Sunday, November 9, 2014

Window on Eurasia: Bolsheviks Gave Ukrainian and Belarusian Areas to RSFSR – and Other Unexpected Facts from Contemporary Maps


Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, November 9 – Vladimir Putin and his regime have routinely invoked the notion that Ukraine includes many “historically” Russian lands and continues to violate ethnographic borders, but an examination of the best available Russian maps from a century ago show that the violations were all in the opposite direction in those cases and others.

 

            And that is not all they show, according to Yaroslav Butakov, a historian and political commentator who on today’s Rufabula.com portal provides what he says is “a small ‘liquidation of illiteracy’ session on ethnography” based “on the facts and nothing but the facts” (rufabula.com/author/yaroslav-butakov/166).

 

In 1914, the Imperial Academy of Sciences issued “A Dialetical Map of the Russian Language in Europe,” which showed that “not only Crimea but even – in contemporary borders – almost all of Krasnodar kray and Belgorod oblast as well as significant parts of Rostov and Voronezh oblasts were settled primarily by Ukrainians.”

 

The map contained in that publication, available on line at karty.by/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/...) also clearly shows that to the east of Belarus now, Belarusian speakers predominated in Smolensk oblast, large parts of Bryansk and Kaluga oblasts, the south of Pskov oblast and the northwestern part of Tver oblast.

 

And this map reflected the best expertise at the time and was used by other official publications and scholars at the time, up to 1928 when K.V. Kudryashov published the Russian historical atlas. In his article, Butakov provides precise citations to these Russian-language publications.

 

“From this the conclusion follows that when they drew the eastern borders of the Ukrainian and Belarusian SSRs, the Bolsheviks made significant revisions from the ethnographic principle in favor of the Russian SFSR,” giving it ethnographically Ukrainian and Belarusian lands which the Russian Federation retains.

 

(Butakov does not say in this article, but it is certainly worth noting: many of these areas acquired a Russian cast after Stalin’s terror famine when ethnic Russians were moved into areas that had been Ukrainian speaking for centuries.  So much for these regions being Russian from “time immemorial” as Putin likes to say.)

 

This is not the basis for proposing a revision of the borders, Butakov says. “But it is necessary to know historical truth and to distinguish it from lies.”  And the issue of these borders is hardly the only one where the facts of the case and what some in Moscow say are two very different things.

 

These linguistic maps also show something else: they indicate that in many parts of Ukraine, Russian should have the status of a regional language, even as they show that in many parts of the Russian Federation, Ukrainian should have that status.  Moscow talks a lot about the former, but it does not do anything for the latter.

 

And there is a third aspect to all this that older maps show.  The 1914 maps showing Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian treated not only the latter two as dialects but also discussed the Olenets and Pomor dialects of the Russian language. The Pomors predominated in the Russian North but no one called it Pomorya.

 

 As even Soviet era scholars acknowledged, the Pomors were not only linguistically but socially distinct from the Russians: Unlike the latter, they never lived under the conditions of serfdom.  But now, Russian writers don’t want to talk about that difference, perhaps Butakov says because they want to “level down” all Russians into one rank.

 

In conclusion, Butakov gives his readers one piece of valuable advice: “In general, study history from the original sources until they are banned.” Those in cartography are especially instructive.

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