National Projects
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the peasantry of the western and southwestern gubernias of the Russian Empire became a bone of contention between two national projects.
Alexei Miller has defined the first of these as the project of the 'great Russian nation.' 5 Supported and carried out by the government, it was meant to create one modern Russian nation out of the Great Russians, Little Russians, and Belarusians. This program, which we shall call 'pan-Russian,' was opposed by projects for the creation of individual East Slavic nations - Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. The clearest and best articulated of them was the Ukrainian project, which duly became the main competitor of the pan-Russian idea on Ukrainian ethnic territory. In the course of the nineteenth century, the peasantry had a fairly definite social and religious identity but lacked any feeling of modern national identification, for which ethnic and local loyalties served as partial substitutes. Alternative national identities could be - and were - established on that basis.The educational system became the principal agent of 'nationalization' of the peasant masses that had recently been emancipated from serfdom, while the question of the language in which the peasants were to read and study became the central issue in a confrontation between supporters of the pan-Russian project, the imperial government, and the Ukrainophiles. The Valuev Circular of 1863 and the Ems Ukase of 1876 prohibited Ukrainian-language teaching and the publication of educational, religious, and popular literature in Ukrainian, considerably impeding the realization of the Ukrainian project and creating favourable conditions for its pan-Russian competitor.6 The latter posited the replacement of Church Slavonic as the literary language of educated strata of the Ukrainian peasantry with Russian.
Even if the existing idiom could not be eliminated entirely, Russian language and literature were definitely to constitute the basis of high culture in the new pan-Russian nation, leaving the lower cultural sphere - everyday life, folklore, and so on - to the local (in this case, Ukrainian) language, whose official status was that of a 'dialect' (narechie), and to the literature written in that 'dialect.'7The peasant histories published in the Zaporizhia collection give a good idea of the progress of linguistic Russification in southern Ukraine in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. Four of the seven authors obtained their education in Russian in their native villages before the revolution, and three of them wrote their histories and diaries in Russian, laced (even in the case of the ethnic Russian Alekseev) with a considerable admixture of Ukrain- isms. Even the greatest 'Ukrainophile' of the whole group, Vasyl Rubel, who wrote in Ukrainian, still had the intention of 'translating' (per- evodyty - a Russianism) his text - into Russian, of course.8 The 'History' of Rubel, who came from a family of village 'literates,' offers a good example of the gradual transition from Church Slavonic to Russian as the language of rural education. Vasyl's great-great-grandfather Danylo and his great-grandfather Ivan 'understood letters well according to the Psalter.' His grandfather Kuzma not only 'knew the Psalter straight through but could sign his name in Russian.' According to Vasyl Rubel, in Mala Bilozerka, where there had previously been one school offering instruction only in Church Slavonic, two parochial schools that also used Russian as a teaching language opened in the 1880s. Thus Kuzma's sons could not only read the Psalter but 'also knew Russian.' The peasants evidently welcomed the transition from Church Slavonic to Russian; even if it was not their native language, it was still closer than Church Slavonic.
Judging by the memoirs of one of Vasyl Rubel's relatives, the study of Church Slavonic according to the Psalter left particularly unpleasant impressions, with a large number of incomprehensible words.9 Moreover, the peasants, with no thought of pursuing ecclesiastical careers, had much more reason to study Russian than Church Slavonic. It was Russian that opened doors for them to the wider world, which in the peasants' case was represented by the Russian-speaking state administration and the army. The educational system promoted Russian as the language whereby the peasants were introduced to high culture. This was symbolized by the gift - the Gospels and 'a book by [Nikolai] Gogol'10 - presented to Mikhail Alekseev in May 1907 together with a certificate of completion of a four-year school. Pupils from Ukraine were attracted to Russian culture by reading the works of one of their most famous countrymen, who had contributed greatly to the formation of pan-Russian identity through the medium of the Russian language and literature.But what did the peasants themselves - the objects of attention of the two competing national projects - think of Russo-Ukrainian unity or difference? The coexistence of Ukrainian and Russian settlements in the northern Black Sea region made linguistic and cultural differences between the two ethnic groups particularly apparent in that region of Ukraine. At times, as Rubel recounts in his 'History,' Ukrainian wagoners and Russian traders came to blows.11 Citing his father, Alekseev recounts how Russians resettled from the Kursk gubernia and Ukrainians resettled from the Poltava and Chernihiv gubernias quarrelled and finally proved unable to live together in the same village. As a result, the village of Petropavlivka was divided into the Russian Petrovka and the Ukrainian Pavlivka.12
Ethnic identity became the basis for differentiating 'one's own' from 'foreigners.' Alekseev's use of the terms 'Russians' and 'Ukrainians' - terms of modern national identity - was rooted in concepts characteristic of the revolutionary and postrevolutionary era.
His own records, as well as those of other contemporary authors, attest that the names most often used by peasants of the prerevolutionary era with reference to ethnic Ukrainians and Russians were khokhly (referring to Cossack topknots) and katsapy (a derogatory term). These terms, which hardly excluded negative connotations, were used to denote the two ethnic groups faute de mieux: as Rubel's own 'History' attests, Ukrainians used khokhol, inter alia, as a self-definition.13 The official term maloros (Little Russian) did not, however, gain currency among the peasants. When Alekseev served in the army during the First World War, Moldavians called him a katsap, but then, he himself applied the term to a Russian from Penza.14 That khokhly and katsapy were terms for ethnic groups, not for well-defined modern nations in the present-day sense of the word, is attested by the dominance of local or regional identities in the early decades of the twentieth century, which is established in the peasant histories.