THEY PLANNED THE WEDDING FOR SUNDAY, MARCH 30, 1847, but two days earlier police officials unexpectedly showed up at the groom’s apartment and arrested him, postponing the wedding for twenty-eight long years. The arrested man was a twenty-nine-year-old professor of history at Kyiv University, Mykola (Nikolai) Kostomarov. On the evening of March 31, a day after his wedding was supposed to take place, Kostomarov was sent under police escort to St. Petersburg: the order for his arrest had come from the very top of the imperial hierarchy.
It was given by Count Aleksei Orlov, head of the Third Section of the Imperial Chancellery—the body responsible for political surveillance. The heir to the throne, the future Tsar Alexander II, was briefed on the case, which involved a number of Kyivan intellectuals—government officials, teachers, and students. One of them, Taras Shevchenko, an artist and popular poet who wrote in Ukrainian, was arrested on April 5, upon his arrival in Kyiv, and also escorted to St. Petersburg. There were further arrests and more deportations to the capital, where the liberal public was at a loss to explain the authorities’ actions.
The governor general of Kyiv, Podolia, and Volhynia, Dmitrii Bibikov, was then in St. Petersburg, reporting on, among other things, a proclamation that had been found on the wall of a building in Kyiv. It read: “Brothers! A great hour is upon us, an hour in which you are being given the opportunity to wash off the dishonor inflicted on the dust of our ancestors, on our native Ukraine, by the base hand of our eternal foes. Who among you will not lend a hand to this great undertaking? God and good people are with us! The ever loyal sons of Ukraine, foes of the katsapy [derogatory term for Russians].”
The appeal was as anti-Russian as could be imagined, but it was written in Russian, not Polish, and not addressed to the Polish nobles who then dominated Kyiv society. It was directed to “the faithful sons of Ukraine”—people whom the imperial government considered Russian by nationality. Bibikov was sent back to Kyiv with orders to take over supervision of the Kyiv educational district. At a meeting with faculty and students of the university, he warned them against “loose thinking,” threatening, “If I managed to bring 5 million people to heel, then I will do it to you as well: either I will burst, or all of you will explode!” The reference was to the millions of the inhabitants of Right-Bank Ukraine, entrusted to Bibikov but claimed as followers by the Polish insurgents.
There was no doubt that this manifestation of disloyalty came from the very institutions that had been created to ensure the loyalty of the region’s inhabitants to tsar and empire. Mykola Kostomarov taught at the university, while Taras Shevchenko, who had just been appointed instructor of drawing there, had earlier been employed by the Archeographic Commission, which aimed to document the Russian identity of Right-Bank Ukraine. Official policy appeared to have backfired. Instead of solidifying a common front between the government and the “Russian” population of the western provinces against the Polish threat, it had contributed to dividing the imperial Russian nation and promoted the development of a separate nation that would claim equal rights with the Great Russians in the core areas of the empire in the course of the next few decades. A new Ukrainian nation was emerging from the cocoon of the old Little Russian identity. The imperial government would do everything in its power to stop its development and put the Ukrainian genie back into the Little Russian bottle.
THE THIRD SECTION’S INVESTIGATION INTO THE ACTIVITIES OF Kostomarov, Shevchenko, and others uncovered the existence of a clandestine organization, the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. Its goal was the creation of a voluntary federation of Slavic nations, with Ukraine at its core. The brotherhood became known in government circles as the Slavic Society, later renamed the Ukrainian Slavic Society.
There was reason for the authorities’ initial view of the case as part of a broad intellectual movement. As employed by government officials of the 1840s, the designation “Slavophiles” was applied to a group of intellectuals, located mainly in Moscow, who took the issue of nationality—Slavic in general, and Russian in particular—very seriously. Their views coincided only in part with the government’s understanding of the principle of nationality as presented in Count Sergei Uvarov’s triad of Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. The Slavophiles held Orthodoxy in great esteem but were much less enthusiastic about the government. Moreover, they believed that with the introduction of Western practices by Peter I, Russia had almost lost its unique character.
The Slavophile movement emerged in opposition to the “Westernizers” among the Russian intellectual and political elite, who saw Western Europe as a model for Russia’s development. Their viewpoint was first fully articulated in the Philosophical Letters of Petr Chaadaev, who criticized the Russian social and intellectual scene, claiming that his country was lagging behind the West. Written in the years following the Decembrist Uprising, the letters were first published in 1836 and provoked a negative reaction not only from the government, which closed the journal that published the letters, but also from the nascent Slavophile movement, led by the prominent theologian, philosopher, and poet Aleksei Khomiakov. Khomiakov’s followers were influenced by the ideas of Friedrich Schelling, a friend and later rival of G. W. F. Hegel, whose vision of society as a living organism appealed to them. Their texts emphasized the Russian historical tradition, the importance of the church, and differences between Russia and the West.
Among the key figures of the Slavophile movement mentioned by investigators of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius in their reports were two Moscow University professors, Mikhail Pogodin and Stepan Shevyrev. Pogodin, whom Uvarov had rejected as the prospective author of a Russian history textbook integrating the western provinces into the empire, taught history at Moscow University; Shevyrev lectured there on philology and literature. The two also served as copublishers of the journal Moskvitianin (The Muscovite), which became a mouthpiece of the Slavophile movement in the 1840s. Pogodin was a leading figure in the emerging pan-Slavic movement, which regarded all Slavs as a single family. By stressing the uniqueness (samobytnost’) and self-awareness (samosoznanie) of the Russian nation, the Slavophiles, for all their pan-Slavic ecumenism, set an example to non-Russian Slavs who wished to celebrate the distinctiveness of their own peoples and, consequently, their right to autonomy and independence.
Early on, Ukraine took a special place in the Slavophile imagination. Pogodin and Shevyrev in particular showed great interest in the culture and history of Ukraine, or, as they called it, Little Russia. In the 1830s, Mykola Kostomarov, then a student at Kharkiv University in eastern Ukraine, had been strongly influenced by Stepan Shevyrev, whose lectures he attended. Shevyrev, who referred to Little Russia as Great Russia’s elder sister, put a strong emphasis on nationality and encouraged the study of popular culture. But there was a problem, since “nationality” meant different things in Moscow and Kharkiv. When Kostomarov went to the people to collect their lore, he had to speak to them in Ukrainian, and by 1839 he was already writing in that language. Kostomarov was not the first admirer of nationality to bring back texts from his field trips that were written in a language difficult to understand, if not entirely foreign, to enthusiasts of nationality in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
The first major literary work in vernacular Ukrainian was published in 1798. It appeared in St. Petersburg, where a printshop issued the first three parts of a six-part travesty of Virgil’s Aeneid, titled Eneïda. The Greek characters of the original epic were turned into Ukrainian-speaking Zaporozhian Cossacks. The author, Ivan Kotliarevsky, was descended from a Cossack officer family residing in the former Hetmanate. Employed as a schoolteacher and military officer, he also served as artistic director of a Poltava theater between 1812 and 1821. During that time, he wrote the first modern Ukrainian-language play, Natalka from Poltava. By then the Ukrainian language had already acquired its first grammar, and the first collection of Ukrainian folk songs had seen the light of day.
In the 1830s, Kharkiv became the center of the Ukrainian Romantic movement, with a promising Russian philologist, Izmail Sreznevsky, and the descendant of a local noble family, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, among others, writing on Ukrainian topics and trying their hand at expressing themselves in Ukrainian. In 1833, Kvitka-Osnovianenko produced the first Ukrainian-language short story. Five years later, Kostomarov made his contribution by writing a Ukrainian-language drama on a subject from the Cossack past and then publishing collections of his Ukrainian poems.
But the most important contribution to Ukrainian literature in the late 1830s was made by Kostomarov’s future co-conspirator, Taras Shevchenko. Like Kostomarov, Shevchenko was born a serf, but whereas Kostomarov was recognized as a free man at the age of fifteen—his mother was a serf, but his father had been a nobleman—Shevchenko had to wait for his freedom until he was twenty-four. He owed it to the Russian artistic community and, improbably enough, to the generosity of the imperial court. Shevchenko was brought to St. Petersburg by his landlord in the early 1830s, where his artistic talent was noted by the most prominent figures in the Russian artistic and intellectual world. They wanted to set the young artist free and eventually achieved their goal. Kirill Briullov, one of the best painters of the Russian Empire, produced a portrait of Vasilii Zhukovsky, one of the most prominent Russian poets of the era and a tutor of the future Tsar Alexander II. At an auction held in 1838, the portrait went to a member of the imperial family who knew that the proceeds would buy the freedom of a twenty-four-year-old artist born into serfdom.
It was Shevchenko’s aptitude for drawing and painting that was recognized at the time. In 1838, after becoming a free man, Shevchenko entered the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts and joined the class of his savior, Briullov. But Shevchenko’s real talent lay in poetry and writing. He wrote prose in Russian and poetry in Ukrainian, and it was the latter that both made him famous and got him into trouble, first with the Russian critics and then with the imperial authorities. His collection of Ukrainian-language poetry was first published in 1840 under the title Kobzar (Minstrel). It was widely reviewed in Russian literary journals and newspapers: while some critics welcomed the appearance of a collection of Ukrainian poetry, others questioned the legitimacy of such an enterprise, expressing regret over the decision of a gifted poet to waste his talent by writing in Ukrainian.
“It seems to us,” wrote one of the critics in a popular journal, Biblioteka dlia chteniia (Library for Reading), “that the Little Russian poets pay insufficient attention to the fact that they often write in such a dialect as does not exist even in Russia: they unceremoniously rework Great Russian words and phrases in Little Russian fashion, creating a language for themselves that has never existed, that none of all possible Russias—neither great, nor middle, nor little, nor white, nor black, nor red—could call its own.” Another critic proposed that Shevchenko switch to Russian. “We would advise him,” wrote this contributor to Severnaia pchela (Northern Bee), “to convey his exquisite feelings in Russian. Then his little flowers, as he calls his verses, would be richer and more fragrant and, above all, longer-lasting.”
Shevchenko was not the only author attacked by Russian reviewers for his use of Ukrainian as opposed to Russian. When Kotliarevsky’s Eneïda was first fully published in 1842, it met with a similar reaction. “For Russian readers who have not had the opportunity to live in Little Russia or its neighboring lands,” wrote a contributor to Biblioteka dlia chteniia, “Mr. Kotliarevsky’s poem is incomprehensible, even with the help of a dictionary.” Not all Russian critics shared that view, but those who did were not inventing difficulties: the Ukrainian language was indeed hard for Russian readers to understand. Even Gogol’s Russian-language writings on Ukrainian subjects were supplied with glossaries.
The differences between the Russian and Ukrainian nationalities did not manifest themselves in language alone. History became another point of contention. After Nikolai Polevoi, the author of a multivolume history of the Russian people, had criticized one of the imperial historians, Dmitrii Bantysh-Kamensky, for failing to take account of a distinct Ukrainian identity in his History of Little Russia (1822), the Ukrainian Mykola Markevych embarked on the writing of a new kind of Ukrainian history. His History of Little Russia was published in five volumes in 1842–1843. As a template for his work, Markevych used the anonymous manuscript “History of the Rus’” (ca. 1818), which treated Cossack history as the annals of a separate nation. The anonymous work was popularized by Izmail Sreznevsky in Kharkiv and widely read by Kostomarov and his circle, shaping their perception of the Ukrainian past as distinct from the Russian.
In 1846, the 1818 manuscript was published in Moscow by Osyp Bodiansky, a Ukrainian-born professor of Slavic studies at Moscow University who was also a member of the Slavophile circle mentioned in the investigation of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. Another potential suspect, Mikhail Pogodin, saw cultural differences between Russians and Ukrainians that went beyond language and history. He wrote in 1845, “The Great Russians live side by side with the Little Russians, profess one faith, have shared one fate and, for many years, one history. But how many differences there are between the Great Russians and the Little Russians!”
By the mid-nineteenth century, the Slavophiles’ belief in the unity of Great and Little Russia and their treatment of the latter as the fountainhead of Russian culture was being challenged by the Little Russians’ search for a nationality of their own. Encouraged by like-minded individuals in Moscow and St. Petersburg to investigate and embrace issues of nationality, the Ukrainians brought to the salons of St. Petersburg and Moscow not only a language quite different from Russian but also a history distinct from that of the Russian people and state. It would soon become clear that language, history, and culture could be used not only to construct a past separate from that of the Great Russians but also a different future. In that new vision, Little Russia would turn into Ukraine, an entity still close to Russia but also very different and quite separate from it.
THE INVESTIGATION INTO THE ACTIVITIES OF THE BROTHERHOOD of Saints Cyril and Methodius was complete in May 1847, when the chief of gendarmes and head of the Third Section of the Imperial Chancellery, Count Aleksei Orlov, reported his findings to the tsar. “The uncovering of a Slavic, or, more correctly, a Ukrainian-Slavic, society began with a student at Kyiv University, Aleksei Petrov,” wrote Orlov. Petrov was the impoverished son of a former police official. He rented a room in the same building as one of the active participants in the brotherhood, overheard its members’ discussions, and was invited to attend some of their meetings. What he heard at those meetings made him to go to the authorities and denounce his neighbors. According to Petrov, the members were discussing preparations for a popular revolt against the imperial authorities with the goal of uniting all of the Slavic nations and establishing a government based on popular representation. To achieve their goal, he said, they were prepared to do away with the imperial family.
But, in Orlov’s view, the interrogation of participants in the brotherhood and the analysis of its programmatic documents showed only that the original fears and concerns had been exaggerated. The brotherhood consisted of only three members, including Kostomarov. Acquaintances, such as Shevchenko, occasionally participated in the discussions, but even those petered out after a few months. The members of the brotherhood and their circle of friends were not preparing an uprising, and they allegedly only wanted to achieve the unification of the Slavic tribes under the auspices of the Russian tsar. “The political evil per se, fortunately, had not managed to develop to the extent suggested by the preliminary reports,” wrote Orlov to the tsar.
Historians later claimed that Orlov either deliberately or inadvertently underestimated the threat presented by the brotherhood and thus misrepresented or misunderstood the nature of its program. The “political evil” that the authorities were concerned about was expressed in a number of texts, the most elaborate of which was The Law of God, or Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People. Orlov called it a reworking of a text by the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, while Kostomarov claimed at his interrogation that it had been composed by Poles in the early 1830s. In actual fact, Kostomarov was its main author, and the Books of the Genesis presented many of the ideas discussed by the members of the brotherhood.
The political goal put forward in the work was indeed, as the authorities had feared at the start of the investigation, the creation of a Slavic confederation based on the principle of popular representation, with no role envisioned for the tsar. The members of the imperial family were treated as German usurpers imposing their autocratic rule on the freedom-loving Slavs. The social order of the future Slavic state was supposed to be based on equality and Christian ethics. According to the text, there was no tsar but the ruler of the heavens. Kostomarov accepted only two elements of Uvarov’s tripartite formula, religion and nationality, rejecting autocracy. But religion was interpreted in non-autocratic form, and the nationality endorsed in the Books was Ukrainian, not Russian.
The Books characterized the Ukrainians as a people distinct from both the Russians and the Poles who were destined to lead the future Slavic federation. The Ukrainians had a special role because they were the most egalitarian and democratic of all the Slavs. If the Russians were ruled by an autocratic tsar and the Poles had an overbearing caste of noble landowners, the Ukrainians were a peasant nation that cherished its democratic Cossack traditions. What were the distinguishing characteristics of the Ukrainians, aside from their egalitarian social structure? According to Kostomarov’s friend and fellow suspect Panteleimon Kulish, those characteristics were language and customs. Another co-conspirator, Heorhii Andruzky, envisioned Ukraine as encompassing not only the lands settled by Ukrainians in the Russian Empire but also territory extending into Austrian Galicia. Kostomarov saw the future Ukrainian state as a republic in a union of equals with other Slavic states. He concluded the Books with the following statement: “Ukraine will become an independent republic in a Slavic union. Then all the peoples will say, indicating the place where Ukraine will be drawn on the map, ‘Here is the stone rejected by the builder: it will be the cornerstone.’”
Orlov recommended punishing the Ukrainophiles—a term that he invented to denote the core members of the brotherhood and their acquaintances—with imprisonment, internal exile, and, in the case of Taras Shevchenko, forced military service. The authorities did not believe that Shevchenko was a member of the society but were disturbed by his verses, in which he not only extolled Ukraine but also attacked the emperor and empress for exploiting his native land. They were appalled by his lack of gratitude to the ruling dynasty: Shevchenko had been born a serf and redeemed with money paid by a member of the royal family.
Orlov was also concerned about the impact that Shevchenko’s glorification of the Cossack past could have on readers. “Along with favorite poems, ideas may have been sown and subsequently have taken root in Little Russia about the supposedly happy times of the hetmans, the felicity of restoring those times, and Ukraine’s capacity to exist as a separate state,” Orlov wrote. The same applied to the prose of Panteleimon Kulish. Heorhii Andruzky entertained the idea of restoring the Hetmanate—one of the main concerns of the authorities, who, in the opinion of some scholars, mistook the new threat of cultural nationalism for the old one of Cossack separatism.
In order to avoid publicizing the brotherhood’s program, the authorities convinced Kostomarov and others to change their original testimonies in order to fit the official narrative of the case. According to that version, the brotherhood had wanted nothing more than to unite the Slavs under the scepter of the Russian tsar. But that did not mean absolving the members of their misdeeds: the authorities made public the fact of the brotherhood’s existence and the punishment meted out to its members. Orlov recommended a certain level of publicity “so that all may know the fate prepared for themselves by those who occupy themselves with Slavdom in a spirit contrary to our government, and even to divert other Slavophiles from such a path.” The sentences were not excessively harsh. Kostomarov, the key figure of the brotherhood, was given a one-year term in the prison of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, followed by internal exile in the provincial town of Saratov on the Volga River. Others received sentences of one to three years’ imprisonment and internal exile. Most of those involved were simply exiled from Ukraine or transferred to Russia.
The authorities viewed the brotherhood’s activities through the prism of their ongoing struggle with the Polish nobility for the loyalty of Right-Bank Ukraine. “Obviously the work of that general propaganda from Paris,” commented Nicholas I on the investigative reports. “For a long time we did not believe that such work was going on in Ukraine, but now there can be no doubt about it.” A memorandum prepared by an officer of the Third Section developed the same theme while arguing against harsh punishment of the suspects: “Harsh measures will make forbidden thoughts even dearer to them and may cause the hitherto submissive Little Russians to adopt the nervous attitude against our government in which the Kingdom of Poland finds itself after the revolt. It would be more expedient and just not even to give any appearance to the Little Russians that the government had any reason to suspect that harmful ideas had been sown among them.”
Not showing that the government was unduly concerned was one thing; dealing with the newly uncovered problem of Little Russian disloyalty was another. A memorandum prepared by officers of the Third Section suggested measures to curb the future spread of Ukrainophile ideas. It read: “Through the minister of popular education, to warn all those dealing with Slavdom, antiquity, and nationality, as well as professors, teachers, and censors, that in their books and lectures they sedulously avoid any mention of Little Russia, Poland, and other lands subject to Russia that may be understood in a sense dangerous to the integrity and peace of the empire, and that, on the contrary, they strive as much as possible to incline all lessons of scholarship and history toward the true loyalty of all those tribes to Russia.” In 1854, Uvarov, in turn, reminded the minister of the interior 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.”
Faced with the Polish threat in the western provinces, and using the idea of Russian nationality as a weapon in the struggle for control of the region, the government had to be careful not to allow the idea of nationality to undermine the principle of autocracy and the unity of the empire. It was a difficult balancing act, but the authorities understood the complexity of the task.
ALTHOUGH THE PUBLIC WAS ALLOWED TO KNOW NOTHING ABOUT these and other “destructive ideas,” the rumor mill was doing its job. Aleksandr Nikitenko, a literary censor in St. Petersburg, recorded in his diary: “In the south, in Kyiv, a society has been uncovered whose goal was a confederal union of all Slavs in Europe on democratic foundations, on the model of the North American States.… It is said that all this was brought to light by the representations of the Austrian government.”
The Russian Westernizers had a field day. They had always regarded the Little Russian project with suspicion, considering it an intrigue designed to force Russia off the road of European progress and drag it back into the pre-Petrine past, and were constantly polemicizing with the Slavophiles. One leading Westernizer, the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky, in expressing his solidarity with the regime, wrote: “Shevchenko was sent to the Caucasus as a soldier. I have no pity for him: if I were his judge, I would do no less. I hold a personal grudge against liberals of that sort. They are the enemies of achievement of any kind. With their impertinent idiocies they irritate the government and make it suspicious, ready to see rebellion where there is nothing of the kind, and provoke harsh measures that are deadly to literature and education.”
Commenting on Panteleimon Kulish’s suggestion that Ukraine should separate from Russia, Belinsky continued his line of attack: “Oh, those topknots [khokhly, a derogatory term for Ukrainians]! They are just dumb sheep, but they liberalize in the name of dumplings with pig fat! And now that it is forbidden to write anything, they befoul everything. But on the other hand, how can one blame the government? What government would allow the advocacy in print of separating one of its provinces?”
The official investigation of the brotherhood exonerated the Moscow Slavophiles. The Slavophile writer and activist Fedor Chizhov, originally suspected of membership in the brotherhood, escaped persecution not only because he was found to have had no contacts with it, but also because, according to Orlov, he “turned out to be only a Slavophile, a champion of Russian nationality in the spirit of Moscow scholars.” According to a report filed by an agent of the Third Section, the Russian Slavophiles were united only by “some kind of murky and mystical premonitions of the intellectual victory of the East over the West, by attachment to antiquity, by love for Moscow, and, consequently, by some kind of malevolence toward Petersburg.” He continued: “No one suspects a political aim, although the desire and expectation is expressed that Russia, casting aside foreign elements of development, take an exclusively national path of development.” He was right. One of the leaders of the Slavophile movement, Aleksei Khomiakov, upon hearing about the goals of the brotherhood, wrote, “The Little Russians were eventually affected with political stupidity. It is sad and painful to see such nonsense and backwardness.… Moral struggle—this is what we have to think about today.”
The arrests and sentences made the Russian Slavophiles distance themselves from their Ukrainian brethren. This was true even of such “Ukrainophiles” among the Moscow intellectuals as Mikhail Pogodin. According to the report of a government informer, Pogodin began to speak differently about the Slavophile idea after the arrests. What that meant in practice was demonstrated by his review of the History of the Rus’, the anonymous text that Osyp Bodiansky had published in Moscow in 1846 presenting the exploits of the Ukrainian Cossacks as the history of a separate nation, which influenced the thinking of Kostomarov and his circle. In 1849, in a review that appeared in the journal Moskvitianin, of which he was a copublisher, Pogodin noted that the History “passed over in silence all the advantages that accrued to [Little Russia] from unification with mighty Great Rus’, the heart of the Russian state.” His earlier reading of the History, whose authorship was attributed at the time to Archbishop Heorhii Konysky, had been quite different. “I read Konysky with satisfaction,” wrote Pogodin in 1846, a year before the arrests. He went on to express his approval of the way in which the author of the History of the Rus’ portrayed the cruelty of Peter I and his assistants in Ukraine.
In 1851, Pogodin wrote a text styled as a letter to the distinguished philologist Izmail Sreznevsky, a former member of the circle of Kharkiv Romantics. There, Pogodin claimed for Great Russia the history of Kyivan Rus’, which he had earlier regarded as part of the history of Little Russia. This claim marked the beginning of a prolonged Russo-Ukrainian debate over the legacy of Kyivan Rus’, but for Pogodin it was a natural development of his earlier views on the Slavic nationalities and their histories. He believed that history was a product of the activities of nationalities, and each nationality had a history of its own. As long as the (Great) Russians and Ukrainians (Little Russians) were distinct Slavic nationalities (such as the Bulgarians, Serbs, and Czechs), the Kyivan past had to belong to one of them. Pogodin decided that it belonged to Great Russia.
Already in the mid-1830s, Pogodin had had trouble satisfying Uvarov’s request to combine the history of northeastern and southwestern Rus’ into a single narrative. In the mid-1840s, Pogodin suggested that there had been linguistic differences among the population as early as Kyivan times, and that they coincided with nineteenth-century distinctions between Great Russians, Little Russians, and White Russians. Thus the population of Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Halych spoke Little Russian, that of Minsk and Vitsebsk spoke White Russian (Belarusian), and that of Vladimir and Moscow spoke Great Russian. He considered the Kyivan princes, including even a major figure of Russian history, Andrei Bogoliubsky, to have been Little Russian. It was only Bogoliubsky’s descendants, argued Pogodin, who had “gone native” in the northeastern lands and become Great Russians. Bogoliubsky himself, like his father and the founder of Moscow, Yurii Dolgoruky, had been a Little Russian.
Pogodin’s account of Kyivan Rus’ history deprived the early Great Russian narrative of its most prized element—the Kyivan period. In his letter to Sreznevsky, Pogodin decided to correct that problem with another twist of his linguistic argument. He asserted that, in reading the early Kyivan chronicles, he had detected no trace of the Little Russian language, but that there were clear connections between the chronicle entries and the Great Russian language. Equating language with nation, Pogodin suggested that it was Great Russians, not Little Russians, who had inhabited Kyiv during its golden age and created its history and annals. The Little Russians, he went on to argue, had appeared in the region only after the Mongol invasion, which pushed the Great Russians farther north.
Pogodin published his letter in 1856, five years after writing it. It provoked an immediate critical response from his old acquaintance Mykhailo Maksymovych, who explained to his friend in a series of published letters that the language of the Kyivan chroniclers was Church Slavonic, based on South Slavic dialects. As such, it bore little relation to the spoken language of the population of Kyivan Rus’. Maksymovych acknowledged the existence of differences between the Great Russian and Little Russian languages prior to the Mongol invasion, but said they were closely related to each other. He also regarded the histories of northern and southern Rus’ before the Mongol invasion as being closely related. In effect, Maksymovych rebuffed Pogodin’s Great Russian claim to Kyiv and defended the Little Russian (Ukrainian) character of Kyivan Rus’ history. But Maksymovych was not a separatist: for him, the Little Russian ethnic group was part of a larger bipartite all-Russian nation. He wrote to Pogodin: “The fact that I love Kyiv, the city of our first throne, more than you is also natural, since, in cultivating an all-Russian love for it, and a closer Little Russian love for it as well, I also love it as the homeland of my kinsmen.”
With the members of the Cyrillo-Methodian Brotherhood in internal exile or lying low after the arrests, the impulse to separate the histories of the Great and Little Russians now began to originate from Moscow, not Kyiv. The bone of contention was no longer the Cossack past, as it had been for Kostomarov, but the Kyivan Rus’ past, which both sides considered their own. There is no indication that Maksymovych was able to convince Pogodin to change his opinion. Instead, Pogodin rejected his old view concerning the Little Russian nationality of the Kyivan princes and claimed them, along with Rus’ history as a whole, for the Great Russians. In his history of pre-Mongol Rus’, published in 1871, Pogodin wrote: “The supposed Little Russians moved north, to the Suzdal land, with Yurii Dolgoruky and Andrei Bogoliubsky. It would seem that they should have left their Little Russian influence on something—in customs, in language. But no—we see no change in the north at that time; consequently, it was not Little Russians but the selfsame Great Russians who went there.”
Judging by his other works and the reports he made to the government on the results of his travels in the Slavic lands, Pogodin regarded the Great and Little Russians as separate nationalities (he wrote that the latter had “all the distinguishing marks of a separate tribe”) belonging to the same Russian group. Depending on circumstances, he considered the Galician inhabitants of Austria-Hungary as either a separate group or part of the Little Russian nationality, but he also considered them constituents of a larger Russian nation. In both word and deed, Pogodin supported the development of what he called the Little Russian dialect, but he objected to elevating it to a level equal to Russian. Arguing in the mid-1850s for autonomous status for Poland within the Russian Empire, Pogodin suggested that the boundary should recognize only two languages, Russian and Polish. “Language—that is the true boundary between peoples,” he wrote. “Poland is where Polish is spoken. Russia is where Russian is spoken. What principle could be more right or just?”
The Pogodin-Maksymovych debate opened the question of how to divide the historical narrative between Russia and Ukraine. It challenged the model that had dominated the thinking of Russian elites in the first half of the nineteenth century—a model in which Kyivan Rus’ was considered to belong to the all-Russian past. More clearly than any of his predecessors, Pogodin divided that past into Great Russian and Little Russian parts. Besides the Great and Little Russians, he recognized the White Russians (Belarusians) as a distinct group, while Maksymovych maintained the established division of the all-Russian nationality into Great (northern) Russians and Little (southern) Russians. Although this difference in the treatment of the all-Russian nationality was not contested in their debate, it would come to the fore in the next decade, the tumultuous 1860s.
Pogodin’s letter appeared in print in 1856, the first full year of the rule of the new emperor, Alexander II, a student of Vasilii Zhukovsky known for his liberal leanings. Alexander’s rule would begin in an atmosphere of great expectations and bring major political, social, and cultural changes, creating new opportunities for a Russo-Ukrainian intellectual encounter. A few years later, the members of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius were allowed to return from internal exile. They now moved their activities from Kyiv to St. Petersburg. Shevchenko went there after his release from military service and exile, as did Kostomarov, who in 1859 became a professor of Russian history at St. Petersburg University. Ironically, that was a position that had once been held by the father of the “reunification of Rus’” paradigm, Nikolai Ustrialov.
If Ustrialov was the favorite court historian, Kostomarov now became the favorite of the radical students and liberal public of St. Petersburg. After his inaugural lecture, “he was carried out on their arms,” recalled a contemporary. “The great hall of the university was so crowded that listeners sat on the windowsills or two to a seat.” In the lecture, Kostomarov set new terms for the debate on nationality, shifting attention to the popular masses, whom he regarded as the main object of historical study. “No law, no institution will be important to us in themselves, but only their application to the people’s lives,” argued Kostomarov. “Features unimportant to the historian who puts the life of the state first will be a matter of the first importance to us.” The debate was clearly entering a new stage.