We know well and understand our neighbors, their symbols of faith, conflicts, myths, fears and phobias

The end of the First World War is a happy moment in the fate of many peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. Without surviving a protracted military conflict, the empires broke up one after another. The peoples, considered small, gained their own states. But the attempt of the Ukrainians was unsuccessful! The eastern part of Ukraine entered the Soviet Union, the western was under the rule of Poland.

Why? Some believed that there were not enough Ukrainian statesmen. Others were assigned: neighbors who did not allow Ukrainians to gain independence are to blame for everything.

“The history of Ukraine needs to be read with bromine,” one of the prominent figures of the national movement noted sadly, trying to make it an independent state a century ago. She is so dramatic, this story.

"Little Russians" and "Khokhly"

The renunciation of Emperor Nicholas II from the throne aroused great hopes among the national thinking Ukrainians.

“Do we have so much strength, do we have so many hands to direct them to this hard work? - Wrote in the summer of 1917 in the diary Vladimir Vinnichenko, the first head of Ukraine to try to become an independent state. - The heart is compressed with anxiety, sadness and fear: what if we do not raise? We will not be able to take the fact that fate so unexpectedly, fantastically threw under our feet? "

In Kyiv, they argued what Ukraine should be. Completely independent? Or remain part of Russia? The slogan of independence, the national idea inspired mainly the city intelligentsia, the petty bourgeoisie, students, and gymnasium students - not the most numerous social layer. The rest rather passively watched what was happening.

Among the inhabitants of Kyiv in the 17th year, Ukrainians were not a majority. And in the eastern part of Ukraine, for example, in Kharkov, there were even more Russians.

Vinnichenko divided the Ukrainians into “Little Russians” (they were completely Russified), “crests” (they know the language, but nothing more) and “conscious Ukrainians” who did not disappear for a national cause and are ready to fight for it.

In the spring of 1918, Ukraine was headed by hetman Pavel Skoropadsky. Its Foreign Minister Nikolai Vasilenko retold his conversation with the hetman. He asked Vasilenko if he believes in the independence of Ukraine.

The minister honestly replied that he did not believe:

- The border between Ukraine and Russia is artificial, and the connections between Russia and Ukraine are so strong that it cannot be so interrupted.

The hetman said:

“But we must act, as if Ukraine is an independent state.”

Makhno and other chieftains

Nowhere did the power change as often as in Kyiv - the central Rada, the Bolsheviks, the hetman, again glad, the directory, again the Bolsheviks. Either the German army arrives or Polish. And every time the change of power was accompanied by robberies, executions, pogroms.

National self -awareness awakened in the most rude and primitive form: ethnic purges, pogroms. The enemies became Moscow Bolsheviks, Russian and Polish landowners, German colonists and, as usual, Jews. Anti -Semitism in Ukraine resulted in mass killings and robberies. The stimulus for the pogroms was the desire to rob.

The owners of life in the field were adventurers, robbers and small dictators. They got their own armies, armed with machine guns and armored cars. The most famous was the peasant Republic of Nestor Makhno in Gulyaipol.

Atamans could not agree among themselves. One Ukraine went to the other.

Red and white against

Neither red nor white supported the independence of Ukraine. Moscow took the side of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, who fought against the independents as the proteges of the bourgeoisie.

The White Movement figures considered Ukrainian nationalists “separatists”, demanded the restoration of “unified Russia” and did not want to hear about the national aspirations of the Ukrainian people. The word "Ukraine" was not used, they preferred the toponymy of tsarist times-the "southwestern region."

One of the generals of the Volunteer Army Mikhail Drozdovsky wrote in his diary: “The relations with Ukrainians are disgusting. The Germans are enemies, but we respect them, although we hate them. Ukrainians - one contempt for them, like renegades and unbridled gangs ... "

The diagnosis of Vernadsky

The outstanding scientist Vladimir Vernadsky in the hope of contributing to the spiritual revival of the republic took up the creation of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The Academy was founded, Vernadsky was elected her first president. Creating the state did not work.

“For the Ukrainian Renaissance,” the academician wrote, “an almost historical miracle took place, giving an opportunity to achieve a seriously not tea one - thanks to a combination of extremely favorable circumstances. But under the conditions that is in the country, Ukraine can be revived with purely Ukrainian language and culture. There is not a single layer for this that would support and was covered by this idea.

The crazy and unbridled policy of Ukrainians with their incorrect and false actions, ardent chauvinism, ideology built in false, invented positions. In many ways, I understand the mood of hatred that is noticed here among the Russians in relation to them, and I feel painful how much the low moral level of Ukrainian figures harms the whole movement. ”

Vladimir Vinnichenko recalled:

“In Kyiv, the non -Church of the Neconu population simply burned with hatred of Ukrainian authorities. In March 1919, an order was from issuing: in three days to organize Ukrainization of signs. Simon Petliura smugly drove the streets and rejoiced at Ukrainian inscriptions over shops. For the Ataman (and especially Petliur) psyche, this was enough: if only there was an ostentatious, decorative side. ”

Petliura and Pilsudski

The head chieftain, that is, the commander in chief of the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic, Simon Petliura, because for him the enemies were both white and red, turned to the only possible ally - to Poland. The Ukrainian army moved to the Polish command. On May 7, 1920, Ukrainian-Polish troops occupied Kyiv. But the Poles lasted only a month and a half and were knocked out of the city of the advancing Red Army.

On December 3, 1920, Marshal Pilsudsky said with regret:

- We must again take Kyiv and Minsk to unite Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania into the federation. Unfortunately, I am not able to do this now. Poland does not want this. And besides, Poland is very exhausted by the war. No, we can’t raise this task ...

On December 28, 1920, the RSFSR and the Ukrainian SSR signed the Union Workers 'and Peasants' Treaty. Both republics joined the economic and military union, the advice of the national economy and drug addicts - military and naval affairs, foreign trade, finance, labor, tracks of communication, mail and telegraph were united.

Why did an independent Ukrainian state collapse? Not only because neither white nor red supported Kyiv. A significant part of the population, especially Eastern Ukraine, wished to stay with Russia.

The fate of Galicia

Ukrainians have long remained a divided people. Some were subjects of the Russian Empire, others were on the other side of the state border. Galicia to the First World War belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Under the rule of the Austrian crown, approximately four million people lived, whom Ukrainian authors call Ukrainians, and Russian - Russians of the Little Russian branch.

On October 18, 1918, in Lviv, Ukrainians-deputies of the Austro-Hungarian parliament and local meetings, representatives of cultural and public organizations formed a national rain and announced the transition of the authorities to the Ukrainian people. The next day, the Rada announced that it unites Galicia, the Northern Bukovina and Transcarpathia into a single state. On November 1, the creation of the West-Ukrainian People’s Republic was proclaimed.

The fate of Western Ukraine then depended on the countries of the Entente, which, having defeated Germany and other states of the Fourth Union, formed the political map of Europe. But the participants in the Paris Peace Conference did not know what to do: to transfer the West Ukrainian lands to Poland? Or, as the British preferred, Russia? Or maybe Czechoslovakia?

“I saw one Ukrainian,” the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George said dismissively, “and I’m not sure that I want to see one of them.”

“It is very difficult for us to intervene,” admitted American President Woodro Wilson, “without a clear position in relation to Ukrainians.”

The allied powers postponed the decision of the issue of Eastern Galicia. And in Warsaw they did not wait. Here they had no doubt that Eastern Galicia, Western Volyn, Kholmshchina, Polishchi should be Polish. Warsaw did not allow Ukrainians to create their own state. On November 4, 1918, the Polish troops moved to the West-Ukrainian Republic, attacked Lviv and took the city on the night of November 22.

That is why Ukrainian nationalists bitterly said that after the First World War, the Poles received their state, but Ukrainians did not.

Why Bandera?

After the Civil War, the Ukrainian intelligentsia tried to understand why it was not possible to gain independence? Not enough perseverance and will? The classic of Ukrainian literature, Mikola Hvylev, spoke upset in the 1920s: "Little Russia is afraid to drew."

The nationally thinking intelligentsia was offended by the non -recognition of Ukrainians by an independent people. The religious philosopher Georgy Fedotov once wrote that the Russian intelligentsia carries one sin before the Ukrainian national movement: it does not notice it.

The trouble is that in the closed Galicia, fanatics and radicals, such as Stepan Bandera, saddened the national idea. In Western Ukraine, warlike nationalism originated between the two wars. Radical supporters of the reunification of Ukrainian lands entered the organization of Ukrainian nationalists (OUN).

Now, the leader of the OUN Stepan Bandera and his associates draw many fighters against totalitarian regimes - for the freedom and independence of the Ukrainian people. However, an unbiased historical analysis shows that both he and his people deliberately collaborated with the Third Reich. Welled the military victories of the Wehrmacht and the destruction of the civilian population.

They acted in the same criminal methods and adhered to the same racial ideology.

If the Bandera and some of his associates at some point came out of the Germans from trust and ended up in a concentration camp (and someone shot), then not because they were opponents of Nazi theory and practice, but because they intended the role of improvised, although they claimed more. If you contacted criminals, do not be surprised that he himself became their victim.

In Lviv, a monument to the victims of communist atrocities stands on Stepan Bandera Street. Of course, the crimes of the Stalin era have become known in our ideas about the Soviet period of history. But they do not cancel the assessments of the activities of the leaders of the OUN underground.

The trouble is that in Soviet times everything was hiding. For decades, history was deliberately distorted and dissected! As a result, dislike of the Soviet regime gave the heroic features to everyone who fought with her. Around Bandera, OUN, UPA, legends and myths that they do not deserve. Myths live for a long time, but do not become more true from this.

Hungry pestilence

Many Ukrainian politicians and historians call the hungry mor in Ukraine-in the early 30s-an act of genocide, that is, the conscious destruction of Moscow Ukrainians. Are there any grounds for such assessments?

Great hunger became a direct consequence of the Stalinist policy of collectivization and dispossession, which undermined the productive forces of the village. It took grain in order to pay with a huge external debt. The only export product is grain. He was driven abroad - in those months when people were dying of hunger. The peasants did not want to die, did not give bread, and the state declared war on them. The Stalinist leadership said that there was bread in the village, but enemies, that is, fists, are hidden.

The leader himself believed that the “conspiracy of the Petliurists” interfere with the bakery, who retained their personnel underground. They sabotage bakery. Stalin’s anticremesian sentiments intensified by fear of the activation of the Ukrainian national movement. That is why the state did not provide a starving village even minimal help.

Hunger in Ukraine was terrible.

“In 1933, many fellow countrymen died of hunger,” recalled Fedor Morgun, who became the first secretary of the Poltava regional committee and the hero of socialist labor. - My younger sister died. Relatives helped a seriously ill mother to determine us in an orphanage. In 1933, the pupils of the orphanage also died. The dead were buried in large graves, more often in bulk and naked. ”

The classic of modern Ukrainian literature Oles Gonchar marked in his diary: “1933-it was a genocide! Half -ceremony is hungry for one spring. The Bulat Kuznets family, where children ate smaller ... And my comrades-classmates of Kiseli from Breusov’s farms that they showed incomparable successes in mathematics-were at school today, but tomorrow they didn’t come: both died. No, this is a crime of Stalin, who is not and will never be an excuse. ”

The daughter of Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko for the whole life remembered the story of his father about how in those years the future Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, and then graduate student of the Institute of Agriculture Economics, was sent on a business trip to Ukraine:

“He walks along the road from one village to another, and towards - a string of carts drawn by horses. On carts home belongings, children, old women. A man and his wife are walking next to the horse.

- Where are you going? - asks the man's dad.

“And where the eyes look,” the peasant replies.

The village was ruined. "

What did the intelligentsia think about?

In Moscow, they were extremely concerned about the scale of peasant discontent in Ukraine. They were afraid of neighboring Poland, which in the civil war came to the aid of independent Ukraine.

Stalin wrote to his closest assistant-a member of the Politburo and secretary of the Central Committee Lazar Kaganovich: “In the Ukrainian Communist Party (500 thousand members, hehe), many rotten elements, conscious and unconscious Petliurians are found, finally, direct agents of Pilsudski. As soon as things get worse, these elements will not slow down to open the front inside (and outside) the party, against the party. ”

There were no agents of the Polish Marshal Pilsudski in Ukraine. But the idea that Moscow oppresses the Ukrainians excited national feelings: "But still it is a pity that we were not able to create our own state."

And these moods will make themselves felt ...

“What Satanic force was destroyed with Ukraine! - wrote Oles Gonchar. - By the tragedy of fate, we are unique people. The greatest geniuses of the nation - Shevchenko, Gogol, the pan - have been homeless. But

Stalinshchina surpassed everything with her horrors, state sadism.

Genocide exterminated the most active, most gifted forces of the people. What sins did we have such a share for us? "

Oles Gonchar is not a dissident. Favorite of Soviet power: deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, candidate member of the Central Committee of the CPSU, Hero of Socialist Labor, laureate of two Stalin, State and Leninist prizes. And so, it turns out that he was thinking about the fate of his native Ukraine ... Few people realized then what the Ukrainian intelligentsia was thinking about.

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Of course, we are from one state. But you need to know and understand the features of the history of various regions of Ukraine, breaking its conflicts, the interweaving of religious beliefs, the symbols of faith, myths, fears and phobias ... It is necessary to study the past of the neighbors in order to accurately evaluate what is happening in Ukraine, to predict the turns of the mood of the society rushing about in search of the right decision.