Russification of Ukraine

In February 1764, a few months before the liquidation of the office of Hetmenate, Catherine wrote to the Prosecutor General of the Senate Prince Alexander Vyazemsky:[3] "Little Russia, Livonia, and Finland are provinces governed by confirmed privileges, and it would be improper to violate them by abolishing all at once.

According to historian Serhii Plokhy, "the abolition of the Hetmenate and the gradual elimination of its institution and military structure ended the notion of partnership and equality between Great and Little Russia imagined by generations of Ukrainian intellectuals.

"[2] Once incorporated fully into the empire the provinces of the former Hetmenate were dwarfed by the Russian state, and the officer class of the Cossack polity was integrated (though with difficulty) and forced to serve the interests of the all-Russian nation, though they retained their attachment to their traditional homeland.

In December 1792, once Catherine had decided in favour of the Second Partition, she wrote that her goals were, "to deliver the lands and towns that once belonged to Russia, established and inhabited by our kinsmen and professing the same faith as ours, from the corruption and oppression with which they are threatened."

"[2] Catherine was prepared for significant protests and disturbances and expected the governor to ensure that "any disorder and trouble be averted, and that none of the permanent or temporary landowners or spiritual and civil officials of the Roman and Uniate faith dare to cause even the smallest hindrance, oppression, or offence to those who are converting to Orthodoxy.

The excavations were intended to illustrate the supposed "Russian" history of the city that was predominantly Polish; as historian Serhii Plokhy writes, "Its Russification was literally proceeding from below as ancient ruins, accurately or inaccurately dated to princely times, emerged from beneath the surface."

[2] On 12 February 1839, the synod adopted the Act of Union and issued an appeal to the tsar prepared by Semashko that would result in the closure of 1,600 Uniate parricides and the incorporation of 1.5 million parishioners, many of whom were not consulted into the body of imperial Orthodoxy.

"[2] In 1854, Uvarov, wrote to the minister of the interior reminding him of an imperial decree suggesting that "writers should be most careful when handling the question of Little Russian ethnicity and language, lest love for Little Russia outweigh affection for the fatherland-the Empire.

During the early years of Alexander in the late 1850s, Metropolitan Iosif Semashko, who had managed to bring most of the Uniates in the empire under the jurisdiction of Russian Orthodoxy, noticed a new threat to the imperial regime-the khlopomany.

The event that led to the issuing of the Valuev Circular was a letter sent to the Third Section of the Imperial Chancellory allegedly on behalf of Orthodox clerics demanding a ban on the translation of the Gospels into Ukrainian that was then being reviewed by the Holy Synod.

Following Austria's Seven Weeks War with Prussia, the kingdom was transformed into a dual monarchy and the appointment of a Polish governor to rule Galicia was regarded by the Ruthenian elite as a betrayal, the Slovo newspaper promoted Russophilia and a turn away from the west.

After Bloody Sunday of 1905 and the revolutionary upheaval that followed, Nicholas II issued an edict stating that his subjects could now freely choose their religion and more importantly leave the Russian Orthodox Church if they wished without any political repercussions.

His ally in this new campaign of Russification was his nephew and member of the Duma Vladimir Bobrsinyk, who had headed the Galician Benevolent Society which supported the Russophile movement in Volhynia and lobbied the Russian government to do the same.

The nephew of the governor of Galicia, Vladimir Bobrinsky personally travelled from prisons in the newly occupied regions to release Russophile activists imprisoned by the Austrian authorities who helped him propagandise in support of the "White Tsar".

He drafted and presented a resolution to the Central Committee of his party demanding "an end to the anti-state system of Russifying occupied territory, the reestablishment of closed national institutions, and strict observance of the personal and property rights of the population".

Whilst Lenin had seen the Rada as a potential ally in his assault on the Provisional Government and had gone out of his way to recognise the Ukrainian nation as distinct in June 1917, his position drastically changed after the Bolshevik seizure of power.

[2] As Ukrainian complaints about their treatment and the violation of their civil liberties and cultural rights reached the west, who backed Denikin and his anti-Bolshevik campaign, the Western powers tried to restrain the "anti-Ukrainian zeal of Volunteer Army Commanders".

[7] The times of restructuring of farming and the introduction of industrialization brought about a wide campaign against "nationalist deviation," which in Ukraine translated into the end of "korenization" policy and an assault on the political and cultural elite.

[8] Russification of Soviet-occupied Ukraine intensified in 1938 under Nikita Khrushchev, then secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, but was briefly halted during World War II, when Axis forces occupied large areas of the country.

In December 1932, during policy discussions that would eventually lead to the Holodomor, Stalin attacked Mykola Skrypnyk for non-Bolshevik conduct of Ukrainization and blamed resistance to forced collectivization and grain requisitions on agents of Jozef Pilsudski and Ukrainian nationalists.

[2] The reversal of indigenisation suspended the development of non-Russian languages and cultures at a moment when increasing numbers of peasants, driven by collectivization from the villages that had shielded them from the linguistic supervision of tsarist authorities, began to migrate to the cities.

If the Russians had been deemed model citizens, then non-Russians with traditional homelands or significant diasporas outside the USSR were seen as potential traitors and were targeted in a number of repressive operations that culminated in the Great Terror.

According to one theory, the lyrics had actually not been written by Lebedev-Kumach, but by a peasant school teacher, Aleksandr Bode in 1916, during WW1, with Lebedev allegedly replacing "teutonic" with "fascist" and "our Russian native land" with "our Great Union".

[2] By the fall of 1941, all the non-Russian provinces of the western USSR had been lost to German divisions advancing eastwards, crushing the resistance of the Red Army, composed of many with little sense of loyalty to the regime, of conscripts, and, in the case of Ukraine, of victims of the famine.

Although the Pereyeslav Council of 1654 marked the decision of some of the Ukrainian Cossack officers to accept the protectorate of the Muscovite tsar, the accompanying ideological campaign and how the anniversary was to be officially celebrated was the "Theses on the Reunifcation of Ukraine and Russia".

[2] The theses on the anniversary of the alleged reunification approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow read, "the reunion of Ukraine and Russia helped considerably to strengthen the Russian state and enhance its international prestige".

[2] Cultural Russification became official policy in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, the marginalization and degradation of non-Russian languages and their elimination from the educational system began in 1970, when a decree was issued ordering that all graduate theses be written in Russian and approved in Moscow.

Vladimir Osipov's journal Veche published in the early 1970s in print runs of fifty to one hundred copies, proposed their authors believed in the "unity of Eastern Slavs" whom he simply called Russians.

[2] A document adopted by the group in February 1977 reads, "We profoundly respect the culture, spirituality, and ideals of the Russian people, but why should Moscow make decisions for us at international forums on various problems, commitments, and the like?!

While the bill was supported by Ukrainians in the eastern and southern regions, the legislation triggered protests in Kyiv, where representatives from opposition parties argued that it would further divide the Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking parts of the country and make Russian a de facto official language there.