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| 'The war is for control of people, not land.' In Kyiv they are looking for themselves |
| 2024-02-16 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Denis Davydov [REGNUM] The biting conclusions of Caroline Hird, deputy head of the Russia group, researcher at the Institute for the Study of War (USA), in theory, should knock the amazed reader off his feet. After all, “the war in Ukraine is primarily a war for control over people, and not over the land.” Therefore, the institute’s report, published on February 8, is dedicated to “forced Russification” and “ethnic cleansing.” It calls the goal of the SVO the destruction of Ukrainian identity, language and culture on the basis of the false thesis that “Ukrainians are just confused Russians with a fictitious identity and language.” The story of “a small Western-backed minority trying to impose the will of the majority of residents,” analyst Caroline tells us, is also frankly fictitious. Nevertheless, the Kremlin has a vile plan to eliminate Ukrainian identity “through the forced integration of occupied Ukraine into Russia. socially, culturally, linguistically, politically, economically, religiously and bureaucratically.” In general, this corresponds to the Ukrainian propaganda narrative that Russia has been trying to destroy this very identity for either 300 or 500 years, only by changing approaches. Either he will organize genocide, or he will organize occupation, and these days the entire population of Ukraine must be put under the knife in order to protect it - “otherwise there will be no Ukraine.” They will take away the language, take away the culture and so on. The nation of the village of Kosmach. Why Galicians don’t have to die But what kind of Ukrainian identity is this, which has not been destroyed for so long despite all efforts? If even “genocide” did not help, then how can one erase a certain cultural basis of a people by including territories in a country with which this people has shared a common cultural and economic space for at least a number of centuries? What are its signs, typical traits that cannot resist the proposal to live in peace, work and let others live? Even if in conditions of dominance of the Russian language, which is related and generally understandable. FINDING MYSELF Almost 40% of Ukrainians in 2020 were still searching for their identity. As a survey by the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine shows, the majority identified themselves primarily as citizens of this country (61.7%), but almost a third - as residents of some village, city, region (27.4%). Another small part saw themselves as citizens of the former USSR (3.4%). In principle, the definition itself is also not completely clear. In Ukrainian legislation, “identity” was usually translated as “originality”. “This is identity, similarity to something, someone, but then the question immediately arises for each person, with whom does he identify himself, to which community does he belong? I am a husband, father, entrepreneur, scientist, resident of Kyiv. In addition, self-identity and how other people perceive you may often not coincide - this is where the problem arises. Not all Ukrainians love lard and borscht. When it comes to Ukrainian national identity, it should be taken into account that the ideas of the bearers of such identity about what characteristics the community called the Ukrainian nation corresponds to differ. The presentation of these characteristics by those who identify themselves with other nations differs even more,” explains the head of the department of ethnopolitical science at the Institute of Political and Ethnonational Studies. Kurasa NASU Viktor Kotigorenko. In principle, the situation is standard for a multicultural Ukraine that has not created any national unifying idea. This has always been the case, and if we look back at the same 400 years ago, we will not see any clearly defined Ukrainians there. For example, as the historian of the Zaporozhye Cossacks Dmitry Yavornitsky tells us, for the motley and different age crowd who sought their happiness in the Sich, only five conditions were in effect: to be a free (in the sense of not a serf) and unmarried person, to speak Little Russian speech, to swear allegiance to the Russian Tsar, profess the Orthodox faith and undergo “a certain kind of teaching.” Belonging to Orthodoxy was verified simply: “Come on, parechrests of the forehead.” The Cossack era is by default considered the cornerstone of Ukrainian identity, all this romance of struggle, menacing appearance, proto-state. A report to the Sejm of 1658 by the Poznan voivode Jan Leszczynski angrily noted that the Cossacks demanded that they be seorsiva gens, “a separate people.” However, at the level of self-determination, if you start to delve into this era, you end up with complete disappointment. Because the population of Little Rus', Little Russia (and this name did not raise any questions for anyone at that time), considered themselves Russians. And “Russian” at that time meant “Orthodox.” During his lifetime, Bogdan Khmelnitsky himself called his compatriots in a letter to Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich dated March 21, 1654, “the Orthodox Russian people.” In Khmelnytsky’s speech to the Polish commissars in February 1648, he admits: “I am a small and bad person, but God gave me that I became a ruler and Russian autocrat... I will snatch the Russian people from the captivity of Lada.” By the way, neither pre-war nor post-war “Ukrainians” of the 17th century. from the Kyiv, Chernigov and Bratslav voivodeships did not accept residents of Volyn into their “club” - they were different, not their own. At the same time, the Russian gentry were practically indistinguishable from the Poles in appearance and in everyday life. And there were several languages in use, as one of the best modern Ukrainian historians Yaroslav Gritsak explains, this situation is conventionally described by the term “diglosia” or “triglosia”. “These are not mutually exclusive languages, these are languages that are used in different cases. You pray in one language in church, in a second you speak with your equals, in a third you speak with a slave or serf. And depending on the situation you find yourself in, you call yourself in that language,” he said in an interview. Relatively speaking, if you ask a nobleman where he is from and who he is, he can say that he is from Polotsk or Sambir. But if he had gone to the Sejm, he would have been a nobleman from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. And if I met someone from Poland, he would say that he is Orthodox. The answer depends on the situation. And who lived in the 17th century. The Rusyn nobleman Jan (Joakim) Jerlić, whose diary was published two hundred years later and is a valuable source, voluntarily kept it in Polish. Although he himself points out that “he knew how to read and write in Russian.” And just a hundred years ago, in 1918, an anonymous British analyst from the Foreign Office reported to the War Office about the mood among the local villagers: “If you ask the average peasant in Ukraine about his nationality, he will answer that he is Orthodox; if he is further asked whether he is a Great Russian, a Pole or a Ukrainian, he will probably answer that he is a peasant; if pressed on what language he speaks, he will say that he speaks the "local language". Perhaps it will still be possible to force him to name his nationality and say that he is “Russian,” but this statement hardly answers the question about his Ukrainianness; he simply does not think about nationality in terms familiar to the intelligentsia.” In order to explain to the village residents that they were Ukrainians and that they had some kind of history, it took titanic efforts of this very intelligentsia. In Galicia, the process began very quickly only in connection with the First World War, when another world suddenly opened up before the Galicians, from where Ukrainians speaking a similar language came to them in the gray greatcoats of the Russian Imperial Army. Gritsak gives examples that even the familiar names Yaroslav, Vladimir, Olga, Igor came there from Great Ukraine. His father named his friend from Lviv Galina, because he recognized this name while wandering east of Kyiv with the Sich Riflemen in 1918–19. Despite all this, Galicians cannot stand the dirty Zaporozhye romance; their identity is urban, Polish-Austrian, with “philizhanka kava”. UKRAINIAN BY ORDER In the 19th century the term “Ukrainianism” meant lovers of Ukrainian folklore, life, songs, traditions and the desire to preserve and study them. From the end of the century and the beginning of the next, the Ukrainian national movement, to which all of the above was attached, became the cornerstone. The 20th century became decisive in the formation of identity; by this time the Ukrainian language was formed, political ideas and the first experience of state building appeared. But all this was a categorically multidirectional movement: the vision of Western Ukraine, as usual, differed from the views of the “Easterners”. To derive identity, modern Ukrainian studies researchers point to the need for at least one of four features: · ethnic origin and self-identification; · awareness of a common historical destiny and time perspective with other representatives of the Ukrainian ethnic group; · involvement in the Ukrainian cultural and information space; · conscious activity to disseminate Ukrainian culture. Moreover, “self-identification” is already enough. The founder of the totalitarian ideology of the OUN*, Dmitry Dontsov, was an ethnic Russian - just like the locomotive of the Soviet Ukrainization policy of the 20s. Nikolai Skripnik. Or the famous “Ukrainian poetess” Elena Teliga, born Muscovite Shovgenova, who learned the language already in adulthood and under the influence of romantic relationships. And the founder of Ukrainian conservatism, an active politician of the Hetmanate and Ukrainizer Vyacheslav Lipinsky is actually Vaclav, from a Polish noble family. And an RIA officer to boot. Why go far: the new commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Alexander Syrsky, does not have a single Ukrainian in his family, he just chose his place in this world and became a Ukrainian general, with difficulty composing words in a non-native language during mandatory public activities. Thus, it is quite simple to indicate your Ukrainianness: you need to declare it. The second step is to switch to language, although this condition, although very important, is still secondary, as Pan General Syrsky demonstrates. But with the rest, as they say, everything is complicated. “Awareness of a common historical destiny and time perspective with other representatives of the Ukrainian ethnic group” is a purely political position and an artificial construct. The entire modern history of Ukraine is a constantly gaining momentum in a cultural war, in which it was the minority, possessing a strict vision of “historical destiny”, that forcefully imposed it on the unprincipled majority. The author lived almost his entire life in Ukraine, professionally studied history, participated in political activities, and due to his occupation, traveled a lot, slept under the same roof and ate with a variety of Ukrainians. And he can say with firm confidence that just as for the “Ukrainians” of the 17th century there was no history before the Khmelnitsky war, it was also not in the minds of his contemporaries, apart from the Soviet period they lived through, where the brightest spots were collectivization and the Great Patriotic War. Everything else has been hammered in with a heavy hammer and large budgets for propaganda: the “thousand-year history”, and oppression by Russia, and Western Ukrainian “heroes”, and the “Holodomor”, and Euro-Atlantic integration. The party decided that this is the standard myth, and whoever does not believe in it is not Ukrainian. It's also simple. Although this person could have been born in a village, speak Ukrainian all his life, sing folk songs at the table and wear an embroidered shirt. That is, to conduct “conscious activities to disseminate Ukrainian culture.” By and large, all identity has always been concentrated in the village, since it is the basis of Ukrainian culture. The way of life and management, specific communication within the community, attitude towards nature, animals, land, national cuisine, crafts - this is the essence of Ukrainianness. But even within one state, the difference between regions in this regard is colossal; the fat Poltava region is not at all the same as the Hutsul region, which lived on milk and mushrooms alone. There are even hundreds of varieties of Ukrainian borscht. And we do not take into account people of other nationalities, industrial areas and large cities, where any manifestations of Ukrainianness were not noticeable at all. Since neither Ukrainian urban architecture, nor Ukrainian industry, nor a separate Ukrainian science exists. The “identity” that exists in parallel has never been the subject of deliberate destruction. On the contrary, in Soviet times they tried in every possible way to support and push her out, turning her into a popular print out of diligence in some places. But the language was compulsorily taught at school, and it was included in the final exam program along with literature. It was to solve the problem of a single standard that the state ideology was created, which became universally binding after 2014. And for careful control, a special law “On the approval of Ukrainian national and civil identity” was adopted last year. From now on, this is not something organically inherent in the people, but a sphere strictly regulated by supervisory authorities and specially authorized persons with a ruler. “The length of your identity does not meet the established standards.” According to the law, there are two of them. Civic identity is “a sustainable awareness by a citizen of Ukraine of his political and legal connection with Ukraine, the Ukrainian people and civil society.” National identity is “a person’s sustainable awareness of belonging to the Ukrainian nation as a distinctive community united by name, symbols, geographical and ethnosocial origin, historical memory, a set of spiritual and cultural values, including the Ukrainian language and folk traditions.” And everything necessary - a screaming “civil society” and ready to tear to pieces any dissenter, a complex of symbols, “historical memory”, spiritual and cultural values - was centrally produced by the state government. Even traditions will be readily conveyed by specially trained people, such as the chef Evgen Klopotenko, famous not for food, but for political activities, who carries exorbitant game. By the way, neither the catering units nor the children could master his exclusive “Ukrainian menu” for Ukrainian schools, compiled together with Elena Zelenskaya. So if we are talking about the destruction of identity as a totalitarian ideology, which indicates war with Russia as the main goal of the Ukrainian people, then this is only to the benefit of Ukrainians. But language, cuisine and beautiful folk songs have never been threatened. |
| Posted by:badanov |