From the viewpoint of contemporary European ethnology,
the people who inhabited Southern Rus' in the 10th through the 13th century
A.D. and were governed by the principalities of Kyiv, Pereiaslav and Halych had
proto-Ukrainian ethnolinguistic traits
The historical heritage
of Kyivan Rus' is a key problem in the history of Eastern Europe. It is
undeniable that the Ukrainian lands governed by Kyiv played a leading role in
the formation of the Eastern Slavic world and its statehood. Whether real or
imagined, the heritage of Kyivan princes not only legitimized the very
existence of young East European states (above all, Muscovy) in the late Middle
Ages, but also provided the basis for their expansion into the rich territories
of Southern Rus'-Ukraine.
That is the reason why, as Russian historian
Alexander Pypin put it, “the dispute between the southerners and the
northerners” (i.e., Ukrainians and Russians) over Kyivan heritage has shown no
signs of slacking in the five centuries since the formation of Muscovy. For
obvious reasons Ukrainians (“Little Russians”), as “the younger brother” in the
empire of Great Russians, found it hard to argue their case. The “older
brother” had at its disposal a totalitarian government apparatus with a wide
range of “weighty” arguments ranging from financial incentives and promotions
for supporters to camps on the Solovky Islands and execution of its opponents.
LAWS OF ETHNOHISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
The framework for identifying the ethnicity of the
people who lived in princely Kyiv and figuring out Ukrainian ethnogenesis is
defined by the universal laws of ethnohistorical development in medieval
Europe. The following are the fundamental postulates of contemporary European
ethnology:
1. Approach ethnic groups as ethnocultural
organisms that are born at a certain point, go through a life cycle and
inevitably disintegrate as they dissolve among their neighbours.
2. The age of an ethnic group is
determined retrospectively with the help of methods from various disciplines
(history, archaeology, linguistics, ethnography, anthropology, etc.) which are
used to identify the starting point of the people’s continuous ethnocultural
development.
3. Most European peoples (the French, the
English, Germans, Spaniards, Czechs, Serbs, Croatians, Poles and others) who
live in the territory of cultural and historical influence of the Roman Empire
emerged in the early Middle Ages, i.e., the 5th through the 7th century A.D.
4. The tribal stage in the development of
peoples populating the European middle belt began when Europe entered the
Middle Ages and ended in the 9th-10th century when these ethnic groups united
to form their own states (English, French, Czech, Serbian, Polish, etc.). These
often covered the territories of neighbouring peoples and took the form of
medieval empires (British, Spanish, French and Polish).
5. As backward provinces were colonized by
their metropolises, young post-imperial ethnic groups were born. They emerged
out of a synthesis between local traditions and the ethnic culture of the
conquerors and began their own historical existence at the moment they split
off from the respective empire. For example, the barbarian frontiers of the
Roman Empire were home to Romanic peoples (Spaniards, Portuguese, French,
Romanians, etc.). The Spanish Empire gave rise to Spanish-speaking Mexicans,
Chileans, Argentineans, Peruvians, Venezuelans, Cubans, etc. The British Empire
was the motherland of English-speaking Americans, Canadians and Australians.
The Portuguese Empire brought forth Portuguese-speaking Brazilians and the
French Empire the Quebecois. As the Kyivan Rus' Empire colonized the forested
northern parts of Eastern Europe, it gave rise to Belarusians,
Pskov-Novgorodians and Russians.
Contemporary ethnology distinguishes between several
stages in the ethnic development of large peoples in medieval Europe. The
origins of European ethnic groups populating the territory that fell under the
cultural and historical influence of the Roman Empire go back to the Middle
Ages. The fall of the empire caused well-known upheavals (the Barbarian
Invasions), after which the situation stabilized. Ethnographic, archaeological,
linguistic and anthropological evidence, as well as written sources, enable us
to retrospectively trace the continuity of ethnocultural development in the
ethnic territories populated by a large group of the Romanic peoples (Spaniards,
Portuguese, Catalonians, French, Provençals, Italians, Sicilians and
Romanians), Anglo-Saxons, Slavs (Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croatians,
Bulgarians and Ukrainians) and others back to the late 5th-7th century A.D.
This provides a foundation for describing the development of the aforementioned
ethnocultural groups in these territories. In particular, notable Russian
archaeologist Valentin Sedov traced the origin of the abovementioned Slavic
peoples (except Ukrainians) through the early Middle Ages.
The population in the European middle belt was in the
tribal phase of its development in the 5th through the 9th centuries when it
was composed of separate interrelated tribes or ethnic groups with their own
ethnonyms. For example, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes are considered
proto-English tribes. Likewise, there were proto-Polish and proto-Czech tribes,
while Volhynians, Derevlianians, Ulychians, Tivertsians, White Croatians,
Polianians and possibly Siverians could be viewed as proto-Ukrainian tribes.
Related tribes consolidated and crafted their own
states during the 9th and 10th centuries. This is how the Kingdom of England
and the Kingdom of Poland emerged, as well as the Duchy of Bohemia and the
first polities of Serbians, Croatians and Bulgarians, which sometimes expanded
into neighbouring lands and took the form of medieval empires. On the same
reasoning, the medieval state of Rus', which was formed when the abovementioned
proto-Ukrainian tribes united, should be viewed as an ancient Ukrainian polity.
The first polities that arose in the lands populated by the Anglo-Saxons,
Poles, Czechs, Serbians, Croatians, etc. are without reservation recognized as
the medieval states of these respective peoples.
KYIVAN RUS’ AS A MEDIEVAL EMPIRE
In line with the universal laws of ethnic development
in medieval Europe, the Ukrainian ethnocultural entity emerged in the early
Middle Ages and went through an intensive formative period in Kyivan Rus’.
There is no doubt that the Kyivan Rus' of the 10th
through the 13th centuries was an empire spanning the lands of many Slavic,
Baltic, Turkic, and Finnic ethnic groups. With the metropolis exerting
sustained influence on the conquered provinces, the ethnic culture (and
language) of the conquerors mixed with those of the subjugated peoples.
Directly emerging from this process were young ethnic groups that inherited
ethnocultural elements of both the ruling ethnicity and the indigenous peoples.
These groups put themselves on the historical map as distinct entities when
they freed themselves from their metropolises. This most often happened when
empires declined and young peoples fought for their independence.
The Roman Empire, for example, spawned the Romanic
peoples. After the fall of the British Empire, its descendant nations –
Americans, Anglophone Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders continued their
independent existence. The Spanish Empire gave rise to around 30 post-imperial
ethnic groups in Latin America: Mexicans, Chileans, Bolivians, Argentinians,
Cubans, Puerto Ricans, etc. Brazilians came from the Portuguese Empire and the
Quebecois from the French Empire.
Much like the Romans Latinised their conquered
provinces and triggered the formation of the Romanic peoples, ancient
Ukrainians from the Kyivan Rus’ Empire Rusified (not Russified!) Baltic and
Finnic peoples that inhabited the woodlands of Northeastern Europe and
engendered a group of Rus’ ethnicities (Belarusians, Pskov-Novgorodians and
Russians). Similar views on the genesis of East Slavic peoples have been
expressed by Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Mykola Chubaty, Mykhailo Braichevsky and
Yaroslav Dashkevych.
In their interpretation, the common Old Rus’ “cradle
of brotherly East Slavic peoples” acquired a completely new meaning. Emergent
peoples such as Belarusians, Pskov-Novgorodians and Russians lay in this
cradle, rocked by their father, the proto-Ukrainian colonists centred around
the metropolitan city of Kyiv. The Ukrainian people took form in the early
Middle Ages, while Belarusians, Pskov-Novgorodians and Russians emerged from
the body of the Old Ukrainian empire – Kyivan Rus’. Classical Russian
historiographer Vasily Klyuchevsky wrote:
“It was not until the time of Andrey
Bogolyubsky that Great Russians came onto the historical stage”, which was in
the second half of the 12th century. Therefore, there is no way Kyivan Rus’
could have been simply the first stage of Russian statehood – it was formed
long before the Russian people emerged as such, and was a product of the
efforts of Old Ukrainians at the medieval stage of their development.
After the fall of the medieval empires, their
formative ethnicities (the British, Spaniards, French, Portuguese, etc.) lived
in ethnic states, while the emergent peoples began writing their own history.
It most often began with a national liberation struggle against the centre of
the empire. Think of the American War of Independence or many of the military
conflicts in the Spanish colonies of Latin America during the 19th century. The
demise of the Roman Empire came amid endless wars of independence waged by
Roman provinces. One theory states that the so-called period of feudal
fragmentation in the 12th-century Rus' consisted, in fact, of a series of wars
waged by young proto-Belarusian, Pskov-Novgorodian and Russian ethnic groups in
a bid to free themselves from proto-Ukrainian imperial Kyiv. These led to the
decline of the Rus’ Empire, and the Mongols merely completed the process. The
12th-century feudal wars and the Mongol invasion made Southern Rus’ easy prey
for Poland, Lithuania and later Russia. In this way, the direct ancestors of
contemporary Ukrainians lost not only their empire but also their own ethnic
state.
NOBILITY AND ETHNONYMS
Some Soviet researchers denied that proto-Ukrainians
were the creators of Kyivan Rus', referring to the well-known fact that
Scandinavian Varangians were the first Kyivan princes. The important role
Scandinavian commercial, aristocratic and military elements played in the
formation of Rus' in the 9th and 10th centuries is undeniable and rests on
convincing evidence from medieval written sources and archaeological finds
along the Dnieper: typical ornaments worn by Vikings, characteristic burial
rites, Runic inscriptions and so on.
However, the Scandinavian names of the first Rus'
princes and their warriors – Askold, Olaf (Oleh), Ingvar (Ihor) and Helga
(Olha) – were replaced with Slavic names such as Sviatoslav, Volodymyr,
Yaroslav, Yaropolk and others as the Rus' state asserted itself in the second
half of the 10th century. This seemingly formal indicator reflects the deep
process of foreign noblemen being assimilated by the proto-Ukrainian population
of Rus'.
Similar occurrences were typical of European states in the early
Middle Ages. Most European medieval ethnicities in the 8th through the 10th
centuries that were mature enough to form their own states rallied precisely
around foreign nobility, often Scandinavians, as was the case in Rus'. For
example, the state-forming elite in France under Charlemagne was the military
nobility of the Franks, a Germanic tribe. Just as in Rus', Vikings from Denmark
and Normandy were the oldest kings and noblemen in England in the 10th and 11th
centuries. The first Polish kings in the 10th century from the Piast dynasty
actively engaged Scandinavian Vikings in order to consolidate lands around
Gniezno, at that time the capital of Poland – exactly what the Kyivan princes
did around the same time. Now the Kingdom of England is considered the first
state entity of Anglo-Saxons, i.e., the English people at the early medieval
stage of its ethnohistorical development. By analogy, we have every reason to
believe that Kyivan Rus' emerged as a state of the Southern Rus' people, i.e.,
proto-Ukrainians.
Beginning with 19th century historian Mikhail Pogodin who
was promoted the Normanist theory of Russian statehood, those opposed to
granting the principality of Kyiv the status of a proto-Ukrainian city claimed
that there was a break in the ethnohistorical development of the Middle Dnieper
region under Mongol rule. However, archaeologists and historians proved during
Soviet times that despite the Mongols having exterminated the residents of
Kyiv, Pereiaslav and Chernihiv, no replacement occurred in the populations of
the Middle Dnieper Region, Volhynia and Galicia. Thus, one and the same
ethnocultural population, known as Ruthenians (Rusy) in the princely era and Ukrainians in
recent centuries, has been developing in this territory since the early Middle
Ages. Advocates of the view that Ukrainians emerged in the late Middle Ages
maintain that Southern Rus' was populated by Ruthenians in the princely era,
while the ethnonym Ukrainians gained currency much later, allegedly
at the time when Ukrainians emerged as a people. This approach is clearly
manipulative. Changing ethnonyms in the course of national history is common
among European ethnic groups. The Polish people were known as the Lyakhs in the
late Middle Ages, but prior to that it consisted of individual tribes, each
with different names. Medieval Romanians went by the name Wallachians, and
Russians were referred to as Muscovites.
There is no doubt that the
Lyakhs/Poles, Wallachians/Romanians and Muscovites/Russians are the same
ethnicities known under different names during different historical periods.
Why then doesn’t this rule apply to Ruthenians/Ukrainians?
In line with universal laws of the development of
European peoples, the Ukrainian ethnocultural organism was known under several
ethnonyms over its 1,500-year existence. In the first millennium A.D., it
consisted, just like other young European ethnicities, of individual
interrelated tribes, each with a different name – Dulibians, Antes, Sklaveni,
Volhynians, Derevlianians, Polianians, Siverianians, Ulychians, Tivertsians and
White Croatians. When they united to form Rus', a proto-Ukrainian state, one
ethnonym, Ruthenian, was
established. From the late Middle Ages until modern times, this was gradually
replaced with the ethnonym Ukrainian. Traces of the
older name survive in the Carpathians (Rusyns), a fact that is unjustifiably
exploited by some politicians. The language of Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1595-1657)
was not significantly different from modern Ukrainian, but he was known as a
Ruthenian prince. The Polish population of Lviv referred to the urban residents
of Galicia, who were, no doubt, Ukrainians, as Ruthenians and their language asRuthenian in the interwar period. Therefore,
tying the genesis of Ukrainians to the history of their latest ethnonym is
unconvincing. Ethnonyms change, while ethnic essence remains the same, as we
have seen through the examples of Poles, Romanians, Russians and Ukrainians.
This proposed version of the ethnic genesis of the
Ukrainian people rests on universal principles of ethnic development in
medieval Europe. It provides an answer to the key question in the history of
Eastern Europe: what was the ethnicity of the residents of princely Kyiv and
Southern Rus'-Ukraine from the 10th through the 13th century? The answer is
that they were as much Ukrainian as their contemporaries in Gniezno, Paris and
London were Polish, French and English, respectively. In terms of language,
culture and consciousness, each of these peoples was vastly different from its
modern-day descendants. Nevertheless, they clearly were Ukrainians, Poles,
Frenchmen and Englishmen at the medieval stage of their historical development.
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