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| Kharkov, the Old Russian: How 'fairy tales' refute the lies of the Ukrainizers |
| 2024-11-20 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Yaroslav Karpikov [REGNUM] In the last week, there have been reports of the advancement of the Russian Armed Forces in the north-east of the Kharkiv region - our military is leveling the front line along the Oskol River, on November 14, an assault group managed to gain a foothold on the outskirts of Kupyansk. The Ukrainian Armed Forces group finds itself in a difficult situation, which is also recognized on the other side of the front line. The gradual liberation of the Kharkiv lands means, among other things, the restoration of unity in that part of historical Russia that was called "Slobozhanshchina". It is the current Kharkiv region that is the core of this historical region, which also includes the modern Sumy and Belgorod regions, the Kursk border area and partly the north of the DPR and LPR. The historical (and in fact ideological) narrative adopted in Kyiv implies that the south of the Sloboda lands, that is, “Sumy” and “Kharkiv”, are essentially original Cossack, read - Ukrainian lands. The Kiev regime, despite all its ostentatious decommunization, made the works of academician Dmitry Bagaley, a pre-revolutionary historian and public figure who made a successful career under the Bolsheviks, during the era of the formation of the Ukrainian SSR and indigenization, the actual historical basis for such assertions. EXPERIENCED IDEOLOGICAL SABOTEUR On the one hand, it was thanks to the work of Bagaley, a native of Kyiv and later rector of the Imperial Kharkov University, that a systematic study of the history of Slobozhanshchina began. But, on the other hand, Bagaley, a student of the Ukrainophile Nikolai Kostomarov and a native of the Polish gentry, the " khlopomaniac " Vladimir Antonovich, was himself, to put it mildly, not impartial. He could well have subscribed to the phrase of another left-wing radical from science, Mikhail Pokrovsky : history is politics, overturned into the past. Bagaley had been sympathetic to Ukrainian "separatists" since his student years. At the same time, the historian-Ukrainizer did not suffer from persecution by the "bloody tsarism": in 1914-1917 he was elected mayor of Kharkov. Under the conditionally independent Ukrainian state of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, Bagaley almost took the post of prime minister. But he prudently refused the offer, preferring to become one of the founders of the national Academy of Sciences, created by decree of the same hetman. It is interesting that the Soviet government preferred "not to notice" these facts of the biography of the author of the fundamental "History of Sloboda Ukraine" (1918). Actively welcoming Ukrainization, Bagaley covered the predominantly Cossack history of "Kharkovshchyna". As a result, the history of settlers from central Russia "accidentally" ended up in the background and the idea of Slobozhanshchyna was created as a region exclusively populated by Little Russians. And since Bagaley was a teacher of many, already Soviet specialists, the history of Russian settlers in the modern Kharkov, Sumy regions and part of Donbass was lost. The descendants of Russian Kharkovites and residents of Sumy lands, receiving truncated knowledge in school and universities, gradually lost their historical connection with the "big" Russian people, who remained on the other side of the administrative border of the RSFSR. And post-Soviet generations have been repeating the Jesuit formula "Kharkiv is Ukraine!" since school. The descendants of Russian service people of Slobozhanshchina live compactly in the modern Kharkiv and Sumy regions. Most of these people do not even imagine the history of the origin of their ancestors with Russian surnames ending in "-ov", "-ev", "-in" and as a result of the Ukrainization carried out, they firmly believe that they are "true Ukrainians - descendants of the Zaporozhian Cossacks". To detoxify public consciousness, we must turn not to the “nationally conscious” manipulations and distortions of the Bagaley school, but directly to the archives, to historical documents. We will mention some of them in this article. "FROM ANCIENT TIMES THEY CONSTITUTED A SPECIAL KIND" Parts of the Kharkov, Kursk, Belgorod, Sumy, Voronezh regions, the LPR and DPR were part of the Slobodskaya or Slobodsko-Ukrainian province in 1765–1780 and 1796–1835 (the “Ukrainian” was the historical name for the outlying lands of the Russian state). The term "Slobozhanshchina" was subsequently borrowed by historians from the name of the Slobodsko-Ukrainian province. And from archival documents it follows that the authorities of the Russian Empire considered this region as lands that had been inhabited for centuries by people from Great Russia. More precisely, settlers - "odnodvortsy". One can understand who the odnodvortsy were, for example, from the decree of Emperor Paul I of November 3, 1798 (on the allocation of these subjects 15 dessiatines of land for each male soul). The decree explains: “ Since ancient times, single-householders constituted a special kind called streltsy, gunners, Cossacks, boyar children, stanichniks and vorots ( vorots are gate guards whose duties included unlocking and locking the city gates and keeping the keys to them). Emperor Paul refers to the "construction books" of 1648-1649. At that time, under his ancestor Alexei Mikhailovich, settlers were given "plots of land for each person separately, and they settled in separate households, which is why they adopted the name of single-householders." In this decree of Paul I we see that the government remembers and values the services of the ancestors of the single-householders, which they rendered to Russia from ancient times. And by the end of the 18th century, Great Russian single-homesteaders made up to half of the state-owned villagers “in the most affluent Russian provinces.” CITIES OF REITERS AND GUNNERS "Odnodvortsy" are the descendants of Russian service people (streltsy, soldiers, reiters, city service of boyar children, gunners, etc.), who formed the backbone of the population of new cities on the southern Russian border in the 17th century. In the second half of this century, the Russian state began to expand into the steppe, to the south and west of the Belgorod line. New cities were founded and built: Akhtyrka, Valki, Kharkov, Kolontayev, Volnoye, Aleshnya, Kamennoye, Chuguyev, Ostrogozhsk and others. Both Russian "settlers for eternal residence" and those who were sent to serve "in turns" - so to speak, on a rotational basis on a business trip - took part in the construction. Later, the Russian service people were joined by Little Russians (Cherkasy), who came to the tsarist land beyond the Belgorod line. Often, taking into account the unsuccessful experience of Great Russians and Cherkassians living together in the city, the tsarist government left the fortress or prison in the jurisdiction of the Great Russian voivode and Russian service people, and settled the Little Russians next to the city, in the "Cherkassian" settlement. It turned out that only settlers from the central regions of the Russian state lived in the cities. One can judge who made up the Russian service corporations of Kharkov and other tsarist cities by the “fairy tales” – as the settlers’ reports about themselves, their property and service were called in the 17th century. THE TSAR'S "FAR SOUTHERN HECTARE" PROGRAM The first example is a document that was submitted to the Duma clerk Semyon Titov at the congress in Kharkov in 1675. From it one can understand what “social groups” lived in the Kharkov district at that time. Let us mention one more important point. The "fairy tale" indicated which of the settlers received the "local salary", that is, land holdings, thanks to which the single-homesteaders, their families and their descendants "settled" in the Sloboda Ukraines, on the distant southwestern borders of the Russian state. So, the estates were owned by: three of the four heads of Kharkov families mentioned in the “tale” - spearmen, 63 of 75 reiters, 73 of 94 soldiers and fifty of 106 “city service of boyar children”. The actual size of the estate varied from 20 to 30 quarters, that is, approximately from 11 to 16.5 hectares, if we consider that 1 quarter (chet) in the 17th century was equal to approximately 0.55 hectares. For example, in the village of Tishki near Kharkov (the village still exists today under the name Russkie Tishki), the tsar allocated about 676 hectares of land for 42 settlers. One and a half kilometers from Russkie Tishki is the village of Borshchova of the Slobozhansky village council, or Borshchevoe, as it was called in the "fairy tales" of the 1670s. Here, the Great Russian settlers received over half a thousand hectares from Tsar Alexei - for houses and arable land. About the same amount was allocated to the sovereign's people who settled further north, in the village of Liptsy near Volchansk. Liptsy is still on everyone's lips - in the first days of the SVO, the Russian Armed Forces entered the village. During the withdrawal of our troops from Kharkov in September 2022, control over Liptsy was lost. But since May 2024, after the offensive in the Vovchansk direction, our troops have once again been fighting to liberate the ancient Russian outpost, known since 1660. In February–August 2022, battles took place near the village (formerly a Russian border town) of Zolochiv, 39 kilometers from the border with the Belgorod region. Soviet historical sources indicated that Zolochiv was founded in 1677 by Cossacks from the Dnieper Ukraine. But archival documents clarify the picture. Yes, the Cherkasy Cossacks of the Zolochiv hundred who entered Russian service also lived here (according to the 1691 census, they were commanded by two centurions of the Kharkov regiment, Yakov Semenov, son of Kovalevsky, and Ilyash Vasiliev, son of Gonchar ). But no less significant part of the population were Russian odnodvortsy - city service people, soldiers and reiters under the command of the Great Russian city governor. Earlier, IA Regnum told in detail about this system of governing the Slobodskaya land - when two parallel verticals of power existed for the Cherkass and Great Russians. PANKOVS AND ESKOVS ARE WAITING FOR THE RUSSIAN ARMY In general, judging by the documents from the archives, Russian service people received estates and served under the command of Russian governors in many settlements to the north, east and south of the city of Kharkov - in the Kharkov, Zmievsky, Chuguevsky, Saltovsky, Zolochevsky, and Volchansky districts. But the settlement area was not limited to the region that the current Ukrainian government calls “Kharkiv region”. There were especially many Great Russian settlements to the south of Sumy: Kamenovsky, Aleshansky, Volnovsky, Miropolsky districts and to the northeast of Sumy: Miropolsky, Sudzhansky districts. If you look at the maps, it is easy to see that the Russian Slobodskaya land covers both parts of Russian regions and territories that currently remain under the control of the Kyiv authorities. Single-farmers as a separate class in the Russian Empire (including in the Kharkov province) were officially abolished by the opinion of the State Council “On the land arrangement of state peasants”, which was approved by Emperor Alexander II in 1868. But, according to ethnographers, until the beginning of the 20th century, the descendants of the first settlers of the Slobodsky lands preserved their own traditions, which differed from those of Little Russia - including trying to marry their own people, without mixing with people of other classes. Some of the odnodvortsy were registered as petty bourgeois of the Kharkov, Kursk and Voronezh provinces, and some as peasants. Those descendants of the odnodvortsy who became wealthy villagers were registered as "rural bourgeoisie" after the revolution, and they were subjected to dispossession. Many old-time families were “decimated” by the terrible famine of 1932–1933, a disaster that also shook many regions of the RSFSR and Kazakhstan, but which current Kiev historiography considers to be an allegedly “exclusively” Ukrainian tragedy – the Holodomor. But even now, typical single-court surnames - Pankov, Yeskov, Golovin or Vityutin - are not uncommon in the same Kharkov region. Incidentally, the Voronezh Vatutins also come from single-court surnames, to which the Soviet military leader General of the Army Nikolai Vatutin, the liberator of Kiev, who died at the hands of Bandera militants, belongs. It is impossible to rule out that the descendants of Great Russian settlers are among those Kharkiv residents who indicated Russian as their native language in the 2001 census (44.3%), and also among the 53.8% of officially “Ukrainian-speaking” people. But first, the indigenization of 1921–1930, and then the post-Soviet derussification (which began long before the 2014 coup) are doing their job. If in 1991 Russian was the language of instruction for 72% of students in the Kharkiv region, then in 2005 this share fell to 45%, and in 2023/24, for obvious reasons, it was reduced to zero (formal 0.56% with 99.4% of instruction in the “mova”). Naturally, the “purely Cossack-Ukrainian” history of the region is taught in the right way — in the spirit of the Bagaley school. Only the liberation of our historical lands can save the Russian language and Russian culture in Slobozhanshchina and once again instill in generations of Kharkovites and residents of Sumy an objective view of history. |
| Posted by:badanov |