukrainian language and culture, etc. I am not complaining, for there is nobody to complain to. It is just “for information.” I dare say the empire was also no less “good” to other, including the Russian, peoples. Otherwise, why did the empire have to break up with so much stench and blood? I can believe that the Soviet Union was brought down by Mikhail Gorbachev or somebody else. But there were no Gorbchevs at the time, nor were there any US “pressure groups.”
But I may be mistaken. For there were more than enough other pressures and groups, such as Herzen, Shevchenko, Chernyshevsky (sorry, it must be inappropriate on my part to call the name of a very bad “revolutionary democrat”), Saltykov-Shchedrin, Leo Tolstoi, populists, socialists (God forgive me), separatists, and others who should not be mentioned in a good company of “liberal imperialists,” and if one still has to do so, s/he should do this with a righteous wrath or, still better, with quiet contempt. And, naturally, when speaking about imperial bliss, one ought to forget the harmful and deserving nothing but oblivion works of turn-of-the-20th-century Marxist historians who babbled (“What did I, a madman and a villain, babble?”– Boris Pasternak) something about the concocted woes of the Russian Empire’s peoples.
And may I quote some non-Marxists? Here is, for instance, the Constitutional Democrats’ journal Polyarnaya zvezda. His editor Pyotr Struve, a former Marxist and now champion of a liberal empire, has come up with the epoch-making aphorism: “Capitalism is speaking Russian.” Issue No.6 (January 1906) opens with his article “The Two Russias” on the confrontation between the people and the bureaucracy, including “punitive expeditions to the Baltic region, arrests, endless and mindless executions,” and other “phantasmagorias” (p. 379). Then comes S. Kotliarevsky’s article “The National and Regional Question in the Constitutional Democratic Party’s Program.” The author interprets ethnic unrest as “an instinctive response to years-long merciless oppression, the suppression of the native language, the native faith, and the native school – all that forms the treasure of a nationality” (p. 385). The present-day champions of a “liberal empire” are clearly not reading their predecessors!
And I am just afraid to quote the prominent Russian philosopher Fyodor Stepun whom Lenin banished to the West on a well-known “steamship of philosophers” together with other unsuitable thinkers. I am sorry, but it is Stepun, not me, who says: “The Russian people, of course, did tremendous work to establish the Russian State, but still it had never been what the industrious Europe means by the word ‘work’ (…) Reading any history of Russia, you gain an impression that the Russian people used to not so much conquer land as to take it into captivity without a battle. This captured land worked for the Russian people, while the latter never really worked on it” (F. A. Stepun, Cherished Russia, St. Petersburg, 1999, p. 11).
But Stepun is not a Russophobe but a Russian patriot, which is clear even in his phrase “take it prisoner without a battle.” This can only be a Russian patriotic point of view.
As we see, imperial bliss is not at all doubtless even from the viewpoint of consequences for the Russian people themselves, let alone other peoples.
But let us listen to Russian State Duma expert Sergei Ochkovsky. He reminds us that, although the constitution of revolutionary France was the first in Europe, “Poland and Finland received the second and third ones from the hands of Russian monarchs.” This is true: for some reason, Russian monarchs bestowed a constitution on Poland and Finland, not on Russia. Magnanimous generosity – especially if one does not take into account the almost a thousand-year-long tradition of Polish statehood, the never-ending Polish struggle for independence, the 1794 uprising, the acute rivalry for Polish lands between Russia, Austria, and Prussia, and the plans of Napoleon who was supported by thousands of Polish volunteers. In this situation, the young liberal Tsar Alexander I, educated by Frederic-Cesar Laharpe, dropped the crude colonizing policy of Catherine II and, influenced by the Polish Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, who became his friend and foreign minister, agreed to grant a constitution, assuming the title of the King of Poland. “Poland has three enemies: Prussia, Austria, and Russia, and one friend: me,” he used to say. Moreover, he dreamed of introducing the constitutional rule in Russia after testing it in Poland. Unfortunately, his idealism soon vanished into thin air, and when Poles agitated again under the influence of 1820 revolutionary movements in Spain and Italy, the Polish press began to expose administrative abuse, and secret patriotic societies, including those connected with Russian pre-Decembrists, began to crop up, Alexander I threatened to abrogate the constitution and authorized Grand Prince Konstantin to resort to unconstitutional methods. What was then is common knowledge. Nicholas I was guided by only one principle: “We are prepared to exterminate our enemies wherever they may appear” (Complete Laws of the Russian Empire. 2nd edition, St. Petersburg, 1849, Vol. 23, No. 22017). And all the next generations of imperial thinkers could not forgive Alexander I his young-age sin. The struggle of Finns for a constitution and independence was not so bloody but no less stubborn. It has been amply analyzed in political writing and historical research. Unfortunately, there is no time and place to dwell on this.
A different fate befell Ukraine. It failed to defend its independence at the time but, instead, was granted a number of Soviet constitutions, including “the world’s most democratic” Stalinist one. Under the circumstances, as Gleb Pavlovsky notes quite rightly (and which we know even better than he), “Ukrainian cadres were among the cruelest (…). And the Ukrainian KGB was far crueler to dissidents and the opposition than the one in Moscow was.” It is the gospel truth. There was even a popular aphorism: when Moscow trims nails, Kyiv cuts off fingers. (Some Ukrainian figures of science and culture saved themselves by “escaping” to Moscow. And how many “cosmopolitans” found refuge in Russian culture after being ousted from Ukraine? And how many of us published our books in Moscow journals and newspapers because Kyiv did not need us?)
Where did the Ukrainian government draw such an excessive energy? Arbitrary rule? But it is worthwhile to recall some obvious things. The Ukrainian KGB was just a branch of the all-USSR KGB, and the latter knew how to maintain discipline and would thwart any attempts to stand out. The KP(b)U and then the KPU functioned, by statute, as regional organizations of the VKP(b) – CPSU. It is common knowledge. So do we have to fantasize about what caused an especially cruel terror in Ukraine? It was not the personal qualities of its leaders but a special position of Ukraine in the USSR and the fear of losing it. Hence is everything else. One could look through an enormous number of propagandistic, journalistic, and theoretical Party documents devoted to combating the “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” in the 1920s-1970s and the proceedings of trials – from the “Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party Central Committee Case” (1921) to hundreds of materials about the Block operation (1960-80). And if you read the memoirs of Petro Shelest and CK KPU Secretary F. Ovcharenko, as well as some other documents, you will see that Ukrainian leaders were even trying, albeit to no avail, to somewhat quench the “antinationalist” fervor of Brezhnev, Suslov and Andropov in the 1960s-1980s.
These are only some of the issues raised in Rossiyskaya gazeta on which I would like to polemicize with the newspaper’s contributors. I can well imagine that they, too, might polemicize with me – polemics versus polemics, so to speak, although I do not exactly expect to attract their kind attention. I do not think that all their opinions are biased, and I have often had (and, unfortunately, will still have) to level no less scathing criticism on various aspects of our reality, albeit from a different viewpoint. After all, it is always possible to come to an agreement, if one wishes well to another, and thus come to love something that does not belong to and is not binding on you only.
The famous historian N. Kostomarov, a Russian by origin and a Ukrainian patriot by fate, has a work titled Two Russian Nationalities. It was first printed almost one and a half centuries ago in the Ukrainian journal Osnova (1861, Vol. 3) which was soon banned. The scholar discusses the formation of the “Southern Russian” (Ukrainian) and “Great Russian” nationalities among the eastern Slavic tribes, the dramatic peripeteia of their history, and their relations with the Poles. The work having been written long ago, both Russians and Ukrainians (not to mention Poles) may not agree with the author on some points. But its conclusions are interesting: neither the “Southern Russians” have anything to learn from the Poles, nor the other way round, because “their root qualities are the same.” Conversely, the Great Russians “are opposite to us by nature, but this makes it imperative” for us to maintain links, “exchanges,” “union and fraternity.” Kostomarov used the word “fraternity” only once on the 70 pages of the journal’s text – but in a meaning entirely different to the one that got the upper hand later in the agitprop. This word has been compromised by political manipulations for centuries on end. But it has the eternal truth. Fraternity is the ability to understand something different (which does not belong to you) and to “exchange” it with the best in order to support one another in the construction of a decent life. This may be not enough for politicians, but it is sufficient for the people of labor, science, and culture.
