Myths about the origin of Ukraine and the Ukrainians. Myth 2. Polish name: Ukraine
A mass of historical documents have long been proven that this word originated from the “outskirts” of the Russian and Polish lands. But the Ukrainian state-sponsors strongly disagree with this. According to their version, it was invented by illiterate Great Russians to humiliate the great Ukrainian nation, and the word "Ukraine" consists of the word "kra", meaning steppe, and the word "ina" is a country. Therefore, Ukraine is a “steppe country”. The most "svidomye" generally believe that it means "principality", and the term "Oukraina" is a self-name of the territory.
And yet: how and when did the word "Ukraine" appear?
"Oukrainymi", "Ukrainy", "ukrainymi" in Russia from 12 to 17 century called the various border lands. Thus, in 1187, Pereyaslavl “oukraina” is mentioned, in 1189 Galician “oukraina”, in 1271 Pskov’s “Ukraine”, in 1571 Tatar “Ukraine”, “Kazan Ukraine” and Ukrainian people. In the 16 century documents speak about “Ukrainian service” , and in the 17 century the “Ukrainian cities of the wild field” are mentioned and the word “Ukrainian” began to denote the lands of the Middle Dnieper region.
The Polish sources also mention the border "places and towns of Ukraine", "Ukraine Kiev", "Lyakhov Oukrainyane", "lords of the governor and the elders of Ukraine".
There was no ethnic nuance in both Russian and Polish naming. This concept was purely toponymic, indicating the geographical location of the area. That is, the word “Ukraine” as a common noun, in the sense of borderlands, was known both in Russian and in Polish and has been used in them for a long time.
After the Union of Lublin 1569, with the inclusion of Kyiv and Bratslav voivodships in the crown Polish lands, they became the new Polish borderland and gave birth to a new generalized name as “Ukraine”. This name did not become official, but, having become entrenched in the use of the Polish gentry, it began to penetrate into clerical work as well. By the middle of the 17 century, the word Ukrainians began to call the Polish gentry in Ukraine by the word "Ukrainians". So the crown hetman Potocki in 1651 calls them "Panov Ukrainians".
Despite the political division of the people of Russia, its ethnic unity continued to persist, which did not suit the power of the Commonwealth. The Poles decide to take measures to divide the unity of Russia at the conceptual level, the papal envoy Antonio Possevino proposes in the 1581 year to call the south-western Russian lands "Ukraine".
A new toponym begins to take root in clerical work and gradually, in the workflow of documents, instead of the concept “Russia,” “Ukraine” appears. So, from a purely geographical concept, this term acquires a political meaning, and the Polish authorities, through the Cossack sergeant, who received mainly Polish education and is striving to become a new gentry, are trying to introduce this concept into the masses. The Little Russian people categorically rejects the identity being imposed, and after the Pereyaslav Rada, the “Ukrainian” terminology in the ethnic sense goes out of use.
It remains geographically understood, so the word "Ukrainians" applies to service people of the Sloboda Ukraine, and from 1765, the Kharkov province even bore the name of the Sloboda Ukrainian province. During this period, the word "Ukrainians" is used in relation to the Little Russian Cossacks, that is, the Cossacks, military people of different parts of the Little Russia, came to be called "Ukrainians".
But the Polish concept of replacing Russia with “Ukraine” did not die and reaches its logical end in the 19 century. Polish propaganda writer Count Jan Pototsky publishes in Paris in 1796 a book called Historical and Geographical Fragments about Scythia, Sarmatia and Slavs, outlining a fictitious concept of a separate Ukrainian people of completely independent origin.
He developed these marginal ideas of another Polish historian, Tadeusz Chatsky, who wrote a pseudoscientific work “On the name“ Ukraine ”and the origin of the Cossacks” in 1801, in which Ukrainians were deduced from the ukrov horde he had invented in the 7th century because of the Volga. On the basis of these opuses, a special “Ukrainian” school of Polish writers and scholars appeared, further promoting the fictitious concept. Then they somehow forgot about the ukrah and remembered them only after more than two hundred years, already at the time of Yushchenko.
Fresh blood in this doctrine poured Pole Francishek Duchinsky. He tried to clothe his crazy ideas about the “chosenness” of the Polish and kindred “Ukrainian” people in the form of a scientific system and argued that the Russians (Muscovites) are not Slavs, but descendants of the Tatars, and that the name “Rus” was stolen by Muscovites from Ukrainians who the only ones are entitled to it. Thus was born the still-living legend of the bad Muscovites who stole the name of Rus.
However, all these Polish attempts are not perceived by society, and the word "Ukrainians" in literary and political works until the middle of the 19 century continues to be used in former meanings
Marginal ideas of Potocki and Chatsky found support among a part of the South-Russian intelligentsia, who founded the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood in Kiev headed by Kostomarov. The latter proposed his own concept of the existence of two Russian nationalities — Great Russian and Ukrainian, but later revised it and noted that “Ukraine meant every margin in general and this word had no ethnographic meaning, but only geographical”.
In general, the word "Ukrainians" as an ethnonym neither in the intelligentsia, nor in the peasant environment has received wide circulation at this time. It is noteworthy that one of the most radical members of the Brotherhood, Taras Shevchenko, never used the word Ukrainians.
Later, the professor of Lemberg (Lviv) University, Grushevsky, who headed the Shevchenko Partnership in 1895 and decided to prove the existence of an independent “Ukrainian people” with Austrian money, tried to bring it all to a logical conclusion. In his pseudoscientific work “The History of Ukraine-Rus”, which caused only laughter in academic circles, he introduces the concepts “Ukrainians”, “Ukrainian tribes” and “Ukrainian people” into the historiography of Ancient Russia, and the scholarly world of that time, who “adequately” estimated it contribution to historiography, called it a "scientific nonentity."
In their political activities, Grushevsky and his associates began to actively use the word "Ukraine" only at the beginning of the 20 century in the Ukrainian Herald weekly published in 1906 in St. Petersburg and in the magazine Ukrainian Life published in 1912-1917 in Moscow .
Their efforts are spreading literature about the oppression of "Ukrainians" by Muscovites, in the books and documents the words "Little Russia" and "South Russia" are replaced by the term "Ukraine" and the already forgotten legend about the abduction of the name "Rus" by the Little Russians is thrown, left as if without a name and they had to look for another name.
After the February Revolution, with the support of Russian liberals, the word "Ukrainians" gradually began to acquire widespread circulation, first in a geographical sense, and then in an ethnic one. As an independent ethnos, the word "Ukrainians" at the official level was legalized only by the Bolsheviks, and the nationality "Ukrainian" appeared in the passport, and in Galicia this happened only 1939, at the behest of the dictator Stalin, so unloved by them.
So, the primordial nature of the concept “Ukraine” is a myth consciously introduced by the Poles into the Little Russian environment in order to split Russian unity. The ancient name of the territory of present-day Ukraine before the 17 century was Russia (Black, Chervonnaya or Small), and these names were used by all ethnic, class-professional and confessional groups living here. Having taken the place of the disappeared Little-Russian elite, the Polish gentry deliberately imposed the concept of "Ukraine" instead of the natural and historical concepts of Russia and Little Russia, and the word "Ukrainians" (from the designation of the border guards of the Moscow State) acquired the meaning of a separate Ukrainian ethnos.
- Yuri Apukhtin
- komitet.net.ua
- Myths about the origin of Ukraine and the Ukrainians. Myth 1. Ukraine is the successor of Kievan Rus
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