From the editor

FROM THE EDITOR

“The Ukrainian night is quiet, the sky is transparent, the stars are shining, on...” This is the average minimum knowledge about Ukraine for any secondary school graduate. However, the knowledge of Ukraine even among interested Russians (not counting specialists in Ukrainian studies) does not rise very much above this minimum. Taras Bulba - “I gave birth to you, I will kill you”, “wonderful is the Dnieper in calm weather”, the Cossacks write a letter to the Turkish Sultan, the tsar’s cherevichi, “Khrushchev” gave up the Crimea, rarely does a bird fly to the middle and... the inevitable lard. Lard, it should be noted, smears with some kind of cloudy film not only the brains of ordinary lovers of simple jokes about crests (and there are almost more of them than jokes about Jews) and fans of jokes about Ukrainian Snickers, but it seems that it often clouds the eyes of even those experienced fellow citizens who have read Grigory Skovoroda and can quote pages and pages of Gogol.

Russia’s ineradicable habit of treating all members of the former “family of Soviet peoples” as “our little brothers” is still alive. Moreover, the closer the brother is in body and soul, the more petty and subject to loss of rights he is for some reason seen by the “elder”. Especially if the brother also has a similar face and voice. He can be tortured, subjected to love-family hazing. In such close relations, Russia holds Ukraine and Belarus. Today, it seems, even those Russians for whom the word “Maidan” has become a symbol of hope for a permanent democratic revolution also look at Ukraine through a murky film, in this case - tears of tenderness for a rebellious relative, pride for a younger brother who has grown up and is taking revenge for his elder .

Otechestvennye zapiski made an attempt to throw off the veil of seniority from the eyes of its readers and its own. The time has long come to learn how to build relations with Ukraine the way one should build relations with a neighbor who is big himself, decides his own destiny and is responsible for himself.

Leonid Kuchma, by calling his book “Ukraine is not Russia,” clearly wanted to emphasize that Russia still considers Ukraine its physical continuation. It is not surprising that the Russian political establishment chose not to pay attention to this work of the Ukrainian president, as if it were a fantasy novel.

“OZ” tried to give this problem a “Ukrainian dimension.” We are publishing materials from a round table we held in Kyiv, where the discussion, naturally, was not about what Russia should do with Ukraine, but what Ukraine should do with Russia.

The fate, features of the development of our forever closest neighbor, and most importantly, its future - these are the topics of this issue. The authors, who are predominantly Ukrainian citizens, discuss the economic difficulties facing the country, its foreign and domestic policies, ethnic and religious characteristics, cultural life and language life.

Over the long centuries of living together, our two peoples have grown into each other to such an extent that this today gives rise to a lot of problems, and at the same time a lot of mutual claims. Several articles are devoted to this range of issues, not only by Russian and Ukrainian, but also by Western researchers.

Some political scientists see the future of Russian-Ukrainian relations as cloudless and good neighborly as relations between the United States and Canada. God willing. Let's start small. Let’s remove the expression “near abroad” from the Russian political lexicon.

See you again!