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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