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previous: Chapter 1 This webpage reproduces a chapter of The Nationality Problem of the Soviet Union by Roman Smal-Stocki published by The Bruce Publishing Company Milwaukee, 1952 The text is in the public domain. This page has not been proofread. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 3

 p14  Chapter II

Russian Tsarism's Conflict with the National Idea

1. What is Russia?

Since Muscovy after the battle of Poltava in 1709 became geographically a European power⁠1 as modern Russia, this large state and the overwhelming majority of the dominant Russian nation has been in constant conflict with Europe and with all the ideas that Europe has stood for.

To uncover the real roots of this conflict we must give an answer to the question: What is Russia? Is Russia, culturally, Europe? Was Muscovy-Russia a partner of the historical cultural community of Europe? This problem of the relation between Russia and Europe is for modern history a crucial issue,⁠2 investigated not only by non‑Russian scholars like T. G. Masaryk, M. Hrushevsky, O. Halecki, J. Kucharzewski, F. Dvornik, C. A. Manning, and N. Chubaty, but by such Russian writers and scholars as A. Presniakov, P. Miliukov, D. S. Mirsky, E. Denissoff.

This problem the genius of A. K. Tolstoy long ago felt and solved:

This perception, this deep insight and understanding of the whole problem, the objective scholars can only support. Kievan Rus′-Ukraine (Ukraine is a term already used several times in the Nestor-Chronicle and it is older as a term for, at least, a part of the later Rus′ territory, than the term Rus′) is the Ukrainian and Byelo-Ruthenian national original home and heritage, which as the Kievan Rus′-Ukraine Empire was a part of Europe. We regard as decisively important for the emerging of the Kievan‑Rus′-Ukraine even the earlier Gothic Empire (166‑375) in the Ukraine and the Gothic influences on the ancestors of the Ukrainians,  p15 the Antes.⁠4 The northeastern border colonies of the Kievan Rus′-Ukraine Empire, being colonial border­lands on the Slavic ethnographic frontiers, with their princely residences in Suzdal, Rostov, Vladimir, and Moscow, soon including and Slavizing the native pagan Finnish tribes, developed there a different nationality with a different kind of Christianity, a different, autocratic character of government, and a different culture. The clash between European Rus′-Ukraine and this cradle and home of what is now called the Russian nation (until Peter's decree, usually called "Moscovites and Muscovy") is reported as early as 1169, when Suzdal completely devastated Kiev and robbed the Kievan churches. That is a good refutation of the myth that Muscovy regarded Kiev as the "mother city."

After the Mongol invasion in 1240 the Ukrainian, Byelo-Ruthenians, and Novgorodians and the emerging Moscovite nation separated completely. The Ukrainians in the West attempted to co‑operate with Lithuania and Catholic Poland against the Tatars, the Byelo-Ruthenians soon joined Lithuania, the Novgorodians, the nucleus of the fourth eastern Slavic nation, gradually were integrated with the Baltic-Scandinavian sphere. But in the northeast the princes of Moscow capitulated completely and became servants of the Tatarian Khans. With the active support of their Tatarian sovereigns, they united that former colonial border­land of the old Kievan Empire, into a Tatarian vassal-dominion under their rule. The Ukrainians, Byelo-Ruthenians, Lithuanians, and Poles formed their Commonwealth from 1386 (which the Novgorodians later attempted to join also) participating more or less in all the Western European cultural trends and movements.

But Muscovy became a Tatarian cultural sphere under Tatarian influences that dominated the court, princes, family life, the whole mentality. The process of political liberation from the Tatarian yoke virtually lasted until the destruction of the Golden Horde in 1502 despite the fact that from 1480 tribute was no longer paid. All leading Russian historians from N. Karamzin (1766‑1826), to V. Kliuchevsky (1841‑1911) stressed the decisive Tatar influence, on the formation of Moscovite State, and the Soviet historian M. Pokrovksy (1868‑1932) directly states that the Grand Duchy of Muscovy owed its birth entirely to Tatars. We can guess the force of these Tatarian influences by evaluating the fact that, according to Kliuchevsky, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 17 per cent of the surnames of Muscovite nobility were Tatarian. The women were treated, in the Tatarian way, as second class, and until 1551 men wore headgear in the churches, a Tatar-Moslem custom. The greatest influence was on the absolutist conception of the ruler; the Khan was regarded as the shadow of the Lord on earth.

This Tatarian-Muscovite world acquired a Byzantine façade after the marriage (1472) of Sophia, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, to  p16 Ivan III, who now began calling himself "Tsar of all the Russias." He regarded himself as the successor of the Byzantine emperor, he accepted the Byzantine double-eagle as the State emblem, and with the help of the clergy Moscow created the myth of the third Rome of Christianity (after the downfall of the second Rome, Constantinople, in 1452). In 1589 the Tsar obtained his own patriarch and nationalized the Church, establishing in Muscovy a Byzantine Caesaropapism. Igumen Philoteus advised the Tsar that he was the only true Christian ruler on earth, thus the natural Tsar of all Christians. The Mongol-Tatarian conception of the mastery of the world created by the Jenghizides acquired here the "Christian" formulation.

Tatarian tyranny was established behind the Byzantine Christian mask — and tyranny cannot stand still. It is a force like fire, it must destroy. Tyranny must annihilate all seeds of individual or national freedom or collapse. Ivan's successor, Vasily III, was a brutal tyrant and Ivan the Terrible murdered nearly three fourths of the dynastic and aristocratic families. Ivan himself subjugated the Republic Novgorod with unheard‑of cruelty by smoke and flames and rivers of blood, fighting here the European traditions. Finally, after organizing a forced resettlement of thousands of free Novgorodians in Muscovy he "unified" them.⁠5

That was the beginning of the expansion of Muscovite tyranny in all directions because of its excellent geopolitically central position. The increase of tyranny is parallel to its territorial growth, as J. Kucharzewski rightly stresses; the despotism of the Tsars is closely linked with the expansion of the State, for their unlimited power became inseparably connected with the might of the State. As their despotism became the State's source of power and aggrandizement the acceptance of slavery by the citizens became patriotism.

After the establishment of Tsarist tyranny in Muscovy many nationalities had to share the fate of the Novgorodians. The Tatarian Khanats of Kazan and Astrakhan were conquered between 1552 and 1656, penetration into Siberia and the subjection of the Siberian peoples started in 1581 and in 1645 reached the Pacific. Peter I put on the throne of Poland his puppet, August II, and by a coalition with Poland and Denmark against Sweden started the expansion toward the Baltic Sea. Sweden and Ukraine, Charles XII and Hetman Mazepa attempted to stop Muscovite imperialism by a barrier in which Poland-Lithuania had also to be included, and which would have been backed by France and Turkey. But their defeat in 1709 in the battle of Poltava opened the West to Muscovy and finally enabled her to incorporate the Ukraine; in 1721 Livonia, Ingria, and parts of Finnish Karelia were annexed; in 1741 the Bering Sea and Straits were reached; in 1740 Transcaspia was incorporated; in 1739 the Black Sea coast from the mouth of the Don to the Bug River was reached; in 1783 Crimea was absorbed, and in 1792 the Black Sea shore to the Dniester; in 1772‑1792 in the partitioning of Poland, Russia acquired Byelo-Ruthenia, Western Ukraine, and Kurland; in 1813 Baku  p17 was annexed from Persia; after 1815 Poland, Finland, and Bessarabia were annexed and Russia reached the pre‑World War I frontiers in the West, founded Vladivostok, and in 1865‑1881 conquered Central Asia (Bokhara, Khiva, Turkestan, Turkomania); and in 1898 she founded Port Arthur. On the American continent Russia insisted on the formal acknowledgment as a Russian territory of the land from Alaska to the Columbia River and trading posts as far as San Francisco, and after 1814 Russia proclaimed the entire northern Pacific Ocean a Russian mare clausum. The sale of Alaska in 1867 ended Russia's expansion in America, after she had partly provoked the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823.

Having freed herself from her own Asiatic conquerors Muscovy-Russia developed on lines justly compared by C. Vernadsky with similar trends of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, and, finding in Asia a power vacuum, Russia soon invaded even the American continent.

In the course of this expansion to the West, South, and East, many foreign countries and nationalities were incorporated into the Russian Empire but Russia's land hunger was still unsatisfied; she extended her feelers into Afghanistan, Tibet, Persia, Siam, even Abyssinia, and openly stated her claims to the inheritance from the Turks of Constantinople and of the Slavic peoples, rounding it off by aspirations for Greece as well. The subsequent history of Europe and the world passes under the constant "shadow" of Tsarist Russia.

On the one hand the Russian Empire gradually became everywhere in Europe and Asia a rival of the British Empire; on the other hand, by incorporating these nationalities which for centuries had belonged to the European community, and by her advance into Central Europe, Russia found herself faced with the basic problems of European history: the individual and national freedom. The ideas of the British, American, and French revolutions confronted Russia, who, in the great historical progress toward humanity herself developed into the antithesis of all the ideas the Western world cherished. We see the backwardness of Russia best in the fact that serfdom was abolished in Russia only in 1861, but in England it had disappeared before the sixteenth century. In Western Europe the serfs became mostly hired laborers and free tenants by the sixteenth century. Thus, compared with the West, there is in the East a great tardiness in the historical processes of human progress. In all spheres Russia proper was overdue to follow the West.

2. Russian Solution of the Nationality Problem

In the historical literature of United States there exists a profound misconception of the peculiarity of the old Russian Empire. The historians are misled by the conceptions of the old Holy Roman Empire or the Austro-Hungarian or British Empires and imagine a similarity also in the Old Russian Empire. This is a fundamental mistake. The Russian State, beginning with Muscovite times had always a specific character, and developed into a specific Russian Empire. The ruling Russian nation never regarded any part of the conquered or annexed non‑Russian  p18 nations in Europe and Asia as their colonies, but as "indivisible parts of Russia herself." The ruling Russian nation did not wish to acquire economic colonies, she wished to "swallow and digest" the non‑Russian nationalities, transforming them into Russians and thereby increasing her own growth. Consequently, the Russian Empire never possessed dominions or colonies but immediately included non‑Russian nationalities and their countries in "Russia." A remarkable scholar of Russian history, W. Baczkowski,⁠6 compares the Russian Empire with China's territorial expansion and increase in population, absorbing, without even leaving a trace, many conquered peoples. But there exists, in my opinion, a basic difference between China and Russia. The Chinese digestion of non‑Chinese nationalities was executed so to say by the "Chinese flood," the immense numerical superiority of the Chinese and the superiority of the Chinese culture and civilization. Besides, there were active in this process long centuries of common history and common cultural processes in a "natural organic way." Russia, on the contrary, had no superior culture or number in comparison with the non‑Russian nationalities (they were, even until World War I, a minority of 43 per cent in the Russian Empire), but Moscovite Russia from the beginning of the rise of Muscovy developed the "artificial methods for Russification by all means and all the force of the State." The methods of using the terror of organized gangsterhood to strengthen the Russian State executed by the oprichnina was first used against the Russian feudal nobility; it later became the usual method of dealing with conquered nations, which in the northwest, in the west, south, and in the Caucasus were far superior in culture and civilization to Moscovite Russia.

The terror in the service of Russification, the whip, had a counterpart: the cookie. All renegades, opportunists, sadists of the conquered non‑Russian nations, all the lowest scum of opportunists were eagerly invited by the Russian bureaucracy to join the ranks of the "Herrenvolk" and to participate, after full Russification, in the manifold careers as Russificators all over the Empire, with all the honors of titles and the material benefits. This half-intelligent mob of the "new Russians," who denied their nationality and churches, became "more Russian" than the Russians themselves, and were then used systematically by the ruling, pure Russian bureaucracy for the "swallowing, digestion, and full Russification" of non‑Russian nationalities. As the careers of this bureaucratic rabble were closely connected with special achievements in Russification there developed very soon from the ranks of German, Ukrainian, Polish, Armenian, Georgian, even Jewish renegades many high-placed fanatical Russifiers. For their use the ruling, pure Russian bureaucracy developed a special method. They were seldom used in service among the people they had denied, because there they would feel the general scorn of their own nationality and its moral contempt. Consequently, Ukrainians were used in the Polish territory, Balts in Turkestan, Poles in the Caucasus, Caucasians in Byelo-Russia, etc. — with the  p19 special mission to destroy all local traditions of a separate State existence, to erase all national peculiarities and characteristics of the separate political, cultural, religious life. First of all, the languages of the non‑Russian nationalities had to be suppressed in schools, churches, press, and public life. Everything had to be reduced to the one common Russian and Orthodox denominator. Only in the Russian language could one approach this Russian State in the administration, courts, and public life. Thus, the all power­ful Russian bureaucracy became the well-paid chief agent of the State's Russification and assimilation policy, backed by the ever present secret political police, with the right to exile every person suspected of opposition, without judicial procedure but in the administrative way, to Siberia for a couple of years.

The Tsars carefully supervised this rather old policy with special instructions. A good illustration is the instruction issued to Prince Viasemsky, then General Procurator, by the Empress Catherine in 1764:

The reigns of Nicholas I, Alexander II, and the last Nicholas II are dark pages in the history of all the non‑Russian nationalities in the Empire.

The Russian intellectual upper class and society — confronted with Europe, with the European basic problems of freedom, with European progress in all spheres of life — were filled with a deep sense of their own deficiencies which gave them an inferiority complex. And we can witness how this inferiority complex gradually developed the "compensation" and how, as in a hunchback, there emerged a "superiority complex," exalted soon into a Russian master-race complex and Russian messianism against the background of the almost endless Empire and the unlimited tyranny of the Tsars. The old ideology of the third Rome combined with the messianistic Pan‑Slavism and with the influences of German philosophers such as Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, and became the ideological weapon against Europe and against all the subdued non‑Russian nationalities of the Empire, soon proclaiming the program: one God, one Tsar, one nation, and one language. Westernized Poland especially, with her revolutionary outbursts (1794, 1830, 1846, 1863), Lithuania, Byelo-Ruthenia, Ukraine, and Finland became for Muscovy inside Russia "the European problem"; then a whole series of Russian writers and thinkers, especially Aksakov, Pogodin, Danilewsky, Dostoyewsky, formulated Russia's answer to Europe. A leader of this ideological pogrom of everything Europe highly esteemed is Dostoyewsky with his hatred and fear of Europe; with his fanatical hatred of France, Catholicism,  p20 Socialism; with his conception of a "Russian God" and aggressive imperialism with his admiration for the "iron chancellor" Bismarck and his "blood and iron" methods. True, there was also a group of Westerners among the Russians, even some liberals: the members of the Decabrists (1825), and later Herzen and V. Soloviev (1853‑1900), who taught the right to be a free man in a free society and nationality, but they had no influence on Russian policy. Nor did the Socialist theorists in exile in Western Europe have any influence. The techniques, based on Pan‑Slavism, for all non‑Russian nationalities were the methods of the hangman Muraviev, secret police, prisons, Siberia, full absolutism, censor­ship, and Russification. Tsarist Russia not only crushed in domestic politics all freedom of individuals and nationalities, but was always ready with her army to crush, as in 1848 in Hungary, every national revolution against absolutism.

3. Russian Methods Applied to the Solution of Nationality Problems

We have given a general background of the "Russian" solution of nationality problems and we should like to demonstrate their methods. They had a rather long tradition and are linked with Muscovy. From the times of Ivan the Terrible until the end of the Russian Empire (1917), Muscovy used and in course of time perfected her own methods for solving the nationality problem, which in modern times became indissolubly connected with the basic problems of European history: with her fight against individual and national freedom, with her fight against democracy, Russia opposed these European ideas by her problem of Russian chauvinism, which usually was formulated by the slogan: "Russian absolutism, Russian Orthodoxy, Russian nationality." Thus, the Russian solution of the national problem, we repeat, meant a complete Russification, and Orthodoxization of all non‑Russian nationalities, so to say "unification" and eradication of all their democratic ideas by "educating" them into enthusiastic acceptance of Russian absolutism. This was the program put forward by the almighty Russian State, backed by the Russian Orthodox Church and the overwhelming part of the Russian nation.

This Russian solution of the national problem was for more than two centuries practically executed in the Russian Empire by the following methods:

a) Genocide. This modern word — for a rather old Muscovite specialty — means "race murder" or "nation murder."⁠7 It is the modern juridical term for any act which is committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group; it is now used especially for killing members of the group, causing them  p21 serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.

b) Exile, forced labor and imprisonment of the leaders of the democratic national movements.

c) Systematic persecution and annihilation of non‑Russian Churches, propagating ceaselessly the "unification" with Orthodoxy.

d) Systematic persecution and extermination of non‑Russian languages by excluding them from schools, press, administration, public life, theaters, etc., and enforced Russification of non‑Russian youth by schools, press, obligatory military service, corruption, etc. Especially the substitution of Latin letters by the Cyrillic letters, used in Russian, was regarded as the first stage of "unification" with Russian.

e) Colonization of non‑Russian ethnographic territories by Russians and giving them a privileged standing for the Russification of the countries.

f) Iron Curtain; this curtain against Western Europe was established by the "censor­ship" over the whole correspondence with outside Russia, incoming and outgoing, by a special censor­ship on foreign books, by a special passport agency, often prohibiting for private persons any travel abroad.

g) Supervision and control of the whole life of all Russian citizens inside and outside Russia by a secret police with unlimited funds for stool pigeons and provocation.

h) In the last period (1871‑1913) the Jews were made responsible for all the advances of democratic and national trends in Russia, and Jewish pogroms, organized by the police and their "black hundreds," became a favorite method of Russian absolutism in fighting also the Jewish national idea, advanced by the Jewish Bund and later Zionism. What it meant anyone can see from the fact that in one year — 1905 — 700 pogroms took place in Russia. Russia is also the cradle of the famous falsification, "Proto­cols of the Elders of Zion" (later the chief propaganda weapon of Hitler; its contents were translated into 14 languages and distributed in millions of copies).⁠8

There was not one non‑Russian nationality in Russia which was not the object of this "Russian solution of the nationality problem." The nationalities of the Baltic: the Finns, and Finno-Karelians, the Ingrians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Byelo-Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Tatars, the nationalities of the Caucasus and of Turkestan,⁠9 with their  p22 national traditions, cultures, languages, and churches, became the subjects of a systematic pogrom by the Russian State for many decades.

We do not have here sufficient space for presenting the tragic history of the "Russian solution of the nationality problem" applied practically to these non-Russian nationalities. We limit ourselves here to the Poles, Lithuanians, Byelo-Ruthenians, and Ukrainians as examples of the Russian Tsaristic epoch.

The Poles were, because of their revolutions, torchbearers for Europe in the dark age of the Russian Empire. Russian absolutism had fostered all the elements of disintegration of the Commonwealth, finally partitioning the State, erasing the very name of Poland from the map of Europe and imposing on the country the name of the "Vistula-land." Her whole public life was Russianized — the schools, the Warsaw University, the administration and courts; large Russian garrisons in Polish towns changed their pure Polish appearance. Even the Western European architectonic features of the main streets and places were changed, as in Warsaw, by alteration of the Empire façades by Russian ornaments or by special monumental churches built in the Russian-Byzantine style. Inscriptions on the streets enforced the law in Russian. All Polish publications were put under Russian censor­ship. Special systematic persecutions were endured by the Catholic Church, whose priests had to be educated in St. Petersburg and were forced into the churches to pray for the Tsar, the perpetrator of all these barbarities. The leaders of the revolutions were usually murdered, all their private property and that of the emigrants confiscated, and thousands of persons who participated in the national uprising were exiled to Siberia, kept in prisons, or employed in mines as forced laborers. Russia had even conceived a plan, not realized, to introduce Russian letters into the Polish alphabet in order to break even this link with Western Europe. No Pole could be a civil servant in Poland but only outside the Polish ethnographic territory. And finally the Tsar built a citadel loaded with artillery opposite the former Polish capital Warsaw, promising to the Poles, in the case of a next uprising, to erase the capital with all their national treasures. . . .

 p23  The persecution of Lithuanians is summed up by the Lithuanian historian C. R. Jurgela:⁠10

The famous hangman Muravyov executed this policy after the last Lithuanian revolution (1863) with a Russian army of 90,000, having executed 128, banished to hard labor in Siberia 972, exiled to Siberia 1427, seized as recruits for the army 345, convicted to prison terms 864, banished to the interior 1529, "relocated" and endowed with land in Russia 4096 — totaling 9361 persons while 1794 estates were confiscated.

Who was Muravyov? Tsar Alexander II looking for a man to suppress the "mutiny" boasted: "I shall defend myself, and my means shall be a man combining the qualities of a Roman proconsul and a Tatar Khan. I shall slap the law of nations! and he shall slap the laws of Divinity and humaneness!" He found the man in this unscrupulous general with a well-known record of embezzlements. In his memoirs the hangman wrote:⁠11

Coming to Wilna, Muravyov started to hang and shoot indiscriminately on the slightest suspicion in the market place. The revolutionaries were executed publicly with fanfare heralding the executions. The scaffolds built in Wilna were busy for many months. . . . Parents were frequently compelled to witness the executions of their sons and then they too were banished on foot to Siberia. Muravyov extorted money from the gentry, he accepted 100,000 rubles from Count Tyzenhauz and gave one half to Katkov, the apostle of Pan‑Slavism.

The "liberal" Tsar Alexander II conferred upon Muravyov the title of Count and throughout Russia his name commanded the greatest respect. On his birthday holy icons were presented to him with thanksgiving addresses, signed even by Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow, and "liberals" like Kavelin. Russian poets, among them Tyutchev and Nekrasov, wrote odes to Muravyov as the "national hero" of Russia. Therefore, Muravyov boasted in his memoirs:

With such methods Russia attained her aim: the very name "Lithuania" was officially abolished and the country renamed "The Northwestern Territory" of Russia.

Similar to this was the fate of Byelo-Ruthenia, which for many centuries was united with Lithuania. Their national State was reproclaimed by Napoleon during the march to Moscow. After Napoleon's downfall the Russian repressions followed, against which the Byelo-Ruthenians simultaneously with the Poles rose in the revolutions of 1831 and 1863. V. Kalinovsky the leader of the Byelo-Ruthenians, caught and hanged by Muravyov, managed before his death to smuggle his last appeal to the Byelo-Ruthenians, which is an illuminating document regarding the ideology of all national movements in Russia:⁠12

All of Byelo-Ruthenia was kept from 1863 until 1870 under military war dictator­ship. Hundreds of estates were confiscated and presented to Russians as rewards. Already in 1820 the University in Polock was  p26 closed, and in 1832 the University in Wilna, in which many Byelo-Ruthenians studied; in 1842 the Theological Academy was transferred to St. Petersburg and Russified, 190 monasteries and their schools were closed; in 1840 the special Lithuanian Law Codex of the courts was abolished. At the same time the Byelo-Ruthenian language was forbidden in the orthodox churches and Russian introduced; the Byelo-Ruthenian Catholic Church was, in 1839, forcibly liquidated and Catholics by governmental order were included in the Russianized Orthodox Church. Byelo-Ruthenia was divided into Russian gubernias and her very name disappeared.

Muscovy struck perhaps its heaviest blows on the Ukraine. From the oldest times this nation as the Kievan Rus′-Ukraine Empire was with her Viking dynasty an integral part of the European civitas christiana. After the Mongol invasion and the occupation of Kiev in 1240 the Ukrainians became with the Byelo-Ruthenians a part of the Lithuanian federation, which used the old Byelo-Ruthenian-Ukrainian-Church language as the official language in their countries. Later, as a part of the Jagellonian Commonwealth, Ukraine was always under the influence of Western European culture and civilizations. In 1654 the revolution under Hetman Bohdan Khmelnitsky re‑established the Ukrainian sovereignty. As the historian of law S. Shelukhyn points out, the principles of "equality, brotherhood, liberty" lived in the everyday practice of the Ukrainian Cossack Host two hundred years before the French Revolution and these slogans animated the Cossacks and peasants in their fight against the Polish gentry and aristocracy. In the Treaty of Perejaslav⁠13 concluded by the Hetman with the Muscovite dynasty (1654) S. Shelukhyn sees only a "personal Union" of the Ukrainian Republic under a common dynasty, and he established the fact that in the treaty are included some points of the English Magna Charta. In 1656 Khmelnytsky annulled the treaty by a close alliance with Sweden and Transylvania — in the next year he died. But the Tsar soon had his garrisons in the Ukraine and interfered with the internal Ukrainian affairs, breaking the treaty. Thus the foreign policy of all the immediate successors of Khmelnytsky had one aim: to get rid of the Muscovitean protectorate. Hetman Vyhovsky re‑established the Federation of the Ukraine with Poland and Lithuania in a united Commonwealth, by the Union of Hadiach (1658). Hetman Doroshenko in 1671 even preferred the protectorate of Turkey to that of Muscovy; and Hetman Mazepa⁠14 finally made the attempt to liberate  p27 the Ukraine by the alliance with Charles XII of Sweden. Mazepa formed and shaped the political and cultural origin of the Ukrainian nation. In his struggle with Russia, Mazepa displayed wisdom and foresight. As early as the beginning of the eighteenth century, Mazepa sensed the ever present and ever growing danger presented by Russia. He noted the gradual penetration of Russian influence into Ukraine, the Russian interference with Ukrainian internal affairs and the Russian infiltration into the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He quickly saw that only an alliance of all the countries endangered by Russia, from the north to the south, could stop her aggressive advance.

His guiding idea in foreign policy was that Ukraine should form a common anti-Muscovite front together with Sweden (Finland, Estonia, and Latvia), Poland-Lithuania, and Turkey. In order to be success­ful, however, the alliance also needed the support of France from the west.

Only such a political alliance, he maintained, could success­fully block the aggressive advance of Russia under Peter the Great into Northern, Western, and Southern Europe. Unfortunately, the first part of his coalition materialized belatedly (the Swedish-Ukrainian alliance), and its first attempt to stop Russia was crushed at Poltava, Ukraine, in 1709, where both the Swedish armies of King Charles XII and the Ukrainian armies under Hetman Mazepa were defeated by the Russians. King Charles XII and Hetman Mazepa went into exile to Turkey, where Mazepa died shortly afterward.

After the death of Mazepa, his great plans for an anti-Russian alliance of Western nations were continued by his successor, Hetman Pylyp Orlyk, whose diaries were found in the archives of Quai d'Orsay (the French Foreign Office)⁠15

The son of Hetman Pylyp Orlyk, Hryhor, who was a lieutenant general in the French Army of Louis XV, continued the work of Mazepa and inspired Voltaire to write his L'Histoire de l'Ukraine. It was Voltaire who was the author of the famous phrase: "The Ukraine always aspired to liberty." In his memo to the French Cardinal Minister Fleury, Hryhor prophetically stated: "France and all Europe think lightly of Muscovite expansion, and yet that is the chief factor which may destroy the entire European system."

Hryhor Orlyk fell in battle against the Prussians in 1759 as a French general. A group of Ukrainian diplomats, such as Voynarovsky, Mirovich,  p28 Nakhimovsky, and others, did not let the ideas of Mazepa die, but continued their patriotic work for the liberation of Ukraine.

It was Mazepa's uncompromising attitude toward Russia as a main entrance to the peace and freedom of smaller nations that evoked the profound hatred for him on the part of all Russians. Mazepa is the godfather of the anti-Muscovite and pro‑European origin in both the cultural and political sense. Mazepa's ideology, based on the ideas of freedom and independence, has inspired millions of Ukrainians to struggle for these God‑given rights. This ideal of the Western European community of nations, given to the Ukrainians by Mazepa 250 years ago, spread to the other Eastern European nations.

How the Russian feared Mazepa is best exemplified by Peter the Great's order after the battle of Poltava. He ordered the razing of Baturyn, Mazepa's capital, to the ground, and had some 18,000 inhabitants killed, mostly women and children. He ordered the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church to anathematize Mazepa as a "traitor." From that time on until 1917, every Good Friday the Russian Orthodox Church, in a special ceremony, faithfully and servilely excommunicated Mazepa.

To make the aspirations of the Ukrainian people for freedom as horrible and "criminal" in old Russia as possible, the Russians began applying the term "Mazepists," that is, the partisans of Mazepa, to all the Ukrainian patriots ever since. Muscovy systematically applied genocide to the bearers of the national consciousness of the Ukraine, the Ukrainian Cossacks and their leaders. The Hetmans Somoylovych, Doroshenko, and Mnohohrishny were exiled to Siberia; Hetman Polubotok died in the Petropavlovsk fortress near Petersburg; the Cossack army was used as forced labor at the construction of Petersburg, along the Volga, and more than 20,000 perished in toiling on the Ladoga Canal. Catherine II, for whom the Ukrainian folksongs reserved the title "daughter of a bitch," annihilated (in 1775) the traditional center of the Cossack Host, the Zaporogian Sich, exiling and imprisoning their commander Kalnyshevsky in the Solowki Islands; she enforced from the last Hetman Razumovsky his abdication in 1764 (died 1802), divided the Ukraine into Russian gubernias provinces and imposed serfdom on the Ukrainian peasantry. Finally, in order to erase any tradition (as the last Hetman attempted to introduce a hereditary hetmanate) the Rozumovsky family was exiled under the pretext of a Russian ambassador­ship to Vienna (where the ambassador became the protector of Van Beethoven) — intermarried with the Austrian nobility and became Austrianized.

Systematically, Muscovy annihilated the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and its direct subordination to the Patriarch of Constantinople. Moscow forced the election of her candidate Prince G. Svyatopolk Chertwertynsky to the Metropolitan­ship of Kiev, and in 1685 he subordinated the Ukrainian Church to the Muscovite Patriarch. Catherine II confiscated the estates of the Ukrainian Church in 1786, distributing hundreds of thousands of acres to her lovers. The opposing Bishop Arsen Matsiyewich was tried in St. Petersburg and by Catherine's order immured in a tower in Reval.

 p29  But the Ukrainian language had to suffer the most systematic persecution. Hatred and intolerance for everything that was not Muscovite was peculiar to Moscow and anything different was regarded as heresy and treason against Orthodoxy. Therefore, Moscow, the "Third Rome," immediately started to persecute the Ukrainian Church language and to "unify" it with the Moscovite. Already before the personal Union of Ukraine with the Moscovitean dynasty, all books which differed in language with the Muscovite had been burned in Moscow. The Russian priests preached that there must be "one language" everywhere. In 1690 Patriarch Yoakim anathematized all books printed in the former Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian Commonwealth and nearly the whole Ukrainian Church literature of that time was forbidden. Even the first volume of the works of St. Dmytro Rostovsky was burned as differing in its Ukrainian language from Russian, and all new editions were "unified with Russian." We find an open hatred of the Ukrainian language in the preface to the works of Yoan Zlatoust printed 1709 in Moscow, where it is stated that the "very obscure Ukrainian" was, in its orthography and language, "translated and corrected into Russian." Gradually Moscow began to persecute the books and printing presses in the Ukraine. Moscow attempted to enforce the Russian-Moscovitean pronunciation of letters in the Ukrainian language, which had, like the Bulgarian, Serbian, and Byelo-Ruthenian an alphabet similar to the Muscovite. In 1720, Peter I forbade the printing of books in the Ukraine with the exception of Church books; but the Church books had to be completely "unified" with the Moscovite Church books, "in order that there may be not the slightest difference and no separate language in them." In 1721, an order was issued that all manuscripts of books to be printed in Ukrainian printing presses had to be sent to Moscow "for correction and unification with the Russian" in the Synodalian Censor­ship Office. By constant heavy fines this order was strictly executed: in 1724, the Archimandrite of the Kievan Pecherska Lawra monastery was fined 1000 rubles for printing a "Triodon" different from the Muscovetean one; in 1726, the Brotherhood of Chernyhiv was fined 2000 rubles for printing Ukrainian books, and the printing press was confiscated and brought to Moscow. Finally at the time of the Metropolitan Raphael Zaborovsky (1731‑1747) Moscow ordered that all old Ukrainian Church books be confiscated and destroyed, and Muscovite introduced. In 1769, the Kievan Pecherska Lawra printing press was forbidden to publish anything in the Ukrainian tongue. At the end of the eighteenth century, Moscow enforced the introduction of the Russian teaching language in the Kievan Academy and all the existing schools in Ukraine; also the priests were ordered to pronounce the Old Church language not with the traditional Ukrainian but with the Russian-Muscovite pronunciation.

The Ukraine under Russia gradually became a land of illiteracy. . . . In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there existed over 20 printing presses in the whole Ukraine, but soon they disappeared with few exceptions in that part which came under the Muscovite rule. Around 1740 the left-bank Ukraine had 860 schools, and 60 years later only a dozen. . . .

 p30  In 1800, Tsar Paul forbade the construction of churches in the Ukrainian style with three cupolas; only the Muscovite style was permitted.

The whole nineteenth century is also filled with the Russian persecutions of the Ukrainian language and nation. In 1835 the self-government of Kiev based on the German Magdeburg Law was liquidated; in 1840 the Lithuanian Law Codex was abolished and Russian Laws in the courts in the Ukraine were introduced; in 1843 the obligatory passports were introduced; in 1839 the remnants of the Ukrainian Catholic Church on the right bank liquidated. Tsar Nicolas I organized a special committee for the Russification of the Ukraine and the erasing of all traces of different Ukrainian traditions.

But in spite of all these persecutions of the Ukrainian language, there was, in the Ukrainian folksongs and folklore, very much life beneath this official Russification, and soon the upper class returned to the use of it. And in 1798 there appeared the travesty on the Aeneid by Kotlyarevksy, written in the Ukrainian vernacular, which was followed by the works of Hulak Artemovsky, Kvitka, Hrebinka, and others. Of great importance were the anthologies of Ukrainian folksongs by Maxymovych, Sreznewsky, and by the Russian Tsertelev, who was deeply moved by the great spiritual wealth and creative energy of the Ukrainians. "Do you know," wrote Tsertelev, "that I value this popular poetry more highly than the major part of our (Russian) romances and ballads and even many of our romantic poems." And soon the national bard Taras Shewchenko appeared asking in the dark night of Tsarism: "When will at last arrive also our Washington, with the new and just law (The American Declaration of Independence)?" Russian Pan‑Slavism (in reality brutal Pan‑Muscovitism) was opposed by the Ukrainians by means of the ideology of the Brotherhood of SS. Cyril and Methodius, which repeated the Western European ideas with which Mickiewicz fanaticized the Poles.

And soon Moscow acted again. In 1847, the leaders of this brotherhood, Kostomarov, Shevchenko, and Kulisch, were arrested and the government confiscated everything which appeared in Ukrainian. Russian censor­ship was in no hurry: Metlynsky's collection of songs were submitted to the censor in 1847 and returned from the office in 1854. The anthology of works of Ukrainian writers remained two years in the censor's office and returned half confiscated. Besides, the word volya, "liberty," was confiscated, even in the phrase kin' hulaye na voli, "the horse enjoys its freedom." The censor treated mercilessly the works of Hrebinka, Artemovsky-Hulak, Fedkovych, Zinkivsky, Marko Vovchok, Nechuy-Levytsky. . . . The government forbade the use of the terms "Ukraine," "Ukrainian"; even "Little Russia" was changed into "South Russia" or simply "Russia." The censor­ship refused permission to print the reader of Potebnya, the novels of Nechuy-Levytsky, Mykola Djerya, Zaporozhtsi, and Chmarya; a pamphlet: "About the life of the human body" by Maryupolec; a pamphlet: "Advice to mothers" by Myrovets; pamphlets about "Volcanos," about "The Mountains," etc.

In 1863, the minister of interior, Walujew, issued his famous circular stating that a separate Ukrainian language never existed, does not  p31 exist, and never will exist, and the censor­ship refused permission to print the translation of the Bible into Ukrainian by F. Morachevsky. . . .

From 1862 to 1872 the Russian censor­ship passed a single Ukrainian pamphlet. . . . But luckily for the Ukrainians a part of their ethnographic territory after the partitions of the Polish Commonwealth and later also Bukovina became parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Therefore they transferred the printing activity to Lviv in Galicia, even to Budapest, later to Praha, and to Switzerland.

In the year 1875 the southwestern branch of the Geographical Society controlled by Ukrainian scholars, was closed in Kiev and soon the leading Ukrainian professors Dragomanov (history), Zieber (economy), and Chubinsky (ethnography) were dismissed from the University of Kiev.

In the year 1876 the Tsar signed in the Bad Ems the following Ukaz — which is a unique document in European history:

Consequently, the censor refused to allow composer Sokolowsky to print a collection of Ukrainian folksongs with their Ukrainian texts, and passed it only with a French text. In 1880, the censor burned the Ukrainian translation of the Book of Job. In 1883 the Russians refused permission to print the translation of the works of Shakespeare and they remained in manuscript 20 years. In 1884, they forbade the printing of Nishchynsky's translation of Homer's Odyssey. In 1885, they forbade the printing of a reader and reading books for children in Ukrainian. Only near the close of the century did the censor­ship become weaker, and the works of Nechuy-Levytsky, Myrny, Kotsiubynsky, Hrinchenko, Shevchenko, Marko Vovchok, Rudansky, Svydnytsky, Hlibov, Franko, Teslenko, Vasylchenko, and others began to appear; only after 1905 there was a short time of relief.

It must be kept in mind that these persecutions and acts of Russification were backed not only by the whole Russian administration, schools, and army, but by the Russian Church with the famous Russificators Anthony and Eulogy;⁠a the universities with Russificators such as Pogodin, Florinsky; by the Russian black hundred press and Purishkevich, the chief of Russian hooligans and apostles of the permanent pogrom of all non‑Russian nationalities.

 p32  We cannot but draw attention here to the great moral courage and objectivity of a group of Russian scholars headed by Shakhmatov, who in 1906, in a special declaration of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, defended the independence of the Ukrainian language and its right to free development.⁠16

These examples may suffice. Similar persecutions were suffered by all the non‑Russian languages and nations in the Russian Empire, especially the languages of the Caucasus and Turkestan.

4. The Fight of the Oppressed Nationalities Against Russian Tyranny

Not only did the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Ukrainians, and the Byelo-Ruthenians fight against Russian tyranny, defending their freedoms, but the whole modern history of Russia is internally a constant civil war between the oppressed nationalities and Russia, which from time to time flares up in full force, then again glimmers in the embers of Russian repressions. This fight forms practically one whole and is systematically disregarded by American historians of Russian descent.

 p33  We should like briefly to survey this struggle against Russia. Simultaneously with the fight of the Ukrainians against Muscovy, after the death of Khmelnitsky, the Don Cossacks revolted in 1667‑1678 and their leader Stephen Razin became the legendary hero of the Volga peasantry. In 1773‑1775 the Ural Cossacks with O. Pugatchev, repeated their rebellion. In this fight the Kazakhs also participated. In this territory from the shores of the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea there were from 1826‑1834 145 rebellions; from 1838‑1854 the people organized 848 smaller and larger uprisings. The Cossacks regarded themselves, and regard themselves now, as a separate nationality from the Muscovites.

The subdued peoples of the Asiatic part of Russia have a fine record of uprisings against Russia. In Kazakhstan⁠17 the defense against the Russian occupation lasted from 1783‑1794 under the leader­ship of S. Datov. In the 30's and 40's of the nineteenth century the Kazakhs again revolted against the confiscation of land by Russia. The largest revolts occurred between 1837‑1838 under the leader­ship of I. Tayman. The Uzbeks constantly revolted, from 1838‑1898 they rebelled 608 times; great rebellions occurred in 1875 and 1885 — all suppressed by mass executions.

The Siberian peoples also revolted in the 30's and 40's under the leader­ship of W. Pyatomlyn. The separatist tendencies there remained strong; even newcomers, immigrants, supported them; the Russian police uncovered a special organization of this movement in 1864.

The Bashkirs, Tatars, Mariis, Chuvashs, and Komis were in constant turmoil; in Bashkiria the people rebelled in 1840 and 1874. Because in 1906 the Russian government forbade the Komis and Kalmyks to settle within the circuit of ten kilometers from every Russian colony, they revolted.

The fight of the Caucasus against the Russians was heroic. The Georgians revolted in 1804, 1807, 1812, 1841 — in Abkhazia in 1877. The Azerbaijanians fought from 1870‑1880, the Armenians from 1885‑1886, the Caucasian Highlanders fought the Russians under the leader­ship of Shamyl for twenty years and not until 1859 did he surrender, although the spirit of the Highlanders was never broken.⁠18

In the decades before World War I the oppressed nationalities gave many leading personalities to the revolutionary movement in Tsarist Russia. As the revolutionary movement of these decades merged with the Socialist movement, in which the Russian socialists and social revolutionaries participated and which they also led, the significance of the participation of these representatives of the non‑Russian nationalities in the revolutionary fight against Russian tyranny is often disregarded. This participation was a continuation of the fight for national freedom of the oppressed peoples, who attempted to use the Russian socialist movement for their own liberation.

 p34  The revolution of 1905 showed immediately all the national problems of Russia and the elections to the first Duma, carried through in a relatively honest way, gave all the oppressed nationalities many representatives in the Russian parliament. And immediately at the initiative of Alexander Lednicki all the non‑Russian nationalities formed a common front against the Russians in the so‑called "Club of the Autonomists," demanding national self-government for their countries. The Russian tyranny, backed also by the chauvinism of the overwhelming part of the Russian intelligentsia, stopped the peaceful transformation of Russia into a commonwealth of free nationalities, dissolved the Duma, changed the electoral laws, and the democratic spring ended with a real Russian reactionary winter. All the non‑Russian nationalities became finally disappointed in the Russian liberals and so‑called democrats and were brought to the conviction that only an active fight against the Roman Herrenvolk could give them freedom.

5. The Victory and Defeat of the National Idea

Tsarist Russia has done in foreign politics everything in her power to combat outside Russia the ideas of the American and French revolutions, with which her nationality problem was inseparably united.

But no unholy "Holy Alliance" could abolish the progress of individual freedom and national liberty in Europe. Gradually the national idea dissolved the Ottoman Empire, liberated Roumania, Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, Albania, and slowly undermined also the foundations of Austria-Hungary and Russia, the "Prison of nationalities."

The economic rivalries between the European Powers led later to the reciprocal use by these powers of the national ideas of the oppressed nationalities against one another. England tried to weaken the junior partner of Germany, Austria-Hungary, by sympathizing with the national ideas of the Czechs and Slovaks, Poles, Croatians, Slovenes, Italians, and Roumanians; Russia, so intolerant in internal politics of all the non‑Russian nationalities, especially of the Poles, Ukrainians, Byelo-Ruthenians, the Baltic, Caucasian and Turkestanian nations, in foreign politics supported the national aspirations of the Serbs, Montenegrins, Croats, and Slovenes, and tried to create by heavy subsidies also a Russophile orientation among the Ukrainians in Austria-Hungary; Germany fought Russian opposition against her Berlin-Bagdad project by supporting the idea of the dissolution of Russia in her national parts and supporting the national ideas of the Finns, Lithuanians, Byelo-Ruthenians, Ukrainians, of the Caucasian and Turkestanian nations. Germany besides fought England by supporting the Irish and Indians. France fought for the restoration of the self-determination of Alsace-Lorraine by Germany by sympathizing with the Poles annexed to Prussia.

Thus, the national idea of the oppressed nationalities became the sharpest weapon in the ideological war between the European powers, and was closely connected with their foreign politics and economical conceptions, which before World War I finally appeared as the Triple Entente and Triple Alliance, both promising freedom to the oppressed nationalities in their desired sphere of influence.

 p35  The whole European policy, which the American historians seldom understand, was conducted on two levels. The ministries of existing European powers, exploiting the national ideas for their purposes, is the upper level; but there existed at the same time a lower level: the struggle for freedom of the oppressed nationalities, usually under leader­ship of under­ground organizations, backed by public opinion. These nationalities consciously exploited the rivalries of the European powers for the realization of their national aims. This whole period is characterized by the struggle for democracy and the advance of socialism in Europe, giving the national ideas of the subdued nationalities the general character of the struggle for social justice and self-government. Shining examples of independence showed the way to the realization of the national ideas: the revolutionary spirit of Ireland against England and the indomitable will for liberty of Poland, Lithuania, Byelo-Ruthenia, Ukraine, and of the heroic Caucasian nations against Russia, and of the Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgarians against Turkey.

These revolutionary ideas not only penetrated the oppressed non‑Russian nationalities in European Russia, but also many nationalities of Asiatic Russia, whose youth was usually studying at the Russian European universities. Thus, through this underground, the modern national idea continued its victorious march into Russian Asia.

World War I was an explosion of all the economic, territorial, and political rivalries of England, France, Russia on the one side and of Germany, Austria, Hungary, Turkey on the other. This explosion found a tremendous response among the non‑Russian nationalities in Russia. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey, now openly including the liberation of the non‑Russian nationalities in their war aims, were supported in the war against Russia by Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Finnish, Azerbaijanian, Turkestanian, Georgian, Tatarian political organizations and formations of fighting volunteers. These facts hastened the military and political breakdown of the Russian tyranny. And as a matter of fact the revolution in Russia in 1917 started with the mutiny of the guards, composed of Ukrainians,⁠19 who refused to fire upon strikers, and with mass desertions from the front of soldiers of all non‑Russian nationalities. It must be clearly stated that these peoples did not revolt in order to help Kaiserism or effete Austria-Hungary to defeat democratic France or England. J. Pilsudski, who later became marshal, gave a good formulation of the political tactics of the under­ground of the oppressed non‑Russian nationalities: first, the Russian Tsarist Empire must be destroyed, then we will help the West to destroy the other oppressors, Prussia (Germany) and Austria. The peace of Brest Litovsk was not only the victory of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey over Russia, but also a victory of the national ideas of the non‑Russian nationalities over Russia in the West and the beginning of Russia's dissolution.

Let us survey the revolution in Russia from the point of view of the national idea, which aimed at the realization in this vast territory of the great European idea of freedom.

 p36  We deliberately speak about the "revolution in Russia" and not about the "Russian revolution." This latter term is very misleading for Americans and is systematically used by the (white and red) Russian-inspired historians in the United States in order to hide the most important question and cause of the revolution in Russia: the nationality problem of the old empire.

Actually, two revolutions started in Russia in 1917: a Russian revolution in the Russian ethnographic territory, with primarily political, later social aims and an anti-Russian revolution in all the non‑Russian ethnographic territories of the oppressed non‑Russian nationalities with aims primarily national and social, which could be realized by the departure of the Russian profiteering classes from the non‑Russian territories.

This anti-Russian revolution was soon greatly intensified by the ideas proclaimed by President Wilson, when World War I in its final stage brought into European politics a power from outside of Europe, the U. S. A. In all the great ideological processes the 14 points, the self-determination principle for the nationalities and the idea of the League of Nations played a decisive role.

The last fateful act which preceded the dissolution of the Russian Empire and Brest Litovsk, was the permission given by Germany to Lenin and his bolsheviks to return from exile to Petrograd. Thus, there returned home the man who transferred Von Clausewitz' methods into politics with a blueprint (long ago thought out) for the world revolution and the establishment of the dictator­ship of the Russian proletariat.

The revolution in Russia of 1917‑1918 opened the doors to freedom and sovereignty for all the subject peoples under Tsarist rule. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, White Ruthenia, Kubania, and the Caucasian countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, North Caucasia), the whole of Turkestan became free and independent, while the Don Cossacks and the various Tatar peoples experienced a great national revival.

All these nationalities responded enthusiastically to the principles of President Wilson and to his new international institution, the League of Nations. In throwing off the chains of Russian slavery they were willing to accept the duties and obligations of this new World Confederation, and longingly waited for the leader­ship of the U. S. A. The seeds of a real Eastern democracy, called forth and animated by the great American idealist, burst into full bloom, and were cultivated by the Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries, who in all the various national democratic republics formed the governments and were backed by the entire equally enthusiastic youth of their nations. They believed that a new era was coming to give humanity at last the reign of law, and therefore all these Socialist governments decided at once to disarm their nations — as a visible sign of goodwill and further faith toward the League of Nations and an example for the coming universal disarmament.

Unfortunately, this blossom of democracy, this freedom and sovereignty of the nationalities, was short-lived. The most important reasons for the catastrophic turn of events were in our opinion:

 p37  a) On the ruins of Tsarist Russia after a coup d'état and the scattering of a lawfully elected Parliament, there was installed, within the walls of Moscow, the Communistic Dictator­ship with its ideology of the coming proletarian world revolution. To achieve this Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin forcibly mobilized, armed, drilled, and fanaticized the (Great) Russian working masses; they murdered all opponents or put them in concentration camps; they abolished all human rights and put forward, against the idea of Democracy, the idea of the proletarian dictator­ship, against the idea of the League of Nations in Geneva they advanced their own method for the organization of the entire world: the Comintern of Moscow, the blueprint for the World Soviet Union.

Thus, at once there was created an ideological battle front in Eastern Europe between the "national ideas" of the liberated nationalities with their Democratic Republics, Socialist Governments, and their support of the League of Nations in Geneva, and the Proletarian Dictator­ship of Soviet Moscow with its Comintern, which was intended to use "Red Russia" as the mighty base for the world revolution. The Russian Communists started a furious propaganda campaign against the sovereignty of the nationalities conquered and oppressed by the Russian Tsars; they accused all democrats, who had often spent years in Tsarist prisons for their national cause, as traitors, agents, and hirelings of capitalism; they ridiculed the League of Nations as a "bourgeois deceit," as a "devil's kitchen," a "prostitute," and started at once with the newly formed Red armies a series of aggressive wars against the neighboring peaceful, disarmed democratic republics.

b) The U. S. A. was not prepared politically for a constructive leader­ship of the world or an active collaboration in world politics. The American people and authorities were completely unaware that the new democratic republics of the former oppressed nationalities in Tsarist Russia were in reality "the children of Wilson's principles and of the American Declaration of Independence." The greatest blow which the young Eastern Democracy received was given by President Wilson himself when he openly repudiated the right of "self-determination" for the nations of former Tsarist Russia. There is no need to throw stones at the tragic figure of President Wilson. It is enough to cite the opinion of Robert Lansing (The Peace Negotiations, 1921, p99):

Characteristic of the American policy of that time is the case of the Ukraine in the League of Nations in Geneva.

In 1920 the Government of the Ukrainian People's Republic, for its part, instructed its minister in London, Mr. Arnold Margolin, former president of the Jewish Territorial Organization in the Ukraine, judge of the Ukrainian Supreme Court, the well-known jurist and the defender of Beilis, to submit an application for the admission of the Ukraine to the League of Nations.

The aim of the application was obvious: the Ukrainian Democratic Government wished to submit to the judgment of the League of Nations the causes of the war due to the invasion of the Ukraine by the Communist army from Moscow, and to ask the League of Nations to bring this dispute to a peaceful end. By the entrance of the Ukraine into the League of Nations a foundation was to be laid for the political and economic reconstruction of Eastern Europe.

Mr. Arnold Margolin in his note⁠20 summed up as a lawyer the international status of the Ukraine:

In the denial of the application of the Ukraine for admission to the League of Nations a note by the Undersecretary of State of the United States, Mr. Bainbridge Colby, to the Italian Minister at Washington, Baron Camille Romano Avezzana, played a decisive part. This note is an interesting example of anthem lack of information concerning the problems of Eastern Europe, due to the want of elementary knowledge of the history of Tsarist Russia."⁠21

The Ukraine soon became Soviet Moscow's first Korea! The American note was even an open invitation to aggression and annexation. Thus the Moscow bolsheviks then concentrated all their forces against the rich land of Ukraine. Owing to lack of munitions, arms, and medicaments, the Ukrainian government, its army and the provisional Parliament consisting at that time of representatives of all democratic parties, left the country and sought refuge in the west, in France.

c) While these blows were felt in the political field, Winston Churchill — who as a young Tory gained wide experience in "dealing with the nationality problems" in India, safer, Egypt, and Ireland — administered a still heavier blow to Ukrainian and Caucasian democracy in a realm of greatest importance: in the military-strategical field. Already Wilhelm II, after the downfall of Tsarist Russia in the East, followed the policy of restoring Russian Tsarism, and gathered on the Don under the leader­ship of Generals Krasnow and Denikin the White Russian Tsaristic Army. After the downfall of Germany and the restoration of the Democratic Ukrainian People's Republic in the Ukraine, Churchill granted millions of tons of war material and millions of financial means and full support of Denikin and induced France in the Crimea to do the same for General Wrangel, whose group was even then recognized as the Provisional Government of "Russia."

Thus the young Ukrainian and Caucasian democracies with their improvised and badly equipped armies were suddenly compelled to fight a war on two fronts: against the Communistic aggressors, the Communistic dictator­ship in the north and against the Tsaristic reactionary dictator­ship of Denikin and Wrangel on the other fronts. The Red and White Russians had on one point a common aim: the suppression of the freshly gained national sovereignty of the former oppress non‑Russian nationalities and the destruction of the new democratic republics.

These were the chief reasons that determined the result of the aggressive war of the Communistic Moscow dictator­ship against the  p40 liberated democratic nations and their republics — a war which decided the fate of Democracy and of the League of Nations of Geneva so far as Eastern Europe was concerned. The lack of understanding in Western Europe of the Eastern problems and the disregard of Wilson's principles led to the complete breakdown of the ideas of democracy and of the authority of the League of Nations in the East, contributed to the victory of the totalitarian Communistic dictator­ship and brought about its later results: the appearance of Mussolini and Hitler in Europe.

The first victim of Soviet Moscow's armed aggression was Ukraine. After Ukraine the next victims were White Ruthenia, Don, Caucasus, Kubania, and Turkestan (the national governments of Kokand and Alash-Orda).

The League of Nations was informed of these facts of international banditry, but it kept silent about these evident cases of aggression. The League quietly watched the Soviet Moscow dictator­ship annihilate all the democratic republics of Eastern Europe one after another, using that technique of aggression which is now known to everybody. Agents of Soviet Moscow's imperialism appointed by the Comintern occupied the countries one after another by means of the Soviet Red Army, murdered the democratic leaders and enslaved the peoples, while pretending to liberate them, and forced the legal governments of these peoples, confirmed by democratic parliaments, into exile.

From this pogrom of the democracies in Eastern Europe only Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland were saved, partly because of the exhaustion and weariness of the Soviet Red Army after the fights in Ukraine, Kubania, and Caucasia.

Thus the non‑Russian nationalities of former Tsarist Russia lost the war — in the defense of democracy and the League of Nations — against the aggressive Communist dictator­ship of Moscow, which has been indirectly supported by the American policy of denying their rights of self-determination.

---

The Author's Notes:

1 The battle of Poltava is listed in the book of Edward Shepherd Creasy, Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, London, 1851.

2 Cf. O. Halecki, The Limits and Divisions of European History, pp85‑101.

3 Cf. The Slavonic and Eastern European Review, Vol. XIX, 1939‑1940, pp71‑72.

4 Cf. ibid., and also Roman Smal-Stocki, Die Germanisch-Deutschen Kulturinfluesse im Spiegel der Ukrainische Sprache (Leipzig: Hirzel Verlag, 1942); F. Dvornik, The Kiev State and its Relations with Western Europe, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 29 (1947), pp27‑46.

5 Jan Kucharzewski, The Origins of Modern Russia, 1948, p4.

6 W. Bączkowski, Towards an Understanding of Russia, Jerusalem, 1947, p163.

7 P. Pobedonostsev (1829‑1907), Cabinet minister under Nicholas II advocated the following solution of the "Jewish problem": one third of the Jews has to be converted to Christianity, one third forced to emigrate, and one third starved. Purishkevich proposed the deportation of all Jews into the Kolyma Region of arctic Siberia.

8 Jacob Lestchinsky, "Anti-Semitism," in F. Gross, European Ideologies, pp649‑673.

9 To demonstrate the cultural achievements of Muscovy in Asia may these quotations be sufficient:

An American scholar, W. Kirchner, of the University of Delaware, sums up in the following way Russia's government in Siberia (An Outline-History of Russia, p49): "The further the conquerors were away from Europe, the greater their lawlessness. Torture, abduction, murder and cannibalism were among their crimes. . . ."

10 C. R. Jurgela, History of Lithuanian Nation, 1948, pp469‑472.

11 Ibid., pp449‑450.

12 Ibid., p460.

13 Against any alliance with the Muscovite Tsar was a violent opposition headed by Father Hursky and Colonel Bohun, which did quit the meeting.

14 Today there is a vast literature on the life and statesman­ship of Hetman Mazepa and his attempt to organize Western and Southern Europe against Peter the Great and Russian imperialism. Foremost is the work in French, La Vie de Mazepa (Paris, 1931), written jointly by a Ukrainian scholar, Elias Borshchak, and René Martel, the French writer. Prof. Borshchak also wrote The Great Mazepist Hryhor Orlyk, Lieutenant General of the Army of Louis XV (in Ukrainian, Lviv, 1932) — another Ukrainian historian, Bohdan Krupnycky, wrote Hetman Mazepa und Seine Zeit (Berlin, 1942), as well as a historical study, "The Mazepists" (The Ukrainian Quarterly, Vol. IX, No. 3); another penetrating article on Mazepa, entitled, "Mazepa's Champion in the 'Secret du Roi,' of Louis XV, King of France," was written by Prof. N. Chubaty (The Ukrainian Quarterly Vol. V, No. 1).There are several historical studies on Charles XII, King of Sweden, and Hetman Mazepa in Swedish.

15 They were edited by Prince de Tokary Tokarzewsky-Karasiewicz and published in Les Travaux de l'Institut Scientifique Ukrainien, Vol. XVII, Warsaw.

16 "In 1906 the Academy of Sciences was requested by the Council of Ministers to give a considered opinion upon the Ukrainian language. For this purpose, under the presidency of F. E. Korsh, a special Commission was composed consisting of A. S. Famitsin, V. V. Zelenski, from Fortunatov to Fortunatov, A. A. Shakhmatov, A. S. Lappo-Danilevski and S. F. Oldenburg. A report prepared by F. E. Korsh and A. A. Shakhmatov was approved by the Academy and submitted to the Council of Ministers; its main conclusions were that historic circumstances had brought about a complete differentiation between South-West Russia (Ukraine) and the region inhabited by (Great) Russians, that this differentiation was reflected in the languages of the two peoples, that instead of providing them with a common language, historical development had deepened dialectal differences manifested from the time when the two peoples first appeared on the stage of history, that in view of the fact that there was in existence a Ukrainian language, as spoken by the people of Poltava, Kiev, Lwow, the (Great) Russian language spoken by the people of Moscow, Yaroslavl, Archangelsk and Novgorod, could not be considered as 'all‑Russian.' Finally, the recommendation was made that the Ukrainian people should have the same right as the (Great) Russian people to speak their own language in public and to print in it.

"In 1906, the year when the report alluded to was issued, in response to an inquiry from the Council of Ministers, the Universities of Kiev and Kharkov endorsed the findings of the Academy, and added a request that Ukrainian literature should be given the same rights as those enjoyed by Russian literature, that the Holy Scripture should be translated into Ukrainian, that teaching in the primary schools in Ukraina should be conducted in Ukrainian and that Ukrainian periodicals should be permitted to enter Russia from Galicia (Austria)." (Quotation from Lancelot Lawton, Ukraina: Europe's Greatest Problem, London, 1939.)

17 Regarding the Kazakhs the Russian administration applied the principle: "There is no other way to manage the Kazakhs except through massacres," cf. Encyclopedia Americana, p291, Vol. 27, 1947.

18 Cf. J. Milton Mackie, Life of Schamyl and Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia, Boston, 1856.

19 The Volynian Regiment revolted March 12.

20 Cf. Roman Smal-Stocki, "Application of the Ukrainian Republic for Admission to the League of Nations," Paris, 1930, Association Ukrainienne pour la Société des Nations.

21 Cf. its analysis, ibid., pp. III‑V.

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Thayer's Note:

a The Russian Orthodox bishops Antonii Khrapovitsky and Evlogii Georgievsky. See the article "Russophiles" in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine.

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