Let the world hear the truth about our family: what will be the ideology of Ukraine after the victory over Russia

It is unknown when the Russian aggression against our country will end, and Ukrainians, confident of victory, are already working out plans to rebuild destroyed cities and villages. In fact, we want to see new streets and avenues so quickly; we sincerely believe that everything rebuilt will be better, more majestic…

However, will the world, amazed by our courage on the fronts, finally be able to learn from ourselves about the true origins of this civilizational phenomenon? Is our state again, as it was after the declaration of independence in 1991, neglecting its obligation to present the vision of its past to humanity? Whether will we once again start agreeing with our neighbours on how to write our history?

Maybe we are to blame because we have not been able to bring our truth to the world in thirty years of independence, but Russian propagandists have tried their best, especially during Putin’s rule.

We made no effort to reveal to the world that Ukrainians are a separate nation

It is known that US President Woodrow Wilson, who put forward 14 points of peaceful settlement of disputes that had accumulated in international relations at the end of the First World War in January 1918, did not mention the Ukrainian nation—he simply could not know about it.

After all, the Americans, like their allies, used to be accustomed to dealing with tsarist Russia for centuries. So they wanted its revival, and when the Bolsheviks won there, the West cooperated with Red Moscow. Although in its eyes, it organized an unprecedented genocide of Ukrainians in world history, taking bread from them.

Therefore, before the Second World War, the Ukrainian issue was not on the agenda of the international community. With the beginning of large-scale hostilities in Europe in 1939, no one in the West mentioned the right of our people to free life, although the proclamation of Carpathian Ukraine on March 15 was already sanctified by blood, and the organizers of the restoration of the Ukrainian state on June 30, 1941, in Lviv led by Stepan Bandera, sat in Hitler’s concentration camp.

And only the statehood of the leader of the nationalist underground Roman Shukhevych, who at the head of the insurgent armed forces continued to fight for an independent and united Ukraine even after the Second World War, forced the West to pay attention to this incomprehensible phenomenon of resistance.

And when Moscow, thanks to brutal punitive actions, managed to suppress our national liberation movement, both in Europe and abroad, already in the Cold War, began to listen to the Ukrainian diaspora, which continued its coordination—until the restoration of an independent state in its homeland.

However, after this event, our society had to rely on its own strength to build a new life which they voted so unanimously in the All-Ukrainian referendum on December 1, 1991. Because at first, the West was in no hurry to support our independence, extracting promises from the leaders of independent Ukraine to renounce nuclear weapons and at the same time watching the process of creating our own army.

There are many examples of unsuccessful experiments of modern Ukrainian state-building, when Ukrainians weaned from centuries of captivity tried to revive their own democratic traditions, encountering various obstacles.

There will be complaints against every President of Ukraine regarding the inept conduct of a state ship in the turbulent political and economic life. But, as is now clear, one of the most critical mistakes was to ignore the ideology of independent state-building. And its creation, from the beginning, consisted first and foremost in raising awareness of the truth of our history among all citizens, not just our own.

We ourselves did not make the necessary efforts to reveal to the world that Ukrainians are a separate nation. Moreover, the main task was already undertaken by the Russian ideological machine—Ukrainians and Russians as well as Belarusians—one nation hence the future of a single Slavic state.

And that is what prevailed in Moscow’s attempt to impose a shared vision of the past, which we wanted to present through agreed-upon history textbooks, which we agreed to. So what did those meetings with the “older brother” give?

Souls of the sun and people of the swamps

But it was possible to immediately explain to everyone that before the first contacts of our ancestors with the Finno-Ugric peoples in the second half of the 10th century, who then inhabited the territory from the Baltic to the Urals, we were completely different from them—agricultural tribes and hunting and fishing.

The latter ones, having been conquered by force, that the Kyiv princes as Rusichi (Rusini, that is, Ukrainians in the current sense) Russified with the help of the Orthodox Church planted here and sketched out to them the form of our self-government. And the Tatar horde came there in two hundred years, after which the organized influx of the Ukrainian elite stopped for the spiritual development of those territories.

This problem, as well as the lack of their own self-sufficient armed forces, will force Moscow’s rulers in the future to recruit it at the expense of the Ukrainian Cossacks, created on the border of two worlds—Christian and Muslim.

And after the Pereyaslav Council of 1654, the tsarist autocracy began to use our Cossacks in their imperial conquests; it did a lot to subjugate the freedom-loving Ukrainian people politically and economically as well as spiritually, creating such conditions for our outstanding figures of culture, science, education, and technology, so that their creations to be considered the achievements of the Russian people.

However, the events of centuries ago show that Ukrainians remain a separate nation. One hundred years ago, at a meeting with Ukrainians in Moscow in November 1916, the prominent Russian writer Maksym Gorky pointed specifically to a separate, independent type of Ukrainian.

“For me,” he said, “there is no doubt that the soul of the people, their character, their abilities, their culture, and their whole way of life depend on the sun.” Just like everything we live on, we see on our earth. I crossed Russia with my feet in different directions, —said Gorky. — I know almost all its lands and corners from the endless Black Sea steppes to the gloomy northern forests and tundra.

Everywhere I lived with the people and looked at them; and it is clear to me that the soul of a Ukrainian, who grows and bathes in the bright and hot rays of noon, is and must be not only different, but in many cases, opposite to the soul of those who grew up and are its age in the twilight and cold of the northern forests.

In addition, it must be wealthier; it must have more colours, so the culture that this soul creates; it must be richer, more diverse, it must shine with the joys of life.

The breadth of thought, the thirst for freedom, happiness, beauty, the need for living creativity must characterize and really characterize what the Ukrainian people have given and are giving to the world. I am convinced that the culture of the Ukrainian people is essentially higher than the Great Russian…

Gentle sky, bright sun, fragrant steppe, full of sounds, warm noisy sea, in some Kherson or Katerynoslav and suddenly the Volga region with endless age-old harsh forests, heavy twilight, winter mist and somewhere deep in the depths of “boom! … boom!».

This is a schismatic schism; these are hermits, ascetics who have renounced the joys of the world seeking the truth in the dry papers of an old printed book, burn themselves at the stake, bury themselves in the ground, fleeing from the antichrist… Two completely different worlds! Can they have the same psyche, the same language, the same world view, the same way of life? Of course not! And the ethnographer, and the philologist, and the economist, and the politician, and the religious researcher will prove it to us with full clarity… ».

Even after a thousand years, the two neighbouring ethnic groups did not come together mentally, despite the forced nature of this kinship. Therefore, it is not surprising that in 1917, when the Russian Empire began to collapse, Ukrainians demanded freedom and tried to live an independent life. The facts of history show that it was Russia, both white and red, that opposed the independent will of our people.

Having organized three wars against Ukraine’s independence, the Bolsheviks constantly instructed their fifth column in Ukraine, as in 2014 and 2022, on methods of seizing power. For example, on November 18, 1917, on a straight line, Stalin, in particular, dictated to them a directive to convene a congress of councils to seize power in Ukraine.

These directives are very similar to those given to separatists in Crimea, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Odesa, in February 2014 by Russian presidential adviser Serhii Glazyev, who called on regional council sessions for creating “people’s republics” and turning to Moscow for help. And don’t we see the same thing today on the south of Ukraine occupied by Russia?

Back in April 1918 when the Ukrainian Bolsheviks wanted recognition of the so-called socialist state formed for them by Lenin, Stalin’s People’s Commissar for Nationalities issued a stern statement from Moscow, saying, “Enough of playing government and republic.”

The same thing happened with the occupation of Crimea—first, the independence of the peninsula was proclaimed on the bayonets of Russian “green men.” Then, it became part of the Russian Federation.

In the same scenario, it is possible to join ORDLO. And all this could be predicted since August 27, 1991, when representatives of Moscow Sobchak and Rutskoy flew to Kyiv and demanded from the leadership of the newly proclaimed independent Ukrainian state not to leave the USSR because otherwise they would take Crimea and Donbas.

Yes, it was necessary to analyze promptly and take appropriate measures to ideologically support state independence ahead of time, including through the spread of this information in the world; and we have started writing joint textbooks.

“Did you get crazy there?..”

Under such circumstances, how could the West see us as separate and solid partners when we continued to please those who threatened to take away our constitutional territories?

In recent years, we have appealed to the world to recognize the Holodomor of 1932-1933 committed by Moscow as genocide of the Ukrainian people, which has taken away, as the Ukrainian diaspora has consistently emphasized since the middle of the last century, 7 to 10 million of our compatriots.

But how can the United States react to this appeal, for example, when they see incomprehensible initiatives by Ukrainian scientific institutions in North America – to limit the number of losses to 3.5 million Ukrainians, as some foreign researchers believe (they never, by the way, never worked with primary documents of Ukrainian archives).

It’s hard to believe, but it’s really the leaders of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, the Association of Ukrainian Scientific Institutions of North America, the Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences in the United States, and the Shevchenko Scientific Society in New York signed a letter to the chairman of the organizing committee for the opening of the Holodomor Memorial in Washington asking not to talk at the ceremony about the loss of 7 to 10 million…

How can this be perceived by the American congressmen, who must vote on the relevant document? Especially if it is well known that individual signatories of the mentioned letter were marked by the Ukrainian state with high awards, and the authors of its draft prepared in Kyiv and brought overseas were honored by our diaspora with nominal prizes.

Consequently, legislators on Capitol Hill are left wondering if there is a nation anywhere else in the world that asks for a halving of its losses during its genocide.

Such doubts are exacerbated by the absurdity of some of our intelligentsia, supporting those who denied the crime of genocide in Soviet times and now organized on the site “Historical Truth” protests against the findings of the investigation, conducted on behalf of the Prosecutor General’s Office since the 2009 year. And they claimed that the victims in the USSR and the Ukrainian ethnic settlements of the North Caucasus were 10 million 500 thousand people. That is the number that our diaspora insisted on decades before.

How will the foreign politicians of the countries we ask to recognize the Holodomor genocide evaluate, surprisingly, the voluntary reduction of the losses of Ukrainians in 1932-1933 after the publication of the pre-trial investigation into the Holodomor genocide?

Especially, when it is known that none of these signatories worked with the original materials of the national archives, but only relied on the authority of those who asked to sign the petition. By the way, this kind of “victory” stopped only after the loud indignation of the famous lawyer from the United States, Bohdan Futey: “Did you get crazy there? ..”

However, it is against this background that space is opening up for Russian propaganda, which is making great efforts to cover up the Kremlin’s planned crime against the Ukrainian peasantry in 1932-1933.

And if Moscow did not recognize this Holodomor in Ukraine at all before, then due to open documents they are now trying to convince the world community that all the peoples of the Soviet Union are starving.

In particular, the authors of the collection “Famine in the USSR” say: “No document confirming the concept of “holodomor-genocide” in Ukraine or at least a hint in the documents of ethnic motives, including in Ukraine.”

But why, then, by the decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR of December 14, 1932 “On grain procurements in Ukraine, the North Caucasus and the Western Region”, the Belarusian villages of the Smolensk region were not punished for not fulfilling an unrealistic plan with the termination of their national development and eviction to the eastern regions of the USSR, and the 14,000-strong Ukrainian village of Poltava in the Kuban, where the First All-Russian Ukrainian Pedagogical College existed, was deported to Kazakhstan with the liquidation of its name. The same fate awaited the 20,000-strong Ukrainian Uman village, renamed Leningradska.

Apparently, we need to remind more often about the resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) and the SNC of the USSR on December 15, 1932, “On Ukrainization in PECs, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, Central and other regions of the USSR,” which officially ends the possibility of spiritual development of Ukrainians outside the USSR.

It is also not published in Russia today – it allegedly did not exist. However, according to the testimony of the head of the Secret Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) Poskriobyshev, this document should be sought in the minutes of the Politbiuro of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) № 126, paragraph 50/22.

Having confiscated everything edible from the Ukrainian population, the Moscow authorities did not allow them to obtain food in other regions of the USSR. The resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Soviet People’s Commissar of the USSR on January 22, 1933, on the ban on bread, went only to the peasants of Ukraine and Kuban, where according to the 1926 census. It may seem strange, but for some reason, modern Russian historians do not pay attention to this document.

The world received information about Crimea from Russian narratives

Another issue that we have neglected is the problem of Crimea. As you know, all the documents clearly state that the peninsula was handed over to us at the request of Russia itself.

In the Kyiv and Moscow archives, there is an original and a copy of the appeal of the Presidium of the Verkhovna Rada of the RSFSR to the Presidium of the Verkhovna Rada of the USSR on February 7, 1954, with a request to take the Crimean region. One week later, on February 13, 1954, it was considered positively by the Presidium of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR, as reported by Moscow.

And only after that the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR passed a decree on the transferring the Crimean region to the Ukrainian SSR, which then included Sevastopol as an administrative and economic center of republican subordination.

But since the Ukrainian leadership was not interested in this issue, especially for the spread of objective information abroad, the world received it from Russian narratives. The authorities of our country were not interested in volunteer work, so to speak.

For example, the book “Ukrainian Crimea” prepared on the proposal of the Ukrainian lawyer from Toronto, Volodymyr-Yuriy Danyliv, was translated into English on the initiative and with the assistance of the late Liubomyr Husar. However, our officials did not find an opportunity to transfer it free of charge to different countries of the world so that they could know the truth from us and not from Russian propagandists.

For some reason, our state still believes that civil society should do this. Why, then, are we surprised that the West is wary of us, in many cases carefully considering its steps before making any important progress towards Ukraine. They are carefully analyzing how we respond to their efforts in our support.

Perhaps that is why the West began to provide us with adequate military assistance only when it became convinced that with the beginning of Russian aggression in February 2022, the Ukrainian people and its army were ready to fight for independence, as they had already testified in 2004 and 2014.

They believed the Ukrainians because they unanimously sided with the enemy, as in the days of Khmelnytsky, when “everything that lives rose to the Cossacks”…

Volodymyr SERHIYCHUK, Head of the Department of World Ukrainian History of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor

Source: Ukraina moloda