Ukraine or Little Russia?

Few factors are as crucial to the formation of modern national identities as the creation and dissemination of common historical myths that explain the origins of a given ethnic or national group and provide it with a sense of common belonging.¹ The late eighteenth and early nine­teenth centuries were a period of mass production of national myths, given the high demand for them on the burgeoning European market of ideas.

James Macpherson (1736-96), a Scottish poet little known in his own right, produced the best-known literary mystification of the era. In the 1760s he published what he claimed to be English translations of poems by a third-century bard named Ossian. These were in fact old Irish ballads of Scottish origin that Macpherson turned into 'old Scot­tish epics,' contributing in the process to the formation of modern Scot­tish identity. Although the translations were shown to be forgeries soon after Macpherson's death, his poems appealed to the reading public far beyond Scotland and contributed to the rise of literary romanticism and national movements all over Europe.⁴ Soon after the appearance of the first Russian translation of 'Ossian,' lovers of litera­ture in the Russian Empire discovered, to their surprise and delight, that they had their own Ossian.

The manuscript, entitled 'History of the Rus',' began to circulate in the Novhorod-Siverskyi region in the mid-1820s. It traced the history of the local Cossacks, known as the Rus', to the era of the Kyivan princes, and from them, via the history of Slavic settlement in Eastern Europe, all the way back to biblical times. As an exercise in mystifica­tion, it was a much less ambitious undertaking then either Ossian or the Igor Tale. The introduction to the 'History of the Rus'' claimed that the manuscript had been produced by generations of monks working at the Orthodox monastery in Mahiliou and completed in 1769 - a mere fifty-six years before we encounter the first clear evidence of the existence of the work. The anonymous author covered his tracks by claiming that the work had passed through the hands of two highly respected and, by now, safely dead individuals, the Orthodox arch­bishop of Mahiliou, Heorhii Konysky (1717-95), and the best-known Ukrainian delegate to Catherine II's Constitutional Assembly of 1767-8, Hryhorii Poletyka (1723/ 25-84).

shaped the views of scores of professional and amateur historians, as well as Russian and Ukrainian authors, including Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, and Taras Shevchenko, about the Ukrainian past. Romantic authors of the era were excited by the discovery of an 'ancient' manuscript that went beyond the dry facts presented in the Rus' chronicles. It narrated the heroic deeds of the Cossacks in terms that fired the imagination of the literary public. While the fascination of Russian literary figures with the 'History of the Rus^,' turned out to be short-lived, it had a spectacular career in Ukrainian historiography and literature, shaping generations of Ukrainian patriots both directly and through the medium of Taras Shevchenko's works.⁷

Like all influential mystifications, the 'History of the Rus^,' has inspired a voluminous literature. The most contested question dis­cussed by students of the work has been the identity of its author. The first possible author considered (and rejected) was Archbishop Konysky. A more serious candidate emerged in the person of Hryhorii Poletyka, who has been regarded as either the author or a co-author (together with his son, Vasyl Poletyka [1765—1845]). Another high- profile candidate was Catherine II's chancellor and a native of the Het- manate, Prince Oleksander Bezborodko (1747-99). Other candidates have been mentioned in the literature, but only the Poletykas and Bezborodko have had a steady following among historians. Opinions on the time of the work's appearance often depend on a given scholar's favoured candidate for authorship. Those supporting the authorship of Poletyka or Bezborodko stick to the eighteenth century.

The name of the author and the time and place of the creation of the 'History of the Rus^,' are not the only questions debated by scholars. The political and cultural identity of the unknown author, whose work contributed immensely to the process of Ukrainian nation building, remains as obscure today as it was a century and a half ago. The ability of every new generation of students to find in the text ideas consonant with its own seems to explain both the lasting success of the work and the lack of a comprehensive study on the identity of its author. The first generation of Ukrainian national awakeners influenced by the 'His­tory' included such luminaries of the national movement as Mykola Kostomarov and Panteleimon Kulish, who had a love-hate relationship with the work. On the one hand, they were inspired by the heroic and colourful images of the Ukrainian past presented by the unknown author; on the other, they regarded the 'History' as the product of sep­aratist thinking and nobiliary conservatism, which their populism led them to reject. Mykhailo Drahomanov, by far the most influential Ukrainian political thinker of the nineteenth century, took it upon him­self to defend the unknown author against populist attacks. He saw in the author an early promoter of all that the Ukrainian movement was striving for in the last decades of the nineteenth century: Ukrainian autonomy, constitutionalism, and the federal restructuring of the Rus­sian Empire.

Not surprisingly, the revival of the Ukrainian national movement in the USSR in the late 1980s and the emergence of independent Ukraine in 1991 cast the political and cultural views of the author of the 'His­tory of the Rus^,' in a new light. As the advance of Russification in the Soviet Union threatened the very existence of the Ukrainian nation, some students of the 'History' came to see its author as a defender of Ukrainian identity. 'The individual who wrote it,' asserted the Ukrai­nian author and historian Valerii Shevchuk in 1991, 'truly burned with great love for his unfortunate and enslaved land. Thus, at a time when everything Ukrainian was being barbarously destroyed, he managed the feat of casting this passionate pamphlet - a historical remembrance - before the eyes of his foolish and indifferent countrymen, who were scrambling, as Taras Shevchenko wrote, for "tin buttons," who "knew all the ins and outs"; who were grasping for estates and jumping out of their skin to obtain Russian noble rank by any and all means; who had even forgotten their mother tongue.'¹⁰ It would appear that quite a few studies dealing with the 'History of the Rus'' published in Ukraine in the 1990s and early 2000s adopted Shevchuk's patriotic interpretation of the work and the goals that its author set himself.¹¹

Clearly, the 'History of the Rus'' played a major role in the formation of Ukrainian national identity, but the questions that remain unan­swered are whether and to what degree that role corresponded to the aspirations of the unknown author of the 'History' and what his politi­cal and ethnocultural identity actually was.

The passage of the 'History of the Rus'' that seems most important to our discussion appears in the introduction to the work. It reads as fol­lows: '[I]t must be said with regret that certain absurdities and calum­nies have unfortunately been introduced into Little Russian chronicles themselves by their creators, native-born Rus'ians, who have carelessly followed the shameless and malicious Polish and Lithuanian fabulists. Thus, for example, in one textbook vignette, some new land by the Dnieper, here called Ukraine, is brought onto the stage from Ancient Rus' or present-day Little Russia, and in it Polish kings establish new settlements and organize Ukrainian Cossacks; and until then the land was allegedly empty and uninhabited, and there were no Cossacks in Rus'. But it is apparent that the gentleman writer of such a timid little story has never been anywhere except his school, and in the land that he calls Ukraine he has not seen Rus' towns, the oldest ones - or at least much older than his Polish kings, namely: Cherkassy, Krylov, Mishurin, and old Kodak on the Dnieper River, Chigirin on the Tiasmin, Uman on the Ros, Ladyzhin and Chagarlyk on the Bug, Mogilev, Rashkov, and Dubossary on the Dniester, Kamennyi Zaton and Belozersk at the head of the [Dnieper] Estuary. Of these towns, some have been provincial and regional Rus' towns for many centuries. But for him all this is a desert, and he consigns to nothingness and oblivion the Rus' princes who sailed their great flotillas onto the Black Sea from the Dnieper River, that is, from those very lands, and made war on Greece, Sinope, Trabzon, and Constantinople itself with armies from those regions, just as someone hands back Little Russia itself from Polish possession with­out resistance and voluntarily, and the thirty-four bloody battles that it required, with Rus' armies opposing the Poles and their kings and the levy en masse, are of insufficient merit that this nation and its chieftains be rendered due justice for their exploits and heroism.'¹³

What should we make of this statement? Andrei Storozhenko, who was the first to focus attention on this particular passage of the 'His­tory' in 1918, treats it as a manifestation of the anonymous author's discontent with the efforts of the Polish authors Jan Potocki and Tadeusz Czacki to treat the Ukrainians as a people separate from the Russians - theories that in Storozhenko's opinion laid the historical foundations for the modern Ukrainian movement.¹⁴ While such a pos­sibility cannot be ruled out, in the above extract the author of the 'His­tory of the Rus'' does not argue either against Potocki's theory linking Ukrainian origins with those of the Polianians, Derevlianians, Tivertsi- ans, and Siverianians or against Czacki's theory that the Ukrainians were descended from a tribe called 'Ukr.' Instead, he rejects the notion that credits Polish kings with the establishment of Cossackdom and the settlement of the Dnipro region even as it neglects the Rus' origins of the Cossacks, ignores their long and determined struggle for union with Russia, and undermines the claim of the Rus' nation to its glori­ous history. It should also be noted that the anonymous author 's pro­test was provoked not by Polish (and Lithuanian) writings per se but by the adoption of the views set forth in those writings by the authors of 'Little Russian chronicles.' Identifying the writer whose work pro­voked this polemical outburst on the part of the author of the 'History of the Rus'' is an important step towards understanding the nature of the debate and, among other things, can help establish the time frame within which the famous 'History' was written. I shall therefore begin my discussion with an attempt to identify the author and title of the work that provoked the polemic - an approach overlooked or deemed impossible of realization by all students of the 'History' known to me.

The author of the 'History of the Rus'' left some useful clues on where to seek the object of his attack. The mysterious author must have been a professor or teacher in some kind of school, and his allegedly pro-Polish views were apparently set forth in a textbook or other peda­gogical work. The teacher-historian Tadeusz Czacki (1765-1813), men­tioned by Storozhenko, might well be considered a candidate for the role. In 1804-5 he was the founder (and subsequently a professor) of the Volhynian gymnasium, which later became the Kremianets Lyceum, a springboard of the Polish national revival in the early nine­teenth century. He was also a historian and a rather prolific author. But Czacki, a prominent Polish educator, is not known for having written textbooks dealing with 'Little Russian' history. His views on Ukrainian origins were most fully expressed in his article 'On the Name of Ukraine and the Origin of the Cossacks,' first published in a Warsaw periodical in the autumn of 1801, before the founding of the Volhynian gymnasium. Besides, the 'History of the Rus^,' is silent about the tribe of 'Ukr,' the hallmark of Czacki's theory. More importantly, Czacki can by no means be considered a 'native Rus'ian,' as was the mysterious author of the textbook, according to the 'History.'¹⁵ Tadeusz Czacki should therefore be eliminated as a possible addressee of the polemical statement quoted above.

In searching for the author of the textbook among professors/teach- ers of East Slavic origin, it makes sense to begin with schools in north­eastern Ukraine, where most scholars believe the 'History of the Rus^,' to have been written. The town of Novohorod-Siverskyi, on which the author of the 'History' focuses attention, had its own school from 1789, but none of the teachers at the secular school or (from 1805) the gymna­sium is known for having published anything on the history of Ukraine.¹⁶ Still, we know of a published historian who was then employed in neighbouring Chernihiv, which had emerged in the late eighteenth century as not only the administrative but also the intellec­tual centre of the region. One of the leading historians there was Mikhail Markov (1760-1819), a Great Russian by origin who served as a prose­cutor in Novhorod-Siverskyi. In 1799 Markov moved to Chernihiv, where he was appointed director of schools in the Little Russian guber­nia, and from 1805 he served as director of the Chernihiv gymnasium. He published a number of works on the history of Chernihiv and vicin­ity, and in 1816-17 he contributed to the periodical Ukrainskii vestnik (Ukrainian Herald), discussing the origins of Rus' history.¹⁷ The prob­lem with Markov's possible authorship of the textbook that so upset the author of the 'History of the Rus'' is that although he contributed to publications dealing with education, he never wrote anything approaching a history textbook, and his eight-page essay ambitiously titled 'An Introduction to Little Russian History' (1817) advanced no further than the period of Kyivan Rus'. On top of that, while Markov contributed to Ukrainskii vestnik (so titled because it appeared in Kharkiv, the capital of the Sloboda Ukraine gubernia), he avoided Ukrainian terminology in his writings and can hardly be suspected of Polonophilism or Ukrainophilism in the senses implied by Storozhenko.

The school and gymnasium next closest to Novhorod-Siverskyi with a published historian on its staff was in Kyiv. The historian in question was Maksym Berlynsky (1764-1848), who lived long enough to chair the organizing committee for the establishment of Kyiv University. Having been born in the vicinity of Putyvl into the family of an Ortho­dox priest, Berlynsky could certainly be considered a 'native Rus'ian,' a term that could be applied by the anonymous author of the 'History of the Rus'' to Great Russians and Ukrainians alike. He was appointed a teacher at the recently opened secular school (later gymnasium) in Kyiv in 1788, after graduating from the Kyiv Mohyla Academy and training for two years at the teachers' college in St Petersburg. Berlynsky taught at the Kyiv gymnasium until his retirement in 1834, thereby meeting another qualification - that of a lifelong teacher who had never been anywhere except his school, as specified by the author of the 'History.' But probably the most important of his formal qualifications is that his many works on 'native' history included a textbook, Kratkaia rossiiskaia istoriia dlia Upotrebleniia iunoshestvu (Short History of Russia for the Use of Young People, 1800).¹⁸

Even more interesting in this connection is that the textbook included an essay on Ukrainian history entitled 'Primechanie o Malorossii' (Note on Little Russia). It was inserted into a basically Great Russian histo­rical narrative, in the section dealing with the rule of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, and covered the history of Ukraine from the Mongol invasion to the Truce of Andrusovo (1667). Subsequent Ukrainian his­tory was treated within the context of imperial Russia.¹⁹ Thus Berlyn- sky perfectly matches the image of the mysterious opponent invoked by the author of the 'History of the Rus'' in the introduction to that work. But does Berlynsky's textbook indeed use 'Ukrainian' terminol­ogy and include pro-Polish passages, as suggested by the anonymous author? The very first sentence of Berlynsky's 'Note on Little Russia' gives a positive answer to this question, since it implies that the original name of that land was indeed Ukraine. It reads: 'Ukraine received its name of Little Russia after its union with Russia.' According to Berlyn- sky, King Sigismund I of Poland, 'seeing that the Ukrainians engaged in military pursuits, who were known as Cossacks, were accomplishing very brave and valiant exploits... gave them permission to occupy places above and below the town of Kiev and, in 1506, gave them their first leader with the title of hetman, a certain Liaskoronsky [Lanckoron- ski], to whom he granted the towns of Chigirin and Cherkassy as pos­sessions.' King Stefan Batory, for his part, 'confirmed the Ukrainians' previous privileges in 1576 and gave them new ones; hence the empty lands between the Dnieper, Bar, and Kiev were soon settled by them.'²⁰ Thus the author of the 'Note on Little Russia' was indeed 'guilty as charged' by the author of 'History of the Rus^,' when it comes to the ori­gins of the name Ukraine, the Polish kings' organization of the Cossack Host, and the settlement of the steppe borderlands.

What might this finding mean for our discussion? First, it appears that Berlynsky was indeed the target of the author of the 'History of the Rus'.' It also indicates that the 'History' could not have been writ­ten prior to 1800, the year in which Berlynsky's textbook was pub­lished. Nor could it have been written later than the first decade of the nineteenth century; otherwise the critique of the textbook would have lost its significance to the anonymous author and appeal to the reader. This finding is supported by Oleksander Ohloblyn's research, which places the creation of the original manuscript of the 'History of the Rus'' between 1802 and 1805, and George Y. Shevelov's hypothesis that final changes to the text may have been made in 1808-9.²¹ It gives us much better grounds than any previously available to place the monu­ment into a particular time frame and political context. Last but not least, an analysis of Berlynsky's textbook and his other writings can offer a better understanding of the historical and ideological message of the 'History' and the nature of the 'Ukraine vs. Little Russia' debate initiated by its anonymous author.

A reading of Berlynsky's Short History of Russia indicates that he hardly deserved the harsh treatment meted out to him by the author of the 'History.' Berlynsky was by no means systematic in his use of the terms 'Ukraine' and 'Ukrainians,' which he considered interchangeable with 'Little Russia' and 'Little Russians.' The textbook also shows that he was far from being a Polonophile: for example, he noted with regret that the Time of Troubles did not allow Little Russia to unite with Rus­sia ('our fatherland') in the early seventeenth century. Berlynsky con­demned the Poles for their persecution of Ukrainians on the eve of the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648), allegedly against the wishes of King WLadysLaw IV. He even wrote in that regard: 'That was the main reason for the civil war! What the crown affirmed, the Polish nation rejected. And that discord united all the Little Russians against the republic.'²² Although Berlynsky did not produce colourful descriptions of the Cos­sack wars with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth prior to the Khmelnytsky Uprising, as did the author of the 'History of the Rus',' he noted that Khmelnytsky 'was not the first to take up arms against the Poles, for at various times in the course of fifty years his predecessors had done so, but always in vain.'²³ In general, Berlynsky produced a brief but quite accurate description of the period, especially as com­pared with the one offered by the author of the 'History of the Rus'.' The latter clearly resorted to simplifying and vilifying the arguments of his opponent. But were his suspicions regarding Berlynsky's Polish leanings completely groundless?

Berlynsky did not identify his sources, leaving us no direct evidence of possible influences on his work. He certainly could not have taken his lead from the above-mentioned article by Tadeusz Czacki on the origins of Ukraine and the Cossacks, for it was published a year later than his own textbook. But this does not mean that he lacked access to other works by Polish authors or had no direct contact with Polish his­torians. We have no indication that Berlynsky was close to Polish intel­lectuals or alleged 'Polonophiles' in the Russian Empire around 1800, but there is plenty of such evidence pertaining to the later period. The secular school in Kyiv where Berlynsky taught, which later became a gymnasium, belonged to the Vilnius educational district; from 1803 it was headed by the close confidant of Emperor Alexander I and ardent Polish patriot Adam Czartoryski. Not surprisingly, it was to him that Berlynsky sent the manuscript of his new work, entitled 'A History of Little Russia' (1803), requesting permission and financial assistance to publish the book. Czartoryski was quite supportive of Berlynsky's ini­tiative. In a memorandum on the issue he pointed out that there was no published history of Little Russia, he endorsed the publication of Berlynsky's manuscript, and he noted that it would have 'a great bear­ing on general Russian history as well.' Also supportive of the project was Czartoryski's superior at the time, the minister of education, Petro Zavadovsky, to whom the memorandum was addressed. A native of the Hetmanate and a former lover of Catherine II, Zavadovsky began his education at a Jesuit seminary in Orsha and was known for his good relations with Tadeusz Czacki and general sympathy towards the Poles. Acting on Czartoryski's endorsement, he allocated 500 rubles for Berlynsky's 'History,' but that was insufficient to cover the costs of publication, and it never appeared in print.²⁴

Excerpts from the book were eventually published by another reputed Ukrainian 'Polonophile,' Vasyl Anastasevych, who was a sec­retary to Czartoryski during his years as head of the Vilnius educa­tional district (1803-17) and a close acquaintance of Czacki and the Polish ethnographer Zorian Dolyga Chodakowski (Adam Czarnocki). In 1811, Anastasevych published the first excerpt in his journal Ulei (Beehive), where it appeared several issues after the Russian transla­tion of Tadeusz Czacki's famous article on the origins of Ukraine and Cossackdom. It seems that Anastasevych then took possession of the manuscript, for he published the last known excerpt of the book as late as 1844.²⁵ Berlynsky's close contacts with 'Polonophiles' among the Ukrainian bureaucrats and intellectuals may well have been known to broader circles in the former Hetmanate. An episode that may have revealed such contacts was the controversy of 1805 over the language of instruction in the Kyiv gymnasium, whose director insisted on Rus­sian, while Minister Zavadovsky, who, given his background and edu­cation, considered Russian and Polish mutually intelligible, favoured the latter.²⁶ We do not know whether Berlynsky took a position on the issue, but if he did so, he may well have supported Zavadovsky, who (as noted above) sought to promote the publication of his history. There were certainly other occasions for former Cossack officeholders of northeastern Ukraine to learn of Berlynsky's contacts and possible sympathies, which must have been at odds with the traditional anti­Polish sentiments of the region's elites. The author of the 'History of the Rus^,' may well have read back into Berlynsky's textbook what he knew about the author otherwise.

The irony of the situation is that Ukrainian terminology may have entered Berlynsky's textbook and his 'History of the City of Kyiv,' a work written in the late eighteenth century, not from Polish but from Ukrainian writings. One of the last eighteenth-century Cossack chroni­clers, Petro Symonovsky, the author of 'Kratkoe opisanie o kazatskom malorossiiskom narode' (Brief Description of the Cossack Little Russian Nation), was Berlynsky's supervisor and mentor during his first years at the Kyiv school.²⁷ The major Cossack chronicles of the early eigh­teenth century, including that of Hryhorii Hrabianka - an important source for Cossack historiography of the later period - were full of ref­erences to 'Ukraine,' used interchangeably with 'Little Russia,' as in Berlynsky's textbook.²⁸ At the turn of the nineteenth century, Berlynsky was by no means the only Ukrainian author prepared to make a con­nection between Stefan Batory, the Cossacks, and the name of Ukraine. Similar views were expressed by his contemporary Yakiv Markovych, who published his Notes on Little Russia (1798), a historical, geographi­cal, and ethnographic description of his homeland. But Markovych never wrote anything remotely resembling a textbook or taught in any 'school' in Russia or Ukraine, which excludes him as a possible object of attack by the author of the 'History of the Rus'.'²⁹

Even the unknown author of the 'History of the Rus',' who objected to Ukrainian terminology as a sign of Polish intrigue, was unable to keep the term 'Ukraine' out of his own work. It penetrated the narra­tive despite the author's intentions, proclaimed in the programmatic statement included in his introduction. He was overcome by his sources - apocryphal eighteenth-century letters, foreign histories, and Russian official documents of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, which were full of Ukrainian terminology. For example, in an apocryphal letter of May 1648 from Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the term 'Little Russian Ukraine' appears four times in a variety of combina­tions, and there is a reference to 'all Ukraine.'³⁰ The anonymous author also writes of Ukraine when referring to Voltaire's comment on the Ukrainian expedition of Charles XII of Sweden in 1708-9.³¹ There are at least two references in the text of the 'History' to the 'Ukrainian line,' the group of Russian forts built by the imperial government to protect Ukrainian and Russian territories from Tatar incursions.³² Under the influence of his sources, the anonymous author often uses 'Ukraine' with reference to the Right Bank of the Dnipro - the territory that he defines as Rus', not Ukraine, in his introduction.³³ In the main text of his work, the anonymous author also writes about 'Ukrainian peoples' and 'Christians of Ukrainian faith (veroispovedaniia).'³ⁱ Whatever his ideological postulates, the author of the 'History of the Rus'' was unable to divest himself entirely of the tradition established by earlier Ukrainian authors, for whom the term 'Ukraine' had no negative con­notations and entailed no suggestion of Polish intrigue.

The hostility shown by the author of the 'History of the Rus'' to the term 'Ukraine' marked a clear break with Ukrainian historiographic tradition. Since it occurred in a work that generations of scholars have considered the pinnacle of early modern Cossack historiography, it deserves further discussion. What made such a break possible, and what motives lay behind it? With regard to the first part of the ques­tion, one should take account of the new meaning acquired by the term 'Ukraine' in official discourse and public consciousness of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In that period, the term began to be associated first and foremost with lands outside the Cossack Hetmanate. Thus the 'Ukrainian line' of fortifications was built in the 1730s to the east and south of the Hetmanate. The Sloboda Ukraine gubernia was established in 1765, with its administrative cen­tre in Kharkiv. It kept that name until 1780 and was then restored with different boundaries in 1796; it was renamed the Kharkiv gubernia in 1835. By contrast, the restoration of the Hetmanate's territorial integ­rity after its liquidation by Catherine II was associated with the brief existence of the Little Russian gubernia, administered from Chernihiv, between 1796 and 1802.³⁵ The close association of 'Little Russia' with the lands of the former Hetmanate and of 'Ukraine' with the territo­ries of Sloboda Ukraine is well attested in a private letter from a prom­inent Ukrainian intellectual of the period, Hryhorii Skovoroda. In September 1790, he wrote of 'my mother, Little Russia,' and 'my aunt, Ukraine,'³⁶ apparently meaning that while he had been born and raised in the Hetmanate, most of his adult life had been spent in neighbouring Sloboda Ukraine. Thus, by the time the 'History of the Rus^,' was written, local elites had largely ceased to associate the name 'Ukraine' with the territory of the Hetmanate, and some authors may well have regarded it as a foreign invention.

Let us now turn to the author's motives for breaking with historio­graphic tradition. The most obvious of them appears to be his anti­Polish attitude, which he does not attempt to conceal. In Polish histori­ography the term 'Ukraine' preserved its original meaning as first and foremost the land of the Cossacks, giving the author a good opportu­nity to strike at the Poles. His attack seems to have been well timed. If the author was indeed responding to Berlynsky's textbook, as argued above, then the Zeitgeist of his 'History' was that of the first decade of the nineteenth century, which was highly conducive to a renewed con­frontation with the Poles. The feverish activity of Adam Czartoryski, who was not only presiding over the increasing cultural PoloniZation of the Vilnius educational district but also, as de facto foreign minister of Russia, preparing to restore the Kingdom of Poland under the auspices of the Russian tsar, provoked a strong negative response from Russian society. Distrust of Poles grew in the second half of the decade, when Polish exiles in the West sided with Napoleon, and the French emperor, perceived by that time as Russia's worst enemy, carved a Polish polity known as the Duchy of Warsaw out of the Prussian part of the former Commonwealth. In 1806-7 the Poles were submitting proposals to Napoleon to make Podilia, Volhynia, and Right-Bank Ukraine part of a future Polish state.³⁷ The elites of the former Hetmanate could by no means have endorsed the inclusion of the Right Bank (lands that the author of the 'History of the Rus'' claimed as ancient Rus' territories) into a future Polish polity under Alexander I or Napoleon. Rising anti­Polish sentiment in the Russian Empire gave the Cossack elites of the former Hetmanate a good opportunity not only to settle historical scores with their traditional enemy but also to take credit for their age- old struggle with Poland.³⁸ At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Cossack elites needed recognition of their former services to the all­Russian cause more than ever before, as the imperial authorities contin­ued to question the nobiliary credentials of most of the lower-ranking Cossack officers.³⁹ Not surprisingly, in the above-cited extract from the 'History,' its author asked rhetorically whether the Cossack wars with the Poles were 'of insufficient merit that this nation and its chieftains be rendered due justice for their exploits and heroism.'⁴⁰

Maksym Berlynsky, a priest's son and a schoolteacher, is unlikely to have been ready or willing to perform that function for the Cossack officer elites of the former Hetmanate. His general assessment of the Ukrainian past was damning of those who extolled the heroic deeds of the Cossack nation. 'In a word,' he wrote in his article 'On the City of Kyiv,' 'this people groaned beneath the Polish yoke, made war under Lithuanian banners, occupied itself with the Union under Polish rule and contended for privilege under Russian rule, producing nothing for us except descendants.'⁴¹ As Volodymyr Kravchenko has recently noted, Berlynsky was also quite negative in his assessment of the role of Cossackdom, especially the Cossack officer elite - an attitude that caused him difficulty when an excerpt from his 'History of Little Rus­sia' was considered for publication in 1844. On the recommendation of the prominent imperial Russian historian Nikolai Ustrialov, a negative characterization of the Cossacks was removed from the journal publica- tion.⁴² It is entirely possible that the anti-Cossack attitudes of Berlynsky, whose writings clearly favoured Ukrainian city dwellers, prevented the publication of his 'History' year after year. Ironically, Berlynsky lived long enough to see the publication of the 'History of the Rus',' which contained an attack on his views and was potentially dangerous to the imperial regime, but not long enough to witness the appearance of his own works, such as the 'History of Little Russia' and the 'History of the City of Kyiv,' which were perfectly loyal to the authorities.

It would appear that Andrei Storozhenko was wrong when he pre­sented (first in 1918 and then in 1924) the unknown opponent of the author of the 'History of the Rus'' in the 'Ukraine vs. Little Russia' debate as a promoter of Polish-led attempts to establish the Ukraini­ans' distinct origins and separate them from their Rus' roots.⁴³ In the early nineteenth century, the Ukrainian terminology against which the author of the 'History' protested was indeed associated with the Polish vision of Ukraine as separate from Russia, and from the 1840s on it served to promote the Ukrainian national idea in the Russian Empire. But it would be wrong to assume that the author of the 'History' was combating the Ukrainian or proto-Ukrainian trend represented by Berlynsky's textbook. While the Ukrainian terminology used by Ber- lynsky implicitly compromised his project of integrating the Cossack elites into the imperial Russian narrative, Berlynsky himself did not threaten the pan-Russian vision of the anonymous author, nor did the historical paradigm employed in his textbook. If anything, Berlynsky's scheme integrated the Cossack past into the imperial Russian narrative more effectively than did the 'History of the Rus'.' Berlynsky, who traced all that was good in Kyiv and Ukraine back to the reign of Catherine II, achieved his integration without claiming any special his­torical rights for the Cossack elites - an attitude directly opposed to that of the anonymous author of the 'History.'⁴⁴

This explains how the 'History of the Rus'' became a major ideologi­cal threat to the empire. Given its long-term impact on the historical imagination of generations of Ukrainian activists, that threat can hardly be denied. Despite the 'anti-Ukrainian' remarks made in the introduc­tion to the book, the author of the 'History of the Rus'' filled his narra­tive with numerous anti-Muscovite statements, which, like the term 'Ukraine,' he may have taken over from the earlier Cossack chronicles and historical tradition. He also claimed the Kyivan Rus' past, which had been considered part of Russian history alone, and extended the courte duree of previous Cossack historiography, whose narrative was mainly limited to the post-1648 history of Ukraine.⁴⁵ By celebrating the glorious past of the Cossack Host, the 'History' - either directly or through the works of Taras Shevchenko - inspired Ukrainians to espouse a historical and national identity distinct from that of Russia.

What conclusions may be drawn from the origins of the 'Ukraine vs. Little Russia' debate and its role in the formation of national mytholo­gies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? First, it appears that there are grounds to challenge the dominant historio­graphic trend, which treats the 'History of the Rus'' as a manifestation of growing Ukrainian self-awareness. The delimitation of Russian and Ukrainian identity was not among the goals of the anonymous author of the 'History of the Rus'.' In all likelihood, as noted above, his imme­diate goal was to ease the integration of the Cossack elites into the Rus­sian nobility and society at large, as well as to enlist St Petersburg's support in fighting Polish 'intrigues' in Right-Bank Ukraine, by narrat­ing the heroic deeds of his people. His polemic with Berlynsky and his choice of terminology show that the anonymous author wanted to achieve his goal by playing the Rus' card (the title of his work is most eloquent in that regard). He presented his compatriots as more Rus'ian than the Russian themselves, giving former Cossack officeholders a basis to claim equal status with the Great Russian nobility.

If that was indeed the case, how does the 'History of the Rus'' fit into the 'national mythology' and 'national mystification' paradigm? While such mystifications as the Igor Tale helped build up pride in the all­Russian nation, tracing the roots of its literary tradition back to the twelfth-century court of the prince of Novhorod-Siverskyi, what was the function of the 'History of Rus',' a work actually produced in the vicinity of that ancient town? It may be argued that originally the 'His­tory's' main function was the creation of a subordinate myth, a histori­cal narrative intended to help Little Russians partake in the larger historical myth of the all-Russian nation. That function, however, changed with the passage of time. As Anthony D. Smith has noted, 'myths, memories, symbols and values,' if viewed as constituent parts of cultures and identities, 'can often be adapted to new circumstances by being accorded new meanings and new functions.'⁴⁶ This is what seems to have happened to the collection of heroic stories and images created by the author of the 'History.' Produced for one purpose, they were successfully adapted to serve another: instead of helping to inte­grate the Cossack past into the all-Russian narrative, they served as a basis for the creation of a new national narrative of Ukrainian history.

The role that the 'History of the Rus'' has played in the formation of Ukrainian historical identity highlights the simple fact that historians have little control over the use of their narratives. As Eric Hobsbawm warned his fellow historians, 'The crops we cultivate in our fields may end up as some version of the opium of the people.'⁴⁷ If this metaphor, supplied by one of the last Mohicans of Marxist historiography in the West, can be applied to national ideology, then the reception of the 'History of the Rus'' is indeed a case in point. Like the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz, which inspired proponents of the nineteenth-century Polish, Lithuanian, and Belarusian national movements, the image of the heroic Cossack past produced by the anonymous author of the 'History of the Rus'' clearly captured the imagination of his readers, whatever their national ideologies.⁴⁸ It inspired both a proponent of all-Russian identity, Nikolai Gogol, and the father of the modern Ukrainian nation, Taras Shevchenko. In the end it was the latter's inter­pretation that prevailed, turning the anonymous author of the 'His­tory,' a self-proclaimed enemy of Ukrainian terminology, into the forefather of Ukrainian national historiography.

4