during the russian-ukrainian war, which began in early 2014 and was somewhat misrepresented in Western media as a kind of Ukrainian “civil war,” rather than a Russian invasion, there emerged a number of supposedly new images of Ukrainian warriors.

One showed a group of soldiers decked out in typical modern military fatigues and gathered around a table in rough and ready style. In the centre a seated soldier was writing a letter.

Ilya Repin's Zaporozhian Cossacks Writing a Satirical Letter to the Turk­ish Sultan (1878-91), oil on canvas, 203 cm x 358 cm/80 in x 141 in, hung for well over a century in St Petersburg's prestigious Russian Museum (Plate 13); we met this image above, in chapter 2. Those fighters were the most famous of all Ukrainian Cossacks and lived south of Kyiv, “beyond the rapids” (za porohamy), halfway down the Dnieper River towards its mouth on the Black Sea. The sultan was Mehmed (Mohammed) IV, Turkish ruler of the Ottoman Empire, the greatest foreign power to threaten Christen­dom since the Middle Ages. In 1676 this sovereign had supposedly written the Cossacks and demanded their submission to him in no uncertain terms. His missive started with a long list of his high-flown titles and the names of some of the many countries that he and his predecessors had conquered over the centuries. The Cossacks, who had no intention of submitting to him, were making fun of him and his extravagant claims, replying to him in a very vulgar way and mocking his various titles and claims.

Ukrainians in the 2010s who saw this new photo did not miss the sa­tirical parallel, as they faced a new, secular sultan with similar grandiose dreams at Ukrainians' expense.¹ Ilya Repin, whose canvases are known far better in both Russia and Ukraine than those of the Moscow-born Wassily Kandinsky or Belarus'-born Marc Chagall (so rightly admired by Western art critics), still stands at the centre of Ukrainian and Russian art history, claimed by both countries as their own. Indeed, he was the central figure in the Russian national school of painting, which scorned Western models and the spirit of “academism” that had ruled in Russian art since the time of Catherine the Great.

Of Repin's various major paintings, his Volga Barge Haulers (1870-73, Russian Museum, hereafter rm) launched this new realistic, or “naturalist” trend, his Ivan the Terrible Killing His Own Son (1885, Tretiakov Gallery, hereafter tg) shocked Muscovite society out of its complacent, traditionalist slavophilism, his magnificent Leo Tolstoy Barefoot (just after 1900, tg) was seared into the mind of every Russian subject who loved Russian literature, and, finally, his Zaporozhian Cossacks has been almost universally admired throughout Russia. Tsar Alexander III proudly acquired the last for his new Russian Museum in St Petersburg; Joseph Stalin, attracted to the lavatory and other vulgarities indicated in the painting, hung a copy of it in his dacha outside Moscow and quietly made it known that it was a work of art to be admired by all “progressives.” And who could disagree with Stalin? ²

Consequently, Ilya Repin was declared by Soviet art critics and histo­rians to be a “progressive” and a “realist,” persona grata in the ussr, even though he had refused to return to Russia after the Revolutions of 1917 and quietly defied both Lenin and Stalin from his home just across the border in neighbouring Finland. To this day in the West, he is still little known or regarded, and his paintings may seem foreign and exotic, though not without a certain Romantic attraction, so some Western art historians have finally begun to pay some attention to him.