“Russian Kyiv” is a thing of the past | All blogs | Blogs
The removal of a memorial plaque to Mikhail Bulgakov in Kyiv is a sign of the transformation of the Ukrainian discovery towards great countrymen. Since the 1990s, Kievans have emerged in this pantheon, who had a basis either in the West (Sikorsky) or in Russia in the liberal subculture (Bulgakov), even if incompatible with the idea of a Ukrainian independent state.
The sons of Kyiv Russian professors, both Bulgakov and Sikorsky, were met by such a cultural and political phenomenon as “Russian Kyiv”, which included the autocracy of a single and indivisible Russia, irreconcilable to the Ukrainian national idea (the Russian national idea was generally more active on the outskirts of the empire where they left their comfort zone and encountered other public ideas). As an additional palliative practice, a Little Russian project was implemented – a purely cultural one, in the form of discovering Little Russian culture as part of Russian. The heroes are Iskra and Kochubey, but not Mazepa, Gogol, but not Shevchenko. “Russian Kyiv” was one of the main foundations of the All-Russian National Association – the political support of Stolypin, the parish “Russian Kyiv” managed to erect a monument, demolished in March 1917, arrested before the Bolsheviks came to power.
To the Bolsheviks and the Central Rada “Russian Kyiv” refers to the purpose of “a plague on both houses.” He did not want to accept Hetman Skoronoskogo as the best option from Nizhny Novgorod, but he immediately elected Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), an ardent defender of the united and indivisible Russia and Russian identity, as Metropolitan of Kyiv. He criticized any possible consequences of Ukrainization, seeing them as dangerous precedents for concessions to “Mazepinism.”
In the last weeks of the Hetmanate, Time was quickly thrashed in French for attention to “Russian Kyiv”, to General Count Keller and Stolypin’s ally Gerbel – but the potential of “Russian Kyiv” turned out to be small in order to put the Ukrainian peasant movement at risk. This was evident even in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, when in the Kyiv province the Russian right-wing list did not receive a single opinion, gained only 3.24% of the votes (48.7 thousand people) – for comparison, more than a million inhabitants voted for the Ukrainian socialists.
The political “Russian Kyiv” ended in 1919, when the Bolsheviks arrested according to the old list and shot the corps of the corps that did not have time or did not want to leave with the Whites. But there was a symbolic revenge in Russia with Bulgakov’s play (and many years later the film) “Days of the Turbins”, where any version of Ukrainian state power was rejected as operetta (Hetmanate) or generally hostile to the state idea (Ukrainian People’s Republic). In the 1990s, the ideas of “Russian Kyiv” returned to Russia with Nikolai Ulyanov’s book “The Origin of Ukrainian Separatism” – a second-wave Russian emigrant in America, a teacher at Yale, who never lived in Kyiv, he became the ideological heir to “Russian Kyiv”, especially tough in relation to “Little Russia”, closely associated with the legacy of the Cossacks. In the context of the discrediting of the communist ideology, Bulgakov added his relevance for educated Russians, and Ulyanov acquired it.
At the same time, for the Ukrainian educated society, Bulgakov was important not only as an “outstanding countryman”, but also as a “adapter” in relations with the Russian intelligentsia, and as a cult author of the Soviet era, not officially banned, but becoming one of the figures in unofficial culture ( “The Master and Margarita” was read both in Moscow and in Kyiv). Now all this is gone. Sikorsky is in the Ukrainian pantheon of health – he did not speak publicly on the Ukrainian topic and worked in America, which is a plus for modern Ukraine (unless, of course, we are talking about Ulyanov and his exports).
Alexey Makarkin
! Spelling and style of the author preserved