Holos Pravdy Vox Veritatis — Historical encyclopedia

When Ukrainian Identity Emerged

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Kremlin thesis that "Ukrainian identity is artificial and recent, while Rus' is the Russians, because we are one people" rests on "historical statics": the claim that nations exist eternally and unchanged. In reality, the ethnic consciousness of the pre-modern era formed gradually and from the bottom up. According to the recent 6-volume academic series "Ukraine: Essays on History" (Institute of History, NAS of Ukraine), by the end of the 10th century there was no formed ethnic identity on the Ukrainian lands at all — what prevailed was a local, "local-dweller" (tuteishyi) consciousness, then a "land-based" one (Kyivans, Galicians, Chernihivians), and only at the end of the 12th and during the 13th century did "Rus'/Rusyn" become the common endoethnonym of the population of present-day Ukraine. This happened early compared with other European peoples — and had nothing to do with the northern lands, where the self-designation "russky" (an adjective) took hold later and on a different model.

The myth: identity as an "eternal essence"

The Russian narrative about Ukraine rests on a simple assumption: if a people exists today, it has existed "always" — from the birth of Christ and earlier, unchanged. From this follow two mirror-image conclusions: Ukrainians do not "really" exist, because they were "invented" recently, while Rus' is precisely the Russians, so "we are one people." The historian Vitaliy Dribnytsya calls this move operating with historical statics: opponents fail to understand that any identity is dynamic and changes over time[2].

This cycle consists of seven authorial mini-lectures based on the first volume of the recent academic 6-volume series "Ukraine: Essays on History" (Institute of History, NAS of Ukraine, 2023–2024), the chapter "Formation of Ethnic Identity"[1]. It answers a direct question: when and how did Ukrainian ethnic consciousness actually emerge — and why its roots cannot be reduced either to an "eternal" people or to a shared "Old Rus'" one.

Before the 10th century: ethnic identity does not yet exist

The main sign that a people has formed is the appearance of a self-designation, recorded in sources and accepted by the members of the community themselves[2]. By this criterion, it is impossible to speak of an ethnic identity on the Ukrainian lands before the end of the 10th century. The first written mentions of the Slavs — the ancestors of Ukrainians — begin in the 5th century, and everything earlier is archaeology, which describes material culture but not ethnic groups.

In the Middle Ages a person was defined not by "nationality" but by entirely different identities: territorial (one knew which village or town one lived in), religious (which church one attended), and estate-based (feudal lord, clergy, or the "third estate")[3]. The reason is the underdevelopment of communications: for a mass ethnic consciousness to appear, one needs printing (where you can read that you are a Ukrainian or a Russian), communication routes all the way to railways, and state education with unified curricula — and that is already the 19th century[4]. As the historian Natalia Yakovenko formulates it, the absence of a single information field across a territory "laced with impassable forests and marshes," as princely Rus' was, altogether rules out the possibility of a single identity — so before the formation of Rus' (the second half of the 9th century), the sources record no ethnic identities at all[5].

Tribes against archaeology: there was no "single people"

The Russian ideologeme of a "single Old Rus' people" is shattered against the concrete sources. The "Primary Chronicle" lists seven (possibly nine) tribal unions on these lands — Polianians, Derevlians, Siverians, Volhynians, Ulichians, Tivertsians, Croats — but this list does not map onto the archaeology: only two archaeological cultures can be traced here (the Luka-Raikovetska on the right bank of the Dnipro and the Volyntsevo-Romny on the left bank), which in no way divide into seven[7]. Moreover, the chronicles themselves record enmity and wars between these tribes — one's own kin do not fight like that.

Telling, too, is something else: the artifacts of both archaeological cultures, in the assessment of the archaeologist Volodymyr Baran, are 80–85% similar[8] — that is, materially this is rather a single, kindred mass. Dribnytsya, meanwhile, criticizes the very term "Southern Rus'" used by the authors of the 6-volume series: in his view, Rus' was one, centered on Kyiv, and in the chronicle sense — the lands of present-day northern Ukraine (the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Pereyaslav, and Volhynia regions, and later Galicia)[6]. Either way, neither archaeology nor the chronicles yield a "single people" that could be identified with present-day Russia.

"Local-dweller" consciousness: an identity the size of a county

So what existed instead of ethnic consciousness? What prevailed was a "local-dweller" (tuteishyi, local) consciousness — a term coined by the Belarusian ethnologists Chakvin and Tereshkovich. Within it, a person regards as their own only the inhabitants of their own village or a few neighboring ones, and all others — "outsiders" from other counties — as strangers[9]. This is not a unique "backwardness": the researcher Smith showed that even in Turkey before 1900 — despite the sultanate, railways, and newspapers — the local identities of clan, village, and region carried more weight than the all-Turkish one[10]. In certain parts of Belarus, ethnographers recorded the "local-dweller" consciousness right up to the 20th century.

Above this local level rose a "supra-local," land-based consciousness — but it was characteristic not of the peasants but of the elite: the princes, the administration, the priests, the upper merchantry, that is, the stratum that was effectively common to all of Rus'[11]. This is the very source of the word "land" itself: in place of the vanished tribal names, the chronicles introduce "lands," and the term "land," as medievalists note, is identical to the modern concept of "country" — zemlia, kraina, Ukraine[12].

"Land-based" identity of the 12th–13th centuries: Kyivans, Galicians, Chernihivians

From the 12th century, the lands come to the fore — the Rus', Galician, Volodymyr, Volhynian, Chernihiv, and Turiv lands. It is important to distinguish them from principalities: the borders of principalities were constantly changing, while a land remained a stable unit[13]. The hierarchy of identities was concentric (after Smith): the lowest level was the "local-dwellers," the middle level was the land-based consciousness (Kyivans, Galicians, Chernihivians), and only the highest, weakest level was the all-Rus' one — and the local population was called "Rus'" mainly from outside, in dealings with foreigners[14].

That the land-based identity was real and acute is clear from the constant wars between the lands — Novgorodians against Suzdalians, Galicians against Kyivans. In such wars the chronicler calls the warriors of his own land "ours" and rejoices at the defeats of rival land-based communities[14]. These unifying processes, which in Europe led to overcoming fragmentation, were on Rus' interrupted by the Mongol invasion of the mid-13th century — which is why a Ukrainian late-medieval centralized state never took shape, and the "local-dweller" and "land-based" consciousnesses were preserved for a long time[15].

The completion of the formation of the Rus' identity

And yet it is precisely at the end of the 12th and during the 14th century, in the assessment of Ukrainian historians, that the formation of the Rus' identity on the Ukrainian lands is completed[16]. The specificity of Ukraine here is that not only the political factor worked (the overcoming of fragmentation) but also large-scale migrations: the importance of the migration waves caused by the advances of nomads was pointed out already by Mykhailo Hrushevsky[17].

The political side of this process was described by Mykhailo Braichevsky: within the bounds of the future Ukraine, two integration centers stood out — the western one (Galicia and Volhynia) and the eastern one (Chernihiv), whose spokesmen were the Romanovych and Olhovych dynasties, which competed for Kyiv and the legacy of Rus'[17]. The princes of these lands saw themselves as the continuers of the cause of the former Kyivan princes; according to Yaroslav Isaievych, the compilers of the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle regarded Halych as a "second Kyiv"[18]. An eloquent proof of this Rus' identity is the Ukrainian students at European universities at the end of the 15th century: by their allegiance they registered as "Lithuanians" or "Poles," but they called themselves Rusyns[19]. At the same time Dribnytsya honestly cautions that this identity encompassed mainly the elite, while the peasant mass remained "local-dweller"[19].

"Rus'/Rusyn" becomes the ethnonym of the Ukrainian lands

The most important thing for refuting the "one people" myth is to trace the ethnonym itself. Drawing on the works of the Ukrainian linguist Antin Hensiorsky (a researcher of the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle), Dribnytsya shows that from the end of the 10th and the beginning of the 11th century the name "Rus'" spread from the middle Dnipro to the neighboring lands — first the Chernihiv land, then Galicia, Volhynia, and even Transcarpathia, where Hungarian sources of the 12th century already speak of a "Rusyn march"[20][21]. Hensiorsky's conclusion is categorical: over the course of the 13th century the term "Rus'" in its ethnic sense encompassed all the south-western lands — the territories of present-day northern and western Ukraine — and there became established as an ethnic one[21].

Here too lies the key linguistic boundary between the Ukrainian "Rusyn" and the Russian "russky." "Rusyn" is a noun (a substantive), a native self-designation. Whereas "russky" was originally an adjective (an attributive: "russkie liudi," "Russian people"), which only later became substantivized, turning into a noun[22]. The ethnonym "rus, Rusyn" was on the Russian territories never a self-designation of the broad masses, and it entered the chancery language of Moscow late — and even then under the influence of the Kyivan (Kyiv-Mohyla) written school[22].

An ethnonym from the very beginning: the treaties of 911 and 944

That "Rus'" is an ethnonym, and not a later label, is clear already from the earliest sources. In the "Primary Chronicle" the name "Rus'/Rusyn" is recorded precisely as an ethnonym (not a politonym and not a toponym) from the 10th century — in the texts of the treaties with Byzantium of 911 and 944, and at first fixed only to the middle-Dnipro Rus' land[23]. The Russian researchers Belova and Petrukhin noticed a telling detail: in the preamble of the 911 treaty, Rus' (the princely retinue of Varangian origin) is still contrasted with the Slovenes, whereas in the 944 treaty this contrast is already gone — the name "Rus'" unites rather than divides[24]. It was precisely in this interval that the Dnipro Slavs and the Varangians merged into a single community; according to Oleksiy Tolochko, the chronicle formula "the Polianians, who are now called Rus'" explains why the mentions of the Polianians disappear so quickly: the Polianians were the first to adopt the name Rus'[24].

What this means

The unfolded picture of pre-modern identity demolishes the "one people" myth not with a slogan but with a method. To unite the local land-based communities of Ukrainian Rus' with the northern lands (the future Belarus and Russia) into a "single people" there were no grounds whatsoever — neither geographic, nor cultural, nor political, nor even a network of communications that would have made it possible[25]. Instead, "Rus'/Rusyn" became, at the end of the 12th and during the 13th century, the endoethnonym of precisely the population of present-day Ukraine — early compared with the English, the French, or the Russians. Therefore, Dribnytsya concludes, when in Moscow they repeat that Ukrainians are "russkie" and "we are one people," behind that phrase stands emptiness: it is enough to open even a basic textbook of ethnopolitology to see it[26]. Ukrainian identity is neither "artificial" nor "recent" — it has documented medieval roots that do not lead to Russia. More on the very term "Rus'" — in the articles "'There was no Kyivan Rus''" — the myth examined and how "Rus'" became "Russia"; on the modern nation-building of the 19th century — in the article is the Ukrainian nation "artificial".

The 1954 Transfer of Crimea: Was It Illegal?

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. "Crimea was transferred to Ukraine illegally" is the cornerstone of the Kremlin's justification for the 2014 annexation. Legally, this is a myth. The 1954 transfer of Crimea Oblast was carried out under all the Soviet procedures of the time: by three decrees of the Presidiums of the Supreme Soviets of the RSFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, and the USSR, together with synchronous amendments to the 1936 USSR Constitution, in which Crimea disappeared from Russia and appeared as part of Ukraine. Sevastopol was not separately "left Russian" — the category of "city of republican significance" did not even exist in 1954. And the 1992 resolution of the Russian parliament declaring the transfer "illegal" has no force over internationally recognized borders, which Russia itself confirmed in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and the 1997 Treaty on Friendship.

The Myth: "Khrushchev Illegally Gifted Crimea Away"

Russian propaganda presents the 1954 transfer of Crimea in two ways. The cruder one is the caricature of a "drunken Khrushchev" who "gifted Crimea away for a sack of potatoes." The more serious one, on which the legal justification of the annexation actually rests, is the claim that not all the procedures of Soviet legislation were followed: that the document was signed only by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, and that Sevastopol had a "separate status" and supposedly was not transferred at all.

To examine this myth, Vox Veritatis invited Andriy Magera — a specialist in constitutional law, a graduate of the law faculty of Lviv University, who worked for more than 14 years at the Central Election Commission of Ukraine (serving as its deputy chair from 2004 to 2018). His conclusion is unequivocal: such claims are "far from reality," because the 1954 process "began and concluded entirely legitimately, in compliance with all constitutional procedures"[1][4].

Three Decrees and Amendments to the 1936 Constitution

The transfer of Crimea Oblast was formalized not by one but by three decrees of the presidiums of the supreme soviets — of the RSFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, and the USSR[2]. The union decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR "On the Transfer of Crimea Oblast from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR" was adopted on 19 February 1954, and on 26 April 1954 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR confirmed it by a separate law.

It is precisely this law that closes the question of "procedure." It did not merely move the oblast from one republic to another — it introduced amendments to the 1936 USSR Constitution (Articles 22 and 23, which listed the oblasts of the RSFSR and the Ukrainian SSR by name): in the list of administrative units of the RSFSR, Crimea Oblast disappeared, while in the list of the Ukrainian SSR it appeared[3]. From then on, both Crimea and Sevastopol figured in the constitutional lists precisely as administrative parts of Soviet Ukraine, not Russia[15]. The "Stalin" Constitution, adopted on 5 December 1936 and in force until 1977, listed by name all the constituent parts of every union republic, so a change in a republic's composition automatically required a change in the constitutional text. That change was made. The transfer was therefore anchored at the highest — constitutional — level of all three constitutions: those of the RSFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, and the USSR[4].

"No Procedure — Therefore Illegal"? The Tail Doesn't Wag the Dog

The favorite counterargument of pro-Russian "legalists": no separate law spelling out, step by step, the procedure for transferring territory from one republic to another existed in Soviet law — and since there is no procedure, the transfer is "illegal."

Magera exposes the logical fallacy of this argument. Procedure derives from a foundation, not the other way around: "the tail cannot wag the dog's head." The absence of a detailed prescribed procedure does not make a constitutional norm "dead" — the norm operates regardless of whether a separate subordinate act was adopted to elaborate it[10]. Moreover, he stresses, even if the presidiums' decrees had not existed at all, and there had been only the amendments to the 1936 Constitution — the very fact that Crimea was constitutionally removed from Russia and constitutionally incorporated into Ukraine is "more than enough" to consider the procedure observed[11]. The transfer of territory was, incidentally, nothing unprecedented in the USSR: back in the 1920s, Taganrog, part of the Belgorod region, and the Starodub area were transferred from Soviet Ukraine to Soviet Russia — though under a different Constitution, which did not yet contain a list of oblasts by name[9].

Sevastopol: The 1948 Decree "Removed" Nothing

A separate knot of the myth is Sevastopol. The claim is that it had a "special status" and was not transferred to Ukraine. This is a misunderstanding.

The decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR of 29 October 1948 did indeed single out Sevastopol — but only as a separate administrative-economic center with its own budget, that is, a city financed as a separate line item, independently of Crimea Oblast. That is all[5]. The decree did not territorially remove Sevastopol from Crimea Oblast and changed nothing in its borders. The mere mention of a "city of republican subordination" in the text of the decree did not create a separate constitutional status: at the constitutional level, no such category existed in either 1948 or 1954 — the RSFSR constitutions of the time contained no list of such cities. This category received a clear constitutional definition only with the new republican constitutions of 1978 — and it was precisely then, on 20 April 1978, that the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR for the first time named by name two cities of republican subordination: Kyiv and Sevastopol[6][7]. In other words, Sevastopol was constitutionally fixed as "republican" already within the Ukrainian SSR, not within Russia.

Tellingly, this was acknowledged even by the Russian Foreign Ministry itself. Magera reads out the conclusion of Pastukhov, Russia's deputy foreign minister, prepared in 1996 at the request of the Federation Council: the 1948 decree did not single out Sevastopol from Crimea Oblast into a separate unit, so "the city of Sevastopol was transferred within Ukraine together with Crimea Oblast"[16]. That is, the Russian foreign-policy department asserted in writing exactly what the Ukrainian side did: Sevastopol was transferred together with Crimea in 1954.

The Karelo-Finnish SSR: When "Unconstitutional" Is About Russia

A separate proof of the inconsistency of the Kremlin's argument is the Karelo-Finnish SSR. It was created as the sixteenth union republic in 1940 (the same year the USSR annexed the Baltic states) and abolished in 1956, downgraded to an autonomy within the RSFSR[12].

Herein lies the paradox. If one is going to nitpick about "procedures," then the 1936 USSR Constitution provided for the power to create union republics but provided no mechanism to abolish them[13]. The abolition of the Karelo-Finnish SSR was carried out, in Magera's words, "in a crude, makeshift manner" — simply by rewriting a constitutional line. By the very logic with which Moscow declares the transfer of Crimea "unconstitutional," the abolition of an entire union republic within its own composition would also have to be recognized as an unconstitutional "coup"[14]. The argument meant to strike Ukraine in fact strikes Russia.

The 1992 Resolution of the Russian Parliament: Politics, Not Law

Already in the early 1990s, the Russian parliament began advancing territorial claims. As Dribnytsia recalls, in 1992 the Supreme Soviet of Russia (not yet the State Duma) declared that Crimea and Sevastopol had been "transferred illegally"[22]; in 1993 the Russian parliament separately proclaimed the "Russian status" of Sevastopol.

These acts have no legal force over internationally recognized borders — and the international community itself confirmed this. After the 1993 decision, the UN Security Council convened at Ukraine's initiative, where representatives of the Russian Foreign Ministry distanced themselves from the parliament, supporting the president's position, and the Security Council adopted a statement in support of Ukraine's territorial integrity and condemned the resolution of the Russian parliament. Boris Yeltsin himself publicly stated that he was "ashamed of such a decision."

Above all, Russia repeatedly and at the highest level itself recognized Ukraine's borders, including Crimea and Sevastopol. Already at the level of the Soviet republics, Ukraine and Russia mutually recognized each other's territorial integrity in 1990[8]. Then by the Budapest Memorandum of 5 December 1994, in which the Russian Federation undertook to respect Ukraine's independence, sovereignty, and existing borders. Then by the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership, signed on 31 May 1997 (in force since 1 April 1999), Article 2 of which directly enshrined mutual recognition of the inviolability of existing borders. A state cannot first recognize a neighbor's border by treaty and then invoke its own internal resolution to dispute that border.

Self-Determination: Why the 2014 "Referendum" Is a Legal Nullity

The Kremlin's last line of justification is that Crimea in 2014 supposedly "exercised the right to self-determination." Magera, drawing on sources of international law, shows why this does not work.

The right to self-determination is indeed enshrined in the 1945 UN Charter and in the 1966 International Covenants on Human Rights (Article 1 of each), yet no international treaty provides a clear legal definition of "nation"[19]. Furthermore, in a conflict between self-determination and a state's territorial integrity, international law gives preference to self-determination in only one case — for colonial peoples (as in the 1960 UN Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples)[20]. Crimea does not fall under this exception.

Hence the conclusion: the "referendum" in Crimea in March 2014 was a legal nullity for three reasons at once — there was no separate nation there that could exercise self-determination (and the Constitution of Ukraine prohibits the secession of any part of its territory); any vote under military occupation is unlawful by definition; and there did not even exist a law on local referendums, which only the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine has the right to adopt[21]. For more on the circumstances of the annexation, see the article "The Russo-Ukrainian War 2014".

Moreover, there was no "Russian" subject of self-determination in Crimea historically either: both the Karelo-Finnish SSR and the three Soviet constitutions (1924, 1936, 1977) equally guaranteed the free right to secede from the USSR only to the union republics[18] — Ukraine among them, but not Crimea as an autonomy.

What This Means

The legal myth of the "illegal transfer of Crimea" is not a neutral dispute about Soviet paperwork from 1954. It is the foundation on which the Kremlin built the justification for the armed annexation of 2014: first declare the border "illegal," then "correct a historical mistake" with tanks.

But the facts stand against this construction at every step. The 1954 transfer was carried out under all the procedures of the time and anchored at the constitutional level of three republics. Sevastopol was transferred together with Crimea — even the Russian Foreign Ministry acknowledged this. The resolutions of the Russian parliament of 1992–1993 have no force over the borders that Russia itself recognized by treaties in 1994 and 1997. And the 2014 "referendum" created no right — it merely documented occupation. As the interlocutor aptly put it, legitimacy is broader than the mere "letter": it encompasses both constitutionality and conformity with international law[17] — and by all three measures, what was illegal was not the 1954 transfer but the 2014 annexation.

Is Ukraine's 1991 Independence Legitimate?

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Kremlin narrative presents the 1991 independence as "illegitimate" and Ukraine itself as "an artificial entity with no legal basis." Legally, this is a myth. Independence was declared by the Act of 24 August 1991 — a document deliberately named an act in order to place the state's "birth certificate" above the current Constitution — and it was confirmed by a nationwide referendum on 1 December 1991, in which 90.32% voted "yes." Ukraine is the world-recognized legal successor of the Ukrainian SSR — that is, of a state that was a co-founder of the UN as far back as 1945. The dispute over "a new state versus the restoration of an old one" is a question of humanities interpretation, in which both answers are correct, not a gap in legitimacy.

The myth: "the 1991 independence had no legal basis"

Russian propaganda attacks the very foundation of Ukrainian statehood from two sides. The first is political: supposedly Ukraine "never existed," and 1991 was an accidental collapse that can be "rolled back." The second, which pro-Russian online "legalists" often resort to, is ostensibly juridical: the Act of Declaration of Independence is "some unclear sort of document," neither a law nor a resolution, so independence too was "drawn up incorrectly."

To unpack the legal side, Vox Veritatis turned to two legal specialists. Andriy Magera is a specialist in constitutional law who worked for over 14 years at the Central Election Commission (from 2004 to 2018 as its deputy chairman). Yevhen Ponomaryov is a practicing attorney from the Kharkiv region. Their shared conclusion: none of the "legal" objections renders independence illegitimate. As Ponomaryov notes, not a single revolution in the world has ever taken place in accordance with the Constitution in force at the time — and that does not strip its result of force[15].

Why an "act," not a law or a resolution

The first thing critics latch onto is the document's very form. And it is precisely here, Magera shows, that there was no oversight but a precise legal calculation.

On 24 August 1991, several options were considered in parliament. A resolution would not do: it is a subordinate legislative act, so the declaration of a state would have lower force than an ordinary law. An ordinary law would not do either: the Constitution of the Ukrainian SSR in force would stand above it. A law on amendments to the Constitution would place the document marking the state's birth merely on the same level as the Constitution. The solution, which Magera calls "truly brilliant," was proposed by one of the draft's authors, the dissident Levko Lukianenko: to name the document an act[1].

The logic is this: an act declaring statehood is more important even than the Constitution. Magera offers the analogy of a birth certificate: a person renews their passport every ten years, but the birth certificate stays unchanged for life. In the same way, Constitutions will change, but the Act of Declaration of Independence will remain in force "for as long as the Ukrainian state exists"[2]. In other words, the unusualness of the form is not a legal defect but a deliberate decision to place the Act above current legislation.

This view is not marginal. Ponomaryov cites a scholarly work by the legal scholar Berchenko (2020) on the Act and the Declaration within the doctrine of the constitutional bloc: the author is cautious regarding the Declaration of Sovereignty, but with respect to the Act of Declaration of Independence he acknowledges that its direct link to the Constitution is obvious — the Act is named directly in the preamble of the 1996 Constitution[18]. That is, the document did not "hang in midair" but is built into the very foundation of the current constitutional order.

The precedent that confirms it: an act of independence above the Constitution

That a document declaring independence can stand above the Constitution is no Ukrainian exotica. Magera cites the precedent of the Constitutional Court of Moldova: ruling on a language question, the court held that the provisions of Moldova's Declaration of Independence prevail over the corresponding provision of the Constitution[3].

That ruling (of 5 December 2013) framed the principle simply: the Declaration of Independence is the "primary legal and political basis" of the state, it has the force of a constitutional text, and in the event of a discrepancy between it and the Constitution, the Declaration takes precedence. In other words, an entire European constitutional jurisdiction officially recognized what Lukianenko had laid down in the Ukrainian case: the document — the state's "birth certificate" — is the highest legal act, not a dubious scrap of paper.

Declaration or restoration? Both answers are correct

A separate "hook" is the wording. Why does the Act say "declaration" rather than "restoration" of independence, as in the Baltic states? Does this mean Ukraine is a "new" state with no historical roots?

Magera dispels this false dilemma. Law is not mathematics: "2+2" here does not always have a single answer, and in the humanities several variants of the norm are possible. Therefore both those who speak of declaration and those who speak of restoration are right — there is no contradiction[4]. Ponomaryov puts it even more sharply: for him it is "both one and the other" — simultaneously a newly formed state and a continuation of the previous statehood[17].

So why did the Baltic states choose "restoration"? Because between 1918 and 1940 they had sovereign states recognized by Europe — so legally there was something to "restore," and that is precisely why the Baltics in the 1990s were not viewed "through Moscow's glasses"[5]. Lithuania went furthest of all: in the 1990 elections the democratic forces won, declared outright occupation within the USSR, and returned to the 1938 Constitution[21]. Ukraine did not take this path — and not by chance.

Lukianenko himself, according to Ponomaryov's account, first wrote "Act of Restoration," then crossed it out and corrected it to "declaration." He wanted "restoration" in order to link the new Ukraine to legal succession from the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR) and to recognize the occupation, as the Baltics did[22]. But this path carried a heavy legal price (more on that below), and parliament went with the formula of "declaration."

Legal succession vs. continuity: the UNR, the Ukrainian SSR, and why it matters

Here lies the key distinction on which the entire confusion rests. Continuity (from the Latin for "uninterruptedness") in international law means that a state continues to exist despite a change of name, form of government, or the secession of parts of its territory[7]. Magera's classic examples: Iran remained Iran after the 1978 revolution, changing only its form of government; Ethiopia remained itself even after Eritrea's secession in 1993[8].

Does Ukraine have continuity with respect to the Ukrainian SSR? Magera believes it does not — because the Ukrainian SSR was not a full-fledged state by every criterion: it was a federal subject with truncated sovereignty, whose legislation had to conform to that of the Union, and above everything stood the Constitution of the USSR. Hence the correct term is quasi-state[11]. Ukraine is its legal successor, and this manifested itself concretely: the Verkhovna Rada elected back under the Ukrainian SSR in 1990 and the local councils worked until 1994, while the 1978 Constitution and a number of Ukrainian SSR codes remained in force right up until new legislation was adopted[10]. Ponomaryov adds that, formally, the government in 1991 did not change at all: it remained the same, largely communist, Verkhovna Rada (which itself banned the Communist Party), without re-elections — a "soft flow" of one state into another took place, with Ukrainian SSR institutions surviving right up to the 1996 Constitution[17].

And what about the UNR? Here the succession is spiritual, not legal. The Ukrainian People's Republic in exile legally and de facto ceased to exist; in 1992 its last president, Mykola Plaviuk, handed over the state regalia to Leonid Kravchuk — the seal, the flag, the documents. So historians see present-day Ukraine simultaneously as the legal successor of Soviet Ukraine and as the moral, spiritual heir of the UNR of 1917–1921[16]. (For more on that first attempt at statehood, see the article "The Ukrainian Revolution of 1917".)

So why was legal succession not formalized directly from the UNR, as Lukianenko wanted? Because it would have created enormous problems. Ponomaryov recalls: the 2019 bill on succession from the UNR was rejected — the Verkhovna Rada's conclusion noted that proving 70 years of occupation is difficult (millions had sworn an oath of loyalty to the USSR), and, most importantly, Ukraine had already recognized itself as a continuator of the Ukrainian SSR with respect to international agreements and a co-founder of the UN in 1945[23]. To renounce that legacy would have meant casting doubt on its own UN membership from the moment of the organization's founding.

Ukraine in the UN since 1945: a legacy, not an artifice

UN membership itself is the strongest fact against the myth of an "artificial entity." The Ukrainian SSR was a co-founder of the United Nations as far back as 1945. Magera recalls a curious detail of the founding: of all the founding states, only two entities were not sovereign states — the Belarusian SSR and the Ukrainian SSR. Stalin pressed for all the union republics to become founders; Roosevelt replied that in that case all 50 American states would become co-founders as well — and Moscow's appetites "shrank a little"[9].

The consequence of this for 1991 is direct. On the official UN website, Ponomaryov notes, there is a mark next to Ukraine (as there is next to Russia) that explains only a change of name of the state from the Ukrainian SSR to Ukraine — without any "termination" and "new accession"[20]. That is, for the world, Ukraine as a subject of international law has existed continuously since 1945 — the name changed, not the state. This directly refutes the thesis of an "artificial entity created in 1991": on the international stage, 1991 was not a birth from scratch but a change of nameplate over a seat already occupied at the UN.

The legal "subtlety" that pro-Russian commentators play on likewise does not alter the essence. The Law "On the Legal Succession of Ukraine" of 12 September 1991, Ponomaryov stresses, does not contain a direct provision that "Ukraine is the legal successor of the Ukrainian SSR" — it rather regulates succession with respect to the obligations of the former Union in certain parts[19]. But this is not a gap; it is the flip side of continuity: there was no need to separately "inherit" the Ukrainian SSR, because the organs of the state were not interrupted — the same Verkhovna Rada simply continued its work under a new name. Tellingly, Russia's own mirror-image move is far weaker: the 2020 Russian Constitution introduced a formula about being the "continuator of the USSR" — but, if read carefully, only with respect to international treaties, obligations, assets, and property, and not the territory of the former republics (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia)[14]. That is, even Moscow did not dare to legally declare itself the "continuation" of the USSR in full — and therefore has no legal grounds to dispute its neighbors' borders.

Why the world recognized Ukraine after the referendum, not after the Act

Another argument of the skeptics: if independence was "real," why did states recognize it not immediately after 24 August? Magera explains, and the answer is again not in the myth's favor.

After August 1991, there were no recognitions either in September or in October — the first came only in December[12]. There are two reasons. First, foreign-policy inertia: Ukraine was viewed "through Moscow's glasses," as "some kind of Russia, only a little different." Second — the all-Union referendum of 17 March 1991, in which more than 70% of the Ukrainian SSR's residents voted to preserve the USSR. That is precisely why the referendum of 1 December 1991 was critically needed: it nullified the legal consequences of the March all-Union vote and became, in Magera's words, a "reinforced-concrete" basis for recognizing Ukraine[12].

Legally, this referendum was impeccable. The Ukrainian SSR's referendum law (July 1991) used the concept of an "all-Ukrainian and local referendum"; the resolution declaring independence scheduled a "republican" referendum — but these are synonyms: Ukraine is a Republic, so "all-Ukrainian," "republican," and "referendum of Ukraine" are one and the same[6]. The result is well known: 90.32% "yes" with high turnout. Independence was given not only by the will of parliament but also by the people's direct expression of will — and it was after it that recognitions began to pour in (Poland and Canada as early as 2 December).

The very end of the USSR is also telling. As Serhii Plokhy describes in his book "The Last Empire," even Boris Yeltsin hoped to the last to preserve the Union — and was stunned when, in the Belovezha Forest, Kravchuk invoked the result of the referendum and declared that he "had no right to back down"[24]. Ukraine's independence buried the USSR not on anyone's whim, but on the basis of the vote of 90% of its citizens.

"Citizenship out of nowhere"? No — a transfer

A smaller but popular objection: supposedly the new state's citizenship "came out of nowhere." Magera names the legal mechanism: a transfer. From the moment independence was declared, all USSR citizens who permanently resided on the territory of Ukraine became its citizens automatically — without applications, decrees, or petitions, simply by virtue of the new state's emergence[13]. This is a standard instrument of international law (alongside option, filiation, and naturalization), not an improvisation. So there is nothing "unclear" about this citizenship either.

What this means

The Kremlin myth of "illegitimate" independence is not an academic dispute about the paperwork of 1991. It is a tool: first to declare Ukrainian statehood "a mistake without a legal basis," and then to "correct" it by force. The same logic as in the myth of the "unlawful" transfer of Crimea, and the same that feeds the war since 2014.

But the facts stand against it at every step. The "act" form is not a defect but a deliberate decision to place the document above the Constitution, confirmed even by the precedent of a neighboring country. The dispute over "declaration or restoration" is a question of interpretation, in which both answers are correct, not a gap in legitimacy. Ukraine is the world-recognized legal successor of the Ukrainian SSR and a co-founder of the UN since 1945 — that is, a subject with uninterrupted international continuity. And, most importantly, independence was given not by parliament alone but by 90% of citizens at the referendum of 1 December 1991. What is illegitimate here is not the Act of 1991, but the attempt to deny the choice of an entire people.

The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–1921: a state before the USSR

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Kremlin's refrain is that "a Ukrainian state never existed, and modern Ukraine was created by the Bolsheviks (or even in 1991)." This turns the chronology on its head. Before the Soviet Ukrainian SSR ever arose on Ukrainian soil, Ukrainians built states of their own in 1917–1921: the Ukrainian People's Republic, the Ukrainian State of Hetman Skoropadskyi, the West Ukrainian People's Republic. The UNR proclaimed independence in the Fourth Universal of 22 January 1918, and a year later, on 22 January 1919, the UNR and the ZUNR united through the Act of Zluka. The Bolsheviks did not create this statehood — they conquered it.

The myth: "the state of Ukraine was invented by the Bolsheviks (or in 1991)"

In a street debate, a Russian-speaking interlocutor articulates a widespread thesis: the state of Ukraine, supposedly, appeared only in 1991; before that there was merely the Soviet Ukrainian SSR — and Ukrainians had no statehood of their own before then[1]. From here it is one step to the Kremlin slogan "Lenin/the Bolsheviks created Ukraine," which Vox Veritatis examines separately in the article "Did the Bolsheviks 'invent' Ukraine?".

The problem is that between "the old empire" and "1991" — and all the more so before the Ukrainian SSR — lies an entire era of state-building that historians call the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921. It is there, and not in a Soviet decree, that the root of modern Ukrainian statehood lies.

February 1917: the revolution and the Central Rada

Ukrainian statehood of 1917–1921 begins not with the Third Universal but half a year earlier — with the February Revolution. After the Russian Empire fell, power in Petrograd passed to the Provisional Government, and dozens of local bodies of authority arose across its former territory. In Kyiv, Ukrainian political parties created their own representative body — the Ukrainian Central Rada, which acted in effect as a Ukrainian parliament[10].

The Central Rada arose on 4 (17) March 1917; it was headed by the historian Mykhailo Hrushevskyi. This was a body meant to defend the interests of Ukrainians — for the time being, within Russia[11]. In other words, Ukrainian self-government took shape almost immediately after the fall of the empire, long before the Bolshevik coup.

The Universals and the bargaining with the Provisional Government

The Central Rada set out its vision in the Universals. By the First Universal (10 (23) June 1917) it proclaimed the autonomy of Ukraine — but within a democratic, federative Russia, rather than as a secession[12]. The Provisional Government, however, wanted to see Russia as democratic yet centralized, without a federal structure — hence the prolonged bargaining between Kyiv and Petrograd.

Dribnytsia corrects a common confusion in passing: the Provisional Government was headed first not by Alexander Kerensky but by Prince Georgy Lvov; Kerensky became premier only in July 1917[13]. (The video mentions "June" — Kerensky took over the government at the turn of June and July by the old style, in July by the new.)

A compromise was nevertheless found. At the end of June 1917 (29 June / 12 July), a governmental delegation headed by Kerensky and Irakli Tsereteli arrived in Kyiv. As a result of the negotiations, on 3 (16) July 1917 the Central Rada adopted the Second Universal: the Provisional Government for the first time recognized the Central Rada as a regional body of power — in effect, the parliament of Ukraine[14]. At the same time, in June 1917, a government of its own arose — the General Secretariat headed by Volodymyr Vynnychenko, while the Central Rada itself continued to be led by Hrushevskyi[15]. Thus Ukraine, even before the proclamation of the UNR, had both a parliament and a government recognized by the central authority of the former empire.

All of this was struck out by the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd. Soviet Russia did not recognize the Central Rada and launched a war against it: some 60,000 of its troops, under the command of Mikhail Muravyov, invaded the territory of Left-Bank Ukraine, captured Kharkiv, and advanced on Kyiv[16]. It was in these conditions that the Central Rada proclaimed first the UNR and then independence.

Why there was no army: autonomists versus independentists

Here lies the root of the chief weakness of the Central Rada era — the absence of a regular army. The reason was not accidental but ideological. The majority of the Central Rada consisted of Ukrainian Social Democrats, who saw Ukraine as an autonomy within a democratic federative Russia — and an autonomous state, by the legal thinking of the time, ought not even to have an army of its own[27]. Those who insisted on independence and a separate military — above all Mykola Mikhnovskyi and his like-minded allies (later the independentist camp would also be joined by Viacheslav Lypynskyi) — remained a minority[27]. So when Soviet Russia struck, there was almost nothing with which to defend: the UNR proclaimed independence only in the Fourth Universal and already under the pressure of invasion, rather than in advance. This is not "the weakness of the Ukrainian idea" in general, but a concrete political miscalculation by the autonomist majority — a lesson that the eras of the Hetmanate and the Directorate paid for in blood.

The collapse of two empires and the rise of the UNR

The First World War destroyed both empires that divided the Ukrainian lands — the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian. On the territory of nine provinces of the former Russian Empire, the Ukrainian Central Rada, by the Third Universal of 7 (20) November 1917, proclaimed the Ukrainian People's Republic[2]. At that point the UNR was still conceived as an autonomous part of a future non-Bolshevik, federative Russia — the empire had collapsed, but the form of a new common state was still being sought.

The Bolshevik coup in Petrograd and the war that Soviet Russia launched against Kyiv struck out that prospect. Therefore, on 22 January 1918, the Central Rada adopted the Fourth Universal, by which the UNR was proclaimed an independent, sovereign state[3]. In other words, an independent Ukrainian state was proclaimed years before the Bolsheviks took control of Ukraine — and in defiance of them, not by their will.

The Treaty of Brest: Soviet Russia itself recognized the UNR

The young republic needed protection against the Bolshevik offensive and sought a way out of the world war. On 9 February 1918, the UNR delegation signed a separate Brest-Litovsk treaty with the Central Powers — the first international treaty of independent Ukraine. Under it, German and Austro-Hungarian troops entered Ukraine and drove out the Bolshevik units.

A telling detail: under the separate Brest-Litovsk treaty that Soviet Russia itself signed on 3 March 1918, Moscow formally renounced Ukraine and recognized the UNR[5]. That is, the Bolsheviks legally recognized the Ukrainian state as a fact — long before the Ukrainian SSR.

The German ally: a rescuer that became a problem

The Treaty of Brest brought the UNR not only international recognition but also real military force. Around 450,000 German and Austro-Hungarian troops entered the Ukrainian lands, while the Bolshevik forces at that moment numbered only 40,000–60,000 — a tenfold superiority for the allies. The Red units retreated, and they were driven out even beyond the borders of present-day Ukraine[17]. This very balance of forces shows the scale of events: the young republic was rescued not by "a handful of Petliurists" but by a full-fledged international coalition with a treaty of its own.

The alliance, however, had a price. Under the Treaty of Brest, the UNR was obliged to supply the Central Powers with food, but the Central Rada was unable to do so — it simply had no state apparatus of coercion: neither a police force nor a tax system with which to extract grain from the peasants[18]. The German command then went over the head of the Ukrainian authorities. Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn, who headed the German troops in Ukraine, over the head of the Central Rada issued an appeal to the peasants — ordering them to sow, with the harvest to become the property of the German army. This provoked a direct conflict between the Central Rada and the German command[19]: the formal ally began to behave like an occupation administration.

It was precisely this conflict, and not "the weakness of the Ukrainian idea," that drew a line under the era of the Central Rada. On 29 April 1918, with German support, a coup took place: an armed company of German soldiers entered the Rada's premises and dispersed the deputies[20]. Ukraine did not disappear — it changed its form of government.

The Hetmanate: a coup, but not the disappearance of the state

That coup brought to power Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, and the UNR gave way to the Ukrainian State (the Hetmanate)[4]. This was a change of the form of government, not the disappearance of statehood: its own administration, army, and diplomacy functioned, and its own money was printed. When Germany lost the war, in the autumn of 1918 power returned to the republicans.

The ZUNR and the Act of Zluka: unification on 22 January 1919

In the western Ukrainian lands, the collapse of Austria-Hungary gave rise to a second Ukrainian state. As a result of the November Uprising, on 1 November 1918 Ukrainian authority arose in Lviv, and on 13 November the Ukrainian National Rada adopted the fundamental law of the West Ukrainian People's Republic, with its capital in Lviv. (In the video debate Dribnytsia gives the date "13 October 1918" — this is a slip: the ZUNR was proclaimed in November 1918.)

On 22 January 1919, on St. Sophia Square in Kyiv, the UNR and the ZUNR ceremonially united — this is the Act of Zluka, the proclamation of a united Ukraine. The ZUNR entered the UNR as a Western Region with autonomous rights[7]. Two Ukrainian states, on their own, without any Bolshevik or imperial intermediary, united into one — and this is an act of sovereign state will.

War on every front

The Ukrainian states arose surrounded by enemies. From its very first day the ZUNR fought for Lviv and Galicia on several fronts — above all against Poland, which had just restored its independence and laid claim to the same lands[9]. The Ukrainian Galician Army was led by the UNR general Mykhailo Omelianovych-Pavlenko[8]. The Dnieper UNR of the Directorate fought simultaneously against Soviet Russia and against Denikin's White Volunteer Army; the stocks of weaponry left over from the Austro-Hungarian army were running out, while Poland was generously financed by France.

Finding itself in a dead end, the head of the Directorate, Symon Petliura, entered into a forced alliance with Poland: under the Treaty of Warsaw (21–24 April 1920), Poland recognized the independence of the UNR, and the armies became allies against the Bolsheviks. In 1920 Ukrainian and Polish troops fought together against Soviet Russia[6], but the Soviet-Polish war did not end in the UNR's favor: under the Peace of Riga of 1921, Poland recognized Soviet Ukraine, and the Treaty of Warsaw lapsed.

Neighboring state projects: real and stage-prop

The UNR, the Hetmanate, and the ZUNR were not isolated flashes but part of a continuous map of state-building that covered the former imperial borderlands after 1917. Distinguishing within it the genuine national states from the Bolshevik stage-props is important not least because today's Kremlin propaganda selectively "inherits" precisely the latter.

A real national project, alongside the Ukrainian one, was the Crimean People's Republic. Practically simultaneously with the UNR, it was proclaimed by the Crimean Tatars; its leaders, headed by Noman Çelebicihan — a lawyer and mufti — saw Crimea as an autonomy within a democratic federative Russia[21]. The Bolsheviks shot Çelebicihan as early as the beginning of 1918, and the poem he had written, "Ant etkenmen," later became the national anthem of the Crimean Tatars. This is a fact inconvenient for the narrative of "Crimea has always been Russian": there was a statehood of its own on the peninsula — a Tatar one, neither Russian nor "no one's."

By contrast, the Bolshevik "republics" of the same period were for the most part paper formations with a political purpose. The most telling is the Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih Soviet Republic (February–March 1918), the "brainchild" of the Bolshevik Artem (Fyodor Sergeyev). He proposed cutting up states not by a national but by an economic principle — uniting the Donetsk coal basin and the Kryvyi Rih iron-ore basin; this "republic" had essentially neither a government nor a militia of its own, lasted a few weeks, and even Lenin did not support the idea[22]. A detail that strikes directly at the present day: the pro-Russian "DPR" of 2014 declared itself the heir of precisely this DKR of 1918 — that is, of a project that was neither a state, nor "Russian," nor viable, and which the Bolshevik leadership itself rejected.

Equally instrumental was the Taurida Soviet Republic: the Bolsheviks created it deliberately, to show that Crimea was "not Ukraine," at the moment when the UNR signed the Treaty of Brest and German and Austro-Hungarian troops were entering the Ukrainian lands[23]. Alongside it, the Odesa Soviet Republic (which was largely the work of anarchists) and others held out briefly — all short-lived and mostly nominal[23]. The common denominator: these "republics" arose not from the will of the local population but as moves in someone else's game — to cut territory off from Ukraine.

In a category of its own falls the Makhnovshchyna. Nestor Makhno — an anarcho-communist — did not build a state on principle: he fought against all the state formations in southern Ukraine (both against the Hetmanate and against the Directorate, with which he first concluded an agreement and then broke it), trying in his own way to defend the interests of the peasantry of Zaporizhzhia and the Huliaipole region. This is not "a form of Ukrainian statehood" but its anarchist negation — an important backdrop to the era, but not a state project.

Crimea and "Greater Ukraine": what the UNR sought — and what it did not

It is worth separately dispelling two opposite myths around Crimea — and the very course of events refutes both. On the one hand, the Central Rada did not lay claim to Crimea: the Third Universal explicitly delineated the UNR by nine provinces without Crimea. Only at the beginning of 1919, with the change of the head of government, did a view emerge (and even then not among everyone) that Crimea ought to belong to Ukraine[24]. On the other hand, certain attempts to gain a foothold on the peninsula did take place: the well-known campaign of Colonel Petro Bolbochan at the beginning of 1918, when War Minister Zhukovskyi gave him only an oral order to occupy Crimea ahead of the Germans. Bolbochan drove the Soviet troops out of there with a bayonet attack, but with the arrival of the German units the Ukrainian detachment had to be withdrawn[25]. That is, Crimea during the revolutionary era was an arena where the Ukrainian state rather tried to act than possessed it as something "originally its own."

Kuban in this story is not an abstract "ethnic map" but a real state project that was to unite with Ukraine. In parallel with the UNR, the Black Sea Cossacks (descendants of the Zaporozhians) proclaimed the Kuban People's Republic, and on 22 January / 16 February 1918 its Rada adopted a resolution to join Ukraine on a federative basis. During the Hetmanate era, direct negotiations between the government of Hetman Skoropadskyi and the Kuban People's Republic (as well as with the Crimean government of Suleiman Sulkevich) were under way about the entry of Kuban and Crimea into the Ukrainian State[28]. The union failed only because the Ukrainian State fell in the autumn of 1918, and the Kuban government was later dispersed by the White general Denikin, for whom "a single and indivisible Russia" excluded any Ukrainian Kuban[28]. That is, the Ukrainian lands beyond the Don are not an "imperial appetite" of modern Ukraine but an interrupted state union of the revolutionary era.

The notion of "a Greater Ukraine from Slovakia to Kuban" also has a concrete, verifiable origin — and it is not a modern fake. The map that periodically surfaces online (with Kuban, the Starodub region, the Kursk region, the Voronezh region, southern Belarus, and Crimea) is the project of the UNR delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919: a vision of Ukraine within ethnic borders, that is, where the Ukrainian population lived compactly[26]. The conference was dividing up postwar Europe, but the Ukrainian delegations (the UNR and the ZUNR, which moreover acted separately) were effectively not admitted to it — and this "wish" remained on paper[26]. This is proof neither of "imperial appetites" of Ukraine nor of the "invented" nature of its borders, but the ordinary way of the era of asserting the boundaries of a young state on an ethnic principle — exactly as all its neighbors did.

The pogroms of the revolutionary era: an honest reckoning

The revolutionary era also has its dark side, which can be neither concealed nor shifted onto others' shoulders alone. In 1918–1921, the Ukrainian lands were swept by a wave of Jewish pogroms — one of the most massive anti-Jewish catastrophes in Europe before the Holocaust. Modern scholarship counts at least around 31,000 documented dead in more than a thousand pogroms (the statistics of Nokhem Gergel, 1928), and taking into account deaths from wounds, hunger, and disease, the estimates reach around 100,000 killed. The higher figures (150,000–200,000) that occasionally appear are impressionistic estimates rather than a verified count. To stay silent about this would mean repeating the very method that Vox Veritatis exposes in others.

The first thing an honest history must say: the pogroms were carried out by different forces, and not only "alien" ones. Jewish shtetls were ravaged by Denikin's White Guards, by Red Army soldiers, by independent peasant otaman-"fathers" — and by part of the forces nominally subordinate to the UNR. By Gergel's classic count, about 40% of the pogroms fall to formations associated with the Directorate; the rest to otamans (≈29%), Denikin's forces (≈17–20%), and the Red Army (≈9%)[29]. It is fundamentally important what those 40% mean: not "the state policy of the UNR," but the collapse of military control — the pogroms were carried out by undisciplined units, nominally loyal to a government that at the same time granted Jews an autonomy unprecedented until then. The historian acknowledges this in the video interview as well: the UNR army was "unequivocally involved" in the pogroms, though "Petliura was opposed to this"[30].

For the official position of the Ukrainian authorities was the opposite of the pogroms. The first UNR was created by parties — Ukrainian Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries — in whose programs there was no antisemitism[31]. On 22 January 1918, the same day as the Fourth Universal, the Central Rada adopted the Law on National-Personal Autonomy: Jews, Poles, and Russians received the right to their own national self-government, schools, and publications in their native languages. Under the Directorate's government a Ministry of Jewish Affairs was established — one of the first such departments in world state practice (it was headed by Moisei Zilberfarb, later by Wolf Latsky-Bertholdi), and the first Ukrainian banknotes bore inscriptions in three languages — Ukrainian, Russian, and Hebrew[32]. This is not retrospective rhetoric but institutions laid into the very foundation of the republic.

The bloodiest episode at the same time poses the question of responsibility most sharply. On 15 February 1919 in Proskuriv (now Khmelnytskyi), the otaman Ivan Semesenko, commander of a brigade bearing Petliura's name, after suppressing a Bolshevik uprising incited his soldiers against the Jewish population: in a single day around 1,500, by some estimates up to 1,700 people, perished[33]. Russian propagandists ask for years: "why did Petliura not punish Semesenko?" The answer is more complex than the convenient myth. Petliura issued orders against pogroms (in particular an army order of August 1919, which directed that pogromists be brought before a court as traitors), but in the conditions of complete anarchy in 1919–1920 — when the UNR army, the Poles, the Galician Army, the Entente forces, Denikin's troops, and the Bolsheviks were all fighting on Ukrainian territory at once — he could not realistically control the otamans[34]. The UNR ultimately arrested Semesenko himself and shot him by the verdict of a military court in 1920.

Hence the conclusion that modern scholarship shares: the Soviet cliché "Petliura — the chief pogromist" is false — there is no personal order from him to stage pogroms; but there is a real responsibility for not always and not promptly stopping them[34]. The historian Yuriy Mytrofanenko, a specialist on the otamanshchyna, demonstrates that the pogroms of 1919 were for the most part the work of uncontrolled otamans, a "peasant vendetta" of an era of collapsing authority, and not a policy of the UNR[35]. A telling counterpoint: the Galician Army of the ZUNR, where discipline was preserved, carried out no organized pogroms on the territory under its control (and the Lviv pogrom of November 1918 was staged by Polish military and civilians already after the Ukrainian forces had withdrawn)[36]. Where the state held, the security of minorities held too; where it collapsed, banditry and antisemitism gained the upper hand.

Why this matters for the article's subject. The Kremlin narrative uses the pogroms in reverse — to portray Ukrainian statehood as "Petliurist antisemitism" and to deny its legitimacy. An honest history does otherwise: it acknowledges the crimes openly, but distinguishes the official position of the republic (autonomy, a ministry, orders against pogroms) from the crimes of uncontrolled units in an era of anarchy — and does not pin all the blame on "alien" armies alone. This is the same criterion of truth by which Vox Veritatis examines the instrumentalization of the memory of the Holocaust and Ukrainian Righteous Among the Nations: the past does not become brighter through silence — it becomes more honest through completeness.

What this means

The Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921 in the end did not hold on to independence — the Bolsheviks militarily conquered the greater part of Ukraine and founded on it the Ukrainian SSR, which in 1922 entered the USSR. But the defeat of a state is no proof of its non-existence. Over those years Ukrainians proclaimed independence (the Fourth Universal, 22.01.1918), unification (the Act of Zluka, 22.01.1919), signed international treaties recognized even by Soviet Russia, and had governments, armies, and money of their own.

That is why the thesis "the Bolsheviks created the state of Ukraine" is false by its very logic: one cannot "create" what one first had to conquer and whose independence one had already recognized on paper. The Bolsheviks did not give Ukraine its statehood — they took away the statehood that already existed. Exactly how they later inverted this history, turning a conquest into a "creation," is covered in the adjacent analysis of the role of the Bolsheviks; and the heir of the revolutionary statehood in Transcarpathia is covered in the article "Carpatho-Ukraine 1939".

Between Rus' and the Cossacks: the Lithuanian–Polish era

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Kremlin's scheme of "from Kyivan Rus' — straight to Russia" erases several centuries. In reality, after Rus', the Ukrainian lands of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries belonged not to Moscow but to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland — with European law and self-governing towns. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Moscow competed for the Rus' inheritance, and Moscow acquired those lands by war, not by inheritance. The same goes for the Cossack state: Moscow was merely one of several possible suzerains (alongside the Ottoman sultan), and the Hetmanate and the Sich were ultimately dismantled by the decrees of Catherine II — hence the myths such as "Kyiv for four carts of silver."

Not Moscow, but Central Europe

After the mid-fourteenth century, the Ukrainian lands entered not the Muscovite but the Central European political sphere. Galicia and part of Podillia passed to the Kingdom of Poland (formalized from 1434 as the Ruthenian and Podolian voivodeships), while Volhynia, Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Eastern Podillia passed to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; the south and east remained under the rule of the Golden Horde[1]. This was a living, settled space with its own administration — not an "emptiness" between Rus' and Russia, as the imperial narrative presents it.

Lithuania and Moscow: competing for the Rus' inheritance

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was to a large extent a Ruthenian state by culture (the Ruthenian language, the Ruthenian legal and cultural heritage). And it was precisely over these Rus' lands that the Grand Duchy competed with the Grand Duchy of Moscow. The conflict was so acute that at the beginning of the sixteenth century Lithuania lost roughly one-third of its territory as a result of a series of wars lost to Moscow; not even dynastic marriages between the rulers settled the matter[2].

Hence the key conclusion: Moscow did not "inherit" the Rus' lands — it acquired them by war, competing with Lithuania. This shatters the myth of Moscow as the sole natural heir of Rus' (more on this in "How Rus' Became Russia").

The nobility as the political nation

The political nation of the era was the nobility (szlachta): it was the nobility that decided the major questions, while the peasantry and townsfolk had almost no voice. Society was estate-based, yet not entirely closed — a certain mobility existed: some townsfolk of Lviv, for example, managed to cross into the noble estate[3].

European law and legal pluralism

The Ukrainian lands lived under European law. The Statute of Wiślica became the basis of "Crown law" for the Ruthenian and Podolian voivodeships, and the towns enjoyed Magdeburg law. Moreover, a striking legal pluralism prevailed here: in Kamianets-Podilskyi, three urban jurisdictions operated simultaneously — Magdeburg, Ruthenian, and Armenian — each with its own law within a single town[4]. This was a European, multiethnic legal order centuries before "Russia" appeared.

Not an emptiness, but continuity of the elite

Why, then, is this period so easily portrayed as a "failure"? Because sources about it are scarce — and it is precisely on this scarcity that the imperial scheme feeds. As the historian Serhii Olefir notes, up to the mid-thirteenth century there existed a Rus' state; with the arrival of the Mongols, Lithuania, Poland, and Muscovy appear on the historical maps of Ukraine — while Ukraine's own statehood seemingly vanishes, and of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries "we cannot say for certain what was there," because written sources are lacking[5].

But continuity is provided not by the state, but by the elite. The Rus' elite did not go anywhere — it began to serve new overlords (Lithuanian, Polish) while remaining in place: the Rurikid lines continued to rule, just as in Europe foreign dynasties ruled local lands (for example, German dynasties on the British throne). If one looks not at the coat of arms of the state but at this elite and population of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, one sees continuity — at first common-Slavic, and then properly Ukrainian[6]. This is the very soil from which the Cossacks would grow — not a "no man's land" between two "Russes."

How the label was rewritten, not the substance

It is telling how mechanically the imperial scheme has eaten its way even into museum captions. Olefir recalls a concrete case: Soviet museum captions were thoroughly Russo-centric — in the early 2000s they still spoke of the "formation of the Russian centralized state of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries" on Ukrainian lands. Later the captions were redone — but often the word "Russian" was simply swapped for "Ukrainian": now the visitor reads about the "formation of the Ukrainian centralized state of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries"[7]. Changing the label without changing the flawed frame leaves the same error in place: an anachronistic scheme of a "centralized state" is imposed on the Ukrainian lands of this period, whereas in reality they lived under different political and legal systems — those of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland, with European law.

The Cossacks: not an "exit," but a search for a place in Europe

It was from this European soil that the Cossacks grew — and their state, too, arose not as a "reunification with Russia" but within the Commonwealth's system. Modern historiography describes the Khmelnytsky uprising of 1648 as a "Cossack revolution": the Cossacks did not intend to leave the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth but were seeking a place for themselves within its political structure — the right to self-government, so that the Polish authorities would not interfere in the lands under Cossack control[8]. By the Treaty of Zboriv (1649), a Cossack state effectively came into being — the Zaporozhian Host; after the defeat at Berestechko (1651), the rights of the Cossacks were curtailed[9].

Then a purely European logic of vassal–seigneurial relations came into play: if the lord does not protect the interests of the vassal, the vassal has the right to pass to another lord. Such a lord was found in the person of the Muscovite tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (the Articles of March 1654) — but one could equally have been found in the person of the Ottoman sultan: Khmelnytsky did in fact accept Ottoman suzerainty (1651), and the sultan (Mehmed IV) recognized him as a vassal ruler of the Moldavian type[10]. In other words, Moscow was one of several possible suzerains, not a "natural center of gravity"; more on the act itself in the article "Pereiaslav 1654".

Division along the Dnipro and the myth of the "purchased Kyiv"

The military rivalry over the Cossack lands continued until 1686 — the so-called Eternal Peace, which divided the Ukrainian lands along the Dnipro: the left bank passed to Muscovy, the right bank to the Commonwealth[11]. To this is attached a widespread Russian trope: that "Kyiv was bought from the Poles for four carts of gold and silver." A trifling detail explains the mechanism: Kyiv lies on the right bank and should have gone to Poland, but Moscow negotiated a compensation — and kept the city for itself[12].

The reality looks even less like a "purchase" than even this retelling suggests. Kyiv had been under Muscovite control already since the Truce of Andrusovo of 1667 (formally "temporarily"), and the Eternal Peace of 1686 merely secured it for Moscow permanently — in exchange for a monetary compensation to the Commonwealth (about 146,000 rubles), and the Polish Sejm never even ratified this treaty. "Four carts of gold" is a folkloric formula, not a fact: what is meant is a diplomatic compensation within the framework of a peace treaty, not a marketplace deal in which a city can be "bought."

Two different states, not "runaway serfs"

The imperial narrative reduces the Cossacks to a band of "runaway serfs" — and obscures the fact that this concerned two separate state structures. The Zaporozhian Host (the north — the Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Zhytomyr regions) existed as a state from 1649 to 1764; the Lower Zaporozhian Host, that is, the Zaporozhian Sich (the south), was a separate territory and order, from the mid-sixteenth century until 1775. Both were abolished by Catherine II[13]. The last kosh otaman of the Sich, Petro Kalnyshevsky, was exiled to the Solovki, where he lived to a great old age (by traditional estimates, about 112 years); and in the Hetmanate the very title of hetman was abolished under Kyrylo Rozumovsky, the regimental-company order was liquidated, and the documents were carried off to St. Petersburg[14].

Soviet historiography did indeed emphasize the flight of peasants from serfdom — and that happened too. But this is only part of the picture: the Sich was formed above all as a military-estate community (its backbone was the petty nobility, and only later did townsfolk and peasants flee there) with elective offices — a kind of "democracy of the early modern period"[15]. This was not a "wild steppe of fugitives" but a self-governing structure of the European type — the same legal gene as the Magdeburg towns and the Commonwealth's noble tradition.

The Cossacks were a full-fledged estate with their own rights and obligations. A registered Cossack paid the state not in money but with a "tax of blood" — he fought, and in exchange was exempted from the direct taxes and state-wide obligations that fell upon the nobility and townsfolk; in addition, the Cossack held economic privileges (distilling, the right to keep an inn, the keeping of promissory notes), and land of "Cossack tenure" could not pass to a non-Cossack owner[26]. This was not a "free-for-all" but a legally formalized estate of early modern Europe.

The Sich itself was not reducible to a fortified camp. Alongside the Sich proper (a military camp without women) there existed a territory under its control with homestead farms — zymovnyky, where well-off Cossacks raised families; within the Cossack body there was marked social stratification — from very wealthy proprietors to the "have-nots" (holota) who hired themselves out to them. The Cossacks lived by trades (salt, potash — a component of gunpowder — hunting, fishing), that is, they ran a real economy rather than only fighting[28]. After the abolition of the Sich in 1775, some of the Zaporozhians resettled to the Kuban, and some to the Ottoman Empire, where the religiously tolerant authorities did not regard the Orthodox as enemies; the Danubian Sich survived there right up to 1828[27]. In other words, the Cossacks did not "dissolve" after Catherine II's decree — they continued to exist for another half-century beyond the empire's borders.

The Military Revolution: why the Hetmanate did not "fall behind"

A separate imperial accusation is that the Cossack state was "archaic" beside "modern" Russia. In reality, the Hetmanate was part of the same pan-European process that historians call the Military Revolution. The concept was formulated by the British historian Michael Roberts in studying the Eighty Years' War of the Netherlands against Spain: the key was a change in military technology — firearms and artillery ended the monopoly of the knightly cavalry, brought infantry and artillery to the fore, and broke the old feudal military system[18].

The new armies were terribly expensive — and for their sake monarchs rebuilt the entire machinery of state: taxation, administration, structure. The most successful states centralized taxes, abolished the tax immunities of the estates, and even "milked" the church through secularization; this type historians named the fiscal-military states (the model being Britain, and to some degree Sweden)[19]. It is precisely in this context that the myth of Russia's "organic" might collapses: its military leadership was a consequence of Peter's reforms driven by the needs of the Great Northern War, which "pulled" the Muscovite tsardom out of its self-isolation and gave birth to the empire[20]. Here too, then, power was acquired by reform and war, not "inherited."

The Hetmanate, too, was a militarized state: the Cossack host was sustained by self-provisioning, while in parallel the hetmans created a standing mercenary army at the state's expense — with special taxes and obligations, with appointed (not elected) colonels — a classic professional army[21]. Sokyrko's summation: the Hetmanate was a full participant in the Military Revolution, but "failed to board the train" — it was riding along on it but stepped off prematurely, without having finished building an effective professional army, and this became one of the causes of the loss of statehood[22].

This was not "inferiority" but, on the contrary, a phenomenon of record speed: the Hetmanate built its elite and state in about 50 years, whereas Lithuania or Poland needed 150–200 years for the like[23]. And even after the dismantling of its autonomy, its "genes" proved tenacious: the social and cultural structures formed by the Hetmanate carried over into the nineteenth century, and the Russian Empire was unable to root them out[24].

Poltava and the "autumn of the Hetmanate"

The dismantling of this statehood was drawn out across the entire eighteenth century. The turning point was the Battle of Poltava in 1709: against the backdrop of a pan-European "fashion for absolutism," two strong figures collided — Peter I and Hetman Mazepa — and each sought to make his power absolute. Mazepa's defeat (in alliance with Charles XII) put an end to Ukrainian autonomy; more broadly, this was the collapse of the vassal–seigneurial relations of the early modern period and the establishment of centralized states[16] (on the episode itself, see the article "Mazepa's 'treason'").

The dismantling struck above all at elective office — the very core of the Cossack order. Already after Mazepa, Peter I rejected the winner of the election, Pavlo Polubotok, as "too cunning a man" and imposed the more convenient Ivan Skoropadsky upon them; subsequently the senate and the imperial cabinet began to appoint colonels directly — often Serbian officers who did not know local traditions and owed their power to the emperor rather than to the community. The historian Viktor Horobets devoted a separate monograph to this subject — "The Twilight of the Hetmanate"[25]. In this way contractual, elective power was gradually replaced by appointment from above.

Then came the "autumn of the Hetmanate": under the last hetman, Kyrylo Rozumovsky, autonomy was already more of a "game of independence" — for as long as St. Petersburg permitted it. When Catherine II came to power, the choice became stark: renunciation of the hetman's power or death. It is telling how the fate of the Cossack upper stratum concluded: the Cossack officers (starshyna) were equated with the Russian nobility — it sufficed to prove one's rank by document, and a former captain (sotnyk) or regimental judge became an imperial nobleman[17]. Part of the Ukrainian elite integrated into the empire that it had itself helped build — and Cossack statehood vanished from the map.

What this means

Between Rus' and modern Ukraine there is no "failure" but unbroken continuity: the Lithuanian–Polish era, out of which the Cossacks grew, and the Cossack era, which Moscow dismantled by war and by decree, rather than "inheriting." Throughout all this time the Ukrainian lands were part of Europe — with their own elite, European law, self-governing towns, and an elective Cossack state. It is precisely this continuity, and precisely the fact that Moscow was only one of several possible suzerains rather than a "natural center," that the scheme "Rus' = Russia" erases. And myths such as "Kyiv for four carts of silver" are an attempt to turn conquest and diplomatic bargaining, after the fact, into something "natural and lawful."

Carpatho-Ukraine 1939: the state that was crushed

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The claim that "Ukrainians never had a state of their own" shatters against a concrete fact: on 15 March 1939, Transcarpathia proclaimed the independence of Carpatho-Ukraine — with a Diet, a Constitution, and President Avhustyn Voloshyn. Within days it was crushed by Hungary and Nazi Germany. The historian Roman Ofitsynskyi draws a direct comparison with what Russia is doing to Ukraine today.

An autonomy they began to carve up

Carpatho-Ukraine emerged as an autonomous region within Czechoslovakia; the government was headed by Avhustyn Voloshyn — a priest, educator, and statesman. As early as the autumn of 1938 it began to be carved up: the First Vienna Award (2 November 1938), by the decision of its arbiters — Nazi Germany and Italy — handed Hungary part of its territory, including Uzhhorod, Mukachevo, and Berehove[1]. Ofitsynskyi draws a direct parallel: great powers sitting at a table dividing up someone else's land — "we see something similar with regard to Ukraine" today.

The Carpathian Sich

The autonomy had to be defended — Hungarian and Polish saboteurs were running operations along the border. For its defense the Carpathian Sich was formed: a legal paramilitary civic organization made up mostly of young people[2].

Independence: 14–15 March 1939

The denouement came together with the collapse of Czechoslovakia. When, on 14 March 1939, Hitler ordered the occupation of the Czech lands and Hungarian troops went on the offensive, Prime Minister Voloshyn that same evening proclaimed the independence of Carpatho-Ukraine by radio from Khust. The next day, 15 March 1939, the Diet convened in Khust, proclaimed sovereignty, adopted a Constitution, and elected Voloshyn president[3]. The elections held beforehand had taken place under international observation — dozens of journalists followed them.

Defense and betrayal by the "guarantors"

Voloshyn ordered a defense: a Czechoslovak division (about 20,000) could have put up resistance, but Hungary threw a 40,000-strong force against it. From Prague, instead, came an order to evacuate. And Germany — the formal guarantor of territorial integrity — sided with Hungary[4]. The resistance was suppressed within a few days. A democratically elected state was crushed not in open battle but by an agreement among great powers.

What this means

Carpatho-Ukraine did not last long — but it existed: with a parliament, a constitution, a president, an army, and a will to independence. This is a direct refutation of the myth that Ukrainians are "incapable of building a state." And the way it was destroyed — the silent consent of the strong to the annexation of the weaker — remains painfully recognizable even eighty years on.

The Cult of the "Great Victory"

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. Russia's "May 9" long ago ceased to be a day of remembrance for the dead. According to historian Yana Prymachenko, it is a militarist quasi-religion — the cult of the "Great Victory," which in the Soviet-Russian consciousness took the place of "god," left vacant after Stalin's death. Putin aspires to become the "new Stalin," and the cult needs a Nazi enemy — so "Nazis" were found in Ukraine. Behind this cult lies not respect for the human being, but a treatment of the person as a resource.

Victory as a quasi-religion

History politics is the use of the past by the state: to mobilize voters, to justify foreign policy, to settle "historical scores." Since 2014, history has become a hot topic of international politics, and Putin actively appeals to it to justify Russia's imperial expansion[1].

The most vivid example is the Russian cult of Victory. Prymachenko describes it as a militarist quasi-religion: the main cathedral of the Russian armed forces, built in 2020, bears, in place of a biblical quotation, Suvorov's line "God is Victory," and even priests objected to its consecration[2]. The logic of the cult is simple: after the Second World War, Stalin became the "god" of the Soviet pantheon; when he died and Khrushchev declined to take that place, the vacancy was filled by the "Great Victory" — a new deity.

How the holiday itself was constructed

That the cult of Victory was constructed, rather than arising naturally, is evident from the very history of the holiday. In Soviet times, until 1965, May 9 was not even a day off and was not marked by parades — it was an ordinary working day[16]. As Vitaliy Dribnytsia notes, the central Soviet holiday at the time was November 7 (the day of the "October Revolution"), but it was gradually losing popularity — and the state needed a substitute. The living memory of veterans, who had even before gathered informally on May 9, became a convenient foundation: under Brezhnev, in 1965, official parades appeared on Red Square, and the day was made a non-working one[17]. In other words, the popular "nationwide" holiday is a product of late-Soviet history politics, not an unbroken tradition from 1945.

To this belongs the modern "Immortal Regiment" campaign as well. Dribnytsia stresses that it did not appear by accident[18] — and this is indeed true, though the specific attribution in the video is imprecise: the "Immortal Regiment" is not a Brezhnev-era invention but an initiative of Tomsk journalists in 2012, which the state co-opted and turned into a large managed campaign as early as 2015. The essence does not change: both the parades and the "regiment" are constructed instruments, not organic national memory.

And as for why present-day Russia clings so tightly to May 9, Dribnytsia explains this through nation-building. The formation of a nation usually proceeds around unifying myths (the Ukrainian nation, for instance, coalesces around the myth of Cossackdom). The Russian nation, by his observation, is still not formed as a political one — it took shape as an imperial one, without a distinct national core, and is therefore forced to cling to external myths, and such a myth became May 9. A second function is preparation for aggression: having taken on the role of "victors," Russia derives from it a supposed right to do whatever it wishes with neighboring peoples[19].

Putin needs "Nazis"

From here there is a direct line to war. Putin aspires to become the "new Stalin," but to ascend that Olympus he must defeat "mythical Nazis." Where to get them? They were "found" in Ukraine — and thus a justification for the invasion appeared[3].

The nature of this cult also matters. It is a cult of death, built around mass graves: in Russia the human being is a resource, like oil or gas, which the state mobilizes for its needs. A telling contrast: the Germans identified and buried their fallen by name, while the Soviet tradition left anonymous mass graves[3]. The same attitude toward its own soldiers is visible in the current war as well.

The machine of history politics — and honesty toward one's own myths

History politics operates on three levels: the public (museums), the didactic (school textbooks), and the analytical (scholarly history). The first two are direct instruments of the state[4].

Here it is worth stressing a matter of principle: a true historian refutes myths regardless of their origin. Russian myths deny the very existence of Ukrainian identity, language, and history. But Prymachenko honestly notes that there are also national Ukrainian myths — for example, the legend of the "executed kobzars," which has no archival confirmation, even though it lives in folklore as a response to the real terror of the Holodomor[5]. Refuting myths is a craft, not a selective weapon.

Dogmas, rituals, icons

What this cult looks like up close is shown in detail by historian Ihor Shchupak. Like any religion, the "Great Patriotic War" rests on dogmas — "facts" taken on faith, with any attempt to challenge them meeting aggression. Among them are Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the pioneer-heroes, and the textbook "28 Panfilov men": the myth of 28 heroes who supposedly stopped German tanks near Moscow is historically just as fabricated as the mythologized "battles" of Alexander Nevsky[7].

The dogmas accrue rituals-fetishes. The St. George ribbon (in reality the Soviet Guards ribbon) is used no longer for remembrance but for the propaganda of a new war — it is stuck onto vodka, candy, manicures, even a German Mercedes. The "Immortal Regiment" too is done cynically: portraits are bought at the supermarket on the eve of May 9 and thrown away after the event[8].

And the religious imagery of the cult is literal: an icon for the oath of Russian paratroopers depicts Stalin in the role of Jesus surrounded by "apostles." This "pobedobesie" ("victory-frenzy") penetrated Ukraine as well: in 2016, already after the start of the war, in the Kyiv metro station "Arsenalna" a woman in Soviet uniform with such an icon propagandized the "Russian world"[9].

"Great Patriotic": a term that hides 1939

The cult itself rests on a substitution of the name. The author of the Vox Veritatis project, Vitaliy Dribnytsia, in a radio interview singles out three overarching Russian myths about the war: that the "Great Patriotic War" is a separate war from the Second World War; that in 1939–1941 the USSR committed no aggression in Eastern Europe; and that only the USSR won the Second World War[10]. The first myth exists for a reason: counting from June 22, 1941, masks the fact that the Second World War began on September 1, 1939, with Germany's attack on Poland — and on September 17 the Red Army too entered Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany as early as September 3, 1939: the "Great Patriotic War" brackets out nearly two years during which the USSR was not a victim but an accomplice in the partition of Europe[11].

This is not a metaphor. The USSR and the Third Reich jointly partitioned Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, held a joint parade in Brest (on the Soviet side, brigade commander Semyon Krivoshein), and Stalin, in a telegram to Hitler at the end of September 1939, wrote of "friendship sealed in blood." Then came Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, and the annexation of the Baltic states — what Dribnytsia calls "an ordinary partition of Europe between two predators"[12]. The term "Great Patriotic" is needed by the cult precisely because it erases this period and turns the aggressor into a liberator — for more detail on the pact itself, see “The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact”.

That this is not a chance turn of phrase but a constructed concept is evident from how differently the name developed on the two sides of the border. In an interview with the channel "Inter," Dribnytsia, who himself taught history from 1991, traces the evolution of Ukrainian textbooks: at first, until the first genuinely Ukrainian editions of 1992–95, they used Soviet ones, in which the "Great Patriotic War" prevailed; then they gradually moved to the concept of the Second World War, in which the "Great Patriotic" is only a part; there were attempts to call it the "German-Soviet war"; and now the European view of the Second World War as a whole has become established[20]. In Russia the opposite happened: the attempts of the 1990s to move away from the Soviet concept came to nothing, and there they returned to the version that the "Great Patriotic" is a separate war in which the USSR was merely defending itself, while the occupation of Eastern Europe in 1939–41 is entirely justified[21]. The very concept, Dribnytsia stresses, was from the outset invented precisely in order to drown out, in the mass consciousness, the fact of the shared start of the war with Hitler.

A Vlasovite ribbon under the banner of Victory

The same logic of "joining the unjoinable" surfaces in the cult's principal fetish — the St. George ribbon. Besides passing itself off as an old imperial ribbon (when it is in fact the Soviet Guards ribbon), Dribnytsia points to an even sharper contradiction: the black-and-orange ribbon was a symbol of Vlasov's army — collaborationist formations that fought on the side of the Wehrmacht, and whom the Soviet army tried not even to take prisoner but to destroy as traitors. As a result, present-day Russia has combined in one ritual the cult of the red banner of Victory with the symbolism of the very collaborators it supposedly fought[22]. When this is pointed out to Russians, Dribnytsia notes, they stubbornly refuse even to hear it and convince themselves that the ribbon is "from the First World War." This joining of the incompatible is a characteristic feature of present-day ruscism: the cult of victory over Nazism coexists peaceably with the revival of collaborationist symbolism.

"The Second Front": another Soviet frame

The same principle — a name that rewrites reality — operates in the myth of the "Second Front." In Soviet (and present-day Russian) historiography, the Allied landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, is called the "second," as though before it the West had not been fighting. Yet Great Britain was a participant in the war from September 1939, and in no Anglo-American historiography is Normandy called the "second front": this is a purely Soviet term[13]. The logic is simple: following Stalin, only the Soviet-German front was considered the "first," while the fighting in North Africa, Italy, the Pacific, and the Atlantic were not fronts for Stalin — so the opening of Normandy was presented as his personal achievement, that he had finally "pressed" the Allies into it[14].

The scale of the Western operations refutes this. The landing in Sicily (Operation Husky, July 10, 1943) was even larger than Normandy in the size of the first day's landing force — about 180,000 against 156,000 (Dribnytsia cautiously estimates the Sicilian landing at roughly 150,000). The Italian campaign removed Mussolini's regime and pulled German divisions away from other theaters[15]. The historian's conclusion is blunt: the Second World War was won by the anti-Hitler coalition, not by "the USSR alone" — and this fact directly destroys the cornerstone of the cult of the "Great Victory." The context of the war itself is in the article “The Second World War”.

What this means

The cult of the "Great Victory" is not memory but a political technology: it turns the past into fuel for the present war. It is telling that in 2023 Ukraine abolished the Soviet "May 9" and returned to the European tradition — the Day of Remembrance on May 8[6]: the rejection of the cult of victory in favor of remembrance of the victims is precisely the line between the instrumentalization of history and respect for it.

Did the Bolsheviks "Invent" Ukraine?

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. One of Putin's central theses (his 2021 article) is that "modern Ukraine was entirely created by Bolshevik, communist Russia," above all by Lenin. Historian Hennadiy Yefimenko shows the opposite: in 1919 the Bolsheviks, having militarily conquered Ukraine, tried to ignore its statehood and did not recognize it; they formally recognized Soviet Ukraine for the first time only at the end of 1920, and introduced Ukrainization as a forced concession to the strength of the national movement. Not a "creation" — but an attempt to tame what already existed.

The myth: "Lenin created Ukraine"

The thesis that Ukraine as a nation or a state was "invented" by the Bolsheviks is a cornerstone of present-day Kremlin propaganda. The reality, according to Yefimenko's research, is the direct opposite.

Having seized power, the Russian Bolsheviks had by 1919 already conquered almost all of Ukraine — and decided that this support was addressed to communism, not to the national movement. So they tried simply to ignore Ukrainian statehood: in the Kremlin they planned to attach Ukraine to Soviet Russia and did not conceal this. Among the "Soviet republics" of the time, they named a Bavarian one, a Hungarian one, a Russian one — but did not see a Ukrainian one among them[1]. Ukrainian statehood was defended within Ukraine itself; in the Kremlin it was not recognized.

Ukrainization as a forced concession

It was precisely the failure of the attempt to ignore the national question that forced the Bolsheviks to change tactics. Ukrainization (more broadly, korenizatsiya) as a policy began in 1920 — not of good will, but as a forced concession after the Kremlin saw the strength of the Ukrainian movement[2]. The logic was instrumental: to give communist reforms a national form so that they would "take root." That is, the national wrapping was supplied from above — but to the nation, language, and movement that already existed.

The slogan of self-determination — a theoretical construct

To understand why this is about taming rather than "creation," it is worth tracing the genesis of the Bolshevik slogan itself. The right of nations to self-determination "up to and including separation" was personally initiated by Lenin at the Poronin conference of 1913 and substantiated in his writings, with Joseph Stalin brought into the work (his pamphlet "Marxism and the National Question"). It was precisely this slogan that fundamentally distinguished the Bolsheviks from all the all-Russian parties, for whom the unity of Russia was an axiom[8].

But this was a purely theoretical construct. The right was proclaimed — and at the same time any organizational structures that might have realized it were "cut off at the root." A telling document: in a letter of 1913 to the Armenian Bolshevik Stepan Shaumian, Lenin wrote that proclaiming the right of separation did not at all mean that one should agitate for it — on the contrary, one should agitate against this right[9]. That is, from the very beginning "self-determination" was not a goal but an instrument: with the slogan they intercepted a trend popular in the era of collapsing empires, having no intention of giving it effect.

The same logic operated after the seizure of power as well. Within a week the Bolsheviks proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, which recognized for every people — including Ukrainians — the state right of separation. But the concessions on the national question ended there: the declaration was used to "tie" Ukraine to themselves (Yefimenko draws a direct comparison with 2022 — when the Russian guard was already preparing parade uniforms for Khreshchatyk), not to realize what had been proclaimed[10].

Soviet Ukrainian statehood itself arose by the same instrumental logic. The separate Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine was, in words, seen in 1918 as equal in rights and independent of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) — yet in its charter and decisions it was recorded as merely a regional organization of the RCP(B). A separate Soviet government of Ukraine was proclaimed only at the end of 1918 — and not of good will, but when, under national slogans, an uprising against the Hetmanate began and the Directorate unexpectedly gained broad support. The geography is telling too: the first capital of this second Soviet Ukraine was Sudzha, then Belgorod — that is, the territory of today's Belgorod region of Russia, not Ukraine[11]. Soviet Ukraine was built not as a gift to the nation but as a way to mount the national movement, which was arising even without the Bolsheviks.

The first recognition — only December 1920

The legal side is telling as well. Soviet Russia formally recognized Soviet Ukraine for the first time only on December 28, 1920 — through a treaty on a worker-peasant union. Before that it did not recognize it at all: in June 1920 it even included 30 delegates from Ukraine in the Russian All-Russian Central Executive Committee, in effect treating Ukraine as part of Russia. The People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Georgy Chicherin, put it bluntly: "make it look like a state, but change nothing in the substance of relations"[3]. The Ukrainian side, on the contrary, was keen to change precisely the substance — and the treaty became its achievement.

The "1922 project" ignores the UPR

Putin's argument itself often sounds even simpler — in its street version: "Ukraine is a Bolshevik project of 1922," a failed one, so it "must be closed down"[6]. Its weak point is immediately visible: this "1922 project" deliberately overlooks what came before it. For the Ukrainian People's Republic and the whole Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921 — with the achievement of statehood, the Universals, an army of the UPR — preceded any Soviet Ukraine. When this is pointed out, the typical reaction is to wave it away: supposedly those were "stillborn projects" lasting a few months that "can be disregarded," whereas the Bolsheviks created something viable[7]. But this is precisely the substitution: statehood that had to be conquered (see above) existed, by definition, before the conqueror. The "1922 project" is not the point of creation but the date when Moscow formalized control over what was arising without it.

Borders and the name — by imperial logic

The imperial approach is visible in smaller matters too. When the borders were cut up in 1919, ethnically Ukrainian territories — Belgorod region, Starodub region, four districts of Chernihiv region — were left to Russia on purely economic grounds: these are grain-growing regions, without which, as the border commission explained, Russia has "economically nowhere to live," while Ukraine has grain[4].

The matter of the self-name is telling too. A memorandum of the 1920s noted that Ukrainians and Belarusians had a national movement while Russians had none — therefore "Russians as a nation do not exist": Russian identity was imperial, not national. And by a decision of the Politburo around the 1926 census, the "Great Russians" in effect secured for themselves the shared name "Rusians" (ruski)[5] — the same appropriation of the heritage of Rus' as in the renaming of Muscovy into "Russia".

What this means

The myth that "the Bolsheviks created Ukraine" reverses cause and effect. The Bolsheviks did not create the Ukrainian nation — they encountered it as an accomplished fact, tried to deny it, failed, and were forced to make concessions. The Ukrainization of the 1920s was not a gift but a forced tactic, which a decade later was rolled back through repressions and the Holodomor. What the Kremlin calls "creation" was in fact an attempt at the subjugation of what existed before it.

The dissident movement: resistance the USSR called Nazism

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Ukrainian dissident movement of the 1950s–80s was a peaceful intellectual resistance to Russification: for the Ukrainian language, culture, and independence. The Soviet authorities fought it not only with arrests but also with slander: branding dissidents as "nationalists" and "heirs of Nazism." This is the same cliché with which Russia justifies its war today — only half a century earlier.

Who the dissidents were

The dissident movement was a phenomenon of the 1950s–1980s. These were people who, under the Soviet regime, defended their own convictions: the idea of Ukrainian independence, the Ukrainian language and culture. The movement was not narrowly national: there were also religious dissidents (for freedom of worship) and those who defended the rights of national minorities — Crimean Tatars, Jews[1]. Compared with the armed stage of the struggle (the OUN, the UPA), the dissidents were few — this was a different, intelligentsia form of resistance.

Valentyn Moroz and "Chronicle of Resistance"

One of the symbols of this resistance was Valentyn Moroz — one of the most radical dissidents from among the Sixtiers, who openly challenged the authorities. He wrote four essays — including "Chronicle of Resistance" (as well as "A Report from the Beria Reserve," "Amid the Snows," and "Moses and Dathan") — that were popular in dissident circles. Under those conditions, Moroz dared to defend the very term "Ukrainian nationalism"[2]. (Moroz is an ambiguous figure: his later, émigré views were controversial; here we are concerned with his role in the dissident resistance of the 1960s–70s.)

Slander as a weapon

The most important thing for understanding the present is how the authorities fought the dissidents. Besides arrests and labor camps, slander was put to use: Soviet propaganda branded dissidents as "nationalists, heirs of Nazism" in order to strip them of influence and authority[3]. The regime feared the dissidents precisely because they were intellectuals — lecturers, teachers, writers — capable of influencing the young and the student body, and therefore the future.

A blow against the diaspora

The campaign reached abroad. The publication "News from Ukraine" was a mouthpiece of Soviet propaganda aimed at the diaspora. In it were published the "confessional statements" of broken dissidents — such as Ivan Dziuba or Zinoviia Franko (granddaughter of Ivan Franko)[4]. The aim was to sow despair and division among Ukrainians abroad, to portray the resistance as "doomed." These are classic active measures against the diaspora.

What this means

The Soviet cliché "dissident = nationalist = heir of Nazism" is a direct ancestor of today's Russian "denazification" narrative about Ukraine. The logic is the same: any Ukrainian resistance to the empire is declared "Nazism" in order to dehumanize it and justify repression. The dissidents of the 1960s proved the opposite: the demand to speak one's own language and to have one's own state is not "Nazism" but the normal right of a people — a right feared precisely by the empire.

The Executed Renaissance: how Moscow killed a culture

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Soviet myth presented the USSR as a "flourishing" of peoples. The Ukrainian reality of the 1920s–1930s was the opposite: the vigorous cultural renaissance of the 1920s was deliberately destroyed by Moscow after 1933. An entire generation of writers, artists, and scholars came to be called the "Executed Renaissance." Its symbol is Mykola Khvylovy, a leader of that renaissance, who took his own life in 1933 against the backdrop of the Holodomor.

The renaissance of the 1920s

The 1920s in Ukraine were a time of powerful cultural upsurge. Mykola Khvylovy was, in the assessment of historian Lyudmyla Turchyna, one of the leaders — if not the chief leader — of the Ukrainian renaissance of that era[1]. Around him and figures such as the Neoclassicists (Mykola Zerov), literary debates raged and a modern Ukrainian literature took shape.

How Moscow curtailed freedom

This upsurge unfolded under Soviet rule — and the authorities suppressed it. Khvylovy was sent abroad in 1928, his position was examined at the plenums of the Central Committee of the CP(b)U, and People's Commissar of Education Mykola Skrypnyk gave "Khvylovism" a class-based, stigmatizing definition — supposedly the "ideological foundation of the kulak"[2]. Free literary debate was gradually curtailed in favor of the single permitted template — socialist realism. This was not chance but policy.

The suicide of 1933

The denouement coincided with the Holodomor. In his final years Khvylovy was permitted to travel to the villages to record the consequences of the famine; according to one account, in one of those villages he saw the corpse of his own father[3]. In 1933 Khvylovy took his own life — an act of despair against the backdrop of both the extermination of the peasantry by famine and the destruction of Ukrainian culture.

The Executed Renaissance

Khvylovy's fate was not an exception but a symbol. An entire generation of the Ukrainian creative and scholarly elite of the 1920s was destroyed in the 1930s. The phenomenon was named the "Executed Renaissance" by the eponymous anthology of Yurii Lavrinenko (1959). Its preface states plainly: these works were banned and destroyed as a result of Moscow's new policy of suppressing and colonizing Ukraine after 1933.

What this means

The "Executed Renaissance" is a direct refutation of the myth of a Soviet "flourishing" of Ukrainian culture. In reality, the 1920s produced a surge, and the 1930s a systematic extermination of its bearers. It is the same imperial logic as the Holodomor: to physically destroy not only the peasantry but also the intellectual elite capable of keeping the nation separate. The culture that could not be subjugated was erased — but not entirely: it is precisely thanks to people like Khvylovy that we know what was destroyed.

The Holocaust and Babyn Yar: Memory as a Battlefield

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Holocaust is an inseparable part of Ukraine's history, not a "foreign" tragedy. The Soviet Union for decades suppressed Babyn Yar, while present-day Russia does the opposite — it instrumentalizes the memory of it: pro-Russian narratives portray Ukrainians as "wholesale collaborators" with the Nazis, erasing Germany's guilt. According to historian Anatoliy Podolsky, the memory of the Second World War has become a separate battlefield in Russia's hybrid war.

The Holocaust is part of Ukraine's history

The fate of Ukrainian Jews is not a foreign history but part of the past of multicultural Ukraine, just like the fate of the Crimean Tatars or Poles[1]. On January 27, the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day (established by the UN in 2005); Ukraine joined immediately, and the Verkhovna Rada adopted a corresponding resolution in 2011[1].

This presence is not recent. Jews appeared on the territory of Ukraine as far back as the early Middle Ages: probably via Crimea, roughly between the 4th–6th and the 8th–9th centuries CE — historians do not give an exact dating, but the period spans the era before and around Kyivan Rus'[7]. To this belongs the often-cited (and often-distorted) subject of the Khazar Khaganate: the widespread notion that its elite adopted Judaism, but this question is still contested. "Khazars" is rather a political name for a state formation; archaeologically, an Alan-Bulgar symbiosis with a possible Jewish elite for a short time; the categorical manner in which Russian propaganda presents this thesis ("not everything is as clear-cut as the Russians say") is not confirmed by scholarship[8]. In any case, the Jewish communities here are centuries old, and their flourishing in the era of the 19th-century shtetl was described in detail by historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern.

Ruscism and Nazism: a shared mechanism

Podolsky is cautious with comparisons, but he points to structural overlaps between Nazism and present-day Russian ideology ("ruscism"): indifference to human life, contempt for human rights, and keeping society in fear through a constant image of the enemy. For Nazism the cornerstone was antisemitism — the Jew was declared the enemy; for Russian ideology this cornerstone is Ukrainophobia — the Ukrainian became the enemy[2]. And, importantly, Nazism could not have committed so many crimes without the support of part of the society of its time.

Soviet suppression

The first battle over memory is with the Soviet past. In the USSR, Babyn Yar was suppressed: for decades there was nothing at the site of the shootings. A "mendacious" Soviet monument appeared only in 1976 — and spoke of abstract "Soviet citizens," concealing the fact that people were killed precisely as Jews[3]. In Jewish families they were afraid to mention Babyn Yar — just as in Ukrainian families they were afraid to speak of the Holodomor or the Stalinist repressions.

Russian instrumentalization

The second, contemporary battle is with Russian propaganda. From 2016, the pro-Russian "Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center" entered Ukraine's space of memory. It was funded by oligarchs — Mikhail Fridman, German Khan, Pavel Fuks — with ties to the Kremlin; the fact that they themselves are of Jewish origin does not change the essence: this is money connected to the financing of Putin's war against Ukraine[4].

Most dangerous are the center's own narratives: they portrayed Ukrainians as wholesale collaborators with the Nazis, while in effect erasing the responsibility of Germany, Hitler, the Third Reich, the Wehrmacht, and the SS — as though "only Ukraine killed Jews"[4]. This is a mirror image of the Kremlin myth of "Ukrainian Nazis."

"Thank Stalin for Israel": another trick

A separate Russian trope demands that Jews should be grateful to Stalin for the creation of Israel — as if without the USSR there would be no state. The logic is the same as in the rest of the imperial narratives: everyone "must fall to their knees" before Moscow. In fact, Israel was created by the Jews themselves, independently of Stalin. True, in the early stages Soviet diplomacy did support the proclamation of the state (including at the UN vote in 1947 and with recognition in 1948) — but Stalin did this out of his own geopolitical interests, not for the sake of the Jewish people or Israel itself[9]. Gratitude here is as inappropriate as it would be to "thank" someone whose interests briefly aligned with yours and who, just a few years later, launched an openly antisemitic campaign (the "Doctors' Plot," the struggle against the "cosmopolitans"). It is the same mechanism of instrumentalization: someone else's history is turned into a pretext for a debt owed to the empire.

Memory as a battlefield of hybrid war

All of this is part of Russia's hybrid war: the instrumentalization of memory, in order to dehumanize Ukraine's past and present Ukrainians as incapable of either state-building or their own memory[5]. The response was a state concept of memorialization, created by Ukrainian historians: today Babyn Yar has 34 memorial markers — whereas in Soviet times there was not a single one[5].

The roots of this attitude are imperial. Antisemitism, Ukrainophobia, and other phobias are inherent to empire: in the Russian Empire antisemitism was systemic and cruel — beginning with the "Pale of Settlement," introduced under Catherine II. A telling contrast: while revolutionary Europe was proclaiming human rights, the empire was, on the contrary, restricting them[6]. The memory of the victims of the Holocaust remains a battlefield precisely because acknowledging the truth about the past is incompatible with the imperial myth.

The Holodomor

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Holodomor was a mass man-made famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine that killed millions of people (academic estimates of direct losses range around 3.5–4 million). It was not a natural disaster but the consequence of the policy of the Communist Party led by Stalin: forced collectivization, inflated grain-procurement quotas, and the total confiscation of food from Ukrainian villages. Ukraine, the United States, and the parliaments of many states qualify the Holodomor as a genocide of the Ukrainian people.

Nature or policy

Soviet and present-day Russian propaganda portrays the Holodomor as an ordinary famine caused by natural factors — drought and crop failure — that supposedly struck the entire USSR evenly. This is refuted by the facts: the 1931 harvest was good, and the lethal famine of 1932–33 was caused precisely by grain-procurement policy. A detailed analysis appears in the article "The Holodomor: a man-made famine, not a natural disaster".

Why Ukraine specifically

The collectivization of 1929–1930 triggered a wave of peasant uprisings, the most numerous of which occurred precisely on Ukrainian lands. Stalin regarded the Ukrainian national movement as one of the greatest threats to the USSR — so the terror by famine was directed first and foremost at Ukraine. To the political motive was added an economic one: the confiscated grain was exported to finance forced industrialization.

Denial and recognition

For decades Soviet historiography denied the very fact of the famine. The subject was instead researched and documented by independent historians: as early as 1953, Raphael Lemkin — the author of the very concept of "genocide" — described the destruction of the Ukrainian nation as a classic example of Soviet genocide; the U.S. Congress Commission (the report by James Mace, 1988) concluded that it was genocide; the leading Ukrainian researcher of the subject is Stanislav Kulchytsky.

How Russia rewrites history in textbooks

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. Most of the Russian historical myths that this site refutes are not produced spontaneously — they have a factory. It is the state system of school history education, which the Kremlin has consistently monopolized: from the diversity of textbooks in the 2000s to the "single historical-cultural standard" of 2014 (the year of the annexation of Crimea) and the single textbook of Medinsky and Torkunov in 2023. The main aim of this textbook, in the assessment of historian Serhiy Gromenko, is to justify the war against Ukraine and to reformat the consciousness of the young.

History-as-science versus history-as-school-subject

First, a distinction that Gromenko himself (a co-author of Ukrainian textbooks) makes: science strives for truth, while the school subject of history is multifunctional and, alongside its cognitive purpose, carries an educational one[1]. The question, then, is not whether a textbook should "educate," but what exactly and in whose interest it educates. The Russian answer to this question is what turns the textbook into a weapon.

From diversity to monopoly

Under early Putinism there was no direct coercion to uniformity: various textbooks were published — from openly pro-Stalin ones (condemned by the liberal public) to liberal ones (criticized by the "patriots" and by Putin himself). In 2013 Putin for the first time proposed a single textbook; after public criticism, instead of it, in 2014 a single historical-cultural standard appeared — tellingly, in the very year of the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas[2]. At the same time a coalition of "statists and patriots," with state support, began to push through its agenda.

The final step was taken by the full-scale war. At the end of summer 2023 a genuinely single textbook by Medinsky and Torkunov appeared, and the rest are being prepared for a ban. Medinsky and Torkunov did not write the textbook themselves — they merely signed off on the concept; which of the pair is the principal is clear from whose surname recurs[3].

The rehabilitation of Stalin

The most precise "thermometer" of these changes is the attitude toward Soviet repressions. In the 1990s–2000s no one doubted that the repressions were an evil; some textbooks were emphatically anti-Stalinist, and one even compared the annexation of Crimea to Nazi Germany's Anschluss of Austria — for which historian Andrei Zubov was dismissed from his post in 2014 and emigrated[4]. The new textbooks, by contrast, present the Soviet period positively and extol Stalin.

Why: to justify the war and capture the young

The main — perhaps the only substantial — reason for the appearance of the textbook in precisely this edition, Gromenko stresses, is the justification of Russian aggression against Ukraine[5]. Imperial "great-power-ism" here is merely the backdrop.

The intended audience is no accident either. Classic television propaganda no longer works on the young — they live on the internet, not in front of the TV. So the state moves on the young from two sides: it brings Telegram and electronic media under control (a wave of arrests of channel administrators on fabricated "economic" charges) and militarizes schools and universities[6].

A separate front: military history

Alongside the general textbooks, Russia has opened a separate front — military history as a direct instrument of mobilization. As military historian Vasyl Pavlov observes, after the invasion the restraints were removed: this is directed by the same Medinsky (head of the Russian Military Historical Society), and already in 2024–2025 three new textbooks, "Military History of Russia," appeared for various grades[7].

The logic of the narrative is to weld into a single whole the military history from the Principality of Muscovy to the present-day Russian Federation, even though these entities at times fought one another. Only the line leading to a centralized state is selected; national features are erased (with disdain for the Finno-Ugric peoples — the Chuvash, the Mordvins), and the participation of Ukrainians in the Second World War is simply discarded[8]. This is the same appropriated "single" history as in the renaming of Muscovy to "Russia".

All of this is reinforced by an international campaign: for the 80th anniversary of the "victory," Russia toured exhibitions around the world in several languages, in which Ukrainians, Belarusians, Georgians, and people of the Baltic states are either absent or shown as "collaborators"; short translations of the textbook are distributed through embassies[9].

Not only school: Naryshkin's academic multivolume

The same state machine works not only at the school level. In 2024 the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Historical Society began publishing the newest synthesizing narrative — "The History of Russia" in 20 volumes (29 books). And tellingly, who heads its editorial board: Sergei Naryshkin — formally a Doctor of Economic Sciences, but in fact the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation (since October 2016) and a permanent member of the Security Council, head of the Russian Historical Society since 2012, a person under EU, US, and British sanctions. The very composition of the leadership, notes historian Vitaliy Dribnytsya, who has dissected this edition, "inspires great mistrust": the editorial board is rounded out by Academician Chubaryan — the same one who wrote the school textbooks for the senior grades together with Medinsky[14]. In other words, the top of the academic project and the top of the school one are effectively the same people, and Naryshkin, according to the reviewer, "with a magic kick" hastily assembled the edition in order to entrench the required ideologemes in the academic course as well[14].

The methodology of appropriation here is the same as in the renaming of Rus' to "Russia", only dressed in academic apparatus. The edition itself cites the golden rule — the history of a state is written within its present-day borders — and immediately violates it, drawing the entire history of Eastern Europe, centered on Kyiv, into "the history of Russia." Yet the center of statehood, as even the text itself admits, was outside the territory of the present-day Russian Federation: the future Russian lands were the outskirts of the Kyivan state[15]. The technique is not new — back in the 19th century a Czech philologist aptly described it: Russians call everything East Slavic "Russian" in order ultimately to declare everything Slavic Russian.

The most eloquent proof is in the very titles of the chapters. The third chapter of Volume 2 is called "The Steppes of Eastern Europe, the North Caucasus, Crimea, and the South-Eastern Baltic." Crimea is already written into the title. Crimea is internationally recognized territory of Ukraine, occupied by Russia; the academics, Dribnytsya stresses, have no right whatsoever — historical, moral, or political — to write Crimea into their history[16]. The fact that the occupied peninsula made it into the title of an academic volume even before it came up in the text lays bare the very logic of the project: the borders are written not according to history but according to the front line.

Paradoxically, the academic text sometimes refutes its own school textbooks. The edition (p. 246) states plainly that the hypothesis of Ladoga as the "first capital of Northern Rus'" has not been confirmed, and that Novgorod was dependent on Kyiv from the time of Princess Olha — whereas "the first capital, Ladoga/Novgorod" is built precisely into the Medinsky school textbooks. In the same place (p. 253) it is acknowledged that the Moscow River basin in the 10th century remained "deserted," and that the Slavs arrived there late[17]. In other words, even under the editorship of the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, the specialist authors have not yet fully "lain down" before the anti-scientific propositions Medinsky disseminates — and this gap between the academic text and the school myth is precisely what exposes where science ends and propaganda begins.

The scheme that the textbooks reproduce

The textbook does not invent its narrative from scratch — it reproduces a historiographical scheme. And tellingly, the bearers of this scheme articulate its mechanics themselves. In a street conversation, Vitaliy Dribnytsya's interlocutor, who presents himself as a credentialed historian and adherent of the "Eurasian" conception, admits: Ukrainian textbooks reproduce the scheme of Hrushevsky, while his own follows the scheme of Solovyov and Klyuchevsky, that is, the "history of the Russian state"[10].

It is from precisely this that Dribnytsya derives the flaw of the Russian scheme. The history of a state, he notes, is written within the borders that existed at the moment of writing: when Solovyov and Klyuchevsky composed their "history of Russia," the territory of Ukraine was mostly part of the empire — so the scheme drew it into the Russian narrative. Ukraine has long been outside those borders, but the scheme has remained unchanged[11]. Under a normal geographical principle of writing history this is not done — yet the Russian scheme violates it, declaring as part of "its own" history a Rus' centered on Kyiv, while the future Russian lands were its periphery[12]. The very term "Rus'," according to Dribnytsya's observation (he draws on Boris Rybakov's distinction "Rus' in the narrow and broad sense"), begins to be applied to the territories of present-day Russia only from the second half of the 15th century — that is, as a later territorial claim, not as an original self-designation[13].

This is the same operation of appropriating continuity that is examined in detail in "How Rus' became Russia" and "Between Rus' and the Cossacks". The school textbook is merely the last rung, on which this armchair scheme reaches the child as an "obvious" truth.

Where the scheme came from: science from the 19th century versus Tatishchev

To understand why the scheme is exactly as it is, it is worth recalling how it took shape. In a lecture on the most widespread Russian myths, Dribnytsya recalls a banal but, for Moscow, inconvenient fact: all four manuscripts of the "Tale of Bygone Years" — the Laurentian, the Hypatian, and the two Novgorodian ones — historically ended up on the territory of present-day Russia, so it was Russians who first set about studying their history "as a state" on the basis of these chronicles[18]. And, most importantly, they did so before history became a science. For history as a discipline with source criticism took shape only from the beginning of the 19th century, after the works of the German historian Leopold von Ranke; Tatishchev and Karamzin, who had undertaken to interpret the chronicles earlier, worked in a still pre-scientific manner[18].

Later, the scholarly historians Solovyov and Klyuchevsky, seeing in the chronicles the Rurikid dynasty that had "settled" in Kyiv, derived the idea that Russian statehood originated on the banks of the Dnipro. Within the borders of the Russian Empire of the second half of the 19th century this was normal, Dribnytsya stresses — what is abnormal is that these chronicles are read the same way today, when Ukraine has long been outside those borders[19].

A subtlety easy to miss: the various Russian myths were born in different eras. Imperial historiography of the late 19th century treated the Eastern Slavs as a single "Russian people" of three tribes — Great Russians, Little Russians, and Belarusians. But the myth familiar to us of the "cradle of three fraternal peoples" is already an invention of Soviet historiography, which, paradoxically, did acknowledge the separateness of Ukrainians and Belarusians. Contemporary Russian historiography, according to Dribnytsya's observation, has slid even lower than the Soviet one — down to imperial savagery, as if the Ukrainian people did not exist at all[20]. This is the same "rollback" that is visible in the renaming of Rus' to "Russia": the textbook merely delivers it to the schoolchild as an axiom.

What this means

Russian historical myths are not a collection of random errors but a product of the state machine, which every year reaches a new generation through the school. To understand how this factory works — the single textbook, the historical-cultural standard, the rehabilitation of Stalin — is to see the source of the myths themselves, not merely their consequences. And to see that this educational policy directly serves the war.

Is Ukraine a 'Nazi State'?

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Russian aggression of 2022 was officially justified by "denazification" — that is, by the thesis that Ukraine is supposedly a Nazi state. At the level of the state this is refuted by a single verifiable fact: Ukraine is one of the few countries where Nazism is banned by law. The decommunization package of 2015 equated and banned the propaganda and symbols of both totalitarian regimes — the Nazi and the communist. A state that bans Nazi ideology by law is, by definition, not Nazi.

The myth

"Denazification" is the word with which the Kremlin designated one of the goals of the invasion. Behind it stands the thesis that Ukraine is a Nazi state, governed by Nazis, and therefore requires "cleansing" from outside. This is a claim about the state: about its system, its law, and its official ideology. It is precisely at this level that it should be tested — and it is precisely here that it falls apart.

The fact: Nazism is banned by law

Ukrainian legislation contains a direct ban on Nazi (and communist) symbols and propaganda[1]. It was introduced by a law adopted on 9 April 2015 as part of the decommunization package. Under it, one may not publicly display the symbols of either regime, perform their anthems, or name streets and squares after their figures[2]. The Constitutional Court of Ukraine subsequently found this law to be in conformity with the Constitution.

Precision of wording matters here. To equate two regimes in a ban does not mean to declare them identical; it means that both are placed outside the law[2]. A state cannot simultaneously ban Nazism by law and be Nazi — this is a direct logical contradiction.

Why both regimes in particular are banned

The ban is not symmetrical by accident — it has a historical basis. The Ukrainian people suffered from both totalitarianisms: from the communist one (the famine of 1921–23, the Holodomor of 1932–33, the postwar famine of 1946–47, decades of repression) and from the Nazi one (the German occupation brought mass death)[3]. That is why the state condemns and bans both ideologies — as two experiences of the extermination of its own population, not one.

What this means

The accusation of "state Nazism" is easy to check at the level of the state — by its laws. And they say the opposite: Nazi ideology and symbols in Ukraine are banned, on a par with the communist ones. Attempts to save the thesis by shifting the dispute to individual historical figures or symbols do not save it: they no longer concern the system of the state but assessments of the past — a separate and complex question that does not make present-day Ukraine "Nazi." The "denazification" of a country where Nazism is banned by law is not a goal but a propaganda cover for aggression.

Is the Ukrainian nation "artificial"?

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Kremlin keeps repeating that Ukrainians "as a nation never existed" and that "Lenin invented Ukraine." This is ahistorical. In the assessment of historian Ihor Raikivsky, the modern Ukrainian nation emerged in the 19th century — as a normal European modern process: with national consciousness, deep historical roots, and the unique idea of sobornist (national unity) that bound together Ukrainian lands divided between empires.

The myth: "the nation never existed"

Russian opponents, Raikivsky notes, constantly argue that Ukrainians as an ethnos or a nation "never existed" — and add for good measure that "Lenin invented Ukraine." The historian's answer is blunt: this is utter nonsense from someone who knows nothing about history. Nations are not created in a short time by a single figure — that simply does not happen[1].

What a nation is

There is no single definition of a nation — and that is a good thing, because the Soviet era trained people to expect a "single correct theory" that rejected everything else. A nation is a community united by a set of criteria (language, religion, territory, and others), with different nations relying on different factors. But the defining feature is national consciousness: in the words of the French thinker Ernest Renan, a nation is "a daily plebiscite"[2].

The modern era

Modern nations are a product of the modern era. The mass self-awareness of large groups of people became possible only with industrialization, print, schools, railways, and newspapers; the origins of modern nations are linked to the French and American Revolutions of the late 18th century. The Ukrainian nation took shape in the 19th century — just like other European nations[3]. In this sense it is neither "artificial" nor "younger" than its neighbours: all modern nations arose at roughly the same historical moment.

How nations come into being at all

The accusation of "artificiality" usually rests on the naïve notion that a "real" nation has existed "forever." But ethnopolitology — a distinct discipline — says otherwise. There are at least a dozen and a half approaches to defining an ethnos, but two are the main ones. The classical, primordialist approach treats the ethnos as a community with objective markers (territory, language), even though it cannot draw clear boundaries between ethnic groups. Today the constructivist approach prevails[10]. Between these poles there is also a third, moderate one — which the historian Nataliia Starchenko calls "conservatism": since the source base for the Middle Ages has expanded considerably in recent decades, researchers do in fact look for the real roots of an ethnos in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, reducing it neither to an "eternal" essence nor to a purely late "construct"[25].

The key thesis of this approach: the nation is a political and modern phenomenon. Nations form from the second half of the 18th century, roughly from the Great French Revolution. Before that, the labels "Frenchman," "Englishman," "German" were rather conventional: societies were estate-based, and a person was defined by their estate, town or village, and subjecthood to a monarch — not by "nationality"[11]. A large community such as a nation exists primarily in the consciousness of people: we do not personally know forty million Ukrainians — we conceive of them as a community. In the formulation of the founders of these theories (the same "daily" principle of Renan's), the nation is a daily choice[12].

Hence the answer to the myth of "artificiality": if all modern nations were "constructed" at one historical moment, then the charge that "someone invented the Ukrainians" strikes the French, the Italians, and the Russians themselves equally. Nations grow out of ethnic groups in the 19th century; in Western Europe — chiefly on a political basis, in Eastern Europe (where the Russian, Austrian, and Ottoman empires held sway) — on a cultural and linguistic one. Among Ukrainians this proceeded through language — beginning with Kotliarevsky's Eneida — and the name "Ukrainians" spread precisely in the 19th century[13]. Here scholarship also played a key role: until the early 19th century, Ukrainian was regarded merely as a "Little Russian dialect" of a common "Russian" language, but the Czech philologists — Šafárik, Hanka and others — proved at the start of the 19th century that it was a separate language, and therefore a separate ethnos[26]. It is ironic that "artificiality" is pinned precisely on the very language whose distinctness was first established scientifically by disinterested outsiders. Tellingly, the Russian nation, in the author's assessment, is still not fully formed — Russians do not know where Russia's border ends — whereas the Ukrainian nation is already formed as a distinct people with its own territory[14].

Deep roots: the Cossack myth

At the same time, a nation does not arise from nothing. The driving force of the 19th-century Ukrainian national revival was the Cossack myth — the memory of the Hetmanate. Tellingly, it was at work even in Galicia, which had never known Cossackdom: Galician narodovtsi (populists) dressed in Cossack garb, reviving a Dnieper-region symbol. In Raikivsky's apt image, Shevchenko could not have "created" a nation without deep roots: a tree without roots is doomed[4].

Sobornist — salvation from assimilation

A distinctive feature of the Ukrainian revival was the idea of sobornist (all-Ukrainian unity) that joined Galicia (under Austria) and the Dnieper region (under Russia). This is a unique trait: the concept of "sobornist" has no direct equivalent among Poles or Slovaks. For Ukrainians divided between two empires, it was a way to save the nation from assimilation — to preserve it as a single whole despite state borders[5].

A war over identity

Nation-building never ends — it is that same "daily plebiscite." That is why the current war, Raikivsky stresses, is above all a war over identity: the Ukrainian national idea as part of the civilized world against the idea of the "Russian world" as a return to the imperial past[6]. Tellingly, it was tsarism — not only Soviet power — that banned the Ukrainian language altogether. Attempts to declare the Ukrainian nation "artificial" are a direct continuation of this imperial logic.

Not an "Austrian general staff," but the Prosvita society

A separate version of the "artificiality" myth holds that Ukraine was invented by an "Austrian general staff." The historian Ihor Stambol answers this with a concrete example of civic self-organization — the Prosvita society. Opponents, he notes, simply fail to understand the concept of development: they imagine that someone at a certain moment wrote a decree — and "out came" Ukrainians or the city of Odesa — whereas such processes unfold over years and decades[7].

Prosvita (founded in 1868 in Galicia and in 1905 in the Dnieper region) was the first mass legal Ukrainian organization and a forge of national cadres. Ukrainians first united in cultural and educational societies, gained organizational experience, and evolved from a civic organization into a political one, and then into the state-building of 1917[8]. Here the state grew from below, out of a civic movement, not from anyone's "general staff."

Ironically, the accusation of "invention" ricochets back: it was precisely the pro-Russian Galician "Muscophilism", financed by the empire, that constructed an artificial mongrel tongue — yazychie — in which its own adherents could not properly communicate. Prosvita arose precisely as a grassroots counterweight to it[9].

"One people" is an imperial invention, not a natural fact

The thesis that "Ukrainians and Russians are one people" only appears to be an ancient truth; in reality it is a specific official ideology of the Russian Empire of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the doctrine of the "triune Russian people", under which "the Russians" consisted of three branches — Great Russians (today's Russians), Little Russians (Ukrainians), and White Russians (Belarusians), all officially called "Russians"[15]. In other words, the formula Putin repeated in his 2021 article is not a scientific discovery but a reanimated imperial construct.

A factual correction should be made here to the way this doctrine is sometimes illustrated. It is said that even the 1897 census imposed on everyone a "nationality" column — "Russian"[16]. The census did indeed proceed from the same triune logic, but it had no direct "nationality" column at all: ethnicity was determined indirectly — by native language and religious confession. And this detail works rather against the imperial narrative: the census recorded a separate "Little Russian" (Ukrainian) language as a distinct category — meaning that even imperial statistics had to acknowledge linguistic distinctness. (The "Great Russian" mark attributed to Lenin is an illustration of the "triune people" doctrine, not of an actual column on the census form.)

The very semantics of the word "Russian" before the age of nations was not ethnic but confessional: after the adoption of Christianity, "Russians" denoted people of the Rus', that is, Orthodox, faith — and in this sense the word appears even in Bulgarian sources of the period[17]. Imposing today's ethnic equation "Russians = the Russian nation" onto this pre-modern, confessional category is a crude substitution — and it is on this substitution that the myth of "one people" rests.

Rusyns: an ethnographic group or a "separate people"?

A separate version of the "artificiality" myth works in reverse — it does not deny Ukrainians altogether, but tries to carve off part of them: supposedly the Transcarpathian Rusyns are not Ukrainians but an independent Slavic people. Precision is needed here, because two different things hide behind the word "Rusyns," and conflating them is a direct sleight of hand.

The first meaning is entirely real and poses no threat to Ukrainian unity. "Rusyn" is the old self-designation of Ukrainians: from Rus' there remained the memory that the "Ruthenians" were "Rusyns," and only from about the 16th century does the name "Ukrainians" spread alongside it; the process took a long time, and only by the early 20th century did the majority come to see themselves precisely as Ukrainians, while "Rusyns" and "Little Russians" still lived alongside[23]. In Transcarpathia — a land that joined the Ukrainian SSR only in 1945, and before that changed hands and was mostly part of Hungary — this ancient name simply survived longer. In this sense the Rusyns are an ethnographic (sub-ethnic) group of Ukrainians, like the Boikos or Hutsuls; no one denies recognizing Transcarpathian distinctiveness[20].

The second meaning is already a political project. In the 1990s a political "Rusynism" arose that declares the Rusyns a separate East Slavic people in need of recognition as a distinct ethnos[20]. Its theoretical frame was provided by the Canadian historian Paul-Robert Magocsi, who advocates the thesis of the Carpatho-Rusyns as a separate Slavic nation; relying on it, literature was at one time published in Transcarpathia and even schools were opened in Rusyn, and the dialect itself is presented as a "separate language"[21]. This is where the line lies: a dialect and a regional identity are one thing (that is a fact), but constructing from them a "separate people" with political demands is quite another (that is a project).

Why this project provokes wariness is clear from who feeds it from outside. Political "Rusynism" is actively supported by Hungary — above all by the right-wing parties and personally by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán; the logic is transparent — to justify claims to Transcarpathia, which already belonged to Hungary in 1939–1944[22]. In other words, the thesis of a "separate Rusyn people" works not for the Transcarpathians themselves, but as an instrument against Ukrainian territorial unity — by the same imperial "divide" logic as the myth of an "artificial nation" in general.

The legal side is telling too. Rusyns are recognized as a national minority by law in Slovakia, Poland, Hungary (and also Serbia, Croatia, Romania) — where Rusyn communities live outside Transcarpathia. In Ukraine, however, they are not singled out as a separate people but considered a sub-ethnic group of Ukrainians[24]. Paradoxically, opponents present this "Ukrainian peculiarity" as "oppression" — although it is precisely a matter of the state not recognizing an artificially constructed distinctness where there is a linguistic dialect and a shared history. There is no need to deny Transcarpathian identity; it is enough not to confuse an ethnographic group with a political "separate people" — and it is on exactly this confusion that the attempt to instrumentalize the Rusyn question rests.

Statehood — not only the 20th century

A charge close to the myth of an "artificial nation" is that Ukrainians "never had a state," so the nation is not real either. But this is again the imposition of a late legal concept of the state (formulated by 19th-century jurists) onto the Middle Ages. The markers of an early class-based state are different: the sovereignty of the ruler, the collection of taxes, and a non-tribal administrative division. By these criteria, statehood on Ukrainian lands appears already under Princess Olha: before her, tribute was unregulated, whereas Olha introduced a fixed tribute (the uroky and pohosty) and installed her own governors in place of tribal princes — in particular in the land of the Drevlians and in Novgorod[18].

This is not a modern improvisation but a classic periodization: as early as the start of the 20th century, Nataliia Polonska-Vasylenko — the founder of the statist school of Ukrainian historiography — identified, in her two-volume History of Ukraine, the successive stages of Ukrainian statehood (Rus', the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia, and onward)[19]. In other words, the continuity of Ukrainian statehood is the subject of a long-standing academic tradition, not a propaganda fabrication contrived "in response" to a Kremlin myth.

The KGB against the Ukrainian diaspora: 'active measures'

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. Russian disinformation against Ukrainians is not an invention of 2014. As far back as the Cold War, the Soviet intelligence services waged planned "active measures" against the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada and the USA: imposing the Soviet version of history, setting community leaders against one another through fabricated smears, and planting agents in diaspora organizations. The KGB spelled out the stages of this "decomposition" in a secret directive as early as 1962.

A diaspora that worried Moscow

After the Second World War, the Ukrainian diaspora grew significantly stronger — especially in Canada, where it numbered around a million people. The postwar wave of emigration was political: it brought educated people and scholars who saw no future for themselves under the Bolshevik regime. Despite internal divisions into competing currents, the community united in the face of Moscow — and it was precisely this unity that alarmed the Soviet authorities[1].

"Decomposition": the directive of 1962

The response was a targeted operation. From the late 1950s the KGB developed measures for the "decomposition" of the Ukrainian diaspora, and in 1962, under a "secret" classification, a work appeared by Colonel Borys Shulzhenko, deputy head of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR, setting out the stages of this "decomposition"[2]. This was not a matter of isolated episodes but a systemic, documented policy.

Three "active measures"

The term itself — "active measures" — is KGB jargon, and it has not disappeared to this day. According to Siromsky, they proceeded along three lines[3]:

Imposing the Soviet interpretation of events — both past and current.
Sowing discord among community leaders through fabricated smears: a false accusation of someone for theft or dishonorable conduct. Even after refutation, as the historian notes, "the residue remains."
Infiltrating KGB agents into influential positions in Ukrainian organizations — the Ukrainian Canadian Committee, the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America — in order to provoke conflicts from within and promote the idea of a "cultural exchange" with the USSR instead of political resistance.

What this means

The techniques now called "Russian hybrid disinformation" have a long Soviet pedigree. Fabricated compromising material, the splitting of communities from within, agents of influence, the imposition of the "correct" version of history — all of this the KGB systematically applied against the Ukrainian diaspora half a century ago. Understanding this continuity matters: contemporary Russian operations are not improvisation but the continuation of an old, well-honed school of active measures.

The murder of Leontovych: who shot the author of Shchedryk

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. Every Christmas, the world sings "Carol of the Bells." Few know that it is an arrangement of the Ukrainian "Shchedryk" by Mykola Leontovych — and that the composer himself was shot in 1921 by a Cheka agent in his father's house. For decades the Soviet authorities concealed the murder, blaming it on "bandits" and "Petliurites."

The composer the world sings

Mykola Leontovych was an outstanding Ukrainian composer, author of "Shchedryk." His arrangement of an old Ukrainian carol traveled the world as the Christmas "Carol of the Bells" and resounds every year "from every television, radio, and corner of the internet"[1]. Ironically, the world knows the author's name far less well than the melody.

The Markivka tragedy

On the night of 23 January 1921, Leontovych was staying at his father's house in the village of Markivka in Podillia. The historian Larysa Semenko reconstructed the circumstances of the "Markivka tragedy" from two rare documents — the notes of Hnat Yastrubetskyi, the composer's friend, whom the committee to honor his memory sent to gather testimony while the trail was still fresh, and the diary of Stepan Vasylchenko[2]. The killer asked to spend the night, passing himself off as a Chekist fighting banditry — and in the morning he robbed the house and shot the composer.

Whose agent was it

The first person to openly name the killer as a Bolshevik agent-Chekist was Telezhynskyi — an acquaintance of Leontovych who published a memorial pamphlet abroad[3]. Later research confirmed this: the killer was the Cheka agent Afanasii Hryshchenko, and the text of the report bearing his name was made public only in the 1990s.

How the truth was concealed

The Soviet authorities did everything to hide their trail. They called the killer anything at all — a "Petliurite," a "Denikinite," a "nationalist," or simply a "bandit" — but never once a Chekist. The first report in the newspaper Izvestia claimed that Leontovych "died at the hands of a bandit"[4].

The very "muteness" of the archives is telling: in the reports of the Haisyn Cheka for January–February, which note down absolutely everything — even how much liquor was drunk and who fired a revolver — there is not a single word about the murder of the famous composer. Meanwhile, the police officers who searched for the killer Hryshchenko anyway were later subjected to repression[5].

What this means

The murder of Leontovych is a beginning. Already at the dawn of Soviet rule (1921), the system was destroying Ukrainian culture through its creators, and then concealing its handwriting by shifting the blame onto the victims — "Petliurites" and "nationalists." This is the very model that would later produce the Executed Renaissance and the Holodomor: first the bullet or the famine, then the lie about who was to blame. The "quiet genius" whose carol is sung by the whole world died from the bullet of an empire that to this day pretends it had nothing to do with it.

The Partitions of Poland: How Russia Acquired the Right Bank

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The thesis that "the Right Bank is Russian from time immemorial" is false. In the 18th century the greater part of Ukrainian lands belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and came under the Russian Empire only as a result of the partitions of Poland (1772–1795). Tellingly, Russia justified the annexation with a mythical argument — a supposed "Kyivan princely inheritance."

The Right Bank was not Russia but the Commonwealth

Ukrainian history of the 18th century has a "left-bank bias": we speak a great deal of the Hetmanate and the Zaporozhian Sich, forgetting that the greater part of Ukrainian ethnic lands — all of the Right Bank — belonged at that time to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth[1]. There, unlike on the Left Bank, there was not even a quasi-state Ukrainian structure around which one could rally, and the local nobility largely identified itself with the Polish language, culture, and state tradition. That is, these were Ukrainian lands — but within a European state, not Russia.

Why the Commonwealth fell

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 18th century was itself a shaky, unreformed structure — rather a union of parts (Lesser Poland, Greater Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and others) with divergent interests. Its main body, the Sejm, ceased to be effective: the practice of "breaking the Sejm" (the liberum veto) spread, making it impossible both to pass laws and even to levy taxes (the Commonwealth had minimal taxation by European standards)[2]. This internal weakness was precisely what provoked the neighbors to partition.

Partitions on mythical pretexts

The partitions themselves (from 1772) were justified by the neighbors on openly mythical arguments. The Russian Empire appealed to the "Kyivan princely inheritance," Austria to the fact that Hungarian kings had once sat in Halych, and Prussia to the "protection of dissenters." Russia, moreover, relied on the "Eternal Peace" of 1686 (the Grzymułtowski Treaty) with its clause on the mutual protection of co-religionists — a convenient pretext for intervention[3].

The Russian argument here is especially telling: the claim to the "Kyivan inheritance" is the very myth on which the renaming of Muscovy as "Russia" also rests. The annexation of real lands was covered by an invented continuity from Kyiv.

The last attempt: the Constitution of 3 May 1791

The Commonwealth tried to reform itself. Its Constitution of 3 May 1791 — one of the first European constitutions — was an attempt to save the state. But it provoked another confederation, which was followed by new partitions that erased the Commonwealth from the map[4]. It was in precisely this way that Right-Bank Ukraine came to be part of the Russian Empire — it did not "return" but was annexed as a result of an interstate partition.

What this means

The "primordiality" of Russian rule over the Right Bank is a historical fiction. These lands became part of the empire only at the end of the 18th century, through a concrete geopolitical event — the partitions of Poland — and under the invented pretext of a "Kyivan inheritance." Before that, for more than four centuries, they belonged to the European, not the Muscovite, world.

Post-truth: when emotions matter more than facts

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. "Post-truth" is not just one more lie but a condition in which emotions matter more than facts. This is not a coincidence but a phenomenon described as far back as 2004 — and at the same time the chief mechanism of Russian propaganda, which acts not through arguments but through feelings and unverifiable "ready-made phrases."

What post-truth is

Post-truth is, by the definition of the Oxford Dictionary, a condition in which people respond not to facts but to emotions. The term was introduced by the writer Ralph Keyes back in 2004 in his book "The Post-Truth Era"[1]. Importantly, post-truth is not an ordinary lie. It is a "cocktail" of truth and falsehood, interpretations and insinuations that exerts influence not through the force of arguments but through the force of feelings. That is why it is so hard to refute: it offers no verifiable statement that can be shown to be false.

A weapon of Russian propaganda

It is precisely on this mechanism that Russian propaganda is built. As Makliuk observes, the Russian side is "charged with emotion," with ready-made phrases that are practically impossible to verify[2]. The substitution of emotions for facts is its key instrument: instead of an evidence-based discussion — indignation, fear, resentment, "us versus them." This explains why specific refutations (such as those collected in this project) often meet not with counter-arguments but with emotional resistance.

Not just a feeling: the data

Post-truth is not a subjective impression. A 2021 study in the journal PNAS ("The rise and fall of rationality in language"), using computer analysis of large text corpora, showed that the share of rational concepts in language is declining relative to emotional ones, and that this process sharply accelerated after ~2007–2008 — and not only in fiction but also in scholarly literature[3]. In other words, the shift from facts to emotions is a measurable general trend, one that propagandists exploit.

What this means

Post-truth is the operating system of disinformation: a common mechanism underlying all the specific myths (about history, language, symbols, the war). Understanding it matters, because the antidote here lies not only in refuting individual fakes but in returning to the primacy of fact and critical thinking. As long as emotion matters more than fact, lies will go on "traveling the world dressed as truth."

The Red Army's 'Liberation' of Europe

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Soviet — and now Russian — cult of the "liberation" of Europe in 1945 depicts the Red Army exclusively as a liberator. The historian Aleksandr Gogun, drawing on documents, shows a different picture: "liberation" is an incorrect term, because the USSR was itself a state of total unfreedom; what was at issue was rather occupation and plunder sanctioned from above. "Reparations" in practice meant the mass dismantling of industry — around 5,500 enterprises — so ruthless that even the new communist governments protested against it.

The myth

The core of the Soviet cult of Victory is the image of the Red Army that "liberated" Europe from Nazism and brought peoples their freedom. Modern Russian rhetoric is built on this image as well. But the very word "liberation" Gogun considers incorrect for these events: it presupposes "freedom," whereas the Soviet Union was a country of total unfreedom — to free someone into a different slavery does not mean to liberate. That is why, as a historian, he avoids the term "liberation" with regard to the actions of the Red Army and writes neutrally — "occupied," "took"[1].

Tellingly, Stalin himself understood this shade of meaning. For cities that had been victims of Nazi occupation, the medal "for the liberation of Prague," "for the liberation of Warsaw" was awarded, while for German cities or those allied with Hitler it was "for the capture of Budapest"[2]. The difference in awards betrays the difference in the essence of the actions.

Plunder sanctioned from above

The material condition of the occupied territories worsened immediately. Until December 1944 Stalin condoned looting and in part rapes — by some accounts he even reproached the Yugoslav communists for their "disrespect" toward the Red Army. And the resolution of the State Defense Committee No. 7054 of 1 December 1944, formally directed against the unlawful use of captured property, in essence prescribed handing over the loot to "officers in need"[3]. In May–June 1945 Stalin exempted soldiers returning home from customs inspection — a large-scale operation to export valuables, gold, and jewels[4].

"Reparations" as dismantling

The largest in scale was the seizure of industry under the guise of reparations. They were paid by four states — Germany, Finland, Romania, and Hungary — although Finland and Romania were themselves victims of unprovoked Soviet aggression. Under the label of "German property" they took whatever they wished: around 5,500 enterprises were dismantled (likewise in Manchuria and North Korea)[5]. The dismantling was often so reckless that whole production lines ended up on the scrap heap — as attested by the memoirs cited by Gogun.

The recklessness of the requisitions outraged even the new pro-Soviet governments. On 10 July 1945 the head of Poland, Bolesław Bierut, wrote to Malenkov that Soviet trophy teams in the part of East Prussia transferred to Poland were dismantling railways and electrical equipment, paralyzing the local economy without any benefit to the USSR[6]. The canonical academic work on the Soviet zone of occupation — "The Russians in Germany" by Norman Naimark — describes the same thing as a system, not isolated excesses.

What this means

"Liberation" is a word that conceals the essence of the event under a moral sign. The Red Army did indeed put an end to the Nazi occupation — but what it brought in its place was neither freedom nor well-being: occupation, the dismantling of the economy, violence. To distinguish "the defeat of Nazism" from "the liberation of peoples" is fundamental here: the first did happen, the second is a propaganda label that to this day feeds the Russian cult of Victory.

"Russian" Collaborationism: What the Kremlin Hides

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Kremlin justifies its war against Ukraine as "denazification" and portrays Ukrainians as "collaborators with the Nazis." Yet it was Russian collaboration with the Third Reich that was among the largest in occupied Europe: Vlasov's army, Kaminski's RONA brigade, hundreds of thousands of police auxiliaries and "Hiwis." And the white-blue-red tricolor — the flag of today's Russia — was at the same time a flag of Russian collaborators.

A scale the Kremlin erases

By the estimate of historian Lado Khvedelidze, no fewer than 1.5 million people served as police auxiliaries on the occupied territories, and the "Hiwis" (voluntary helpers of the Wehrmacht) numbered from 800,000 to a million. The Soviet Union and the Russians turned out, in his words, to be the ethnic group "most saturated with collaborators" — a higher percentage existed neither in France, nor in Belgium, nor in the Netherlands[1].

The figures on collaboration are debated. The modern historian Mark Edele counts only voluntary defectors among Soviet prisoners of war at 117,000–318,000, and the total number of those who served the Germans (Hiwis, police, military formations) is estimated at about a million. But even by cautious calculations, the figure is in the hundreds of thousands — a scale incompatible with the myth of "the Russian victor-people without a single stain."

The myth and reality of "Vlasov's army"

The most famous symbol is General Andrey Vlasov. The widespread image of "Vlasov's almost million-strong army, fighting since 1941," is a myth: Vlasov, a lieutenant general of the Red Army, went over to the Germans only after being captured, and the Russian Liberation Army (ROA) as a real force took shape late, closer to the end of the war[2]. The ROA fought under the white-blue-red tricolor — the very same flag that is today the state flag of Russia.

The Lokot "republic" and the RONA

The largest center of collaboration was the Lokot "republic" in Oryol region (more than 2 million people). Its core was made up of former Red Army soldiers, collective-farm chairmen, and even members of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks); Voskoboinikov founded a "Russian fascist party" there. Its armed forces — the RONA (Russian Liberation People's Army) — numbered more than 25,000, and the Germans recognized Lokot as a "republic"[3].

When German tanks entered Lokot, they were met with bread and salt — but not under red banners, but under the white-blue-red tricolor, the flag of today's Russian Federation; the honor guard stood in Soviet uniform with RONA insignia[4].

Kaminski: from "hero" to perpetrator

At the head stood Voskoboinikov and Bronislav Kaminski — former members of the All-Union Communist Party. Kaminski, who had earlier taken part in suppressing the Tambov uprising as a "hero" of the Red Army, took command of the RONA[5]. Later his brigade was incorporated into the Waffen-SS; it became notorious for atrocities that shocked even the SS men — in particular the massacre in the Ochota district during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The Germans themselves eventually court-martialed Kaminski and shot him. These were not "liberators," but perpetrators.

What this means

The history of "Russian" collaborationism is a direct mirror to the Kremlin myth of “Ukraine = Nazis”. Collaboration existed in every occupied country; the question is who speaks of it, and why. Russia, which has made "victory over Nazism" the core of its state ideology, has at the same time raised the flag of its own collaborators and concealed the scale of its own collaboration with Hitler. "Denazification" in the mouth of a state with such a past is nothing other than projection.

Self-Governing Ukraine of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Kremlin narrative presents Ukraine as a land without its own state and political tradition — as if everything "was given by Russia." In reality, as far back as the 16th–17th centuries the Ukrainian lands within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had a developed European legal culture: self-government, the rule of law (the Lithuanian Statute), elected courts and the principle of "nothing about us without us." This was the antithesis of Muscovite autocracy — and it is from here, not from Moscow, that the Ukrainian political tradition descends.

Self-government instead of a pyramid

According to the research of the historian Natalia Starchenko, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had no bureaucratic vertical of the kind familiar to us. Offices (posts) were regarded as an act of service to the community: there were no salaries paid for them, and judges in the localities were elected. Order was maintained by self-governing units, not by a state monopoly on violence[1].

That is precisely why historians of the 19th century, who measured the past by the étatist templates of their own age, mistakenly saw here "sheer anarchy." In reality this was a society built on the principles of self-government — Magdeburg law in the towns, noble self-government in the localities[1].

The rule of law: the Lithuanian Statute

The legal framework provided local autonomy. The Ukrainian voivodeships — Kyiv, Volhynia, Bratslav, and later Chernihiv — were adjudicated by the Second Lithuanian Statute. The Lublin privilege of 1569 expressly forbade altering this Statute otherwise than on the initiative of the inhabitants of the voivodeships themselves[2]. The local community itself enacted the laws that applied within its bounds.

"Nothing about us without us"

The king was limited by law. The constitution of 1505 "Nihil novi" established that no resolution could be adopted without the consent of the Sejm — the principle of "nothing new about us without us"[3]. Each voivodeship behaved as a separate republic (which is precisely how "Rich Pospolyta" translates). Starchenko draws a direct line to the modern slogan "nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine" — this is not an innovation but a continuity of tradition[3].

What we today consider "the treasury of democracy" — the inviolability of the person and of property — was likewise an achievement of this political culture, later extended to all citizens[4].

Even the notorious liberum veto was not from the outset an instrument of anarchy, as it is often portrayed. Introduced at the beginning of the 16th century, it was in fact not applied until the middle of the 17th — for nearly a century and a half it served the search for compromise and the protection of the minority from the dictate of the majority: a culture of consensus, not paralysis[8]. And the noble privileges themselves Starchenko directly equates with the Magna Carta: the protection of the person and of private property — it is precisely from here, in her view, that Ukrainian individualism descends, which Muscovy lacked[9].

It is also important that this was not the power of a narrow caste. The nobility in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth made up perhaps the largest share of the population in Europe — from 5–10 to 20–25 percent in various regions — and it was not a homogeneous mass of "feudal lords": alongside the magnates there existed a petty nobility, sometimes poorer than a peasant, yet equal in rights. And the peasants too were not without rights: the court records register cases in which peasants sue their lord over an excess tax, send a deputation to the king at their own expense — and win the case[10]. This is the picture of a society with a functioning law, not of "savage feudalism."

Not Muscovy: service to another ≠ treason

The sharpest contrast is with Muscovy. The privilege of Casimir of 1447 guaranteed the nobility the inviolability of the person and of property, the right to inherit land (including by daughters), and the right to travel beyond the borders of the country — even into the service of another ruler. And such service was not regarded as treason[5]. In Muscovy, departure into the service of another ruler was a grave crime — the difference lies in the very nature of power: contractual, limited by law — versus autocratic.

The Ruthenian nation: a distinct subjecthood, not "part of Poland"

The Kremlin narrative appropriates the word "Ruthenian/Rus'" for Moscow, and depicts the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as simply "Poland." In reality the Commonwealth was a country of many peoples, and the Ruthenians-Ukrainians held within it a distinct subjecthood. The Ruthenian nobility of the Polish kingdom did not dissolve into the Polish — it always preserved its Ruthenian belonging; the jurist Jakub Przyłuski, as early as 1553, in his code of laws separately distinguished the "Ruthenian principality" (three voivodeships), behind which, as everyone understood, stood its own statehood tradition[11].

This was not ethnic insularity but rather a dual identity. The ethnic Pole and Catholic Stanisław Orzechowski said of himself: "I am a Ruthenian and proud of it." Even in the middle of the 16th century people remembered that they descended from old Rus', which had received Christianity from Constantinople[12]. And a nation, Starchenko reminds us, rests precisely on the memory of a common past: the "Ruthenian people" constructed itself through old Rus' and the princes — descendants of Volodymyr the Great, drawing symbolic strength from this. Thus the expression "Ruthenian state" was quite current in the Commonwealth: the Ukrainian voivodeships were credited with a statehood tradition that no one even denied[13].

This was formulated most vividly by the Kyiv voivode Adam Kysil in a speech of 1641: "We came not to a state, but with a state, and we came not to a people, but with a people." Kysil emphasized that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a republic of three peoples (Poles, Lithuanians and Ruthenians), and that if the rights of the Ruthenians were violated and not restored, it would turn into a "simulacrum"[14].

That this autonomy was real is involuntarily attested by the imperial officials themselves. The Hetmanate was built upon the legal culture of the Commonwealth: the Cossacks were still, in the 18th century, adjudicated by the Lithuanian Statute — a thing utterly impossible in the Russian Empire. And the memorandum of Hryhorii Teplov "On the Disorders in Little Russia" (1762), with irritation, acknowledges the main point: the "trouble" of the Little Russians is that they have their own rights, which give them an "imaginary freedom" and distinguish them from others who have submitted to the monarch's power[15]. A hostile witness confirms what the propaganda denies: Ukrainian autonomy and a distinct law actually existed.

What an early modern state is

In order to see that the Cossack state was a full-fledged early modern state, it is worth having a measuring stick. The historian Oleksii Sokyrko, in an article for the Ukrainian Historical Journal, set out six criteria of the "ideal type" of the early modern state. The first three: the sovereign power of the ruler and the political elite over a territory (a state that is at once territorial and dynastic, where the king is influenced by the elite); the presence of stable institutions resting both on public mechanisms and on private ties; complexly structured institutions of governance and law[19]. The rest: the monopoly on violence, which was held not only by the state but also by local cells; representative institutions (sejms and sejmiks); and a gradual secularization — the subordination of the church to secular power[20].

This state itself evolved: from a fiscal-military state (which the prolonged wars of the era of the Military Revolution gave rise to) to a well-ordered state with a new political philosophy that for the first time separated the person of the ruler from the state as such. The bearer of sovereignty became the political people — the estate endowed with the right to influence politics[21]. By all these features, the Ukrainian lands of the Commonwealth and the Hetmanate were not a "borderland without a state" but participants in a pan-European process of state-building.

The Cossack variant of the Commonwealth

This tradition did not vanish with the Cossack revolution — it continued it. According to the research of the historian Viktor Horobets, the Cossacks themselves were not homogeneous: by the middle of the 17th century a distinction was drawn between the Zaporozhian (lower), the town, and the registered Cossacks (taken by the Commonwealth into state service for pay and privileges), whereby the lower Cossacks maintained reciprocal — mutual — relations, while the state ones maintained redistributive relations[6].

Most importantly: the Cossack state — the Hetmanate — was in essence a "Cossack variant of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth." The Cossack officer class was genetically a product of the Commonwealth's democracy, and the early modern states were not yet centralized. That is why, when Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1657 attempted to introduce the hereditary transfer of power to his son Yurii, this contradicted the very political culture of the officers. Moscow, by contrast, saw a different — autocratic — model: the envoy Buturlin frankly wrote that upon the hetman's death it would be "all as you may wish, sovereign"[7]. The same clash of contractual and autocratic principles as at Pereiaslav in 1654.

It is also worth dispelling the popular myth of "free and equal Cossacks." The Cossack world was deeply estate-based and heterogeneous — a complex mosaic of ranks (rank-and-file Cossacks, banneret, standard-bearer, and noble fellows), not a brotherhood of equals. Yet there is nothing "underdeveloped" in this: estate-based society was the norm for all of Europe before the Great French Revolution, where each estate had its own set of rights and obligations. The Cossack revolution of the mid-17th century even renewed this estate, bringing into it the petty, "castle" nobility with its military and political experience[16].

But the chief feature of the Cossack order was electivity. The Cossacks held that all offices — hetman, colonels, and captains alike — ought to be elective, unlike the Commonwealth, where the king appointed administrative posts. The logic was explained by Hetman Danylo Apostol: an elected colonel feels responsibility to the community, while an appointed one does not. This electivity was enshrined as a "tradition" in agreements — from the Kurukove agreement of 1625 to the articles in relations with Moscow after 1654[17]. At the same time the Hetmanate was no monolith: between the regiments there were striking differences — in the north (the Starodub and Chernihiv regions) power de facto became hereditary (the Zabila family held the captaincy for about 130 years, until 1782), while in the south, in the Poltava regiment, constant elections continued[18].

The summit of this contractual tradition was the Constitution of Pylyp Orlyk of 1710 — the first written treaty of the Cossack officers with the Cossacks. Its history shows well what an early modern "constitution" was. The document is preserved in two redactions: in the Latin one there is the word Constitution, while in the Church Slavonic one the word "constitution" itself is absent. For "constitutions" at that time meant not a basic law in the modern sense, but agreements — first of all between the king and the nobility[22]. Hence to call it "the first constitution of Ukraine" is rather a modernization: the document itself in fact never came into force (Orlyk controlled only a small part of the Right Bank, and only for a short time), and the first constitution in the modern sense appeared in Ukraine in 1918[23]. Yet as a monument of contractual authority limited by law, Orlyk's Constitution is a direct continuation of that same Commonwealth-Cossack tradition, and not of Muscovite autocracy.

What this means

The Ukrainian political tradition is not a "gift" of the empire but a heritage of its own, of a European pattern: self-government, electivity, the rule of law, representation. It is older than the Russian Empire and fundamentally distinct from it. Understanding this matters, because it is precisely this continuity — from "nothing about us without us" of 1505 to "nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine" today — that the Kremlin narrative is trying to erase.

Ukrainian Is Not a Dialect: Hrinchenko's Dictionary

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. "Ukrainian is a dialect of Russian" is one of the oldest imperial myths. It is refuted by a wholly material proof: Borys Hrinchenko's four-volume "Slovar ukrainskoi movy" (Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language) (1907–1909). The historian Ihor Stambol calls it the "passport of the nation": if a codified language exists, so does the nation.

The myth of the "dialect"

The claim that Ukrainian is not a separate language but a "sub-dialect" or "corrupted" Russian served imperial policy for centuries (from bans on the language to assertions that no separate nation exists). The simplest answer to it is the fact of codification: the existence of a complete dictionary of the literary language, compiled on the basis of the people's living speech.

"Slovar ukrainskoi movy"

That fact became the four-volume dictionary edited by Hrinchenko, published in Kyiv in 1907–1909 (about 68,000 words). Its material had been gathered over decades by the editorial office of the journal Kievskaya starina, while Hrinchenko — tellingly, not a professional philologist — compiled it at the peak of his activity, adding about 20,000 words he had collected himself and collaborating with linguists, notably Ahatanhel Krymsky[1][2]. The work was painstaking: cards bearing words were debated — what was Ukrainian and what was not. Hrinchenko's dictionary remains to this day a primary source that philologists consult[2].

"Passport of the nation"

Stambol vividly calls the dictionary the "passport of the nation". The logic is direct: a dictionary is a document that attests to the existence of a language, and language is the principal expression of a nation. If a codified language exists, so does the nation[3]. This is precisely why the empire attacked the Ukrainian language so persistently: to undermine the language was to undermine the very existence of a separate people.

Codification as nation-building

It is worth recalling the context: at the time, the reality of the Ukrainian language was not obvious even to many Ukrainians themselves. People had to be persuaded that the entire public sphere could be Ukrainian-speaking — or even a family (the Hrinchenko family was a rare example of a fully Ukrainian-speaking one)[4]. The pressure to assimilate was immense. That is why compiling the dictionary was not only a philological task but also a nation-building one — a recording of the fact that the language, and therefore the nation, were real.

The empire tried to ban it

The best proof that the language was real and dangerous to the empire is the stubbornness with which it was banned. The notorious Valuyev Circular of 1863 closed Ukrainian Sunday schools (including those funded by the patron Yelyzaveta Skoropadska-Myloradovych) and effectively prohibited Ukrainian-language printing[5]. "Non-existent dialects" are not feared like this.

The ban was circumvented through Galicia, where, under Austria, persecution was milder. Skoropadska-Myloradovych donated 100,000 Austrian guldens and in 1863 founded in Lviv the Taras Shevchenko Printing House: it printed Ukrainian books and smuggled them across the entire Russian Empire. On this foundation the Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTSh, 1892) later arose — an unofficial Ukrainian academy of sciences[6]. The national movement, in the patron's words, "knows no bounds": a ban on one side of the border was offset by work on the other.

Two empires — two regimes for one language

The artificiality of the bans is seen most clearly when one compares how the same Ukrainian language was treated by the two empires between which the Ukrainian lands found themselves after the partitions of Poland — the Russian and the Austrian (from 1867, Austro-Hungarian). Up to the mid-nineteenth century, there was almost no purely linguistic persecution in Russian-ruled Ukraine — Ukrainian was simply regarded as a "dialect of Russian." But in the second half of the nineteenth century outright bans began: the Valuyev Circular of 1863 and the Ems Ukaz of 1876 effectively prohibited book-printing in Ukrainian[12][15].

On the other side of the border, the logic was the reverse. In Austria, Ukrainian (then called "Ruthenian," "Rusyn") was at first also underrated — regarded almost as a "dialect of Polish" — and developed slowly until the "Ruthenian Triad" (Markiyan Shashkevych, Ivan Vahylevych, Yakiv Holovatsky) set about creating a full literary language out of the "rustic" vernacular; their almanac Rusalka Dnistrovaya appeared in 1837. In the second half of the nineteenth century there was no particular suppression of the Ukrainian language in Austria-Hungary[13]. This was no accident: the December Constitution of 1867 guaranteed in the Austrian part of the empire equality of citizens, freedom of speech, assembly, and religion — and remained in force until 1918. On this ground, Ukrainian institutions operated legally in Galicia: as early as after the revolution of 1848 the Supreme Ruthenian Council arose in Lviv, and under its influence the Ukrainian-language newspaper "Zorya Halytska"[16]. Censorship, of course, existed, but its limit was fundamentally different: "the main thing is that you do not speak out against the emperor — and beyond that, write essentially whatever you like"[17].

The difference showed even in the social order. Serfdom existed in both empires, but in Russia it was "closer to slavery" — the historian compares it to the condition of Black slaves in America — whereas in Austria peasants had more rights, and serfdom itself was abolished after the revolution of 1848[14]. That is, the matter was not a "corrupted dialect": the very same language that one empire banned by decree was, on the other side of the border, calmly codified and developed in the press and in institutions. The ban was a political decision of St. Petersburg, not a property of the language.

A language is not "invented" — it develops

The very way the question is posed ("when and who invented the Ukrainian language") betrays a misunderstanding of how language works at all. In Vitaliy Dribnytsia's street interview, the interlocutor puts it succinctly: "Языки не изобретают, язык развивается — это живое явление, оно меняется в веках" ("Languages are not invented; a language develops — it is a living phenomenon, it changes over the centuries")[7]. This is a basic thesis of linguistics from the school curriculum: a language develops on its own, the same way among all peoples, so the notion that "the Ukrainians had a language invented for them" contradicts the very foundations of the discipline[8].

Proof of the language's maturity is the date of the first work of literature. The first work in the new Ukrainian literary language is Ivan Kotlyarevsky's "Eneyida" (Aeneid) (1798); before it there already existed dictionaries of the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries, and later Hrinchenko's four-volume dictionary. The appearance of a full-fledged work at the end of the eighteenth century means that the language was already formed by then, not "invented" later[9].

The claim of a "dialect" also fails to withstand scrutiny: by the classification of languages, Ukrainian belongs to the Indo-European family and, within it, to the East Slavic group alongside Belarusian and Russian. These are three languages of equal standing within one group, not "a language and its sub-dialect"[10]. The chronological argument is telling too: modern literary Russian is the language of Pushkin (not the earlier Lomonosov), and Pushkin was born at about the time the "Eneyida" was already in print. That is, the Ukrainian literary language arose no later than modern Russian[11].

What this means

"Dialects" are not the subject of four-volume academic dictionaries that linguists consult a century later. Hrinchenko's dictionary is a material refutation of the myth: the Ukrainian language was codified as a full-fledged literary language as early as the start of the twentieth century. And together with the language, what the empire tried to erase was also documented — a separate nation.

Ukrainian Righteous Among the Nations

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Russian narrative portrays Ukrainians as "wholesale collaborators" with the Nazis. The documented reality is different: more than 2,670 Ukrainians have been recognized by the Israeli memorial Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations for rescuing Jews during the Holocaust — one of the highest counts in the world. According to historian Ihor Shchupak, alongside the indifferent and the accomplices there were also those who risked everything to save the condemned.

A day of remembrance and a parallel with the present

On May 14, Ukraine marks the Day of Remembrance of Ukrainians Who Rescued Jews during the Second World War. The reach back into the past here is not accidental: just as today Ukrainians risk their lives to rescue wounded soldiers — the example of Sofiia Bila in Kherson region, who hid them, aware of the possible consequences — so too during the Holocaust people fell into the categories of indifferent bystanders, accomplices, and rescuers[1]. The question of why some risk their lives for others while others guide missiles onto their own city remains the same.

The Holocaust on Ukrainian soil

The scale of the tragedy on Ukrainian land is immense. Of the roughly 6 million Jews exterminated by the Nazis in Europe, approximately 1.5 million (a quarter) were Ukrainian Jews. If the worldwide symbol of the Holocaust is Auschwitz-Birkenau, then in Ukraine it is Babyn Yar; but a "local Babyn Yar" existed in practically every city, and the first shootings began in Bila Tserkva[2].

Three types of behavior

Researchers distinguish three responses to the catastrophe: indifferent witnesses (bystanders), accomplices, and rescuers — those who risked their lives to save others[3]. It is the rescuers, whose deeds have been verified, whom the Yad Vashem memorial recognizes as Righteous Among the Nations. Ukrainians number more than 2,670 among them — one of the highest counts in the world.

Metropolitan Sheptytsky and the Greek Catholics

The most famous example is Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, who organized the rescue of more than 150 Jews, above all children, at the Univ Lavra and other church centers. Despite this, he has still not been awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations (nor canonized by the church), whereas his brother Klymentiy Sheptytsky, Olena Viter, and other Greek Catholics who directly carried out the rescues are recognized as Righteous[4].

Orthodox rescuers and the study of their deeds

Rescuers came from different milieus. Among them was the Glagolev family of Orthodox priests: the father had in his time spoken out in defense of Jews in the Beilis affair, and the son rescued those fleeing the shootings at Babyn Yar[5]. The systematic study of the deeds of Ukrainian rescuers began only after the proclamation of independence; one of the first scholarly studies is Zhanna Kovba's book "Humanity in the Abyss of Hell."

What this means

The Righteous do not "cancel out" the fact that collaborators also existed — as in every occupied country of Europe. But they shatter the central manipulation: the depiction of Ukrainians as a homogeneous mass of "collaborators." The reality is more complex and more humane — and it is precisely this that is erased by the Russian instrumentalization of Holocaust memory. More than two and a half thousand documented names are the best answer to this myth.

Ukrainophobia and the War over Symbols

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. Ukrainophobia is not an abstraction but a phenomenon and a political technology directed against Ukrainians as a political nation. One distinct front of it is symbols: for years Russian information-psychological operations have attacked the Ukrainian flag, coat of arms, and tryzub (trident) with long-debunked myths ("someone inverted the flag", "the coat of arms is wrong"). In the assessment of the historian and heraldist Andriy Hrechylo, this is part of a broader war over identity — alongside technologies of manufactured separatism.

Ukrainophobia as a phenomenon

The paradox from which the research began: Ukrainophobia long went unrecognized as a concept. While Russophobia, Judeophobia, or Polonophobia were familiar fields of study, when it came to Ukrainians many people genuinely failed to understand that such a phenomenon existed at all[1].

The key point: Ukrainophobia is directed against Ukrainians as a political nation, not merely as an ethnic group. Abroad, hostility befell even non-ethnic Ukrainians — simply because of a Ukrainian passport. The phenomenon intensified with Putin's arrival (a quiet "purge" of Ukrainian organizations in Russia) and was actively deployed as a political technology from 2010 onward[1].

Through a series of academic seminars titled "Ukrainophobia as a Phenomenon and a Political Technology", the concept subsequently received a legal definition: it is enshrined in the preamble of the 2023 law on condemning Russian imperial policy and the decolonization of toponymy[2].

The legislative response on symbols

Ukraine has consistently built up legislation on symbols: in 2015, as part of decommunization, the symbols of the communist and Nazi regimes were banned; in May 2022, the symbols of the Russian invasion; in 2023, the law condemning Russian imperial policy and decolonizing toponymy, which regulates the renaming of objects named for propaganda purposes after the Russian Empire, the USSR, or the Russian Federation[3].

The myth of the "inverted flag"

The most famous fabrication is that "someone inverted the Ukrainian flag". This is untrue: no one inverted it. The blue-and-yellow flag (blue stripe on top) is a set of symbols approved as far back as the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921 (the UNR, the Central Rada, the Hetmanate). It was precisely the blue-over-yellow variant that the draft constitutions of the UNR specified (Kamianets-Podilskyi, 1920; Tarnów, 1921–1923), and the Ukrainian National Council confirmed it in 1949[4]. The confusion over the shades was generated by private interwar interpretations, not by the flag itself.

Symbols as a target of information operations

The flag, coat of arms, and tryzub have long been a target of Russian information-psychological operations. They promoted already-debunked tales: "the coat of arms is wrong — it's the symbol of the devil, it must be changed", "the anthem is depressing", "the flag was a gift from Mazepa or the Austrians". These fabrications (including from the 2008 TV program "In Search of Truth") were eagerly picked up by "useful idiots", and the goal was a single one — to sow confusion in Ukrainian society[5].

Meanwhile the tryzub itself is a direct refutation of the myth of "invented" symbols. According to research by the historian and heraldist Oleh Odnorozhenko, it is one of the simplest coats of arms in Europe and the world (just a shield and a conventional sign, two colors) precisely because its origin is the personal sign of Volodymyr the Great from the late 10th to early 11th century. During the revival of Ukrainian statehood in the early 20th century, this sign was adopted as the state coat of arms unchanged[7]. That is, the Ukrainian symbol has a direct continuity from Kyivan Rus' — nothing "invented".

Not only symbols: the technologies of separatism

The attack on symbols is part of a broader set of technologies. One example is the manufactured "political Rusynism" in Zakarpattia, which was created as a separate separatist movement in order to produce yet another "hot spot" in Ukraine, of the Transnistria or Karabakh variety. Thanks to subjective factors in 1990–1991, this flashpoint was extinguished, but the negative consequences are felt to this day[6].

Where the blue-and-yellow actually comes from

The best answer to the tales of a "gifted" or "inverted" flag is its real history. In a street dialogue, Vitaliy Dribnytsia traces it through its milestones. The earliest trace of the blue-and-yellow is associated with the Battle of Grunwald in 1410: in the army fighting against the Teutonic Order were the banners of the Rus' Voivodeship (the lands of present-day Western Ukraine), and the coat of arms of the Rus' Voivodeship was a golden lion on a blue field[8]. The combination of blue and yellow as Ukrainian colors is also visible in Ilya Repin's painting "Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Turkish Sultan": in the background are two banners, a blue-and-yellow one (furled) and a red-and-black one[9].

As a national symbol, the blue-and-yellow was established during the Spring of Nations of 1848. In Lviv at that time the Supreme Ruthenian Council arose — the first Ukrainian representative organization — and on 25 June 1848 the blue-and-yellow flag was raised over the Lviv town hall for the first time; the council resolved that yellow and blue were the national Ruthenian (Ukrainian) colors and that the golden lion on a blue field was the coat of arms of the Ruthenian land. (In the video, Dribnytsia ties the appearance of the flag to the student barricades of 1–2 November 1848 — this too is an episode of the same revolutionary events, but the decision about the flag itself and its raising over the town hall falls in June.)[10] From the mid-19th century the blue-and-yellow spread, and in 1917–1921 it was the official flag of the UNR and of Hetman Skoropadskyi's Ukrainian State[11].

That the symbol was real and dangerous to the empire is proven by the persecution: the Bolsheviks banned blue-and-yellow symbols from the 1920s — people were tried for it as "treason against the motherland" and sent to camps. Even in the 1960s–70s, young people and students who hung out flags were punished with real prison terms[12]. So by the time the USSR collapsed, ready-made national symbols already existed: the tryzub of Volodymyr and the blue-and-yellow flag were enshrined by the 1992 law, which describes the coat of arms as the sign of the princely state of Volodymyr the Great on a blue shield[13].

The double-headed eagle — not a "legacy of Byzantium"

A separate myth concerns the Russian symbol. It is usually claimed that Moscow inherited the double-headed eagle from Byzantium — together with the marriage of Ivan III and Sophia Palaiologina. In reality, Dribnytsia notes, the double-headed eagle was the symbol of the Tver principality — the one that first subjugated Moscow; it is in fact traditional European heraldry (the double-headed eagle is still on the coats of arms of Austria and Albania). In the time of Sophia Palaiologina it was merely finally cemented[14]. The irony is that the "heirs of Byzantium" took the symbol rather from a neighboring principality than from Constantinople.

What it means

Ukrainian symbols are not a random set of colors and signs but a continuity reaching back to the Ukrainian Revolution. That is why they became a target: to undermine the flag, the coat of arms, or the anthem is to undermine the very idea of a separate political nation. Recognizing these myths as an instrument of Ukrainophobia, rather than a "debate about design", is precisely the way not to fall for them.

The Union of Brest 1596: Kyiv, Rome, Constantinople

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Russian narrative reduces Orthodoxy to the "Russian world" and a "shared faith" with Moscow. The church history of Ukraine says otherwise: the Kyiv metropolitanate answered to Constantinople, not Moscow, had a deep tradition of ties with Rome, and in 1596 created a separate Greek Catholic Church. The Moscow Patriarchate itself was a later (1589) political project that immediately laid claim to the Rus' lands.

What the Union of Brest was

The Union of Brest of 1596 was a union of the Kyiv Orthodox metropolitanate with Rome. It gave rise to the Greek Catholic Church (the UGCC): it combined the Eastern, Byzantine rite with recognition of the primacy of the Pope of Rome[1]. This was neither an accident nor a "betrayal of Orthodoxy," but a way out of a deep internal crisis within the church.

A Western orientation — a long-standing tradition

The idea of a union was nothing new for Ukraine. It surfaced as far back as King Danylo Romanovych, who received his crown from the Pope of Rome, and in the mid-fifteenth century the Kyiv metropolitan Isidore took an active part in the Council of Ferrara-Florence[2]. In other words, a connection with Western, Latin Christianity had deep roots in the Ukrainian church — long before 1596.

Moscow: a new patriarchate with a claim

A point crucial for the present day: in 1589 the Moscow Patriarchate was created — and in violation of canon law at that. The Moscow patriarch was immediately granted the title "of Moscow and all Rus'" and fifth place among the world's patriarchs. This gave Muscovy formal grounds to lay claim to the Rus' lands — Ukrainian and Belarusian — that at the time belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth[3]. For Kyiv this was not a "shared faith" but a political threat.

Kyiv answered to Constantinople, not Moscow

Before the union, the Kyiv metropolitan was subordinate not to Moscow but to the patriarch of Constantinople. But the latter, residing in Ottoman Istanbul under the sultan's authority, had neither financial nor international influence — he was rather "first among equals" in name only. And when the Constantinople patriarchs tried to interfere in the internal affairs of the Kyiv metropolitanate, this provoked resistance from the local bishops — and became one of the reasons they raised the question of a union: to shut out outside influences and reform their own church[4].

What this means

The religious history of Ukraine is a direct refutation of the myth that "Orthodoxy = the Russian world." Kyiv was never a church "appendage" of Moscow: it answered to Constantinople, had its own tradition of conciliar governance and long-standing ties with Rome, and in 1596 deliberately created a separate Greek Catholic Church. Moscow, by contrast, constructed its patriarchate in 1589 — and immediately used it as an instrument for claiming Ukrainian lands. What the Kremlin today presents as an "eternal shared faith" is historically a later political appropriation.

Was the OUN a Fascist Movement? A Historian's Honest Answer

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. Russian propaganda reduces all Ukrainian nationalism to "fascism," and every Ukrainian to a "Banderite-Nazi." A historian's honest answer is more complex — and rejects both this cliché and its apologetic mirror image, the denial of crimes. According to Oleksandr Zaitsev, the OUN was a "proto-fascist" national-liberation organization that was influenced by fascism but was not a Nazi party; it later evolved toward democratic nationalism. At the same time, an honest history does not deny the participation of some nationalists in violence against Jews.

The question Russia keeps imposing

"Can the OUN — Melnyk's faction or Bandera's — be classed among fascist organizations?" This question, Zaitsev notes, is constantly imposed by the Russian side, because for Kremlin propaganda "Bandera" is a universal label. His answer is measured: "you can, but you shouldn't."[1]

Why "you can"? Because the OUN did indeed have certain fascist features and was influenced by fascism — the historian does not whitewash this. Why "you shouldn't"? Because classing the OUN as fascist erases a fundamental distinction: unlike fascist parties in power (the Italian one, the Nazi one, Romania's Legionary movement), the OUN was first and foremost a national-liberation organization. That is why the more accurate term is "proto-fascist": a movement that had some features of fascism and could potentially have become full-fledged fascism — but only under different circumstances[1].

Fascism, Nazism, nationalism: three different things

The very label "Banderite-Nazi" works only because it conflates three concepts that in fact are not equivalent to one another. This is spelled out separately by historian Ihor Shchupak (director of the Tkuma Ukrainian Institute for Holocaust Studies) in a webinar with the channel's author: most Russians do not distinguish Nazism from nationalism at all — for them these are "the same thing"[14].

All three are worth untangling. Fascism is a fuzzy concept: historians have no single definition, and it is stretched to cover Mussolini's Italian fascism, Spanish Francoism, and German Nazism alike. But Italian fascism built a corporative state and lacked the extreme racial antisemitism of Nazism — for a time, there were even Jews among the activists of the fascist party[15]. Nazism is narrower and more specific: a far-right current based on a biological pseudo-racial theory (a hierarchy of races, with "Aryans" above all) plus anticommunism and antisemitism, carried into the practice of state-building in 1933–1945[16]. Nationalism, meanwhile, is an altogether different category: historians count more than 15 of its varieties, and the core idea of political nationalism is achieving one's own state; it is characteristic of subjugated peoples and can be either left-wing or right-wing. Without such constructive nationalism, no nation-state would have come into being — not India, not Bangladesh, not Ukraine. Its opposite is chauvinism (asserting the dominance of one's own ethnic group at the expense of others) and its imperial variety — great-power chauvinism, which Shchupak sees in both the Russian Empire and present-day Russia[17].

This shows why the Kremlin's equation is false at every step: the OUN is nationalism (a movement for the statehood of a subjugated people), not Nazism (racial theory + the Holocaust); and to project "Nazism" onto Ukrainians from a state that itself lives by great-power chauvinism is a substitution of concepts. None of this removes the questions surrounding the OUN's proto-fascist features or participation in violence (see below), but it separates the real history from the label.

1941: the fork in the road that never happened

Such a chance did exist — in the event of achieving its own state. In 1941 the OUN(b) proclaimed the restoration of Ukraine's independence. But Hitler did not recognize this independence — and thereby crossed out the possible fascist path. From that moment the OUN's struggle began, including against fascism: it abandoned its orientation toward fascist states[2].

From 1943–1944 (the Third Grand Assembly of the OUN, the platform of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council) the movement began to evolve toward democratic nationalism, abandoning the integral nationalism of the 1930s. Even Bandera, in his last articles before his murder, used the concepts of democracy and tolerance — though whether this was sincere conviction or political expediency in life in the West, Zaitsev leaves an open question[3].

"Hitler's ally": what actually lies behind the label

The Kremlin cliché "Bandera = Hitler's ally" rests on several real facts which, if not muddled together, paint a more complex picture — and which do not soften the crimes (more on those below), but only state precisely who was where.

Bandera did not enter Lviv and was not even in Ukraine during the war. In 1941 his deputies and two battalions of Ukrainian nationalists marched in with the Wehrmacht, while Bandera himself was at that time in Kraków[6]. Subsequently, from 1941 to 1944, he was held in the German concentration camp of Sachsenhausen — where the Nazis themselves had thrown him (more on this below)[12].

The "Nachtigall" and "Roland" battalions were not "SS." These were two special battalions formed in 1941 within the "Brandenburg-800" regiment — a unit of the military intelligence (Abwehr) of Nazi Germany, not the Waffen-SS[7]. The Abwehr was headed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris — a Baltic German born in the Russian Empire; unlike Hitler, with his racial dogma about "Slavic Untermenschen," Canaris reckoned not to enslave but to break up the USSR and create buffer states allied with Germany — a plan Hitler did not share[8]. A common Russian confusion conflates these 1941 battalions with the Waffen-SS "Galicia" division — which was created only in 1943 and was an entirely different formation[11]. The distinction is significant: the OUN's "proto-fascist" features are not membership in the SS.

The Act of June 30, 1941, had several editions. In the version proclaimed from a balcony on Lviv's Rynok Square, the end did indeed mention "hope in Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany"; in the draft versions this phrase was absent[9]. In any case, Hitler did not recognize the independence: the Germans arrested Bandera and the head of the proclaimed government, Yaroslav Stetsko, and the battalions themselves were disbanded after Bandera's arrest[10].

None of these facts "whitewash" the OUN — and precisely for that reason they are compatible with the honest framing of the next section. They only show that the label "Hitler's ally" conceals a real collision: a movement that hoped to use Germany for its own state very quickly found itself in conflict with it — while the participation of some nationalists in the Holocaust does not cancel out that conflict.

An honest reckoning with the past

The hardest part — and it is precisely here that Zaitsev shows what an honest, rather than apologetic, position looks like. The work of the Canadian historian John-Paul Himka on the participation of the OUN and UPA in the Holocaust is, in Zaitsev's words, a serious challenge to "Ukrainian historians who deny the participation of Ukrainian nationalists in the extermination of Jews." Himka, he stresses, does not "work for Russia" — on the contrary, he condemns Russian aggression; his charge is that an uncritical cult of the OUN-UPA harms Ukrainian statehood itself[4].

Zaitsev's conclusion is blunt: there is no denying that many Ukrainian nationalists took part in violence against the Jewish population — in the militia created by the OUN, in the German auxiliary police infiltrated by the OUN, and on their own initiative[4]. As for the OUN leadership, he cautiously suggests rather indifference: Jews were not regarded as part of the Ukrainian political nation. And as for Volhynia: Bandera, imprisoned at the time in Sachsenhausen, was hardly aware of the events in real time — but "afterward he did not condemn them, and that too must be acknowledged"[5].

The Volhynia tragedy itself is also part of this honest reckoning, not an exception to it. In the summer of 1943, in Volhynia, the UPA carried out an ethnic cleansing of the Polish civilian population: coordinated attacks on Polish villages (culminating in the "Bloody Sunday" of July 11, 1943) that spared neither women nor children. Estimates of Polish casualties in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia vary: Polish historiography mostly cites 50,000–100,000 dead; historians such as Timothy Snyder, around 40,000–60,000 in Volhynia and another ~25,000 in Galicia; Ukrainian estimates are lower. The cleansings were mutual, but deeply asymmetrical: in response the Polish underground also killed Ukrainian civilians, but on an order of magnitude smaller scale. This is a war crime that an honest history names rather than conceals[13]. The classification of the event remains a matter of scholarly debate (Poland defines it as genocide, most Ukrainian and Western historians as ethnic cleansing/tragedy), but the very fact of the mass killing of Polish civilians is denied by no specialist. Russia actively speculates on Volhynia, setting Poles and Ukrainians against each other — yet this speculation gives no grounds either to deny or to justify the crime.

What this means

The truth here is uncomfortable for both oversimplifications. The Russian cliché "Ukrainians = Banderites = Nazis" is a lie: integral nationalism does not equal Nazism, and the OUN was a national-liberation movement that evolved toward democracy. But the apologetic denial of crimes is also a falsehood, one that honest Ukrainian historians like Zaitsev reject. The strength of Zaitsev's position lies precisely in the fact that it is not afraid of complexity: to acknowledge both the proto-fascist features and the participation in violence, both the national-liberation essence and the turn toward democracy. Russian propaganda, by contrast, feeds on exactly this — discarding complexity in favor of a label.

Was Ukraine a Colony of Russia

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. A common Russian counterargument: Ukraine was never a colony, because "Russia never had colonies at all" — unlike "real" maritime empires such as the British one. This is a sleight of hand built on a false template. Colonialism can be not only economic but also political: Russia was a continental political empire for which the priority was not resources but power and prestige. That is precisely why the West systematically underestimates it. And the "Russian world" is a modernized imperial instrument, sustained by the Russian language and a managed "shared memory."

The myth

"Show me the colonies" is the typical objection: the British, it runs, had overseas colonies, a navy, the East India Company, whereas Russia had nothing of the kind — therefore there was no colonialism, and Ukraine was no colony at all. The argument sounds convincing because it rests on the familiar image of empire — ships, ocean, overseas possessions.

Colonialism can be political, not only economic

The weak point of this argument lies in the assumption that colonialism is always economic and always maritime. In reality it can also be political. The British Empire was economic and maritime: its logic was the extraction of resources from the colonies for the benefit of the metropole (India was called "the jewel in the crown"). Continental political empires, by contrast — the Russian, German, and Italian ones — operated differently: the priority was not profit but glory, prestige, and domination[1].

Russia was never primarily an economic power — it was a political one. That is why the "classic" templates of maritime-economic empires do not fit it, and it is for this very reason that the West misjudges it, trying to contain it with purely economic levers[2]. Tellingly, the colonial character of these relations was acknowledged by the Russian imperialists themselves: Ukraine was directly called Russia's "East India" — that is, what India was to Britain[2].

The "Russian world" as an imperial instrument

The contemporary continuation of this imperial logic is the concept of the "Russian world". In essence it is a modernized version of Minister Uvarov's triad ("autocracy, Orthodoxy, nationality"): at its base lie the Russian language, a "shared culture," and a managed "shared historical memory"[3]. It is no coincidence that the "Russian World" foundation, created in 2007, is headed by Vyacheslav Nikonov — Molotov's grandson: the continuity between Soviet and present-day Russian elites has not gone anywhere[3].

A key element of this "shared memory" is the cult of the "Great Victory": carefully cultivated symbolic capital, convenient both for exerting influence across the post-Soviet space and for reminding Western partners that "we, after all, defeated Nazism." Even the grassroots "Immortal Regiment" initiative (2012) was co-opted by the Kremlin and hollowed out into a state-run pobedobesie ("victory frenzy")[5]. The mechanics of this cult are examined in more detail in the article "The cult of the 'Great Victory'".

Hierarchy instead of equality

The colonial character is also visible from within. The USSR operated a hierarchy of ethnicities: Russians were "first among equals," Ukrainians were "younger brothers" (from 1954), and the rest of the peoples followed by rank; ethnicity was politicized and recorded in the "fifth line" of the internal passport[4]. Ukraine abandoned this model in 1991, taking the path of a civic rather than an ethnic nation.

Not a "quasi-state": the Ukrainian SSR at the UN

The colonial thesis is often pushed to the extreme by denying statehood itself: the Ukrainian SSR, it is claimed, was not a state but a "quasi-state" without agency. But international law tells a different story. Soviet Ukraine was a founding member of the UN — one of the 51 states that signed the Charter in 1945[14]. Moscow secured for the USSR effectively three votes in the General Assembly: the USSR, the Ukrainian SSR, and the Byelorussian SSR each voted separately, and the Allies of the anti-Hitler coalition accepted this compromise[15]. The signature of the Ukrainian SSR's representative Dmytro Manuilsky stands on the UN Charter — he led the Ukrainian delegation at the San Francisco Conference and chaired its First Committee, which prepared the preamble and the first chapter of the Charter[16].

What is more, the Ukrainian SSR was even elected a non-permanent member of the Security Council — for a two-year term in 1948–1949 (in the video the date is given uncertainly, "46–47, I may be wrong" — it was in fact 1948–49)[17]. Of course, the real decisions were taken in Moscow, not in Kyiv, and these were votes under Soviet control. But the very fact that the Kremlin deliberately fought to obtain separate representation for Ukraine at the UN demolishes the thesis "it was not a state at all": a colony is not put forward for the Security Council. Soviet Ukraine was a subject whose subjecthood the metropole simultaneously recognized on paper and hollowed out in practice — which fits entirely within the logic of political, not economic, colonialism.

The myth of "forced Ukrainization"

The colonial optics are also clearly visible in one of the most enduring Russian narratives — that of the "forced Ukrainization" of the 1920s, supposedly an oppression of Russian-speakers. The academician Larysa Yakubova exposes the sleight of hand: russification was always presented as a boon — an introduction to a "higher" culture — whereas the ordinary requirement to know the language of the local population in order to hold state and leadership positions (korenizatsiia, "indigenization," which applied not only in Ukraine but also in villages and national districts) was declared "violence"[6]. In reality this "violence" was not repression but the indignation of a colonizer who, for the first time, had to learn the language of those he was used to ruling over.

An empire built by conquest, not defense

There is yet another narrative the colonial thesis loves to refute — a mirror image of it: that Russia never seized anyone, that it was "constantly being attacked." Here it is useful first to ask what is to be understood as "Russia" and from what moment — and it immediately becomes clear that this state was built not by defense but by the consistent absorption of its neighbors. The Principality of Moscow subjugated Tver and Ryazan; in 1471 the army of Ivan III defeated the Novgorod Republic — a distinct independent state — at the Battle of the Shelon, and in 1478 it abolished the veche and annexed it for good[7]. Then came roughly 80 years of Muscovite–Lithuanian wars, in which Moscow seized the lands of old Rus', and under Ivan IV — the conquest of the Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556) Khanates[7].

The same logic operated in the 20th century: in 1939 the USSR, together with Nazi Germany, partitioned Poland, then tried to subjugate Finland, annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia (1940), and took Bessarabia from Romania[8]. In other words, the overwhelming majority of wars between Russia and its neighbors were not defense but attack on the part of Moscow, the Russian Empire, the USSR, and present-day Russia[8]. "Constant attacks on Russia" is the same inverted template as "Russia had no colonies": the aggressor portraying itself as the victim.

Hence a useful frame for the current war — the "unfinished collapse of empire." Drobnytsia describes the present-day Russian Federation as an empire that has not completed its collapse: the Russian Empire fell apart at the start of the 20th century, the USSR at its end, and the Russian Federation remained "under-collapsed" — and the war against Ukraine is in essence the third wave of this collapse (1917 → 1991 → now)[28]. In this optics the colonial thesis becomes a logical consequence rather than a metaphor: a state that for centuries grew by conquering its neighbors, and which still does not recognize Ukraine as distinct, behaves not like a nation-state within its own borders but like an empire holding a colonized periphery by force.

Deportation as a method of control

If Russia's colonialism was political, then its working instrument was not trade but deportation. As the historian Serhii Hromenko shows, the entire history of Russian statehood is a history of the forcible resettlement of the disobedient: it begins with that very conquest of Novgorod in the 1470s, after which the Novgorodians were dispersed across Moscow and assimilated, and the survivors were "finished off" a century later by Ivan the Terrible[9]. Deportations accompanied every expansion of the empire.

This is seen most vividly in Crimea. Even before the annexation of the peninsula, in 1778, Catherine II — through Suvorov — resettled some 31,000 Christians from Crimea to the mainland — Greeks and Armenians — mostly into the territory of the future Mariupol; the Crimean Khanate was annexed in 1783[10]. (In the video the figure is rounded to "33,000"; the documented figure is about 31,000, with the resettlement overseen by Metropolitan Ignatius.) The culmination of this logic was the deportation of the Crimean Tatar people, which began on 18 May 1944: in a matter of days some 200,000 people were removed (the documented NKVD count was about 191,000)[11]. Deportation was not the excess of a single regime but the means by which, for centuries, the metropole held its colonized lands.

Crimea: not "originally Russian" but annexed in 1783

A separate knot of colonial mythology is the thesis that Crimea was "always Russian." The peninsula's own chronology demolishes it. Already in the 8th century BCE, Greek settlers settled along the coast — on the sites of present-day Sevastopol and Kerch, alongside the Tauri tribes[18]. Later the south of Crimea became part of Byzantium, and Chersonesus remained a Byzantine city[19] — a continuity in which Moscow does not figure at all.

After the disintegration of the western part of the Mongol Empire (the Ulus of Jochi) in the mid-15th century, the Crimean Khanate arose, headed by the Giray dynasty; it lasted until 1783, in a relationship of dependence on the Ottoman Empire, with the khans elected at the kurultai and confirmed by the Ottoman sultan[20]. Economically the khanate rested on the slave trade: the largest slave market was Kaffa (today's Feodosia), subordinated directly to the Ottomans, while the raids reached as far as Moscow — as in the campaign of 1571[21].

The character of the khanate's relations with Moscow is also telling. Down to the times of Peter I, Moscow paid the Crimean Khanate "pominki" — effectively a tribute, in order to avoid raids (Peter sent the last "pominki" to Bakhchysarai in 1721, by which time he had already renamed the Muscovite Tsardom an empire)[22]. That is, it was not Crimea that was a province of Moscow but the reverse — Moscow bought itself off from the Crimean khans for centuries. And in 1648 Khan Islyam Giray became the first ally of Bohdan Khmelnytsky at the start of the Cossack revolution[22].

Crimea came under Russian rule only in 1783: after two Russo-Turkish wars won by Catherine II, the last khan was summoned to Saint Petersburg, the khanate was liquidated, and its lands became the Taurida Governorate[23]. This was precisely the annexation — following exactly the same logic of political colonialism as the rest of the imperial acquisitions.

That Crimea was not "Russian by definition" is also clear from 1917: after the collapse of the empire, the Crimean Tatars convened a kurultai and proclaimed a Crimean People's Republic headed by a directory, which was led by the young mufti Noman Çelebicihan — author of the Crimean Tatar anthem[24]. The Bolsheviks, on coming to power, dissolved the kurultai and on 23 February 1918 shot Çelebicihan, throwing his body into the sea off Sevastopol[25]. As elsewhere, the metropole held Crimea not by right of antiquity but by armed suppression of another people's statehood — first Crimean Tatar, then Ukrainian.

The flip side: the Ukrainian Green Wedge

There is also a mirror side to colonization by land — Ukrainian settlers on the outskirts of the empire. Under the Stolypin agrarian reform, which gathered pace from 1906, Ukrainians settled en masse in the Far East and Transbaikalia — lands that came to be called the Green Wedge — as well as in northern Kazakhstan and the Orenburg region — the Grey Wedge[12]. This too is part of imperial history: peasants were moved to new lands within a single state, and compact Ukrainian communities grew up there. This world was immortalized by the writer Ivan Bahrianyi in the novel The Hunters and the Hunted (1944), set precisely in the Green Wedge — though already in the Soviet era, among those fleeing Stalin's repressions, rather than in imperial times[13].

An even closer example is Eastern Slobozhanshchyna, the lands of the present-day Kursk region, in particular Sudzha. Until the mid-17th century this was a borderland wasteland ravaged by Tatar raids; it came under Muscovite control under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, and was peopled during the era of the Ruin — by Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants fleeing the wars on the Dnipro lands. They were not settled there by chance: this was the Muscovite defensive line against Crimea, and Moscow needed a population to garrison it, having no free people of its own owing to serfdom[26]. That is why the settled population here long remained predominantly Ukrainian: by the census, the share of Ukrainians ("Little Russians") in the rural population of the Sudzha district exceeded 60%, and at first these lands even belonged to the Kyiv Governorate; Sudzha became "Russian" only at the end of the 18th century, when it was assigned to the newly created Kursk Governorate with its Russian majority[27]. (In the video Drobnytsia dates the census to the "end of the 18th century" — the Ukrainian majority of the Sudzha district is documented above all by the first general census of 1897, by which about 61% of the population in the town of Sudzha itself spoke Ukrainian.) That is, here too the metropole settled its "defensive outskirts" with Ukrainian hands — and later, by administratively redrawing the governorates, turned their land into something "originally Russian."

What this means

The question "were there colonies" does not reduce to the presence of a navy and overseas possessions. The Russian Empire colonized by land and by political methods — through language, the church, a hierarchy of peoples, and managed memory. In this optics Ukraine was indeed a colony — not an "East India" with spices, but a territory the metropole held for the sake of prestige and domination. The "Russian world" is not a cultural initiative but a direct continuation of this imperial logic in our own day.

Yurii Lypa: a Black Sea Ukraine and the partition of Russia

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Kremlin presents Russia as an eternal, indivisible "monolith" and Ukraine as a part of it. The Ukrainian geopolitician Yurii Lypa described the opposite as early as the 1930s–40s: Ukraine is an independent Black Sea state, while the Russian Empire is doomed to partition. For these ideas he was tortured to death by the NKVD in 1944, and in the West they are still not taken seriously.

Who was Yurii Lypa

Yurii Lypa (1900–1944), the son of the prominent activist Ivan Lypa, was a physician, poet, and geopolitician. In the assessment of the historian Ihor Stambol, he built up concepts more relevant than anything anyone in Ukraine has formulated since[1]. His major work is a geopolitical trilogy: "The Destiny of Ukraine" (1938), "The Black Sea Doctrine" (1940), and "The Partition of Russia" (1941), in which he reflected on Ukraine's place in the world, its economic power, and the historical foundations of its statehood.

Black Sea, not Muscovite

Lypa's first major thesis is Ukraine's Black Sea orientation. He emphasized Crimea, the Black Sea, Taurida, and the Greek (Pontic) heritage of the Ukrainian lands: Greek colonization, the Bosporan Kingdom, Kerch-Panticapaeum[2]. Ukraine, he argued, is rooted not in the Muscovite "north" but in the Black Sea–Mediterranean space. In "The Black Sea Doctrine" he proposed a union of Black Sea states — Ukraine, Turkey, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania — as a counterweight to Moscow.

"The Partition of Russia" — a thesis ahead of its time

The most topical today is the work "The Partition of Russia." Stambol notes that at international conferences (including with the participation of NATO representatives) Western analysts still do not accept the idea of Russia's disintegration — they see it as a "monolith" that supposedly need only be reformed in a democratic direction[3]. Lypa argued the opposite 80 years ago: an empire built on the subjugation of dozens of peoples cannot be reformed, and the only humane and realistic way to overcome the threat it poses is decolonization — partition into its natural components.

The price of truth

Lypa's own fate shows how much his ideas frightened Moscow. He was tortured to death by the NKVD in August 1944 (his body, bearing the marks of torture, was found near Yavoriv). And in the Soviet era his daughters did not even know who their parents were: the family was under constant surveillance[4]. This is a classic imperial practice — destroy a thinker and erase the very memory of him.

What this means

Lypa is an example of Ukrainian geopolitical thought seeing Ukraine's distinctness and the Russian Empire's vulnerability long before 2022. This is no "exotica": the thesis of Russia's decolonization is today seriously discussed by scholars and politicians. Of course, Lypa was a figure of his time, an age of loud interwar ideologies, and his texts are more visionary journalism than strictly academic work. But his central intuition — that Ukraine is of the Black Sea, and that Russia is not eternal — proved far more perceptive than the notion, widespread in the West, of an "unshakable monolith."

The Holodomor: a man-made famine, not a natural disaster

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. A widespread myth presents the Holodomor as an ordinary famine caused by natural factors — drought and crop failure — that was supposedly "everywhere," and calls the word "man-made" a fabrication. This is refuted by a simple fact: the 1931 harvest was good, and the lethal famine struck at the end of 1932 and in the first half of 1933 solely because of the grain-procurement policy of the party led by Stalin. Unlike the famine of 1921–22 (where there really was a natural drought), the Holodomor has no natural explanation — and that is precisely why it is called man-made. Up to 4 million people died in Ukraine; as early as 1988 the U.S. Congress Commission qualified this as genocide.

The myth

In a typical dispute, the opponent denies the very definition: supposedly "there was no so-called Holodomor," the famine was everywhere, and to call it man-made is wrong[1]. The logic is simple: if a famine arises from drought and crop failure, then it is a natural disaster, not a crime, and there is no question of any targeting of Ukrainians.

Natural famine versus man-made

The key to refutation lies in distinguishing two different events. A famine did occur, but the Holodomor was a man-made famine, caused not by natural factors. A telling counter-example is the famine of 1921–22: it really did have a natural component (a very dry summer) alongside the actions of the Bolsheviks, and that is precisely why no one calls it a Holodomor[2].

By contrast, the famine of late 1932 — the first half of 1933 cannot be explained by any natural factors: the harvest was normal, and 1931 was an exceptionally good year. The mass death on the territory of Ukraine, where up to 4 million people died, was brought about solely by the actions of the Communist Party led by Stalin — above all by inflated grain-procurement quotas that swept all the grain out of the villages[3]. (Academic estimates of direct losses range from 3.5 to 4 million; this figure rests on the work of historians, not on "television.")

Not only Ukraine: the Kazakh parallel

That the cause was political rather than natural is also evident from the geography. The same course — forced procurement — led in Kazakhstan to a catastrophe known there as the "Asharshylyk": around 40 %, and by the estimate in the video up to half of the Kazakh population, perished; this too is considered a man-made famine[4]. By contrast, there was no famine on this scale on Russia's own territory in 1932–33. The disaster struck not "the whole USSR evenly," but specific grain-growing regions with a particular population — those from which grain and livestock were confiscated.

The substitution: the Holodomor is not the Volga famine of 1921

Hence the typical substitution: the opponent conflates the Holodomor with the famine in the Volga region of 1921–23. But what is called the Holodomor in Ukraine is exclusively the man-made famine created by the Soviet authorities in 1932–33; to equate it with the natural famine of the previous decade is an error that erases the difference between a natural disaster and a man-made crime[5].

What Soviet historiography denied — and what the sources say

It is no accident that Soviet historiography denied the famine altogether: it "never happened," and this was asserted for decades, until even the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine began to acknowledge the fact[6]. That is why reliance on sources is decisive here. Among them are the report of the U.S. Congress Commission (published in 1988) with eyewitness testimony, the works of American historian James Mace, the research of Doctor of Historical Sciences Stanislav Kulchytsky (who began studying the subject back in the USSR), and the contemporary works of Hennadii Yefimenko[6]. Denial of the man-made nature of the famine, as a rule, rests on no scholarly work at all — only on "prejudice."

Why: a motive, not chance

If the famine was man-made, the main question arises — why. The answer that distinguishes the Holodomor from an ordinary crop failure lies in the realm of politics, not weather. The collectivization of 1929–30 triggered a wave of peasant uprisings, and the most numerous of them were precisely in Ukraine[7]. At first Stalin temporarily backed off with his article "Dizzy with Success" (1930), and the protests subsided; but already in the autumn of that same year a resolution on the pace of collectivization was issued, ordering Ukraine to "take one of the first places" — the Ukrainian countryside was to pass through the crucible of collectivization by 1933[14]. Stalin ordered Ukraine driven into collective farms, well aware that it would rise up again. He regarded the Ukrainian national movement as the greatest threat to the USSR, so the terror by famine was directed precisely at the Ukrainian lands[8].

To the political motive was added an economic one. The USSR was carrying out forced industrialization, for which it needed to buy machine tools and equipment in the West — and therefore to earn hard currency. This came from exports: grain (along with timber and minerals) was shipped abroad even when people were dying of hunger in the villages. So grain was taken from the peasants for sale as well[11]. The famine was not a side effect but a means of simultaneously breaking resistance and extracting a resource.

Hence the mechanism itself: from November 1932 to February 1933, villages were surrounded and everything edible was confiscated, down to the grain from the oven and the seed stock, so that people would die. In parallel, dekulakization was under way: "kulaks" were divided into three categories — execution, deportation to another republic, resettlement within the republic — with all their property confiscated[9]. These were not the consequences of a crop failure but a planned operation against a specific stratum on a specific territory.

That is precisely why the event is qualified as genocide: the parliaments of many countries have recognized the Holodomor as such[10]. Tellingly, Raphael Lemkin — the jurist who actually introduced the term "genocide" (1944) — in his 1953 work analyzed the destruction of the Ukrainian nation as a classic example of Soviet genocide.

The Holodomor in the context of the 20th century

The man-made famine of 1932–33 was not an isolated episode. Historian Timothy Snyder emphasizes that Ukraine found itself at the epicenter of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century: the First and Second World Wars, communist terror, three famines, and mass deportations[12]. In his work "Bloodlands" (2010), Snyder places Ukraine within the broader space of Eastern Europe — the lands between a notional West and a notional Russia, where millions died systematically from deliberate policy rather than from combat[13]. In this framework the Holodomor appears not as a chance disaster nor as a "famine that was everywhere," but as one of the central crimes of the era — alongside the Great Terror and the Nazi murders, but with its own purposeful logic directed against the Ukrainian countryside.

What this means

The argument over "natural or man-made" is not a terminological trifle. If the famine was natural, then there is neither a culprit nor intent; if it was man-made, then there are both policy and responsibility. The facts stand on the side of the latter: a good harvest on the eve, selective geography along the line of grain procurement, decades of official denial, and recognition as genocide at the level of the U.S. Congress Commission. The Holodomor was not a whim of the weather but the consequence of decisions made in Moscow.

How "Rus'" Became "Russia"

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Kremlin narrative presents Russia as the direct heir of Kyivan Rus' and Kyiv as an "originally Russian" city. This is a substitution. From the very beginning, the name "Rus'" pointed to the Ukrainian lands; Moscow inherited not a state but a name — and even then in its Greek form. The Greek Ῥωσία ("Russia") travelled north together with the Church: after the Mongol invasion the Kyivan metropolitan moved his see to the Vladimir-Suzdal principality[2]. Only two centuries later, leaning on the legend of the Rurikid legacy, the Muscovite rulers wrote "Rus'," and later "Russia," into their own titles — from Ivan III to Peter I[5][6].

The myth

The question is posed bluntly by the author's interlocutor: why did the Muscovite tsardom decide that Ukraine, and specifically Kyiv, was a part of it[1]? Behind this everyday phrasing lies a core Kremlin myth: that Russia is supposedly the natural continuation of Kyivan Rus', so that Kyiv is the "mother of Russian cities," and Ukrainians and Russians are "one people." If that were so, then a separate Ukrainian history would be a misunderstanding.

A name, not a state

The weak point of the myth lies in confusing the name with the state. The fact that modern Russia bears a name derived from "Rus'" does not make it the heir of Rus' — any more than a name travels along with the fugitive who pronounces it.

The sharpest acknowledgement of this comes from official Russian scholarship itself. The newest multivolume academic edition "История России" (in publication since 2024, a project of the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Historical Society) states outright in the introduction to volume 4 ("Россия в X веке," p. 28) that the tenth-century state "называют как русским, так и московским государством, а также российским," because "в источниках встречаются и те, и другие наименования," and adds: "мы используем их как синонимы, не вкладывая никакого иного смысла"[30]. In other words, the state's own Russian academics themselves attest that there is no continuous name "Russia" descending from Rus': they use "Rusian," "Muscovite," and "Russian" as interchangeable labels for one and the same entity. If "Rus'" and "Russia" are synonyms by the choice of a modern editor, then there is no unbroken name inherited from Kyiv; there is a later, agreed-upon usage.

The same substitution hides in this edition's finer formulation as well — "Russian medieval statehood." Earlier, Dribnytsia notes, specialist Russian articles invariably appended a footnote after this phrase: "Russian" here is not in the ethnic sense, because medieval Rus' and modern Russia are different states. In the new academic course this caveat is gone — the "Russian" statehood of the sixth to eleventh centuries is presented as if it were simply an early form of modern Russia[33]. The disappearance of the footnote is precisely the point where scholarship imperceptibly slips into ideologeme.

That "Rus'" pointed from the outset to the Ukrainian lands is already visible from the chronicles themselves. The Soviet archaeologist Borys Rybakov, in his classic 1972 work "Rus' in the Narrow and Broad Sense of the Word," analysed the full text of the chronicles and showed that "Rus'" in the narrow, properly chronicle sense is only the Kyiv, Chernihiv, and part of the Volhynia regions — that is, the territory of modern Northern Ukraine[18]. This is evident from the chronicle formula itself: when a prince travels from Kyiv to Novgorod, the chronicler simply writes "set out," but when he goes from Novgorod to Kyiv, the chronicler adds "set out for Rus'"[18]. More than 700 uses of the term "Rus'" in the pre-Mongol period localize to the territory of modern Ukraine — and do not overlap with the lands of modern Russia; the name only begins to "creep over" into the Zalissia region after the Mongol period[19]. In other words, for contemporaries themselves "Rus'" was above all the Dnipro region, not Moscow.

The mechanism of this transfer is entirely concrete. After the Mongol invasion the Kyivan metropolitan, together with his entourage, moved his seat from Kyiv to the territory of the Vladimir-Suzdal principality[2] — historically this happened around 1299 under Metropolitan Maxim. The Church was then the chief bearer of "Rusian" identity, and all the correspondence of the Kyivan metropolitanate with Constantinople was conducted in Greek. And the Greek equivalent of the word "Rus'" is precisely Ῥωσία, that is, "Russia"[3]. The name, which from the outset referred to the Kyivan, that is, Ukrainian lands, gradually spread along with the metropolitanate to the Zalissia region — the Vladimir-Suzdal, Tver, and Moscow principalities — and over time the rulers there began to call themselves by it[4].

How "Rus'" entered the Muscovite title

The appropriation of the name was not instantaneous — it stretched over centuries and proceeded through the titulature of the rulers. Ivan III was the first to write himself in as "prince of Rus'," in the second half of the fifteenth century[5]. The grounds were not factual but legendary: at that time historical Rus' (the modern Ukrainian and Belarusian lands) was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, but Moscow laid claim to these territories on the basis of a legend that all the princes there were descendants of Rurik[5].

The name then took hold step by step: Ivan IV (the Terrible) was crowned as "tsar of all Rus'," in the title of Alexei Mikhailovich the form "tsar of Russia," Greek in origin, appeared, and in 1721 Peter I assumed the title of all-Russian emperor — and the state officially became the Russian Empire[6]. Thus "Russia" as Moscow's self-designation is not an ancient continuity from Kyiv but a late political construct that took final shape only at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

The title as claim, not mirror

It is worth separately distinguishing title from reality. Titulature was drawn up at the ruler's court — it is a formula by which one was to address him; it recorded not so much existing possessions as claims and aspirations. When "prince of all Rus'" appeared in Ivan III's title at the end of the fifteenth century, this was not a reflection of reality but a territorial claim to the Rusian lands that then belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — asserted during the war over the Smolensk region[10]. Tellingly, Kyiv was not in the list of "Rusian" cities in the title until a letter of 1490: first there was "Rus'," and Kyiv was not in it.

Here lies the boundary between layman and specialist: the layman sees the inscription "tsar of all Rus'" in a source and believes it literally; the historian, who has analysed hundreds of such formulas, recognizes in it a diplomatic claim. And the Hellenized form "Russia" itself took hold even later — under Alexei Mikhailovich in the second half of the seventeenth century, and that under the influence of the Kyiv-Mohyla scholars: during the reforms of Patriarch Nikon, church texts were collated against the Greek model, and the model was taken from Ukraine, where the scholarly centre of the time was located. The "high style" required writing in the Greek manner — "Russia"[10].

Why Moscow writes Rus' into its own history

Why, then, does Moscow consistently present the history of Rus' as "its own"? A methodological substitution is at work here. The history of each country is conventionally written within the borders of the existing state: from the settlement of ancient peoples on its territory and onward. Russian historiography violates this principle — it writes the territory of modern Ukraine and annexed Crimea into its own history, beginning practically from the Neanderthals[7].

The consequences of this substitution are visible even in the most ancient sections. In a street conversation, Dribnytsia's interlocutor, who studied history back in Russia, acknowledges a characteristic detail: Russian university history textbooks, in the chapter on the Scythians and the Greek city-states, describe mostly those that were on the territory of modern Ukraine — Chersonesus, Olbia, Tyras — rather than on the territory of modern Russia, even though the Black Sea coast became part of the Russian Empire only at the end of the eighteenth century[24]. The same "imperial principle" that stretches back from the fifteenth century compels Russian historiography to appropriate the antiquity of the Ukrainian coast — just as it appropriates Rus'.

The same appropriation is visible at the most ancient stratum — in the history of the Slavs themselves, and once again on the material of a Russian academic edition. In volume 2 of "История России" the authors honestly record: the Slavs appear in written sources only from the sixth century — the earliest mentions are in Jordanes and Procopius of Caesarea, authors of the mid-sixth century — and their ancestral homeland lies in the southeast of modern Poland, the north and west of modern Ukraine, in the Pripyat basin up to the middle Dnipro; whereas the territory of the modern Russian Federation was then inhabited by Baltic and Finno-Ugric tribes[31]. Moreover, when modern borders are overlaid onto the edition's own maps, 90–95% of the Slavic archaeological cultures turn out to be on the territory of modern Ukraine, a portion in Belarus, and only a tiny patch of the Romny culture in the Oka-Volga interfluve on the territory of Russia[32]. And the volume's concluding statement (p. 135) nonetheless proclaims that it was precisely these lands that "set the contours of the future state of Rus'"[32] — that is, it contradicts its own 130 pages of description. This is the mechanism in miniature: to describe honestly that there were almost no Slavs on the future Russian lands — and all the same to declare the whole of Eastern Europe the Slavic cradle of "Russia."

The root lies in the origin of this tradition. The conceptualization of its own history began in Russia in the middle of the eighteenth century (from Tatishchev), when Kyiv and the Ukrainian lands were part of the empire — so to describe Ukraine as a part of Russia seemed natural then. A purely source-based circumstance also pushed in this direction: the oldest copies of the Rusian chronicles survived on the territory of Russia, not Ukraine[25]. The Laurentian copy (1377) was transcribed in the Zalissia region, the Hypatian (1420s) was preserved in the Ipatiev Monastery near Kostroma — so when Russian scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries set out to search for "the origins of their own statehood," the very manuscripts at hand led to Kyiv, and beginning Russia's history there seemed natural[25]. The circumstance was accidental (where the parchments physically survived), but a programmatic conclusion was drawn from it — that Kyiv is the beginning of specifically Russian history. This view was continued by Karamzin, Solovyov, Klyuchevsky. After the collapse of the empire and the USSR, history ought to have been rewritten along the new borders, excluding the Ukrainian narratives — and this is precisely what the Petersburg school argued for. But the Moscow school won, the heir of the imperial tradition, which Putin ultimately backed[8]. How this imperial project was built around the legacy of Rus' from the time of Ivan III is shown in detail by Serhii Plokhy in "Lost Kingdom."

Why this narrative took root in the West

There remains the question of why the Russian version is accepted by Western academia as well. The cause is institutional rather than scholarly. The systematic study of Eastern Europe in the West began after World War II — corresponding departments opened in the universities of Europe and North America. They were staffed mostly by émigrés from the former Russian Empire and the USSR — professional historians, but raised in the imperial outlook, which they carried over into the new environment. A Ukrainian state that might have promoted its own vision did not exist then, and the Soviet Union was perceived as "Russia"[9]. The exceptions were literally a few chairs of Ukrainian studies (Harvard, Alberta), headed at the time by historians of Ukrainian origin. So for a long time the world looked at the history of Eastern Europe through the eyes of Russian historians.

Russian academia against the Russian textbook

The sharpest proof of the substitution is provided by Russian scholarship itself. In a street conversation Dribnytsia's interlocutor proposes that they jointly open the "Большая российская энциклопедия" — an academic edition prepared by the Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, not by anonymous contributors. And there Kyivan Rus' and the "Russian State" are two separate entries: the history of the "Russian State" begins with Ivan III, that is, with a state that arose only in the second half of the fifteenth century[11]. And when one opens the entry on Kyivan Rus' (the Old Rus' state), it states outright that this was a multiethnic state in which there were as yet no Russians, no Ukrainians, no Belarusians — the nations had not yet formed[12].

This is confirmed by the encyclopedia itself: the dedicated article on the "Russian State" dates its formation to the fifteenth-sixteenth centuries (from Ivan III), and describes Kyivan Rus' (the "Old Rus' state") separately as a polyethnic entity of the ninth to early twelfth centuries, which, besides Slavic, also included non-Slavic tribes. That is, Russian academia does not merge these two states into a single continuity.

And then comes the key rupture: Russian society, through school textbooks and the media, tells exactly the opposite — that Kyivan Rus' is the "first stage" of Russian statehood[13]. The result is a paradox: professional Russian historians write one thing in encyclopedic articles, while the mass myth, on which state propaganda also rests, says another. The continuity of Rus' holds not on Russian scholarship but in spite of it.

Nor is the conflation of three peoples into one anything new. As early as the second half of the nineteenth century, imperial policy declared Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians "one people" — and it is precisely this formula that Putin repeated in his programmatic article of 2021, before the full-scale invasion[14]. The argument about "one people" is not a discovery but a resuscitation of an imperial thesis a century and a half old.

A detail about the northeastern dynasty itself is worth adding. The princes there held the grand principality not as an inheritance "from Kyiv" but as a yarlyk (patent) from the Horde khan: the Muscovite house received the yarlyk for its principality from Khan Uzbek[15] (Ivan Kalita — in the 1320s–1330s). The legitimacy of early Moscow rested on the Horde, not on the Kyivan continuity that was attributed to it later.

"History within borders": how a single narrative is split in two

There is also a purely methodological device. Russian historiography presents the past of Rus' as one continuous history of its own state, artificially cut in two halves: first the state centred on Kyiv (up to the Mongol invasion), and then, after the arrival of the Mongols, the narrative "leaps" without transition to the Vladimir-Suzdal principality and Moscow, as if it were the same state[16]. In reality these are different polities; stitching them into a single continuity is a narrative trick, not a conclusion drawn from the sources.

The same logic compels Russia to ascribe to itself even what in no way belongs to it. A telling example is Novgorod: from the time of the disintegration of Rus' it was a separate independent republic ("Lord Novgorod the Great"), which Moscow captured only in 1471, but which the Russian narrative also retroactively counts as part of "Russia"[17]. Yet historically Novgorod had a chance to become a separate, fourth East Slavic subject — alongside those from whom the Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians later arose. In other words, the "single history" is a projection of later borders into the past, not what actually was.

Novgorod itself was not "Russian" in its structure either. Kyiv had controlled it since the time of Princess Olga — it was she who first installed her posadnik (governor) there — but this control did not make Novgorod "Rus'": the city was commercially oriented toward the Baltic and the Hanseatic League and sought to free itself from Kyivan control. Having freed itself, it became a trading republic in which the prince was invited as if on a salary, and power was held by the veche (assembly); Novgorod became part of Russia as a statehood only from the second half of the fifteenth century — that is, with the annexation of 1471, not "from time immemorial"[22]. The very cradle of the future Moscow likewise became "Rusian" late: the interfluve of the Oka and the Volga, where the Muscovite principality later arose, was inhabited up to the second half of the tenth century by Baltic, Finno-Ugric, and Turkic tribes, and came under Kyivan control only with the appearance of Slavic settlements there[23]. That is, both Novgorod and the Muscovite core entered the orbit of Rus' late and from the outside — they were not its native heartland, as the imperial scheme requires.

This conclusion rests not only on political history but also on linguistics. Valentin Yanin, the longtime head of the Novgorod archaeological expedition, pointed out: everyone was taught that there once existed a "single Rus'" with a single language, which later split into separate branches. But the analysis of the birch-bark documents gave the opposite result — the older the documents, the more divergent the dialects on different territories were, and the language of the Novgorod documents turned out to be closest to the Lechitic (Polish) group, not to a "common Rusian" one[21]. That is, there was no "single Old Rus' language" from which all three (plus the Novgorodians) supposedly emerged in equal measure; the East Slavic space was diverse, and the annexation of Novgorod to Moscow in 1471 cut short the formation of yet another separate people[21].

"Rus' went north" — a refuted theory of the nineteenth century

To explain how "Rusianness" ended up in Moscow, the Kremlin narrative sometimes reaches for an even older argument: that after the Mongol invasion the population of the Dnipro region "girded itself with the sword and went north," into the Zalissia region, while the emptied south was settled by people who were no longer Rusians but "newcomers." In this scheme, modern Ukrainians are supposedly late aliens on the Kyivan land, while the true descendants of Rus' are the Russians.

This is not a folk fabrication but a specific academic theory of the Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin of the early nineteenth century — formulated at a time when there was almost no archaeological and linguistic material[20]. Tellingly, it was refuted even then precisely by Mykhailo Maksymovych — the very man who introduced the term "Kyivan Rus'": in his polemic with Pogodin he upheld the continuity of the Kyivan population and the Ukrainians' right to consider Rus' their history. Over the following century and a half scholarship has given a definitive answer: neither archaeology nor genetics knows of any mass migration from south to north in the second half of the thirteenth century[20]. On the contrary, the settlement of the Slavs is traced back to the era of the Great Migration (fifth to seventh centuries) from the Pripyat basin — onto the lands of modern Poland, Belarus, Russia, and Northern Ukraine[20]. Kyiv after 1240 did indeed become depopulated and fell into decline, but this is a consequence of destruction and tribute, not of an organized "evacuation of the people." Pogodin's theory has long belonged to the history of scholarship, not to scholarship; clinging to it in the twenty-first century is the same as consulting Karamzin's "History" instead of modern research.

Two chronicle traditions: Kyiv, which resists, and Zalissia, which submits

The appropriation of Rus' is visible even in how it was written about in different centres. An important methodological caveat: the originals of the chronicles do not exist — only later copies survive, the oldest of which dates to as late as the 1420s (the fifteenth century), two centuries after the events described[26]. These are four main compilations, and each reflects the viewpoint of its centre: two Novgorodian chronicles convey the standpoint of the northwest, the Laurentian that of the northeast (the Vladimir-Suzdal principality), and the Hypatian that of the south of Rus', that is, of Kyiv, where the oldest chronicle writing was conducted[27].

And these views are opposed — which is clearly visible in their assessment of the Mongol invasion. The Russian historian V. Rudakov (Russian Academy of Sciences) showed: in the "Kyivan" Hypatian chronicle, the invasion is the wiles of the devil, which must be resisted even at the cost of death. While in the "northern" Laurentian and Novgorodian chronicles the same invasion is a punishment from God, an instrument of chastisement for sins, against which armed resistance is meaningless; the only way is humility and repentance[28]. The Kyivan chronicle is also richer in facts: it writes in detail about the Kyivan princes — Mykhailo of Chernihiv (who perished) and Danylo of Halych, who fled not out of fear but in order to organize resistance to the Mongols, and who, precisely for the sake of this, entered into an alliance with the Pope[29]. The two traditions — of resistance and of submission — diverged already in the thirteenth century, long before Moscow declared itself the sole heir of Rus'.

What this means

The myth of Russia as the heir of Rus' rests on a single word, which is deliberately not distinguished in its two meanings: "Rus'" as the real state centred on Kyiv (which did indeed exist) and "Russia" as a name that Moscow took over through the Greek church tradition and its own titulature. The first is the history of the Ukrainian lands; the second is the history of how that history was subsequently appropriated. Continuity of the name is not continuity of the state: otherwise one would have to recognize as an heir of Rus' everyone who ever wrote this word in Greek.

Pereyaslav 1654: The Myth of "Reunification"

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Soviet cliché "the reunification of Ukraine with Russia in 1654" presents the Council of Pereyaslav as a reunion of "fraternal peoples" who had supposedly always longed to be together. In reality, Ukraine and Russia had never before been a single state[1]. Pereyaslav was not a merger but a military protectorate — one of a whole series of alliances that Bohdan Khmelnytsky sought against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Crimea, Moldavia, Sweden, Transylvania[4][5]. And the Ukrainian lands themselves were divided not in 1654 but only by the Eternal Peace of 1686 — along the Dnipro, between Moscow and Poland[6].

The myth

The formula "reunification" (Russian vossoyedineniye Ukrainy s Rossiyey) is a cornerstone of Soviet historiography: the Council of Pereyaslav of 1654 is presented as the act by which two "fraternal peoples" were finally joined after a centuries-long separation. In the logic of the myth, the union was natural and final, and everything that followed was merely the restoration of an eternal unity.

Correction one: there was nothing to "reunify"

"Reunification" presupposes a prior unity — and none existed. Ukraine and modern Russia had never been a single state before 1654[1]. The Ukrainian statehood of that era — the Zaporozhian Host — arose as an autonomous entity under the mace of Bohdan Khmelnytsky within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth under the Treaty of Zboriv of 1649[2]. It was a separate polity with its own army and governance, not a "part of Russia" returning somewhere.

Correction two: Pereyaslav was a protectorate, not a merger

In 1654 Khmelnytsky withdrew from the authority of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and went over to the protectorate of the Tsardom of Muscovy[3]. The key word is protectorate: it is a form of military-political alliance with a suzerain, not a dissolution into his state. The Hetmanate retained its own order; the matter concerned protection and a joint war against Poland, not the abolition of Ukrainian subjecthood.

That this was a pragmatic step rather than an expression of "brotherhood" is clear from the fact that Moscow was merely one of a series of allies. The first ally of the Zaporozhian Host was the Crimean Khanate (Khan Islam Giray); next Khmelnytsky built an alliance with Moldavia — his son Tymish married Roxandra, the daughter of the Moldavian hospodar Vasile Lupu[4]. Each such alliance had a single goal — to find an external force against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Correction three: the alliance with Moscow quickly fell apart

If 1654 had truly been a "reunification forever", history would have ended there. Instead, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich broke the terms of the treaty by concluding a separate Truce of Vilnius with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Then Khmelnytsky again sought other allies — the Swedish king Charles X and the Transylvanian prince George II Rákóczi[5]. The last joint campaign — the regiment of Anton Zhdanovych together with Rákóczi — was surrounded and defeated in 1657; in the same year Khmelnytsky died[5]. The alliance with Moscow turned out to be just another temporary coalition, not a merger of peoples.

Correction four: division, not unity

The outcome of the struggle for the Ukrainian lands was not "unity" but dismemberment. Only in 1686 did the Eternal Peace between Moscow and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth divide Ukraine along the Dnipro: the Right Bank went to Poland, the Left Bank together with Kyiv remained with the Tsardom of Muscovy[6]. In other words, the real consequence of the Muscovite "protectorate" was not a reunified people but a country cut in half.

What professional historiography clarifies

That Pereyaslav was an alliance and not a merger is also confirmed by the professional historiography of the Hetmanate. The historian Viktor Horobets emphasizes: 1654 did not put an end to Cossack statehood — the incorporation of Ukraine into the "body" of the Muscovite state was a long, non-linear process that stretched over centuries[7]. The Council of Pereyaslav itself, on 8 January 1654, was not the signing of a treaty: only an oath was taken there, while the real terms were worked out later. The hetman's 23-point draft was taken to Moscow, where it was reduced to an 11-point treaty — the March Articles; the original has not survived, only a draft remains[8].

These articles defined the status of political autonomy: nominally the tsar was recognized as supreme ruler, but in fact the Hetmanate retained its own administration and laws, while the presence of tsarist authority was purely symbolic — a voivode in Kyiv merely embodied suzerainty[9]. This directly contradicts the picture of "reunification", in which Ukraine supposedly dissolved into Muscovy as early as 1654.

At the same time, this is precisely where the future vulnerability lay. From the outset, each side invested the alliance with its own meaning — and this divergence, according to Horobets, became the "sword of Damocles" of all the subsequent history. Taking advantage of the internal struggle within the Hetmanate, in 1659 Moscow imposed on Yurii Khmelnytsky a falsified, expanded version of the "Articles of Bohdan", which forbade the Cossacks independent diplomatic relations and the declaration of war or peace without the tsar's permission[10]. Thus the contractual political autonomy was step by step reduced to an administrative one — and then came the era of the Ruin.

What Khmelnytsky was actually building: his own dynasty

It is easiest to see that Moscow was for Khmelnytsky an instrument and not a goal if one looks at what kind of state he wanted to build in the first place. And what he wanted was not a "reunification" with anyone but his own dynastic state on the model of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The logic of the era was simple: without a ruling dynasty, a polity was not yet considered a full-fledged state. At first the hetman tried to embed the Cossacks into the Commonwealth's system — to win noble rights for them; when that failed, the idea arose of creating a classic dynastic monarchy of the European type[11].

It was here, and not toward "brotherhood with Moscow", that his most ambitious foreign move led — the Moldavian one. The marriage of his elder son Tymish to Roxandra, daughter of the Moldavian hospodar Vasile Lupu (1652), was not a chance alliance but a dynastic combination: according to tradition, Lupu had no male heir, so after his father-in-law's death Tymish was to become prince of Moldavia — and thus a Khmelnytsky dynasty would arise in a union of two states. The project was cut short by Tymish's death at Suceava in 1653[12]. (Professional historiography is more cautious here: Lupu did have a son, Ștefăniță, so it was rather a far-reaching dynastic calculation than a guaranteed succession — but the intent to build a dynasty is documented.)

In this light the 1654 treaty itself reads anew. If one looks not from the height of later consequences but through the eyes of the events of that time, it was a very advantageous treaty for the hetman: his power was practically not limited — with one exception (the ban on independent alliances with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottomans without the tsar's consent) — and the Cossack register was set at 60,000, the largest figure in the entire war[13]. That is, Khmelnytsky took from Moscow exactly what his state project needed, rather than "merging" into a foreign state.

That Moscow was a replaceable instrument rather than a final choice was confirmed almost at once. Polish diplomacy, at the height of the "Deluge", proposed a deal to the tsar: their king Jan Casimir was ill, and the throne of the Commonwealth was elective, so if Moscow ended the war the Poles would elect Alexei Mikhailovich himself as king. Moscow agreed to this, concluding the Truce of Vilnius in 1656 — and for Khmelnytsky this was a direct violation of the 1654 agreements[14]. Sweden's reaction to the attempts at a new alliance is also telling: the Swedish kingdom was dynastic and simply did not understand with whom it was supposed to sign a treaty, since Khmelnytsky represented no dynasty[15]. Both episodes hit the same point: the hetman acted as an independent player shuffling allies, not as a subject who had "returned" to his natural ruler.

In the end it was precisely the failure of the dynastic design, and not Pereyaslav, that determined the further fate of the Hetmanate. The younger son Yurii, at the time of his father's death (1657), was only 16 — "a mace needs a head to go with it" (do bulavy treba shche holovy): he was sent to study at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, while the general clerk Ivan Vyhovsky was elected hetman. The dynasty did not come together — instead the Hetmanate became an elective state on the same Commonwealth model (as the nobility elected a king, so the Cossacks elected a hetman), and this was the case right up to the abolition of the hetmanship in 1764[16]. It is symptomatic that even the last hetman, Kyrylo Rozumovsky — already a Russian grandee — again tried to make the hetmanship hereditary in his own line; it was precisely this intent that gave Catherine II a pretext to force him to renounce the mace, after which the Hetmanate as a state ceased to exist[17]. Two attempts to build one's own dynasty — at the beginning and at the end — outline what the Hetmanate aspired to be: a separate European state, not a "reunified" part of Moscow.

What it means

"The reunification of 1654" is a projection of later imperial subjugation onto a moment when it was still an ordinary alliance against a common enemy. Pereyaslav did not join what had been divided, because no single state existed before it; it was one of Khmelnytsky's many alliances — and, like the others, temporary. And when Moscow later began to break the contractual logic of these relations to its own advantage, this led to a different story — the conflict that the Kremlin tradition would call the "treason" of the hetmans.

"Kyivan Rus' Never Existed" — Anatomy of a Myth

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Russian claim that "Kyivan Rus' did not exist because it is an artificial nineteenth-century term" is a conflation of categories. It blurs three distinct things: a modern scholarly label, the chronicle legend of the state's founding (the calling of Rurik), and the medieval state of Rus' itself, centred on Kyiv. The fact that historians coined the name "Kyivan Rus'" and that the Rurik story remains a legend does nothing to abolish the existence of the state. The mirror side of the same myth is the multiplication of "five Rus'es" — including the invented "Novgorodian Rus'," which appears in no chronicle — even though analysis of the chronicles themselves (Kuchkin) shows that "Rus'" in the narrow sense denotes the territory of present-day Northern Ukraine. Tellingly, the very "source-based" standard used to deny Kyivan Rus' also brings down Russian symbolism: the St Andrew's flag rests on exactly the same kind of chronicle legend.

The myth

In a street debate a Russian interlocutor advances a common claim: "Kyivan Rus'" is an artificial name for a period of time, invented by historians at the start of the nineteenth century, and therefore no state by that name ever existed[1]. It sounds like the exposure of a "Ukrainian invention," but in fact three different assertions have been packed together here, each of which must be examined separately.

First conflation: the term versus the state

That the term "Kyivan Rus'" is a late coinage is entirely true. Contemporaries called their state simply "Rus'", and it was nineteenth-century historians who began calling it "Kyivan" to distinguish it from later political centres. One can even point to the very person responsible: the term was introduced by Mykhailo Maksymovych — the first rector of Kyiv University — in a work of 1837, who used it for the period from the ninth to the thirteenth century on the grounds that the centre of decision-making was in Kyiv, while contemporaries and documents themselves called the state simply "Rus'"[8][9]. So "Kyivan Rus'" was from the outset a conventional name for a period, not a self-designation of the state. But a name and the object it names are different things: the fact that a classificatory term appeared in the nineteenth century does not mean that the medieval state centred on Kyiv did not exist[2]. By that logic one would have to "abolish" both Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire — both terms are likewise later coinages.

Second conflation: the founding legend versus the existence of the state

The second move is to reduce the whole history of Rus' to the legend of its founding. The account of the calling of Rurik does indeed come from a single source — the Primary Chronicle — and is not corroborated by parallel sources; similar "summons to power" motifs occur among many European peoples, so historians have good reason to regard it as a chronicle legend[3].

But this is a statement about method, not about the existence of the state. An event becomes a historical fact only when independent parallel sources confirm it; a single chronicle legend is not such confirmation[4]. Acknowledging that the Rurik legend is a legend does not render the state of Rus' non-existent: it is attested by entirely different testimonies independent of the Chronicle — Byzantine, Arabic and Western European. The threshold of verification here is quite concrete: parallel sources reliably attest only Ihor and his successors (Olha, Sviatoslav), whereas everything the Chronicle relates before Ihor remains legendary[7]. The opponent, by contrast, does the opposite: he declares the state itself a legend, exploiting the fact that his interlocutor fails to distinguish these levels.

"The Rurikid dynasty" — also a late name

Bound up with the Rurik legend is another familiar cliché — "the Rurikid dynasty." Here the same confusion of name and object is at work as with "Kyivan Rus'." That a princely dynasty did indeed exist is beyond doubt: the chronicle clearly traces who was whose father and son. But that this dynasty called itself "Rurikids" is a later construction. The very phrase "Rurikid dynasty" does not appear in the Primary Chronicle at all[10][11].

This is pointed to by an indirect but telling piece of evidence — the statistics of names within the princely line itself. If the line had traced itself to Rurik, the founder's name ought to have been honorific and frequent. Instead, princes named Rurik over the whole of its history number only three or four, five at most, whereas the Volodymyrs, Olehs and Ihors are countless[10][11]. The unpopularity of the founder's name is an argument against the line's having understood itself as "Rurikids"; the name itself was ascribed to it much later[10]. So here too the opponent passes off a late label as an ancient self-designation — exactly as with "Kyivan Rus'."

The "five Rus'es" and the invented "Novgorodian Rus'"

The mirror side of the "Kyivan Rus' never existed" myth is the attempt, conversely, to multiply Rus'es: supposedly there was a Novgorodian Rus', a Kyivan, a Muscovite, and "coloured" ones too — White, Red and Black. Hence the typical question from a Russian: why then, in this or that chronicle, is Novgorod or Volodymyr-on-the-Kliazma called "Rus'"?

The scheme of "five Rus'es" was constructed by Vasilii Tatishchev in the eighteenth century: there supposedly existed a Novgorodian Rus' with its capital at Veliky Novgorod, a Lesser one with its capital at Kyiv, a White one at Rostov, a Red one at Cherven and a Black one[12]. But Tatishchev himself wrote this not from the chronicles but from late German and Polish geographers — and even noted that "Black Rus'," for instance, is not mentioned in Old Rus' sources. Of these five, only Red Rus' is a real historical name: it referred to towns now in south-eastern Poland (Kholm, Belz)[17]. But "Novgorodian Rus'" is entirely absent from the sources: the phrase appears in no chronicle — it is an armchair term, invented by historians after the fact[17]. The same device is at work here as with "Kyivan Rus'": a late classificatory name is passed off as medieval reality.

What "Rus'" actually meant: an analysis of the chronicles

Rather than argue at random, it is worth turning to how the word "Rus'" is actually used in the chronicles themselves — and this was done by Russian historians, whom the opponent by definition trusts more. Volodymyr Kuchkin (Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences) analysed the work of scholars from Tatishchev to the present and showed: since chronicle-writing was conducted in different centres — the Laurentian, Hypatian, Trinity and Novgorod copies — the understanding of Rus' varied both with place (spatial dynamics) and with the time of writing (temporal dynamics)[13].

Combining the two dynamics, Russian scholars reached a conclusion opposite to imperial mythology: the understanding of Rus' did not expand over time but contracted. In the ninth to twelfth centuries "Rus'" meant the territory of present-day Northern Ukraine (the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Pereiaslav regions), and by the twelfth to thirteenth centuries it meant chiefly the Kyiv region alone[14]. Another scholar, who tried to find a "broad" understanding of Rus' in the sources, counted: the three main copies use the word "Rus'" 717 times, and only four of those instances are interpreted broadly[15]. So the isolated citations in which Novgorod or Zalissia is called "Rus'" are a statistical exception, which the layman tears out of context while the specialist sees it as a rare deviation from the norm[15]. The myth that "we are all Rus'" itself has a concrete origin — the Synopsis of Innokentii Gizel of the second half of the seventeenth century, from which all later imperial and Soviet historiography reproduced it[16].

The pre-scientific age: why Tatishchev and Karamzin cannot be taken at their word

Behind this lies a methodological observation as well. History as a science arose only in the first half of the nineteenth century — after the work of the German Leopold von Ranke, who established source criticism and archival work as the foundation of the craft. Everything written before that — by Tatishchev, Lomonosov, Karamzin — belongs to the pre-scientific age: the author took documents, pieced them together and drew his own conclusions, without critical verification[18]. So to cite Tatishchev's "five Rus'es" in the twenty-first century is the same as consulting an alchemist instead of a chemist.

Before the state: when archaeology does not confirm the chronicle

It is useful to see the lower boundary too — what came before Rus'. The Primary Chronicle lists fourteen tribal unions (seven of them on the territory of present-day Ukraine), but this list does not map onto the archaeology: only two cultures are traceable here — the Romny and the Volyntseve — into which the chronicle Polianians, Derevlianians, Volhynians and Ulichians fit together, while the Siverianians fit separately[19]. What came before Rus' is reconstructed by historians through the notion of the "chiefdom" — a twentieth-century sociological construct, an intermediate link between the tribe and the early state, transferred from studies of Pacific island peoples[20]. This shows once again that both "Rus'" and its prehistory are an object of reconstruction from the sources, not a ready-made label to be simply stuck onto present-day Russia.

"The first capital of Rus'" — a wrongly posed question

A separate trap lurks in the very formulation "what was the first capital of Rus'." The notion of a "capital" is a phenomenon of the early modern period: before the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries no such notion existed in Europe at all, and an early-medieval state was not described in terms of a "capital" (Madrid, for instance, became the capital of Spain only under Philip II)[6][23]. So to demand a "first capital" of a state of the ninth and tenth centuries is to impose a late category on an era to which it is alien. A wrongly posed question does not prove the "non-existence" of Rus' — it merely betrays the anachronism of the opponent himself.

This is not only a polemical argument but the position of Ukrainian academic scholarship. The latest multivolume edition "Ukraine. Essays in History" (Institute of History of the NAS of Ukraine, from 2023) records directly, in a footnote on page 301: Old Rus' sources — neither the chronicles nor any others — have no term for "capital"[21]. The same was shown by the Russian medievalist Alexander Nazarenko in his paper "Was There a Capital in Old Rus'?" at the Moscow conference "Capital and Peripheral Towns of Rus' and Russia…" (December 1996): the only close expression is Hilarion's designation of Kyiv as the "first-throned mother-city," but even that merely calques the Greek ecclesiastical formula for principal ("primatial") sees, rather than describing a political capital[22]. Kyiv, then, was not a "capital" but a centre of decision-making and a spiritual core — the seat of the metropolitan; it was over this status, not over abstract "capitalness," that the princes fought. Kyiv lost this status only after the Mongol invasion, when the metropolitan left the city[23].

The mirror: the St Andrew's flag

The double standard is seen most clearly when the same "source-based" criterion is turned back on the opponent. Asked to explain the St Andrew's flag behind his back — why it is named after the Apostle Andrew the First-Called and what Andrew has to do with Russia — the interlocutor has no answer[5].

And the answer is telling: the connection of the Apostle Andrew with Rus' comes from exactly the same Primary Chronicle that the opponent has just dismissed — from the legend of Andrew's journey up the Dnipro and his blessing of the hills on which Kyiv would arise. The Russian Empire made the cross of St Andrew the basis of its naval flag, relying on this very chronicle legend. So it turns out that the one demanding "bookish" confirmation for Kyivan Rus' himself clings to a legend — as soon as it serves the desired narrative.

Conclusion

The claim that "Kyivan Rus' never existed" rests not on sources but on three successive conflations: a late term is passed off as the absence of a state, the founding legend as the whole history of Rus', while one's own legendary symbolism is left exempt from criticism. Once the term, the legend and the state are distinguished, it becomes clear that there is no "exposure" at all — only a rhetorical device.

Mazepa's "Treason": Examining the Myth

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The cliché of "Mazepa the traitor" presents the hetman's defection to the side of Charles XII (1708) as a single moral act of betrayal. This is one-sided. The Hetmanate's relations with Moscow were treaty-based — from the Pereyaslav Articles of 1654 to the Kolomak Articles of 1687 — and it was Moscow that consistently narrowed those agreements. Mazepa served not the person of the tsar but the Zaporozhian Host, which acted within the bounds of those articles. Tellingly, the one-sidedness of the "treason" is revisited even by the Russian historian Tetiana Tairova-Yakovleva.

The myth

The most widespread thesis: Mazepa "betrayed his country," betrayed Peter I, by going over to the side of the Swedish king Charles XII during the Great Northern War[1]. In this telling it is a personal betrayal of an oath — and it is on this that the brand of "Mazepa the traitor," entrenched as early as the Russian imperial tradition (the anathema of 1708), is built.

First correction: the "treason" is revisited by Russian historians themselves

The paradox is that the one-sidedness of this narrative is refuted not only by the Ukrainian side. The Russian historian Tetiana Tairova-Yakovleva (St. Petersburg University), in her monograph Ivan Mazepa and the Russian Empire: A History of "Treason" (2011), shows on the basis of Russian archival documents that the history of the "treason" is far more complex than the propaganda cliché[2]. When the thesis is revisited by a historian from the "accusatory" side, reducing everything to a moral betrayal no longer holds up.

Second correction: the relations were treaty-based

The key thing the myth bypasses is that the Hetmanate was not the unconditional property of the Muscovite tsar. Its relations with Moscow were governed by a series of treaties ("articles"), beginning with the Pereyaslav Articles of 1654. In force in Mazepa's time were the Kolomak Articles of 1687, concluded upon his election as hetman during the regency of Tsarevna Sophia[3].

Here precision is needed: the Kolomak Articles declaratively confirmed Cossack rights, but at the same time restricted the hetman's political rights — that is, they were yet another step by Moscow toward narrowing autonomy, not a guarantee of it. And that is exactly what matters: the relations had a treaty form, which the Muscovite side consistently rewrote in its own favor. "Treason" in relations where one party erodes the terms for years is a concept that is at the very least two-sided.

It is also important that the party to these treaties was a fully fledged state, not a shapeless borderland. As Tairova-Yakovleva stresses, the Hetmanate had all the obligatory attributes of a state: borders, an administrative and a separate judicial system, taxes, and an army — and all this persisted right up to the end of the eighteenth century[12]. The other matter is that this state lacked full independence because of the problem of legitimacy: in the Europe of the time a sovereign had to be "crowned" by someone (for example, the Pope of Rome), and a self-proclaimed separateness had to be justified by something. That is why Bohdan Khmelnytsky appealed to the times of Volodymyr and Rus', seeking the historical roots of his state — and geopolitically Ukraine, wedged between three great neighbors (the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Muscovy, the Ottoman Empire), had to seek an alliance in order to hold its ground[13]. The alliance with Moscow was one such option — not an act of vassal devotion to the person of the tsar.

Third correction: to whom Mazepa owed his oath

The myth assumes that Mazepa personally belonged to Peter I. In reality his state was the Zaporozhian Host (the Hetmanate), which acted within the bounds of the concluded articles[5]. The immediate impetus for the break was Peter I's refusal to defend Ukraine against the Swedes (the well-known episode in which the tsar replied that he could not even spare a few soldiers) and the danger that Ukraine's status would become a bargaining chip in great politics — to the point of fears that it would be handed over to the allied king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth[4]. Within the treaty logic, Mazepa's act was not a betrayal of the country but an attempt to preserve its agency.

To the direct question "who betrayed whom," Tairova-Yakovleva answers unequivocally: Peter betrayed Mazepa. All the agreements that existed with Ukraine were violated — and violated first precisely by the Muscovite side. Peter set a course toward a centralized system, relying on new advisers (above all Menshikov), broke economic relations, and, in essence, sought to destroy the Hetmanate as a separate state[14]. When the leading scholar of Mazepa from the "accusatory" side formulates it so directly, the thesis of a single "treason" by the hetman finally loses its footing: the break occurred because the lord destroyed the terms on which the alliance rested.

Fourth correction: the "treason" rested on an unlawful anathema

The brand itself rested not only on politics but also on a church act — the anathema of 1708. But it too was a violation of church rules. In the church, an anathema can be imposed only by a clergyman and only upon a clergyman; it does not apply to a layman. Mazepa — a hetman, a layman — was anathematized only on the direct order of Peter I, contrary to church law[6]. That is, the instrument with which the "treason" was sanctified was itself applied unlawfully and purely out of the tsar's political will.

Fifth correction: the right of a vassal to change his lord

The most important thing that demolishes the moral framing of "treason" is the legal context of the era. In the Europe of the time there operated a vassal-seigneurial "ladder" with clearly prescribed mutual obligations. The key rule: if a lord does not take care of his vassal — above all, does not protect him — the vassal has the full right to pass under the authority of another lord. This is a recognized right, not a violation[7].

That is exactly how the situation of 1708 took shape: when Mazepa asked Peter I for help in defending Ukraine against the Swedes, the tsar refused — and this became the reason for the hetman's transfer from the lord named Peter to the lord named Charles[7]. In the logic of feudal law this is the exercise of a right, not the breaking of an oath.

This conflict had its roots as far back as the Pereyaslav Council of 1654, where two understandings of a treaty collided. The European one (to which the Ukrainians oriented themselves) — a treaty between equal parties. The Muscovite one — a treaty as "service," where the tsar is always higher. A telling episode: at the council the boyar Buturlin refused to take a mutual oath on the tsar's behalf — claiming that the Muscovite autocrat takes an oath to no one, and that only the Ukrainian side can swear[8]. Already then the relations were built as unequal — and later Moscow consistently interpreted them in its own favor.

"Mazepism" as a Kremlin ideologeme

The brand of "traitor" did not remain in the eighteenth century — it turned into a standing ideologeme that outlived both the Russian Empire and the USSR. In a dialogue between two historians, Oleksandr Naboka and Vitaliy Dribnytsia, its genealogy is set out concisely: Peter I took a personal offense at Mazepa, this offense was church-blessed by Feofan Prokopovych — and from this grew "Mazepism" as a label in Russian ideology, that is, anti-Ukrainian irredentism: the conviction that the Ukrainian lands are "from time immemorial" Russian, and therefore no one but Moscow has the right to lay claim to them[9].

Paradoxically, the Ukrainian elite for a long time did not perceive the empire as alien. As Tairova-Yakovleva observes, Ukrainians did a great deal to build it up and at first believed they were creating their own empire, being an influential part of it. Disillusionment came later — when the attitude toward them changed; it was out of this resentment that the anonymous "History of the Rus'" (the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) arose — a pamphlet of the aggrieved Cossack elder, which defended the separateness and rights of the "Little Russians"[15]. That is, even the memory of Mazepa as "one's own" lived on in the milieu that Moscow had only just integrated — and it was imperial ideology, not contemporaries, that made him a "traitor."

The figure of Prokopovych here is no accident. Before 1709 he was an apologist for Mazepa — he dedicated his drama Vladimir to the hetman and praised him in sermons; but after the Battle of Poltava (8 July 1709) he abruptly went over to the tsar's side and already on 24 July delivered a sermon in which he branded the hetman and his followers as traitors, presenting the alliance with Charles XII as a "Judas's betrayal" of Orthodoxy and tsarist power. Subsequently it was Prokopovych who became the chief ideologist of Peter's reforms. That is, the "anathema of Mazepa" was from the outset not a theological verdict but a political instrument serving that same project of integrating the Ukrainian church elite into the empire.

Moscow's subsequent "heatedness" precisely toward the Ukrainian theme is not a chance emotion but a structural feature. Russian irredentism, the interlocutors note, is more radical than Polish or Finnish: Moscow at one time calmly accepted the secession of Finland, but reacts to Ukrainian agency "like a bull to red." The root is the same as in the myth of the "artificial nation": since the mid-nineteenth century the empire has been unable to recognize Ukrainians as a separate people with their own history, and this attitude has "sat" within it for over a hundred years[10]. Within this frame, both Mazepa's "treason" and the later "treason" of Bandera are phenomena of one kind: any attempt at Ukrainian self-reliance is automatically classified as "treason" against Moscow.

The flip side of this logic exposes a double standard. Russia itself, which so jealously guards "its own" irredentism, denies it to its own indigenous peoples: as Dribnytsia observes, the Tatars, Bashkirs, Yakuts, and Dagestanis are so Russified that no movement toward self-determination is visible — and not by chance: in today's Russian Federation there is not a single school with the native language of instruction from the first to the tenth or eleventh grade, the mother tongue smolders only in families and small settlements, and the large cities are completely Russified[11]. A telling contrast: even in Soviet Ukraine, Ukrainian schools, despite the pressure, existed — and it was precisely this that helped preserve the national identity that "Mazepism" in the Russian lexicon to this day presents as "treason"[11]. In other words, the cliché of "Mazepa the traitor" is not a historical assessment of the event of 1708, but an element of a living doctrine that denies Ukrainians the right to be themselves.

Conclusion

"Mazepa the traitor" is an assessment from a single, imperial perspective, which passes off a treaty conflict as the moral crime of one man. If one keeps both sides in view — the series of articles that Moscow narrowed, the refusal to defend the Hetmanate, and the revisiting of the "treason" even by Russian historiography — the cliché falls apart. What remains is not treason, but a breach of agreements, responsibility for which is at the very least shared.

Did the USSR Want to Save Czechoslovakia in 1938?

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. A widespread Soviet myth: in 1938, during the partition of Czechoslovakia, the USSR was supposedly the only power ready to defend it, but was "prevented." In reality the Soviet-Czechoslovak treaty of 1935 obliged Moscow to act only after France — and France did not send troops. Moreover, there was no common border with Czechoslovakia, and Poland, remembering the partitions of the 18th century and the war of 1920, refused transit to Soviet troops. The USSR's "readiness" to save Czechoslovakia was declarative rather than practically feasible.

The myth of the Soviet rescuer

One of the typical Soviet narratives about the eve of World War II asserts: during the partition of Czechoslovakia in 1938 the Soviet Union wanted to send in troops to defend it, but was "forbidden" to do so. In this telling the USSR appears as the only state ready to stop Hitler, while the West "surrendered" Czechoslovakia[1].

This storyline sounds striking, but it falls apart the moment one turns to the text of the treaty itself on which the narrative rests.

Who actually partitioned Czechoslovakia

First, the very frame of "Hitler took everything, while the USSR wanted to prevent it" should be set aside. Czechoslovakia in 1938 was partitioned not by a single aggressor but by an entire coalition of neighbors. Under the Munich Agreement (29--30 September 1938) the Sudetenland went to Hitler, and in March 1939 — all of the Czech lands, turned into the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia." Poland seized the moment and in October 1938 occupied the Cieszyn region (Zaolzie), over which it had already fought the Czechs back in 1919. Hungary, under the First Vienna Award (2 November 1938), received the south of Slovakia and southern Transcarpathia with their Hungarian minority. And in the remaining Slovak lands, in March 1939, the puppet pro-fascist Slovak State, allied with Hitler, was established[5].

In other words, the "partition" was not a duel of "Hitler versus the USSR" but a joint action of several states, among them Poland. This is important to keep in mind, because it is against the backdrop of this real geography that the Soviet myth of the "rescuer" unfolds.

What the 1935 treaty actually provided for

The Soviet-Czechoslovak treaty of mutual assistance was signed on 16 May 1935 and was linked to the Soviet-French treaty of the same year. It set out a clear order of precedence: Soviet troops would come to the aid of Czechoslovakia only after the French had done so[2].

France did not send its troops. Consequently, under the terms of the treaty the Soviet Union was not obliged — and had no right — to act on its own. This was not a "prohibition from outside" but a direct condition that Moscow itself had signed up to. The opponent's call to "open the treaty yourself, find it in the depository, and read all its articles" is entirely apt here: the myth survives precisely because the treaty is not read.

The problem the myth sidesteps: geography

Even if the political condition had been met, a physical one remained: there was no common border between the USSR and Czechoslovakia. Soviet troops would have had to pass in transit — through Poland or Romania. The Romanian route was hindered by the Carpathians; Poland remained[3].

And Poland categorically refused to let Soviet troops through. The reasons were historical and entirely rational: the Poles remembered that in the 18th century the Russian Empire had taken part three times in the partitions of their state, and the recent war of 1920, when the Red Army under Tukhachevsky marched on Warsaw. Warsaw's conclusion was unequivocal: Soviet troops would not appear on Polish territory under any circumstances[4].

Why the West chose appeasement

There remains a question that the myth usually sidesteps: why did Britain and France hand the Sudetenland over to Hitler at all, instead of stopping him by force. The answer lies not in "betrayal" or secret sympathy for Nazism, but in the sober calculation of exhausted states. Britain and France had suffered very heavily from World War I — over a million dead, economic crisis — and had no wish to enter a new great war for a state that had not existed on the map of the world before 1918. Czechoslovakia itself was a creation of 1918, cobbled together from Czech, Slovak, and Ukrainian (Transcarpathian) lands of the former empires[6]. Chamberlain, returning from Munich, sincerely believed he had brought "peace" — and he was wrong: within a year the war began.

The logic of appeasement was also electoral: in London and Paris they feared that firmness would only push Berlin further, and that the next elections in Germany might bring to power someone even worse than Hitler — for no one yet understood who Hitler "really" was, which became apparent only a little later[7]. History proved the falseness of this bet as early as 1939. But what matters is that the motive was fear of a new world war, not a willingness to "surrender" Czechoslovakia to Stalin, who supposedly was the only one who wanted to save it.

Conclusion

The thesis that "the USSR wanted to save Czechoslovakia but was prevented" serves a concrete propaganda function — to portray the Soviet Union as the sole bearer of good on the eve of the war. Yet the 1935 treaty on which this narrative rests is precisely what refutes it: Soviet obligations were conditioned on French action that did not occur, and the transit of troops was impossible without Poland's consent, which was also absent. A readiness that could not be realized physically or legally remained on paper.

Western Ukraine under Poland and the Soviet myth

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. The Soviet (and now Russian) narrative portrays interwar Western Ukraine under Poland as a land of disenfranchisement whose population supposedly envied the "opportunities" on the Soviet side of the border. The facts refute this: Poland had private ownership of land — as opposed to Soviet collectivization, Ukrainian schools operated, and the Ukrainian Vasyl Mudryi was deputy marshal of the Sejm. The thesis that "the USSR gave Ukrainians social mobility" is a contrivance fitted to the scheme "USSR = good, the West = evil," unsupported by sources.

The myth

Soviet propaganda — and its present-day reprises — claims that in the 1930s the Ukrainian population of Western Ukraine, which then belonged to Poland, had limited rights and envied their compatriots on the Soviet side of the border. The Soviet Union, the story goes, gave Ukrainians greater opportunities than "lordly" Poland[1].

A concrete example cited by proponents of this narrative: a young Ukrainian in Poland supposedly had no social mobility, whereas in the USSR a young man of the same kind could climb the social ladder — becoming a "Red commander" or a collective-farm chairman.

Social mobility: the facts against the narrative

The first question that dismantles this thesis: envy of what, exactly? The collective-farm system? In interwar Poland, private ownership of land was preserved, whereas in the Soviet Union collectivization was under way, with its dekulakization and the Holodomor[2].

The argument about a lack of career prospects is refuted by a single fact: a Ukrainian served as deputy marshal of the Polish Sejm — the deputy head of parliament[3]. This was Vasyl Mudryi (1893–1966), head of the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (UNDO), elected deputy marshal of the Sejm in 1935 and reelected after the 1938 elections. This is a perfectly respectable rung on the career ladder — unattainable, incidentally, for any Ukrainian under the Soviet one-party system.

Equally false is the claim about the absence of Ukrainian education. In Poland there were Ukrainian schools, bilingual schools, and Polish schools — as in any civilized state of the time[4]. The number of Ukrainian schools did indeed shrink under pressure from the Polish authorities in the late 1930s, but the system of national education itself functioned. In Poland of that era (as in the USSR), one could fail to get an education only through a lack of willingness or by living on a remote homestead with no access to a school.

That is why all these arguments, as the author of the video debate bluntly puts it, are "sucked out of thin air"[5].

"Stalin was delaying the war"

Adjacent to this narrative is another myth — that an advantageous German loan allowed Stalin to "delay" the start of the war and prepare better. This inverts the causal relationship. The fact that both Hitler was preparing to attack Stalin and Stalin was preparing to attack Hitler is a commonplace among all historians who study World War II seriously. Stalin was not delaying the war — he was bringing it closer[6].

Why it works as propaganda

At the heart of all these assertions is a fixed scheme of the Soviet narrative: the Soviet Union is portrayed as the center of good, while the notional West, including Poland, is the center of evil. Any arguments, not grounded in sources, are fitted to this scheme[7].

Understanding this mechanism matters not only for assessing the past: the same binary lens of "USSR/Russia = good, the West = evil" lies at the foundation of contemporary Kremlin propaganda about Ukraine.

The Russo-Ukrainian War of 2014

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR. Russian aggression against Ukraine began in 2014 — despite the neutral status enshrined in the Constitution. The Kremlin's attempt to create an artificial "Novorossiya" project out of the south-eastern regions (the Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Odesa "people's republics") collapsed. Moscow's argument about a "showdown between the USA and Russia" does not explain why this "showdown" must necessarily take place on the territory of Ukraine.

The start of the aggression

Russian aggression against Ukraine began in 2014, despite the fact that the country's neutral status was enshrined in its legislation. In August 2014, sabotage-and-reconnaissance and company-and-battalion tactical groups of the Russian army invaded the territory of Ukraine.

Crimea: "referendum" or occupation

The core myth of this war is that Crimea supposedly "chose Russia itself" in a referendum. The facts say otherwise. The annexation of Crimea is illegal — this is not the assessment of one of the parties but the qualification of the UN General Assembly (Resolution 68/262 of 27 March 2014), and the occupation itself began on the night of 26–27 February 2014[6]. No referendum was held in accordance with international law: what was staged under military occupation on 16 March 2014 was a survey of the population that, in the author's words, "could be conducted even in your own apartment stairwell." And references to the residents supposedly being "glad" prove nothing: under occupation a person does not speak freely — for saying otherwise one could lose everything, as the Crimean Tatars once did[7].

The thesis that "Ukraine itself gave up Crimea because it did not fight" also fails to withstand scrutiny. The reason was not "unwillingness" but the circumstances: in early 2014 there was a lack of leadership and clear orders (instructions came down from above saying "don't shoot, we haven't sorted it out yet"); the Ukrainian garrison in Crimea numbered fewer than 10,000 — mostly local conscripts, some of whom went over to the Russian side — against roughly 20,000 Russian troops in Sevastopol plus the "little green men"[8]. A full-scale battle in the cities would have cost enormous civilian casualties, so the troops were withdrawn precisely to prevent this. A forced retreat is not consent.

The geopolitical pretext — and its absurdity

One of the main Russian theses is that a supposed "geopolitical confrontation between the USA and Russia" automatically justifies military action on the territory of a third country[1]. In the video dispute, Dribnytsya poses the obvious question: if this is really a quarrel between Moscow and Washington, why must it be "sorted out" precisely on the territory of Ukraine? This question receives no substantive answer[2].

The "Novorossiya" project

Vladimir Putin tried to realize the "Novorossiya" project — an artificial unification of the south-eastern regions of Ukraine into a quasi-state entity under the Kremlin's control. The real attempt took the form of "people's republics": the Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Odesa ones. None of them held out — the local population did not support the project, and "Novorossiya" never extended beyond the temporarily occupied areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. In the video, Dribnytsya directly calls this a failure[3].

"Russian Donbas" — an anachronism

A separate pillar of the justifications is that the Donbas was supposedly "Russian from time immemorial." This is an anachronism on two counts at once. First, the very name "Donbas" is industrial, not ethnic: it is the Donets coal-and-industrial basin, which began to take shape only at the beginning of the 19th century[12]. As historian Nadiia Temirova clarifies, the term itself appeared in the first third of the 19th century — it was introduced by mining engineer Yevhraf Kovalevsky (who, incidentally, had Ukrainian roots) as an abbreviation of "Donets coal basin"[16]. In other words, it is a geological-industrial category, not the name of an "age-old Russian land."

And the industrial Donbas itself was an international project. The first deposits on an industrial scale began to be developed only in the second half of the 19th century: in 1869 the Welshman John Hughes founded a metallurgical plant and the settlement of Yuzivka — present-day Donetsk. By 1900, 13 metallurgical plants were already operating within the bounds of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and the Donbas supplied over 90% of all-Russian coal output[19]. The industrial Donbas, on which the image of "Russian Donbas" rests, arose at the end of the 19th century as an international industrial project within the empire — and not as a "primordially Russian" land.

Second, before the 19th century there were simply no fixed borders here. The southern frontier of the Tsardom of Muscovy in the 17th century was the Belgorod defensive line (built from the 1630s) — a defensive belt against the raids of the Crimean Khanate; Belgorod was the southernmost line of Muscovy[13]. The steppe beyond it was no-man's-land, a territory controlled by no one in any proper sense: Cossack sabers reached it too, but it did not thereby become "Russian"[14]. In the time of Bohdan Khmelnytsky (from 1648), Cossack wintering camps reached here; and the allegiance of a village was determined not by a line on a map but by whom it paid tribute to — the hetman or the Muscovite tsar[15]. Borders in the modern sense — with border guards and barbed wire — began to take shape only in the 19th century[14]. Projecting present-day ethnopolitical categories onto the 17th century is therefore a methodological sleight of hand on which the myth rests.

Third, it was not "Russians in general" who settled this steppe, but above all Cossacks. As Temirova shows, serf-bound Muscovy had no free population for the dangerous frontier, so Cossacks were taken into guard service; it was precisely Cossacks with their families who built and populated the first fortress-cities in the north of the region (including present-day Sloviansk, 1676), which guarded the salt works[17]. The southern part is even more telling: until the destruction of the Zaporizhian Sich in 1775, the Azov-coast lands belonged to the Kalmius palanka of the Zaporizhian Host — an administrative unit of the Cossack state. And only after the palanka was abolished, in 1779, were about 30,000 Greeks expelled from Crimea brought here, while in the first quarter of the 19th century the region was swept by German (Mennonite) colonization — all of this already within the framework of an imperial policy of population replacement, not "age-old Russianness"[18]. In other words, before the arrival of the empire the Donbas was a Cossack steppe, not a "Russian land."

The context of military theory

In the video dispute, the author draws on a classic of military theory — the 19th-century Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz. One of Clausewitz's key principles: the aggressor always presents himself as peace-loving. This is not a rhetorical device but a functional requirement. It is advantageous for the aggressor that the victim offer no armed resistance — so he always calls to "reach an agreement," to "stop the bloodshed," to "find a compromise" — on his own terms.

This principle helps to correctly interpret the Kremlin's calls for "peace" in Ukraine from 2014 onward: this is not a search for compromise but a tactical move to consolidate territories already seized.

"There is no war — there is mobilization"

A derivative technique of denial is the thesis "you have no war, you have mobilization." In the video dispute, the author demonstrates its untenability: mobilization is one of the elements of war, and the fact that the war was not formally declared changes nothing[4]. The history of Russia itself confirms this. Over the past hundred years it has declared mobilization three times: in 1914, which started the First World War; in 1941, when Stalin declared mobilization against Germany (the Soviet "Great Patriotic War"); and in 2022. The first two times turned into world wars[5].

Why Russia attacked: revanchism, not NATO

A separate question is the real cause of the invasion. According to the analysis of historian Serhiy Gromenko, it is not "NATO expansion" but imperial revanchism — revenge for the defeats of the 1990s, when Russia failed to take Crimea solely because of internal troubles (the constitutional crisis of 1993, the war in Chechnya)[11]. The model was the Russo-Georgian War of 2008: having seized South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russia, despite an economic collapse, consolidated politically, and Putin's ratings soared; the same scheme was repeated for Crimea in 2014, plans for which had existed since at least 2008[9].

Hence an important conclusion: this is not only Putin's war. According to polls, 60–67% of Russians support it and believe they are waging war against the West, and do not regard Ukraine as a subject in its own right; a minority (about 15–25%) demands that it continue as a "holy war"[10]. Putin's personal responsibility is indisputable, but to reduce everything to him alone is mistaken: imperial power kept Russia for centuries from maturing into a political nation, and contemporary Russia, according to Gromenko, resembles a defeated but unreckoned-with Germany after the First World War[11].

Why Crimea specifically: the trauma of the Russian consciousness

Gromenko separately explains why the revanchism fixates precisely on Crimea. The reason is not only military or economic but also "traumatic." Without Crimea, Russian history de facto has no antiquity and no early Middle Ages — only a deep periphery remains. All the "great" ancient history — the Hellenic city-states, the Roman-Byzantine heritage — is geographically concentrated in Crimea, not in core Russia. That is why, each time Russia takes possession of Crimea — at the end of the 18th century, at the beginning of the 20th, or now in the 21st — it "warms" the national pride of the "great Russian"[20].

To this is added the myth of Sevastopol. For the past century and a half the city has been presented as a "city of Russian glory," even though historically Russians suffered heavy defeats there — both in the Crimean War and in the Second World War. Gromenko calls this a paradox of collective psychiatry: the real defeats do not destroy the myth but on the contrary feed it[21]. In other words, the Kremlin needs Crimea not as a territory but as the symbolic foundation of imperial identity — hence the urgency of the 2014 annexation.

Tellingly, the strategic inseparability of Crimea from Ukraine was understood by Ukrainian statesmen themselves — long before 2014. Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky wrote as early as 1919 that Ukraine could not exist without Crimea: it is a "torso without legs," because whoever holds the peninsula will threaten Ukraine both in the Azov region and in Odesa, and it is impossible to fully develop the south without a Ukrainian Crimea[22]. The 1918 negotiations of Skoropadsky's government with the Crimean and Kuban regions are a separate story, to which Gromenko devoted a monograph.

What this means for history

The Russo-Ukrainian War of 2014 became the first attempt since 1945 at a forcible redrawing of borders in Europe. Its full-scale continuation in 2022 confirmed that the "Novorossiya" project had not disappeared but had only been temporarily shelved.

Finland in World War II

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Finland's part in World War II is a complex and often oversimplified page of history. Finland formally fought on the side of Nazi Germany, but its aims and motives differed fundamentally from Germany's.

The Winter War (1939--1940)

In November 1939 the USSR attacked Finland, and not the other way around. This aggression, known as the Winter War (November 1939 -- March 1940), was a direct consequence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, under which Finland fell within the Soviet sphere of influence.

Despite the heroic resistance of the Finnish army, under the terms of the Moscow Peace Treaty Finland was forced to cede substantial territories — in particular the Karelian Isthmus and the area of Vyborg.

The Continuation War (1941--1944)

When Germany attacked the USSR in June 1941, Finland, under the command of Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, seized the opportunity to recover its lost territories. The Finnish army retook the lands taken by the Soviet Union during the Winter War.

The crucial difference was that Finland fought solely for its own territories. Unlike Operation Barbarossa, which envisaged the advance of German forces to the Urals, the Finnish army halted at the prewar borders. Mannerheim refused to take part in the assault on Leningrad, confining himself to the defense of the restored Finnish lines.

Outcomes

After Germany's defeat, the Finnish territories recovered in 1941 were once again taken by the Soviet Union. Finland returned to the borders established after the Winter War.

Finland found itself in a tragic situation: a victim of Soviet aggression, it was forced to become a situational ally of Nazi Germany — not for the sake of ideology, but to recover its own land. For Finland this war was not ideological but defensive and territorial.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a non-aggression treaty between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, signed on 23 August 1939. Officially it was a non-aggression treaty with a term of 10 years. But the true significance of the pact lay not in its public part.

The secret protocol

Attached to the treaty was a secret protocol, drawn up in two languages — German and Russian. The protocol came with a map on which lines marked the division of the spheres of influence between the two totalitarian states in Eastern Europe. The map bore the signatures of Stalin and Ribbentrop.

Under the protocol, the Soviet Union received a sphere of influence over Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, eastern Poland, and Bessarabia. These arrangements effectively became a plan for the division of Europe, which both sides began to carry out within a week — starting with the attack on Poland.

The "Golden September": liberation or occupation

The execution of the secret protocol gave rise to a separate Soviet myth — of the "Golden September" of 1939, supposedly the liberation of Western Ukraine and Belarus. The chronology leaves no room for this version: on 1 September Nazi Germany attacked Poland, on 17 September Stalin's USSR did; this was precisely how World War II began[4]. Germany took the west of Poland, the Soviet Union the east: Hitler and Stalin divided an independent state under the pact they had just signed[5].

So "liberation from the Polish lords" was in reality an attack on an independent state and its occupation, not a liberation[6]. And, crucially, the justification itself is recognizable. The thesis about "protecting the oppressed Russian-speaking population" word for word repeats the argumentation of Nazi Germany: what Hitler said in 1938 about the Sudetenland (Germans supposedly persecuted by the Czechs) later sounded verbatim with regard to Crimea and the Donbas[7]. One rhetorical template — "we are protecting our own" — twice served to cover the seizure of someone else's territory.

"Munich came first": examining the argument

A common argument of Kremlin propaganda holds that the Western powers themselves handed Czechoslovakia over to Hitler at Munich in 1938, so the pact was merely a forced response. This is a manipulation that equates things of different natures. The Munich Agreement was a mistaken attempt at appeasement — a concession to avoid a great war. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a treaty for the division of Europe between two dictatorships[1]: the Munich deal did not lead to the outbreak of the war, while the pact led to it directly[2].

Stalin's contribution to Hitler's rise to power began even earlier. Before the Reichstag elections German communists and social democrats traditionally went together, but on Stalin's personal order the communists went separately — the social democrats were declared "lackeys of capitalism." The split of the left-wing electorate gave Hitler his chance, and he took it[3].

The reaction of Soviet society

For Soviet people the pact came as a shock. For years official propaganda had portrayed Nazism as the chief enemy and cultivated hatred of fascism. And suddenly — a treaty of friendship with that very enemy.

Yet the people were silent. In a totalitarian state open protest was impossible. As Pushkin wrote in "Boris Godunov" — "the people are silent." This formula precisely describes the reaction of Soviet society.

The propaganda about-face

Propaganda performed a swift about-face. Whereas Nazism had previously been condemned as absolute evil, after the signing of the pact Vyacheslav Molotov declared at the official level: "Nazism is an ideology. How can one fight an ideology?" This phrase captured the cynicism of the Stalinist regime, which turned ideological principles into an instrument of the current political conjuncture.

The "preventive strike": why it does not exonerate Hitler

A separate — and opposite — myth is promoted by Viktor Suvorov (Vladimir Rezun) and Mark Solonin: namely, that the USSR was itself preparing to attack Germany, so the Wehrmacht's strike on 22 June 1941 was preventive, a forced act of self-defense. Here a precise distinction is needed between two things that propaganda deliberately merges: the fact of Soviet preparation for an offensive and the motive of the German attack.

That Stalin was preparing an offensive in the summer of 1941 is by now an almost undisputed thesis. It was put forward as early as the late 1980s by the defector intelligence officer Rezun (under the pseudonym "Viktor Suvorov") in the book "Icebreaker," analyzing indirect data[9]. It was later confirmed by academic — and, what is more, Russian — scholarship: Mikhail Meltyukhov in his work "Stalin's Missed Chance" (2000) analyzed the available documents minute by minute, and Aleksandr Gogun in the book "The Mistake of 1941" (Kherson, 2021) sums up: the dispute has narrowed only to the approximate date of the planned Soviet strike — 6 or 15 July 1941[10].

But it does not follow from this that the German attack was "preventive." A preventive strike is a strike to forestall an enemy whose plans you know. But German intelligence did not know the Soviet plans: the references to a "Soviet threat" in the German note were merely a justification for its own aggression — the Germans in fact guessed at random, and at the Nuremberg trial they were unable to substantiate their claims with documents[8]. The chronology adds the decisive touch: Hitler signed the "Barbarossa" directive (a plan for an aggressive war against the USSR) on 18 December 1940 — that is, earlier than the Soviet offensive plan was drawn up[11]. Both dictatorships were preparing to attack each other, but Germany took the decision to attack independently and in advance, without any knowledge of the Soviet preparations. That is why the thesis of a "preventive war" is not a justification but yet another substitution: Stalin's real preparation for an offensive does not turn Hitler's attack into self-defense.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact remains one of the most telling examples of collusion between two totalitarian regimes, one that directly led to the outbreak of World War II and to the tragedy of millions of people in Eastern Europe.

Rus'

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Rus' was a medieval state centered on Kyiv that existed from the second half of the 9th century until the mid-13th century, when it was destroyed by the Mongol invasion. It is one of the most contested periods of Eastern European history, one around which disputes still continue among Ukrainian, Russian, and Western historians.

The terminological question

A fundamentally important point: the terms "Kyivan Rus'", "Muscovite Rus'", or "Novgorodian Rus'" do not exist in medieval sources. These names were invented by 19th-century historians for the convenience of classification. Contemporaries called this state simply "Rus'", and its center was Kyiv. The distinction between "Kyivan" and "Muscovite" Rus' creates the false impression that two parallel or successive states existed, which does not correspond to historical reality.

On the late origin of the term itself the Russian myth is built — the claim that "Kyivan Rus' never existed at all." A detailed analysis of this conceptual sleight of hand is in the article "Kyivan Rus' never existed" — debunking the myth.

Kyiv and Moscow: a chronology

Kyiv as a settlement existed from roughly the 5th century AD and became the capital of a powerful state that controlled vast territories from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. Moscow, by contrast, is first mentioned in the chronicles only in the 12th century — that is, when Kyiv had already been the center of Rus' for several centuries.

In 1240 the Mongols destroyed Kyiv. At that moment Moscow as a settlement still had virtually no political significance.

The Principality of Moscow — a different history

Beginning in the 14th century, Moscow began to gather the surrounding lands — but these were not the lands of Rus'. The territory of the Principality of Moscow lay between the Moskva and Oka rivers and included the Moscow, Vladimir-Suzdal, and Tver principalities. This was a separate political process that was not a direct continuation of the statehood of Rus' centered on Kyiv.

The identification of the Tsardom of Muscovy with Rus' is a later ideological construct that served the political needs of the Russian Empire.

The Treaty of Versailles

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, officially brought the First World War to an end. Yet instead of a lasting peace it created the conditions that led inevitably to a new and even more terrible conflict. The treaty placed the entire blame for the war on Germany, even though responsibility for the conflict objectively rested with all of its participants.

Military restrictions

The treaty's terms effectively destroyed Germany as a military power:

The army was capped at 100,000 men (4,000 officers and 96,000 soldiers), permitted only small arms and light artillery
The air force was abolished entirely
Tank forces were prohibited
The navy was dismantled, the submarine fleet included
Territory was reduced, and all colonies were transferred to mandates under Great Britain and France

Economic catastrophe

The consequence of the reparations and economic restrictions was the hyperinflation of the 1920s, which entered economics textbooks as a classic example. There is a famous illustration of the scale of the disaster: a man walks into a café and orders a coffee — the price is 3 million Deutschmarks. Fifteen minutes later, when the bill arrives, the price is already 6 billion. Children played in the streets with bundles of worthless banknotes instead of toys.

The situation was so critical that in 1928–1929 the Americans began extending recovery loans to Germany. The logic was pragmatic: it is impossible to collect reparations from a wholly bankrupt country.

The Versailles system and stateless peoples

Versailles in 1919 was not a single treaty but a system of several peace agreements that redrew the map of Europe: besides Versailles proper, these were the Treaty of Saint-Germain (with Austria), the Treaty of Trianon (with Hungary), and the Treaty of Sèvres (with the Ottoman Empire)[6]. Under this system Germany lost all of its overseas colonies, roughly one-seventh of its territory, and a significant share of its population[5]. (By exact figures — around 13% of its European territory and roughly a tenth of its population; the spoken "1/7" and "up to 1/12" are roundings of the same order.)

The flip side of the Entente's victory was that the new map was drawn unevenly. Many peoples of Eastern Europe received no statehood of their own or found themselves inside foreign states: Slovaks in Czechoslovakia had fewer rights than Czechs; Croats ended up in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia); Ukrainians received no statehood at all[6]. It was precisely this injustice that fed interwar revanchism — and not only the German variety.

This context explains why radical nationalist movements among stateless peoples sought not to "correct" but to break the Versailles system. In Dribnytsia's account, the goal of Stepan Bandera coincided here with that of Hitler: both regarded the system of Versailles treaties as unjust and wished to destroy it rather than revise it at a new conference[7]. A coincidence of tactical aims, however, did not amount to an alliance: why the OUN very quickly found itself in conflict with Nazi Germany — which denied Ukrainians statehood — is examined in a separate analysis, «Was the OUN Fascism?».

Rearmament in circumvention of the treaty

Formally, Germany had no right to full-fledged armed forces. In practice, the circumvention of the restrictions began long before Hitler — and largely on the territory of the USSR. Already in the days of the Weimar Republic, under the Treaty of Rapallo between Soviet Russia and Germany, a secret agreement on military cooperation was in force: ships and submarines were built at the shipyards of Mykolaiv, a school for German pilots operated in Saratov — the technologies were being developed back in the 1920s[1]. The military plants of Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Russia worked for the Weimar Republic, partly supplying its army and weaponry; German pilots, tank crews, and artillerymen trained at Soviet proving grounds[2]. In the literature of the 1990s this phenomenon acquired an apt name: "the fascist sword was forged in the USSR."

There was, moreover, no single, one-time "withdrawal" of Germany from the Treaty of Versailles: after 1933 it freed itself from the treaty's restrictions gradually, breaching the conventions step by step[3].

Hitler's incremental violations

Once in power, from 1935 Hitler began systematically violating the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The strategy was incremental and calculated on the unwillingness of Great Britain and France to go to war:

First, Hitler requested permission for a small navy — and obtained it
Then he expanded the army beyond the set limits
He introduced universal military conscription
He remilitarized the Rhineland

Great Britain and France made concessions because the cost of the First World War had been too high for them. At Verdun alone, in 1916, around 600,000 people died on both sides. The societies of these countries were categorically unwilling to face a new great war.

From concessions to aggression

Each year the small concessions to Hitler grew larger. The Allied leaders understood that it was the Treaty of Versailles itself that had brought Hitler and the idea of revanchism to power — and, for the sake of an illusion of security in Europe, they sacrificed Czechoslovakia: all international policy of the 1920s and 1930s was geared toward appeasement rather than war[4]. The policy of appeasement led first to the partition of Czechoslovakia (the Munich Agreement of 1938) and then to the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War.

The Treaty of Versailles showed that a humiliating peace can be more dangerous than war itself. Instead of creating a stable international order, it sowed the seeds of revanchism, which grew into Nazism and a new global catastrophe.

Violence Against Women in the Second World War

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

One of the most tragic and most suppressed pages of the Second World War is the mass violence against civilian women, which began the moment Soviet troops entered German territory in the final months of the war.

Scale and circumstances

When the Red Army entered the territory of the Third Reich, mass violence against civilian women began — from teenagers to elderly women. This phenomenon was systematic in nature, even though it formally contradicted the orders of the command.

There existed a special directive obliging commanders to treat the civilian population, and women in particular, with due care and respect. But this directive did not in fact work. The scale of the violence was so great that no orders could stop it.

Attempts at countering it

The Soviet command did nonetheless make attempts to reduce the scale of the crimes. There were executions and court proceedings against servicemen found guilty of violence. However, these were attempts to reduce the phenomenon, not to eradicate it. The system had an interest in maintaining the image of a "liberator nation," so incidents were not so much punished as concealed.

Suppression and the opening of the subject

For decades the subject was completely taboo in Soviet and post-Soviet historiography. The first impetus toward addressing it was the publication in the 1980s of the memoirs of a German woman who described her experience. These recollections drew the attention of journalists and researchers.

The real breakthrough came during the so-called Soviet archival revolution — when previously classified documents that confirmed the systematic nature of the violence became available.

Estimates of scale

The British military historian Antony Beevor, author of the books "The Fall of Berlin" and "The Second World War," cites an estimate of approximately 3.5 million German women who suffered violence at the hands of Soviet servicemen. This figure is debated — some researchers consider it overstated, while others point to the difficulty of an exact count owing to the systematic destruction of documents and the reluctance of victims to testify. But even the most conservative estimates point to a tragedy of vast scale.

This subject remains painful and politically sensitive. Acknowledging the scale of the violence does not diminish the feat of millions of Soviet soldiers, but it does demand an honest look at all sides of the war.

World War I

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

World War I (1914--1918) was a global armed conflict that fundamentally reshaped the political order of Europe and the entire world. Contrary to the widespread simplification that the war was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the causes of the conflict ran far deeper and concerned the struggle to redivide the colonial world.

Causes of the war

By the end of the 19th century, the world had already been divided among the old colonial empires — the British, the French, and the Russian. Yet the newer nation-states, in particular Italy and Germany, unified only in the second half of the 19th century, needed resources and markets. They sought their own share of colonies, but redistribution was possible only by force.

In essence, there was no just side in this conflict — all the participants were aggressors, each pursuing its own imperialist interests. The war was the inevitable result of escalating contradictions among the great powers.

A separate factor was the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, after which France lost Alsace and Lorraine and sought revenge. This desire for retribution became one of the drivers that pushed France toward a hardline stance at the peace negotiations.

When the war began

Even the start date of the war is a question on which "experts on history" regularly stumble. Two approaches coexist in historiography: counting from 28 July 1914, when Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia, or from 1 August 1914, when the German Empire declared war on the Russian Empire.

The composition of the alliances is likewise often confused. The Triple Alliance comprised Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy — but in 1915 Italy declared neutrality and later switched to the side of the Entente. The Entente, whose core was Great Britain, France, and the Russian Empire, was joined over the course of the war by a number of states, from Greece to Romania.

Consequences for the defeated

The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 placed all the blame on Germany, although objectively responsibility lay with all sides. The consequences for the defeated were catastrophic:

Austria-Hungary — disintegrated entirely into separate nation-states
The Ottoman Empire — ceased to exist; out of its fragments emerged Turkey and a number of new states in the Middle East
Bulgaria — lost a significant part of its territories
Germany — its army was capped at 100,000 men, its colonies were taken away, and enormous reparations were imposed

These humiliating terms, especially for Germany, did not lead to a lasting peace but, on the contrary, created fertile ground for revanchism and the Nazis' rise to power, which ultimately brought about World War II.

World War II

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

World War II (1939--1945) was the largest armed conflict in human history, claiming the lives of tens of millions of people and fundamentally reshaping the political map of the world. The war began not only with Nazi Germany's attack on Poland on 1 September 1939, but with the joint aggression of Hitler and Stalin — for a week before the invasion, on 23 August 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed, with its secret protocol dividing the spheres of influence in Europe. On 17 September the USSR entered Polish territory from the east.

The roots of the conflict reach back to the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, which imposed crushing restrictions and reparations on Germany. The hyperinflation of the 1920s, the economic crisis, and national humiliation created the soil for Hitler's rise to power; from 1935 he consistently violated the terms of the Treaty of Versailles — with the tacit consent of Great Britain and France, which after the horrors of World War I had no wish for a new conflict.

A separate tragic chapter of the war was the mass violence against the civilian population, in particular against women in the occupied territories. By the estimates of the British historian Antony Beevor, the scale of this phenomenon when Soviet troops entered Germany reached millions of victims.

Finland found itself in a difficult position: after the USSR's attack in 1939 it was forced to fight on Germany's side, but only in order to recover its own territories, not for the sake of Nazi ideology.

Notably, only the leadership of Nazi Germany was condemned at the Nuremberg Tribunal. Hitler's allies — Slovakia, Hungary, and other satellite states — did not answer before an international court for their participation in the war. This decision was dictated by the political circumstances of the postwar order rather than by legal logic.