In 1918 when the Red Army first entered Kyiv after the fall of the Russian empire they began shooting people in the streets for speaking Ukrainian and carrying Ukrainian identity documents. Mykola Skrypnyk, a Ukrainian communist and key ally of the Russian Bolsheviks, noted that those with Ukrainian identity papers were a particular target so that the population had the impression the red army was “fighting with Ukrainians”. Oleksij Goldenweiser, a Jewish lawyer who witnessed their atrocities, wrote that they shot all who were connected with the Ukrainian army “particularly officers”.
The actions of the Red Army show the two elements of Russian hatred of Ukrainian identity that we are seeing now. They are 1 a loathing of Ukrainian culture which we see again in the destruction of Ukrainian cultural artefacts and the eradication of Ukrainian language classes in the areas they occupy 2 an antipathy towards Ukrainian political agency .
Yet Skrypnyk himself, who was one of the Ukrainian communists the Russians allied with to divide and conquer Ukraine, could not see what was staring him the face. The Russian soldiers were killing Ukrainians because they hated them, and the “impression” the population had was the truth. Yet that insight, that Russians kill Ukrainians en masse because of a hatred of Ukrainian identity, which the residents of Kyiv who saw the mass murder of Ukrainians by the Red Army understood, has continuously been eroded .
The two most prominent historians of the Holodomor in the English speaking world, Robert Conquest and Anne Applebaum were unable to blame the real culprit for the genocide of Ukrainians, the vast majority of the Russian people. Where does Russian hatred of Ukraine come from? Why have we failed to see it? How does admitting it exists demand that we re-evaluate historical events that were probably not accidental?
To understand the hatred of Ukrainian identity we must look at the origins of Ukraine itself which lie in a kingdom called Rus whose capital was Kyiv. The inhabitants of the Rus heartland spoke a language that was the fore runner of Ukrainian and is preserved in graffiti on the walls of the Saint Sophia cathedral in Kyiv. Their Church Slavic had been brought to them by Bulgarian missionaries but they incorporated many elements of their spoken language, the Ukrainian variant of Old East Slavic, in their texts and its pronunciation was Ukrainianised.
The kingdom, really a group of principalities centred in Kyiv, probably arose from a union with Slavonic tribes and Scandinavian traders along the route “from the Varangian to the Greek”. The word Ukraine as a synonym for all or part of the country is first recorded in 1425 in reference to events in 1187 and was used interchangeably with words that derived from Rus to refer to Ukraine until the nineteenth century.
Rus fell to the assaults of the Mongols in 1240 and in the subsequent period a realm that had not been part of the Rus state or on that trade route, Moscow, rose to prominence. Moscow's origins probably lie in the colonisation of what was a Finno-Ugric area by some Slavonic tribes, the Vyatichi and the Kryvichi who were not part of the Rus people but occasionally allied with them.
The earliest mention of Moscow in connection with Rus is in 1147 in a letter by Yuri Dolgorukiy, a Grand Prince of Kyiv who is sometimes known as the founder of Moscow. His arrival may mark growing contacts between the Rus principalities and this area, and the imposition of the written tongue of Rus on its inhabitants. Moscow at this point however was merely be a territory annexed by a Rus prince.
The area's first appearance as a political entity, an independent principality rather than an area colonised by the princes of Kyiv is in 1282, until then it had probably been a fortified settlement linked to the principality of Volodymyr-Suzdal. However it was a vassal state of the Golden Horde, the Mongols who had destroyed Rus until the late fourteen hundreds.
It is in that period that the seeds of the hatred of Ukrainian identity were sown. The rulers of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy laid claim to the legacy of Rus. They did not understand their land's origins in the colonisation of Finno-Ugric territory by Slavic tribes or their colonisation by Rus. Nor did they realise that the spoken language of Rus, the forerunner of modern Ukrainian was different to the language they spoke, or that their written tongue, given to them by the Rus, lacked its “Ukrainian” elements.
Ivan Kalita (1288-1341) one of the first Muscovite Princes laid one of the foundations of embryonic Russian foreign policy by loaning money to other principalities that had at one time been part of Rus and then using debt to establish control over them. This is the forerunner of Gazprom using energy debt as a weapon against Ukraine or the Trump MAGA group seeking Russian assistance in the elections.
However, Ivan the Terrible is the key figure shaping the imperial mentality that Ukraine has fought for centuries in this period. The English wiki entry predictably enough is practically a PR text for this brutal man and mistranslates his title as Tsar of All Russia: in fact Ivan was the first Russian ruler to be proclaimed Tsar of All Rus.
That simple word, the assertion of his rule over all Rus required Muscovy to reimagine that medieval Kingdom as part of its heritage and land: but Muscovy had never been viewed as part of Rus.
When Muscovy first encountered the original people of Rus, the Ukrainians, in subsequent centuries, the difference between the myth of their origins in Rus and the fact people with another language and culture dwelt in the Rus heartland was intolerable to them. They believed their own language, based on the written tongue of Rus but stripped of its Ukrainian elements, was closer to the tongue spoken by Medieval Kyiv.
When the Muscovites gained control over most of Ukraine, which had been under Polish sovereignty in 1654, they set about eradicating all traces of Ukrainian identity.
Numerous prohibitions were inflicted on the Ukrainian language including the Ems Ukaz of 1876 which banned Ukrainian in print except for reprinting old documents along with many other restrictions. The claim to Rus also required doctoring the medieval chronicles of Rus and producing tortuous falsehoods about why Ukrainians were not the descendants of Rus.
The prominent Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin (1800-1875) claimed that Ukrainians had only emigrated to Ukraine from the Carpathian mountains in the fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries. He was in effect deleting Ukrainians from their own history. The Russian monarchs traced their descent to Rurik (? -879) who may have been a mythical figure, and supposedly founded the ruling dynasty of Rus in Novgorod.
In fact the Chronicle reference to him was a misreading and gave Rurik two brothers from words which possibly meant “His House” and “His Military Unit”. There have been some unconvincing recent attempts to argue that this interpretation is flawed but in fact the Chronicle is wildly unreliable and this episode is a fabrication. So the chronicle episode was probably a latter day fake but allowed the Muscovites to claim that “Russia” on whose territory they believed the Novgorod referred to lay (there were in fact several Novgorods and one is in modern Ukraine) was the origin point of the Rus kingdom. Alas! There are many archival resources contradicting this theory such as the Bertinian Chronicles
However, the tradition of denigrating Ukrainians and their culture arising from this claim to the legacy of Rus became a recurrent motif in Russian discourse. A Chatham House Paper published in 2012 makes explicit the link between the Russian myth of origin in Rus and the loathing of Ukrainian identity:
the very idea of a Ukrainian nation separate from the great Russian nation challenges core beliefs about Russia’s origin and identity ... It is the control of Kyiv that helped solidify Russia’s claim to imperial status. In time, these myths of common national origin were complemented by the myth that Russian language and culture are a legacy shared by all Eastern Slavs, and the myth of the perpetual incremental growth of the Russian state.. ‘the gathering of Russian lands’ From this perspective, the collective goods that bring the majority of Ukrainians together as a nation (e.g. Taras Shevchenko’s legacy, Ukrainian language...) appear ... meaningless, second-rate or blasphemous to a large number of Russians. Generations of Russian intellectuals have turned belittling of the Ukrainian language and culture into a part of the Russian belief system. (including) a dismissive attitude to any assertion that national differences exist. 1
The opposition of the national myths and the drive to reconstitute Rus in a form in which it never existed result in a perpetual Russian drive to occupy Ukraine and destroy or assimilate Ukrainians. They also generate the perception that Ukrainian nationhood is a foreign artifice designed to separate a single Russian people. Russians have blamed Ukrainian identity variously on Polish, Austro-Hungarian and, more recently western influence. You can find these views in numerous Russian writers, including Solzhenitsyn,
When Russia in its Soviet form regained control of Ukraine after a brief period of Ukrainian independence in 1917 to 1921 the hatred and desire to eradicate Ukrainian culture resulted in three artificial famines.
However, Russian soft power controlled academia and journalism to the extent that these famines were attributed to a range of causes other than deliberate extermination. I will briefly examine all three to show how our new understanding that Russians loathe Ukrainian identity requires that we revise our previous account of these famines by acknowledging Russia's fixed genocidal intent towards Ukraine.
The famine of 1921-23 occurred when the Russian Bolsheviks had formed an alliance with Ukrainian communists to gain control over Ukraine, destroying the Ukrainian People's Republic . While communist soldiers murdered Ukrainians as noted at the beginning of this article, an overt campaign to eradicate Ukrainians might have broken this alliance. However, as they conquered Ukraine they inflicted food requisition, using starvation as a weapon, to eliminate the local Ukrainian population.
There is no doubt that Lenin took advantage of a drought that gripped the Southern Regions of Ukraine and some parts of Russia to continue this policy and inflict a famine on Ukrainians. The harvest was substantially reduced but on 12 May 1921 Lenin sent a telegram to the Soviet Ukrainian government in Kharkiv demanding that bread be requisitioned in Ukraine and sent to the central Russian provinces during that month.
The requisitions continued in June and July and the government sabotaged measures to provide relief while assisting Russian the Russian Volga region which was also affected by the drought. Ukrainians died, Russians lived. It was only in August 1922 that some humanitarian relief was provided.
The casualties of this artificial famine in Ukraine are estimated at 935,800 by the demographic institute of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Details of the famine were suppressed and the use of administrative measures to mask murderous intent confuses researchers to this day.
Despite the famine Ukrainian culture continued to develop, although it was rigorously policed, under the Soviets. However, by 1930, the government in Moscow was increasingly concerned at the autonomy of Ukraine. They had been trying to maintain an alliance with the Ukrainian Bolsheviks in the twenties even allowing Ukrainianisation of the Kuban, an ethnic enclave in Russia, while rejecting the request by Skrypnyk, now the leader of Soviet Ukraine, to include the area within the borders of the Ukrainian “republic”.
It is true that during 1932 grain was being requisitioned from all across the Soviet Union, and some argue in consequence that the Holodomor was caused by economic factors.
However, in letter of 11th August Stalin wrote to Kaganovich that he believed that Ukrainian nationalists working with Polish spies were preparing to sever Ukraine from the Soviet Union. He stated bluntly that ‘Unless we begin to straighten out the situation ..we may lose Ukraine’.
The letter initiated a wave of executions and arrests in Ukraine and was followed by a series of laws targeting Ukraine which led to the borders of Ukraine and Kuban being sealed, and foodstuffs being confiscated in 1933. It is now statistically proven that the famine targeted ethnic Ukrainians. Indeed Ukrainians in both Russia and Belarus as well as Ukraine were subjected to this mass extermination policy. The measures used included the New Year Telegram of 1933 and the order to seal the borders of Ukraine and Kuban of 22 January 1933.
The Ukrainian demographic institute estimates that the famine caused excess deaths of 3.9 million within Ukraine but notably includes the deaths in the Kuban within the Russian total, although that area was targeted because of its ethnic Ukrainian identity. Again because the atrocity was masked as a series of dry administrative measures its nature was hidden.
This period also saw the destruction of a whole generation of Ukrainian artists and writers known as the Executed Renaissance: but the targetting of Ukrainian cultural figures was masked, they were prosecuted on the basis of trumped up charges, ranging from being members of a nationalist underground, counter revolutionary activity etc.
However, the advent of WW2 temporarily broke the Russian occupation of Ukraine albeit only to see the country become one of the main killing grounds for Hitler's planned genocide of the Jews and the site of the Holocaust by Bullets.
The third famine that of 1946 to 47 inflicted on Ukraine by the Soviets after the “liberation” of Ukraine from the Nazis caused an estimated 700,000 deaths according to the Ukrainian demographic institute.
While there were factors such as post war shortages and a desire to export grain to East Europe to illustrate the advantages of Communism which can be viewed as contributory we now have to see this post WW2 famine differently in light of the growing awareness of Russian hatred of Ukraine. As with the previous famine of 1932-33 the legislation imposed by the Soviets protecting “state property” and the unreal grain requisitions caused deaths ethnically targeting Ukraine.
Because, for Russians, the Ukrainian people do not really exist the difficulties collecting the grain were attributed in some of the documents to “nationalists”.
These three famines were, now that we review them in light of the recognition of Russian hatred of Ukraine, intentionally inflicted to cause the deaths of Ukrainians. Yet, one strange feature of Russian hatred of Ukraine is the insistence that Russians and Ukrainians share a historical unity to quote Vladimir Putin.
So Russia often denies that it is targeting Ukrainians instead referring to foreigners who have divided one Russian people and killing Ukrainians opportunistically by seizing advantage of temporary conditions or creating a pretext such as a prosecution for a fake criminal case.
We can now see a pattern emerging whose elements are:
- Hatred of Ukraine arising from Russia's claim to Rus which drives the elements below
- The construction of fallacious histories erasing the Ukrainian people from the past
- Denigration of Ukrainian language and culture as fallacious
- Cultural erasure of Ukrainian identity by murdering or destroying artists and writers
- Mass killings such as those which accompanied the Holodomor of 1932-33
- Opportunistically taking advantage of conditions such as drought to engineer the mass deaths of Ukrainians via measures at state level
- Individual or group violence against Ukrainians
- Lying at both individual and state level to mask the truth
The hatred of Ukrainians and the three famines and mass killings it caused was always in plain sight yet most historical discourse denied their genocidal nature and failed to name the perpetrator of genocide against Ukrainians: the Russian people. I will examine how Russian soft power obscured the reality of Russian violence against Ukraine in my next article.
However, if academics and journalists and all of us had looked at what was staring us in the face and called it by its true name, genocide last century, Ukrainians would not be facing a renewed genocide this century. In the war which Russia has waged against Ukrainians since 2014 we have seen all the elements this article noted that were used last century. There has been the destruction of cultural artefacts, the murder of Ukrainian authors, and the opportunistic creation of famine to render life unliveable and cause death.
Those Ukrainians who want to live will be compelled to become Russian if Ukraine is occupied and in all probability millions will be killed given the genocidal rhetoric from Russia and the already vast number of deaths in the areas occupied to date.
If we had faced the truth about the past we might have avoided war in the present.
Unfortunately as I will show in subsequent articles academics became complicit in obscuring the causes of the famine. One of the demands of this moment is dismantling the disinformation dressed in pseudo scholarship that they have foisted on generations of western minds.
These scholars masked the reality of Russian hatred of Ukraine and helped lead us to this moment with a Russian regime that is rooted in the worst instincts of its people.
It is only by rejecting their flawed work and accepting that most Russians hate Ukraine enough most of the time to engage in acts of mass and individual violence against Ukrainians that we can hope to win the ugly genocidal war they have unleashed.
ENDS
Stephen Komarnyckyj is a British Ukrainian writer and translatorwho will be writing about Russian soft power and Ukrainian literature for the NAFO Forum. .
1A Ghost in the Mirror: Russian Soft Power in Ukraine Alexander Bogomolov and Oleksandr Lytvynenko: Russia and Eurasia Programme | Chatham House; London: January 2012
