This anthology may be used as a supplement to any study of Ukrainian history. There are several histories of Ukraine available in English, but they do not contain the actual documents offered in this book. Without the documents the history itself remains an uncorroborated account. The forty-two documents collected here serve as direct evidence of the evolution of Ukrainianintellectualhistory. They were produced by the Ukrainian intelligentsia over the last three centuries and provide the underpinning of history without which the serious student will be at sea. For the ideas expressed in these documents lie at the heart of...

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, God glorified in the Holy Trinity. Let it be to the eternal glory and memory of the Zaporozhian Host and the Ruthenian [Rossiacae]¹ people.

God, who is wondrous and unfathomable in his judgments, merciful in forbearance, just in punishment, has ever since the beginning of this visible world elevated some kingdoms and peoples according to his most equitable judgment and humiliated others because of their offences and iniquities, reduced some to slavery and liberated others, exalted some and cast down others. In the same way, the valiant and...

But let my words be directed to you, honourable and noble men, glorious in rank and deed, even you who can be called by the name of the whole nation: O Russia! I doubt that the poverty of the preacher will greatly lessen the importance of the sermon, and I confess that I am unworthy of such listeners. But I beg you, when you hear the Gospel read by any man whatsoever, do you not believe? So here, too: look not at the face of the speaker but at the Word of God, and converse not with me, but let...

I have become subject not to you, but to your lord,

Under whom you were born since the time of your ancestors.

Do not think that you yourself are my ruler,

But your lord and my lord in command of both of us.

And the difference between us is only in adjectives,

You the Great and I the Little live in bordering countries.

That I am called Little and you Great

Is neither a small nor a strange thing to you or to me.

For your borders are wider than mine,

And my expanses are less than yours,

Yet we...

My opinions on the aforementioned articles, just heard by you, honourable deputies, were presented by me as a representative in this esteemed assembly, as your co-member and co-worker according to the assent of Her Imperial Majesty, as a Russian citizen obliged to promote and assist the motherly solicitude of our most gracious Sovereign for the well-being of Russia. But while submitting my opinion on the forty-third and last article, I, as a deputy of the Little Russianszlachta, want to know whether the aforementioned rights belong only to the Great Russian nobility, or also to other areas united under the...

Two visitors came into the Temple of Solomon: one was blind, the other sighted. The blind man raised his eyes in vain and ran them along the walls of the temple. The sighted visitor looked at the wall depicting man, animals, birds, mountains, rivers, forests, fields, flowers, the sun, stars, and precious stones and, applying to all the immutable criterion, called draughtsmanship by painters, revelled in inexhaustible enjoyment. With a curious eye he beheld even the seven-lamp candelabrum and the canopy of the cherubim. ‘I see no joy in this temple,’ said the blind man. ‘O, you poor man!’ exclaimed...

Feeling his death approaching, Hetman Khmelnytsky called to Chyhyryn military and government officials and the most distinguished Cossacks, and to all of them, gathered in his home, he reported on the condition of the nation and all the ministerial matters of the time. After that, having recounted the attacks on his native land and the heavy wars which followed, in which they had fought so bravely and overcome evil days with their valour and praiseworthy unity, he ended by saying that, seeing his death near, he was leaving them alone and advising them not to lose heart, to hold together...

… I am sorry that you are ailing. Give up your lousy Russianness [katsapiiu] and go to the Hetmanate. I myself am thinking of doing the same and going off from here in the coming year. We really are fools, if you give it any thought. For what and for whom are we sacrificing everything? Let’s go! How much stuff we’re going to collect there! We’ll dig up everything. If you are in Kiev, then look up Belousov, the former professor. This man will be useful to you in many ways, and I want you to become friends. So, you’ll...

61. The Slavic tribe even before the acceptance of the faith had neither kings nor masters and were all equal and there were no idols, but the Slavs worshipped one God,¹ omnipotent. Thus writes a Greek historian concerning the Slavs.

62. When the older brothers, the Greeks, Romans, Germans, became enlightened, then the Lord sent two brothers, Constantine and Methodius, to the younger brother, the Slavs; the Lord invested them with the Holy Spirit, and they translated into the Slavic language the holy scriptures and determined to perform the divine service in that language, which all spoke; and this was not so...

Shall we never rise against foreign fashions:

So that our wise and good people

Would not consider our speech as German?

A. Griboedov²

I am sending out among the people the second edition of myKobzarand, so that it doesn’t come empty-handed, I am giving it a preface. My words are addressed to you, my dear Ukrainian brethren.

A great sorrow has enveloped my soul. I hear and sometimes I read: the Poles are printing and the Czechs and the Serbs and the Bulgarians and the Montenegrins and the Russians – all are printing. But from us not a...

I first wroteThe Black Councilin the south-Russian, or Little Russian, language. Here a free translation¹ of this work is printed. In this translation are passages which are not in the original, and there is much in the original which is not in the translation. This is owing to the different spirit of the two literatures. Moreover, when I wrote the original, I had a different point of view, and when I translated the novel, I looked at the same subject as someone belonging to a specifically literary milieu. In the past I followed as much as possible the...

We have seen how even in its childhood, when it was centred in Vladimir, and later, in its youth, when it was centred in Moscow, the Great Russian [despotic] element was inclined to subdue and absorb various neighbouring regions.

The same thing occurred in the religious and intellectual sphere. The Great Russians developed an intolerance of other faiths, a disdain of other nationalities, a very high opinion of themselves. All the foreigners who visited Muscovy in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries were unanimous in saying that the Muscovites looked down on other faiths and nationalities. Even the tsars, who...

Dear Sir:

In the thirty-fourth issue ofKolokolyou expressed a view in regard to Ukraine which for a long time has been kept by the thinking part of the South Russian people as a precious sanctum of the heart. Please accept our heartfelt gratitude. Along with the store of the many truths you have been the first to utter in print in the Russian language belongs what you said about your native land. Allow me to convey to you, for all to hear, our heartfelt convictions.

The majority of the Great Russian and Polish public are not accustomed to...

After these general remarks we shall analyse the author’s¹ teaching about the human spirit, which may be divided easily into the teaching on the theoretical and that on the practical aspects of the spirit.

The author frequently reminds us that questions which arise here do not present any difficulty, that ‘they ceased to be questions for contemporary thinkers because they are very easily decided with certainty with the first application of scientific analysis.’ He demonstrates this by means of an example which should interest us in its connection with the author’s teaching about the moral activity of man. ‘One proposes,’...

To weep over the past and wish for its return is always useless, especially for us, the servants of the Ukrainian people. We know that what we ultimately want has never yet been achieved, and will come to pass only in some distant future when the human race is far wiser than it is now. Nevertheless, we must look back in order to find out why our lot is as bitter as it is, so that we will avoid making the mistakes of our predecessors. The Ukrainians must take a good look backward and review the two hundred and twenty...

Whenever an important issue comes up before us, two opposing camps face each other: on the one side the Poles, on the other the Ruthenians.

To be sure, this happens not only with us but in every land and parliament of the Austrian crown. If it is sad that the Germans cannot live in peace with the Slavs, it is much sadder that in Galicia two peoples of Slavic origin not only quarrel in parliament but bring their disputes before the highest state councils and ask the world to be their judge.

It is difficult to approve of such a...

The mistake consists in identifying nationality only with its content. In fact, nationality is real because of its relation to the past. But as an established totality of means for acting upon new trends, it is operative to the degree that a complete though gradual renunciation of its former content is truly conceivable. Language, in this context, is not so much one of the elements of nationality as its most perfect image. Just as it is unthinkable to have a point of view which would reflect all sides of a subject, just as it is impossible to express in a...

I. A Society, in the Free Union, should be formed on Ukrainian territory to work for the political, economic, and cultural emancipation and progress of the Ukrainian people and of the other races living among them in settlements.

Note. Because the Ukrainian people live in various States – Russia, Austria (in Galicia and Bukovyna), and Hungary (in the eastern Comitats) – and under varying political conditions (even though under significantly similar social and cultural conditions), different methods should be employed in each of these. For this reason, separate political societies – completely independent rather than branches of a single organization...

Moving from Western Europe to the East we find more evil. Crossing the Prussian-Russian border we will see that in Russia the policy of forced denationalization is running wild. In Russia, Russification is advancing not by the day but by the hour, as though destined to bring salvation not only for Russia but for all the world from some sort of scourge. There, people are spending all their energy in fulfilling this good and blessed task. The autonomy of provinces and peoples is being broken; nationalities are being bent and twisted. Everywhere national languages and literatures are being destroyed. Everywhere...

Speaking of Kostomarov, of Kulish in his first period, and ofOsnova,¹ the author of these unwise letters allowed himself to disagree with some of their national-historical views. Here, while speaking of the Kulish of the latest period, he will do the same. One might think it strange that a man unknown in literature, who has no right (he would himself admit it) to call himself a historian, should fight with such experts on history as Kulish and Kostomarov, who could smother the author (if they were to notice him) with their historical erudition. Kulish himself says of such opponents...

When we approach from afar high mountains crowned by steep, bare cliffs and glassy glaciers, our hearts are involuntarily gripped by fear, and we think, ‘To go there, to stand on this peak of ice, would be impossible!’

When Europeans began to dig up in the ruins of ancient Nineveh clay bricks, vases, and utensils covered by cuneiform writing and saw that the writing was in an unknown alphabet, according to an unknown system (was it alphabetical, syllabic, or ideographic?), in an unknown language long dead, they decided, after lengthy, wasted efforts, that to decipher the writing was impossible.

When...

The end of the nineteenth century is marked by events that can be characterized as representing a new turn in the history of mankind. The fifth act¹ of a great historical tragedy, the ‘struggle of nations,’ has begun, and its conclusion is fast approaching. These events are the armed uprisings of enslaved nations against the oppressor nations, as witnessed by the bloody rebellions of the Armenian, Cretan-Greek, Cuban, and Boer peoples. When we observe the fluctuating course of this fierce battle, which is in its initial stages in the struggle between the forsaken people of Austria, Russia, and Turkey and...

In your comments entitled ‘On Various Themes’ in the January issue ofRussian Thought,¹ you consider it necessary on the occasion of V.E. Zhabotinsky’s² lively and colourful article ‘The Jewish People and Their Attitudes’ to decide once and for all the question as to the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian culture by the complete flattening of the latter. Most startling is that, in expressing such drastic opinions, you offer no reservations in favour of even some of the cultural aspirations of the Ukrainian people and no objections to the violence committed against them. I will not touch on the fact...

A great moment has arrived! Ukraine is free of the chains placed on her by the cunning policy of the Muscovite tsars, and the Ukrainian people, freed as a result of their great efforts, have themselves taken charge of their newly won freedom.

As soon as the real basis of Muscovite policy became apparent – its intention of treating the Ukrainians not as free partners but as subjects of the Muscovite tsar and the property of the Muscovite state – the political leaders of Ukrainian society loudly and clearly protested. As far back as 1658, four years after their surrender...

No matter how highly we may value the role of the peasantry in our future life and in the building of a state, we should not turn our backs on the cities or on the towns. Although they are not Ukrainian in population and are often centres of anti-Ukrainian feeling, demonstrations, and manifestations which undermine our statehood and therefore evoke dismay in Ukrainian society, we should think even harder of ways to incorporate these heterogeneous and foreign bodies into our life and bring about their integration, thereby neutralizing their alienness and foreignness.

This issue is a heritage of our history,...

To the People of Ukraine:

By your strength, will, and word there has arisen in the Ukrainian land a free People’s Republic. An age-old dream of your forefathers, champions of the freedom and rights of the toiling masses, has been realized. But the freedom of Ukraine has been regained at a difficult time. Four years of destructive warfare have weakened our land and exhausted our people; plants have been closed and factories have ceased to produce; railways have been disrupted and money has lost its value; harvests have declined and the land is threatened with famine. The countryside has been...

There were fewer and fewer adherents of the Central Rada among the wide masses. The very name of the Central Rada began to be unpopular. If we had been more far-sighted, we would have understood that neither the ‘red-capped fur hats’ nor religious services of supplication, nor even secret killings, would be able to crush these spontaneous elements. We needed to change ourselves radically.

Such a radical change among us was advocated by the Bolsheviks and by some of us as well. We needed to re-elect the Central Rada. Let all the local workers’, peasants’, and soldiers’ councils hold congresses...

… The subject of these letters was to be our political tactics, our political self-organization, and our relations with other political groups active in Ukraine as well as with outside political forces influencing Ukraine. In other words, I wanted to outline the methods which, in my opinion, should be used in politics for organization and for increasing one’s strength, and for the achievement of its tasks by the active part of the farmer class, which has the will to create and organize Ukrainian national life.

But here, more than in my earlierLetters, I encountered great difficulties expressing my thoughts....

Our lives see the twilight of the gods to whom the nineteenth century prayed. The catastrophe of 1914 has not shattered our minds in vain; all the unshakeable foundations and ‘eternal’ laws of social evolution crumbled into dust, opening limitless vistas before human will.

Only one law was left intact in the catastrophe. It is the law of struggle, which Heraclitus called the beginning of all things, the law of eternal antagonism between nations which dominates the world now just as it did in the earliest history of nations and states.

The pampered age which received a bloody summing-up from...

These elementary premises concerning the human being’s role in history need restating so that we may ask ourselves:

Has Europe not provided some type of creation which – in the measure with which the so-called ‘variable relation’ endows it – makes history?

You ask, ‘Which Europe?’ Take whichever you like, ‘past or present, bourgeois or proletarian, eternal or ever changing.’ Because, to be sure, Hamlets, Don Juans, and Tartuffes existed in the past, but they also exist today; they used to be bourgeois, but they are also proletarian; you can consider them ‘eternal,’ but they will be ‘ever changing.’ Such...

It would be well to put a full stop after all these quarrels facing the Party. One must realize that such phenomena follow a dual path. On the one hand, the Party understands the needs of life, explains the relations of classes, designates the tasks of the proletariat in the whole historical process, and marches forward step by step. One can see here an uninterrupted line from the pre-October era, through 1917–18, to the present moment. The Party provides us with a short résumé of it in the resolutions of the plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist...

We hear another accusation that the women’s movement and women’s organizations want to cordon off women into a separate society and that this would be harmful for women themselves and for the whole community. Our answer is that the Ukrainian women’s movement has never called for the isolation of women from society. On the contrary, from its very beginning the movement has striven for Ukrainian women to become a vital and most active part of the nation as a whole. Not as an empty gesture did Natalia Kobrynska, in as early as 1887, reject a division into separate men’s and...

Although Dontsov cockily assures us in hisNationalismthat he opposes his view of the world to all others, this simply is not true. Dontsov does not have a view of life of his own; he never had one. Arrogance alone does not create aWeltanschauung, and his is supported by nothing but quotations torn from books by mediocre philosophers. Dontsov was unable to skim through them, let alone read them … Dontsov’s dishevelled and conceited writings may appeal for a while to high school students and seminarians because of the multitude of foreign words he uses. Whenever he has...

The existing political order in the world, which forcibly oppresses important and vital peoples, is threatened by movements for liberation.

The Moscow-dominated empire of the USSR today is a part of this world order.

We, Ukrainians, are raising the flag of our struggle for the liberation of peoples and mankind.

By destroying forever this terrible prison of nations – the Muscovite empire – we are creating a new order and building the foundations of a new political system in the world.

We are fighting for the liberation of the Ukrainian people and all other peoples subjugated by Moscow.

We are...

1. By the will of the Ukrainian people a sovereign united Ukrainian state was created after the First World War.

2. As a result of aggressive wars by its neighbours the Ukrainian state was forcibly occupied and divided among Soviet Russia, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.

3. For twenty years [1919–39] the Ukrainian people conducted a ceaseless struggle for liberation under the occupation.

4. In March 1939, after the collapse of the Czechoslovak Republic, the population of Carpatho-Ukraine created an independent Carpatho-Ukrainian state, which, after bloody battles, was occupied by Hungary.

5. In September 1939, with the collapse of Poland, the Ukrainian territories of Galicia,...

Just as in the case of our doctrine with regard to the nation, our doctrine with regard to the state has grown out of the ideological and political struggle that we have been waging on two fronts – against the imperialist views voiced by representatives of the great powers and against Marxist views of the state.

The views of the representatives of the dominant great powers have consisted in an overt, grossly imperialist denial of the right of small peoples to their own independent states. We have already discussed these views in our writings concerning the position taken by representatives...

Three hundred years ago, by the powerfully expressed will of the Ukrainian people at the Pereiaslav Rada (Council) in January 1654, the reunion of Ukraine with Russia was proclaimed. This historic act culminated the long struggle of the freedom-loving Ukrainian people against alien enslavers for reunion with the Russian people in a single Russian State. The three-hundredth anniversary of that outstanding historic event is a grand jubilee not only for the Ukrainian and Russian but for all the peoples of the Soviet Union.

The reunion was of great importance for the further historic development of the two great peoples, which...

The notion of ‘Little-Russianism,’ as used here, is not limited to a Ukrainian context. In every multinational state, not excepting even the best-ordered empires, there has been created during its historical existence a certain type of imperial man. We can mention here the memorable type of the Austrian who, without much difficulty, could at the same time be a Czech or a Croatian, a Pole or a Ruthenian-Ukrainian. The political sagacity of the old Roman Empire, which never ‘Romanized’ its colonies, was still respected in the Viennese empire of the Habsburgs. To be sure, in the course of the nineteenth...

In keeping with firm instructions by Lenin, the 12th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) in 1923 determined clearly and precisely:

Talks on the subject of the advantages of Russian culture and propositions concerning the inevitable victory of the higher Russian culture over the cultures of more backward peoples (Ukrainian, Azerbaidjani, Uzbek, Kirghiz, etc.) are nothing but an attempt to confirm the domination of the Great Russian nationality.

Today talks and notions of such a character are not only legalized and dominant in everyday civic and Party life, but diverse ‘allegorical’ variants of these ‘talks’ have also long become...

Our society is entering the last decade of the twentieth century in a state of deep political, economic, social, ideological, and moral crisis. This critical phase is the result of the violent introduction of the Stalinist model of totalitarian pseudo-socialism; the usurpation of the power of the Soviets by the bureaucratic apparatus; the alienation of the individual from the means and the output of production; the brutal and absurd dictates of the central government bureaus; the castration of the sovereignty of the republics and the conversion of local self-rule into fiction; the treacherous policy of denationalization, conducted under the guise...

Article 1. The constitutional order of Ukraine is based on the recognition of the individual; of the individual’s life and health, honour and dignity, inviolability and safety as the highest social value; and of the priorities of the individual’s rights and liberties.

The establishment and ensuring of the rights and freedoms of the individual is the principal responsibility of the state.

The state is responsible to the individual and society for its actions.

Article 2. Ukraine is a democratic, rule-of-law, and social state.

Article 3. Ukraine is a republic. All power in Ukraine belongs to the people.

The Ukrainian people,...

Now, in the fifth year of independence, at the time of Ukraine’s acceptance into the Council of Europe, events have taken place which threaten the material basis of the existence of the Ukrainian state and nation, as well as its language, culture, and spirituality.

External and internal forces, which in the course of the last years have blocked and sabotaged in every way the process of Ukraine’s transformation into a strong, rich, socially just, and sovereign state, have today launched an all-out assault aimed at our ‘Belorussianization.’ They, indifferent to those who feed them while disposing of their national wealth,...

Not long ago we used to hear the contrary slogan – ‘Ukraine for Ukrainians.’ Not because many, apart from a few extreme right-wing groups, defended it, but because all the ruling post-communistnomenklaturaand the ideologically united national democrats vehemently opposed it. Everyone wanted to appear modern, European, tolerant, and, of course, democratic. No one wanted, God forbid, to offend national minorities, to repel them from the process of building a democratic, pluralist, multinational country. Instead of the exclusive ‘Ukraine for Ukrainians,’ everyone hoped to build an inclusive Ukraine for all the nationalities which live in it. It was a...