This series continues, amid the buzz surrounding Tucker Carlson's interview this week of Vladimir Putin. A long, complicated history was discussed during the course of that interview with mixed reactions around the world. Hopefully this multi-part series, written from the perspective of a descendant of pre-Revolutionary Russian immigrants to America, who came from the regions in question, will shed light on the issues discussed. My content tends to fixate more on religious issues than others, but this is probably worth a read, even by those who are not primarily interested in religious affairs in Ukraine. My argument is that religion actually did play a major role in the development of Ukraine, as it does virtually every other region of the world.
Competing national visions: Ukrainianism versus Russophilia
There are competing visions everywhere. In Ukraine, historically, there are 2 opposing visions regarding identity, nationhood, and sovereignty. Since the coup d'etat of 2014, these 2 visions, being held by native citizens of Ukraine, have even duked it out on an actual battlefield. While there were other visions at times, these 2 are the most relevant and impact the world today the most: Russophilia and Ukrainianism. Other less relevant or popular visions would be: Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth Identity, Neosoviet, general separatism, and apathy.
Ukraine was not "liberated" from Tsarist rule, it was broken off by the heterodox west, and by the heterodox within Ukraine. Besides the political associations with Muscovy, the way that people actually felt in Ukraine prior to WW1 was fundamentally different than today. Ukraine's nationalist movement is more of a political movement than anything. It used to be called, "Ukrainstvo" translated literally "Ukrainianism." It is an "ism" and it had specific leaders and emerged from a specific group of people. The reasons for the spread of this movement are complicated, difficult to track, and often misunderstood. It is not cut and dry. For that reason, the true story of Ukraine, the objective history, is never told in western media. There is both ignorance, as well as a willful, politically-motivated intent to distort it. An abbreviated, politicized, romantic narrative following the "David vs Goliath" architype is told. There are geopolitical reasons for this, in addition to romanticism.
Russophilia is the term I'd use to describe the vision of the Russian nation according to traditional tsarist sensibilities. It is difficult to say when the basis for this idea emerged. One could say that it began when the Duchy of Moscow first began to retake Russian lands from Lithuania, which seized about half of "Kievan Rus." It's starting point could be traced to the founding of the Tsardom in the 16th century, when the Rus finally had a king as opposed to antagonistic princes in divided micro states. Or one could say that it emerged with the concept of Moscow as a "3rd Rome." Russophilia is the idea that these Rus people, who all equally share in the heritage of Kievan Rus ought to have unity. After the Mongol Invasion, the lands were decimated, creating a power vacuum. Lithuania and Poland swept in, sometimes with blood, and seized the western Russian lands. This is the only reason why Belarus and Ukraine developed separate characteristics from what we call "Russia" today, such as their own dialects and other peculiarities. But Russophilia does not see itself as a movement rooted only as far back as the 16th century, but rather as the celebration and continuation of what always existed back to the beginnings of the Rus in the 9th century.
Russophilia is, objectively speaking, more Orthodox than Ukrainianism. Ukrainianism was primarily a Uniate political orientation that emerged in Galicia, within the Austro Hungarian Empire prior to WW1. It was advanced as an alternative to the Russophilia of those Uniates who were converting back to Orthodoxy in that region. There were some Uniates that became Russophiles, putting them on a course back to Orthodoxy. Because of this, the Austro Hungarian government assisted and promoted the Ukrianianists and repressed the Russophiles within their territory. The Uniate clergy were also instrumental in spreading Ukrainian nationalism. The Uniate Ukrainian vision was one of a Catholic, western-backed, smaller version of Russia, which vicariously operated in the line of succession from the old Kingdom of Galicia (which was made a kingdom by the crowning of Prince Daniil Romanovich by a Papal legate, the only Rus prince to submit to Rome, though he purportedly did not apostatize from Orthodoxy). In a sense this nation of Ukraine would be the true successor to Kievan Rus, not Muscovy. This was an idea that was and is backed by foreigners such as Poles to this very day. This alternative nationhood, this western-backed national idea, this "Antirussia", claims more exclusive rights to the heritage of Kievan Rus. It views Muscovy as something foreign, dirty, unsophisticated, uncivilized. But most of all: foreign. It denies the connection to Moscow, and celebrates the connection to the western Catholics. It denies that the Rurik Dynasty moved to Moscow, while the local Little Russian establishment was slowly Polonized. It denies that the Metropolitan See of Kiev and All Rus moved to Vladimir (an ancient city in Russia, near Moscow) and then to Moscow, in order to protect it from the heathen Lithuanians who occupied Kiev (and it was moved by St. Peter, Metropolitan of Moscow, who was himself a Galician!). This movement, with its narratives, is the direct ancestor of mainstream Ukrainian nationalism today, both in terms of spirit, but even in terms of direct lineage through nationalist leaders and academics.
Within the Russian Empire, Ukrainianism was much much weaker and took on more of a political form than a folk nationalist form. It was composed primarily by anti-monarchical liberals who sought an alternative identity and statehood formation to the Russian Empire. One that was more local and democratic. The reason some of them were repressed by the state was because they were rebels. It was a mirror image of the repressions against Russophiles in Austria Hungary, and on a much smaller and less severe scale. Some of these Ukrainianists within the Russian Empire were actually looked upon favorably in elite circles; a sort of curiosity in the age of Romanticism. There was also a small reaction against Russification (language policy) though nobody seems to admit that Russification replaced the Polonization which came before it. At the time it was mostly academic. All attention and moans are directed at Muscovites, the actual, real brothers who reunited and provided an authentically Rus state, and no attention paid to the Polonized gentry, whose Polish language dominated the Little Russian upper classes, relegating the vernacular (that would later be developed into modern Ukrainian) to an unwritten peasant language. The Polish domination is what made Ukraine separate, and yet Russia, or more precisely the Great Russians/Muscovites are the villains for reuniting and defending Orthodoxy, which was previously suppressed by the Poles. This dismissal of Moscovite unity and consolidation, and a half-hearted celebration of Polish/Lithuanian domination is the core of the Ukrainian national idea. (And when it comes to the relationship between Ukrainians, Poles and Lithuanians, there is a lot to unpack, particularly when discussing nationalisms. It is complicated.)
And here is the kicker: Ukrainianism was not even popular until Germany occupied what we now call Ukraine during WW1. A religious component in these questions of identity was very visible in the pre-WW1 immigration to America. For topics of ethnicity and nationalism it is useful to study religious organizations since they consist of organized communities of people, and serve as centers of culture. But perhaps all the more so because of the role that religion plays in ethnic and national identity. Those who identified as Ukrainian were almost all Uniates. So very many people who came to the US and built the North American Russian Orthodox Metropolia, that later became the Orthodox Church in America, were from Ukraine yet called themselves Russians and identified with that culture. And those people were mostly from western Ukraine, not Donbass, not Crimea, or other eastern regions of Ukraine that tend to be pro-Russian today. There were some of these people who, after being in America or Canada for decades, decided that they were "Ukrainian" when they looked at maps of the Soviet Union and saw that the region their parents or grandparents were from was in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
It is noteworthy also that the Ukrainian language did not exist until the 19th century, and it was based primarily upon the Galician dialect. Galicia had been controlled directly by the Kingdom of Poland for centuries, and their vernacular took on many Polishisms; whereas those to the north and east were dominated by Lithuania, which had little linguistic impact, and the vernacular was closer to Russian. Later, the Soviets made the people in the north and east of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic learn Ukrainian, a language that was as foreign to them like Muscovite Russian language was to a Galician in 1900. To be clear: the vernacular language spoken by peasants in Little Russia, within the Russian Empire was not equivalent to modern Ukrainian, nor did they call it Ukrainian. Immigrants from these regions to America typically referred to their regional vernaculars as "Village Russian" of "Low Russian."
The Ukrainianist vision sees Ukraine as embracing a social evolution akin to that of the west, instead of the Orthodox east. This is opposed to the Orthodox, eastern resistance to western liberalism, and the whole process of development of Papism and Protestantism that preceded it. This is a version of Progressivism. There is a good reason why pro-LGBT and other advocates for social liberalism in Ukraine are ardent Ukrainian nationalists, and were always very anti-Russian. They see the future of Ukraine being very liberal and decadent; basically Ukraine "evolving" into what western European countries are like right now. This is noteworthy as in most of the world the Social Left tends to be anti nationalist.
The Germans supported Ukrainianism twice during their WW1 and WW2 occupations to create disunity and prevent partisan activity. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists developed the Ukrainian national idea in Interwar Poland and spread it. The Soviets reinforced it through Indigenization Policies and the formation of a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, possessing the very same borders as the modern Ukrainian state, minus the region around Lvov which was part of Poland until the end of WW2. In 1991, 3 men got together in Belovezha Forest and decided to break Russian, Ukraine and Belarus apart. One could say that this division was a missed opportunity to reestablish a larger, more powerful Russia in which Ukraine and Belarus would benefit. The division would set in motion new politics for the region and allowed the possibility for hostilities. Afterward, a large portion of the new independent Ukrainian state, a pet country of a certain set of local oligarchs, embraced the Banderite/OUN version of Ukrainian identity and used it to solidify separateness from Russia. And there you have it, that is essentially why Ukraine exists today. But notice how complicated this historical development is? It is too much for most people to grasp, that's why most people just respond to media programming (that's been heavily influenced by the activist Uniates from Ukraine's west) and say: "Russia bad. Ukraine good. Ukraine's been a nation for centuries; fighting for freedom and independence, etc etc."
