When it comes to the southern regions of Ukraine – now occupied, already recaptured from the Kremlin invaders or those they are so eager to seize – we think of the Kherson, Mykolayiv, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia regions. We can see how the slogans of Putin’s henchmen that “Russia is here forever” are shattered by the powerful resistance of both the military and civilians.
However, experience shows that even today, not all inhabitants of the southern regions of Ukraine realize why the so-called “Russian world” seeks to occupy these territories.
Why are Ukrainians in the south of our country still convinced of their “brotherhood” with the Russians and that if it weren’t for Russia, which has been supposedly developing the southern regions of Ukraine since the time of the empire, all these territories would be practically a “wild uninhabited steppe”?
There are several answers to this question. But above all, we must understand that when it comes to the modern occupation of the south of Ukraine, we must talk about it starting not even from 2014. In 2014, Putin only decided to restore and continue what had been done for centuries, and the events of 2014 were the basis for what happened in February 2022.
Machinations of the empire
What we understand today by the phrase “Russian propaganda” is actually deeply rooted. It’s just that nowadays, with the phenomenal development of the media, television, cinema and the Internet, Russian propaganda has reached a scale that Joseph Goebbels could only dream of.
Everything that Russian propaganda has in its arsenal has been nurtured in Russia for centuries, well “nourished” by censorship and various bans against “dissent”.
Back then, 200-250 years ago, the task of propaganda was to make Ukrainians believe that they were not Ukrainians, but “Little Russians”. Being a “Little Russian,” in turn, was at least disadvantageous, and at most shameful. That’s why the so-called “Novorossiya” was created by the “imperial blessing” – a quasi-copy of “Great Russia”. Accordingly, being a “Novorossian” is both prestigious and advantageous.
That’s what the imperial Russians taught Ukrainian children in the then hastily Russified schools. The imperialists understood the importance of education in those days: not everyone could get it. Education was rather a privilege for the middle and upper classes – landowners and production owners, a kind of business elite of those times. And if you convince those business elite’s children that they are not Ukrainians at all, but “Novorossians” or even “Great Russians,” then the children of these children will have no doubt who they are, and later, as the ruling class, they will demand that others renounce their Ukrainian identity. In particular, the enslaved peasantry. So, the system of destroying Ukrainians’ self-identification will work.
Today this policy is called “ideology.” The occupiers’ ideology is to destroy the historical memory of young generations, and thus to destroy national self-identification, foster contempt for their mother tongue, culture and ancestors.
Because when a new generation forgets the history of their homeland, it’s very easy to impose a fictional history, or rather, a complete historical lie. After all, who with an erased memory will be able to reasonably deny the narrative that there was nothing here before the Russian Empire came to the south of Ukraine?
Europe remembers everything
At the time the so-called “Novorossiya” was created in 1764, the population of southern Ukraine was unable to resist the powerful Russian propaganda machine. The historical and folk memory of Ukrainians knew that the Russian Empire was created by Tsar Peter I of Moscow only in 1721, meaning that it had existed for only 43 years by then, but Peter’s successors attracted enormous state and financial resources to legitimize the so-called Russia. The state that was so named after stealing the name of Rus. The Rus that existed only and exclusively on the territory of what is now, and was then, Ukraine.
And if Peter I began by ordering that all ancient manuscripts and genealogy books from Ukraine be taken to Moscow under threat of death (ostensibly for copying, but eventually they were burned, thus starting the process of destroying the memory of the true history of Ukrainian lands), his successors, largely Catherine II, actually completed the process.
At that time, Europe had maps by famous cartographers and research engineers who knew what the territory of the then southern Ukraine had been called since ancient times, and which developed cities with infrastructure were centers of the region’s culture and economy.
In particular, Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris still has a large medieval atlas of the world, consisting of more than 70 parts. And three parts of this atlas are devoted to Ukraine! The atlas was created in the 12th century by the Arab geographer and traveler Muhammad al-Idrisi at the request of the Sicilian king Roger II, which means it was one of the foundations of geographical knowledge in Europe at that time.
The map of the southern part of Ukraine shows not only three large rivers – the Dnipro, the Danube and the Dniester, but also the northern coast of the Black Sea, which geographers of the time believed to be a territory inhabited by Ukrainians.
© jnsm.com.ua
The map shows not only Kyiv, Kaniv, Pereyaslav, but also the cities where Kherson and Odesa are located today. That is, almost a thousand years ago, there were already cities where modern Kherson and Odesa are located today, and the description states that those cities were built by Kyivan princes to control the waterways.
When creating maps, cartographers didn’t rely on their own ideas about a country, but on how a particular territory was called by the people who inhabited it. Maps were created not so much to be studied at universities but rather to promote trade. It was a valuable and painstaking work, since the success of trade expeditions and, consequently, the mapmaker’s prestige depended on the accuracy of the map. In those days, there were no generally accepted names of countries and peoples, like today, in internationally recognized borders, so the accuracy of the map was of utmost importance.
But let’s go back to the name. The famous map of Guillaume de Beauplan, drawn in 1648, i.e. 200 years before Russia created the so-called “Novorossiya” on the occupied territories, shows that there were no “Novorossians” on the territory of Ukraine. And the cartouche on the map clearly states: “Ukraine”. A few years earlier, the French cartographer Guillaume Sanson published a map clearly showing not just “Ukraine”, but also that it was the “Land of the Cossacks”. And this country stretched all the way to the Northern Black Sea area.
Nothing has changed even 150 years after those two maps appeared. In the mid-18th century, atlases were published in Europe, in which the south of present-day Ukraine was marked not just as the country of the Cossacks, but as a densely populated territory with developed cities. For example, in the early 18th century, the map of Placide de Sainte-Hélène and Pierre Duval was published. The map shows Koczuby, the present-day Odesa.
© jnsm.com.ua
Imperial rabies
By the mid-17th century the Russian Empire had already subjugated the entire south of Ukraine. Then why did they have to create a kind of quasi-formation?
This may come as a surprise to some, but in the last two and a half centuries, the motives of Muscovites have not changed.
Having destroyed the threat of Cossack resistance and having bribed mankurts (yes, there were such in those days too), the imperials created a pseudo-legal basis to attract settlers and give them the seized lands. After all, if you destroy a historical name by fraudulently creating a new one, then you can create new documents, giving them pseudo-legitimacy. As a result, all kinds of “Decrees of the Novorossiya Governorate Commission on allotment of land to officers”, “Decrees of the Novorossiya Governorate Commission, reports of land surveyors and titles to land” were issued. The new land owners used these decrees and made Ukrainians who had always lived on in the lands of southern Ukraine feel disabled, “second-class” people.
Having found themselves on the verge of a struggle for their own dignity, few Ukrainians dared to offer at least moral resistance. Because, as already mentioned above, to be a “Novorossian” meant to be a person to whom at least some laws and civil rights of that time applied. And if someone had the courage to call himself a free Ukrainian, it meant that he immediately found himself outside the law. And all that was generously supported by “reforms”, which actually aimed to destroy everything Ukrainian. Here are just a few steps on the way to the Russification of the so-called “Novorossiya” after the seizure of the lands of southern Ukraine:
- 1764. Catherine II’s instruction on the Russification of Ukraine.
- 1769. Decree of the Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church on the confiscation of Ukrainian primers and Ukrainian church books from the population.
- 1784. Complete ban on primary education in the Ukrainian language.
- 1786. Prohibition of the use of the Ukrainian language in church services and teaching in the Ukrainian language.
- 1831. Abolition of Magdeburg law in the cities, which made it impossible to conduct court proceedings in the Ukrainian language.
- 1862. Closure of Ukrainian Sunday schools. Termination of publication of the Ukrainian literary and scientific-political journal “Osnova”.
Ultimately the new generations of Ukrainians no longer wanted to be either “Little Russians” or “Novorossians”– they wanted to be “Great Russians.” And it doesn’t matter what it manifested itself in.
Today’s Kremlin “interpreters” claim that “Odesa is a Russian city”, just like Kherson, Mykolayiv or Zaporizhzhia, and therefore everyone who lives here is “Russian.”
But who are these “Russians”? There was no Russia until 1721, and the territory of the “swamp civilization” was called Muscovy. And this is how it was marked on all European maps, including those mentioned above. What’s more, even after the creation of the Russian Empire, “Russians” did not constitute a distinct nationality, either in the territories seized by the empire or in the empire itself.
However, the chronicles mention a similar word. But it was written differently and meant something completely different. In the chronicles of the 11th-13th centuries, the word “Ruthenian” is often used to denote religious affiliation. The term Ruthenian was most frequently applied to the descendants of the Moscow ulus of the Golden Horde who had accepted the faith of Rus – Christianity. “What is your religion?” – “Ruthenian.” “From what people are you?” – “Rus people.”
However, the Muscovites used this definition to their advantage, equating their “Russians”, i.e. those who accepted the faith of Rus, to the “Rutheni” who lived on the territory of the former Kyivan Rus, and therefore called themselves “Rus people” – the people of Rus.
The term Ruthenian is most often found in documents and letters of the times of the Ukrainian Zaporizhzhian Cossacks, when hetmans wrote letters to Tatar khans and Polish-Lithuanian kings. “We are the people of Rus” – it sounded in the charters of the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks in the sense that the Cossacks opposed themselves to Catholics and Muslims, on the one hand, and on the other – determined their national affiliation to the territory where the great state of Rus, known to all of Europe, existed.
These documents of Zaporizhzhian Cossacks and of all the Cossacks already at the time of the new Russian colonization, namely in the early 20th century and under the USSR, were used by Russian propagandists and falsifiers of history in order to show: see, the so-called “Novorossiya” was created on the territory of southern Ukraine because “Russians” had lived there.
One way or another, the so-called “Novorossiya”, created by the decree of Catherine II in the south of Ukraine, lasted exactly as long as the Russian Empire itself. And already in 1917, this quasi-formation disappeared by itself. Even when Denikin, Wrangel and the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army drowned the south of Ukraine in blood, no one mentioned “Novorossiya” and did not propose to revive it.
The Soviet times
There is a lot to talk about the times of the USSR and the impact of 70 years of actual occupation on the Ukrainian south. After all, Ukraine had never experienced such a number of enslavements, relocations, and deportations as during the Soviet era.
However, an undeniable fact of repeated destructive Russification should be stressed.
The concept of the titular nation embedded in the Soviet Union structure provided that representatives of this titular nation should occupy, if not all, then the vast majority of management positions in organizations, institutions and educational establishments of all levels in all republics. And so, starting with directors and headmasters of schools or foremen at enterprises and ending with the top party leadership of the Ukrainian SSR, all these people were “Russian”. And quite often not by nationality, but by their conformism and desire to destroy everything Ukrainian in favor of Russification.
There were at least three major waves of Russification of the Ukrainian south. The first – the times of Stalinist industrialization, the second – the times of reconstruction after World War II, the third – before the collapse of the USSR in the 1980s, when “young specialists” from Russia began to be sent to all regional and district centers of Ukraine, and especially to the industrial and commercial centers of the Ukrainian south in order to “implement the plans of the Central Committee of the CPSU.” Engineers, teachers, lecturers were resettled in whole families. And specialists from Mykolayiv, Kherson, Odesa and Zaporizhzhia, on the contrary, were resettled beyond the Urals or to regions where there were shipbuilding plants and ports of Russia.
Therefore in the late 1980s, the Ukrainian language, which at that time was virtually unheard of in the big cities of the south, began to disappear even in the district centers and villages. Because that was where “young specialists” of various backgrounds were brought en masse, who demanded communication exclusively in Russian. Later, the Russian language became simply “fashionable”, and not only children and teenagers, but also adults switched to Russian.
Ukrainians in the southern regions began to be ashamed of being Ukrainians. And an addition to this complex of inferiority was the mass introduction of new history textbooks in schools. In the mid-80s of the 20th century, numerous publications devoted to the so-called “white spots” in history began to appear in Moscow and Leningrad. And they mostly concerned the coverage of the years of “activity” of the Russian Empire, its so-called “greatness” and the creation of “common heritage”. These publications were included in the updated school curriculum for the history of the USSR. Since the USSR was unraveling, national movements were emerging in the republics, something had to be done to retrospectively show the unsurpassed importance of the “titular Russian” nation in the union of nations long before the USSR.
As a result, the generation of Ukrainians older 45 are convinced that the south of Ukraine has always been “Russian” and only “Russian people” live there.
Instead of an epilogue
“Any empire lives on foreign territories. Any empire exists at the expense of the conquered. Any conquest is accompanied by the “reinvention” of the conquered – at best, toponymy remains from the native inhabitants” (“Wild West of Eastern Europe”, Pavlo Kazarin).
Today, the Russian occupiers are not accidentally using the thesis that Odesa, Kherson, Mykolayiv and Zaporizhzhia are Russian cities. Thousands of people who currently live on the territory of both free and occupied southern Ukraine are the very generation 45+ who have studied this delusion in schools since childhood.
Why is it important to know and realize this?
Russia still influences the public consciousness (as the successor of past formations) using its narratives and myths. For centuries, they tried to destroy Ukrainians as a nation, now they are destroying the state. Identity (self-identification) has many dimensions: ethnic, civic, regional, professional, religious, political and many others. The destruction of our ethnic, national identity has always been the goal of the RI-USSR-RF.
Now it is very important for us to preserve our civic identity – a sense of belonging to the state, trust in each other, respect and pride, readiness to protect and defend ourselves. This is the main target of Russian propaganda and manipulation. The nation needs the past, but now it is fighting for the future of Ukraine.
Let’s learn history!
The material was prepared as part of the project “Strengthening information resilience in Ukraine” in partnership with the International Practitioners’ Partnership Network (Estonia) with the support of the European Union.