“Ukraine, the Lifeblood of Russia: Part I, Ukraine and Russia” by Dr. Eugene Lewicky
From the magazine Der Deutsche Krieg, 1915 issue
On February 22, 1914, the Russian nationalist newspaper Kievlanin wrote:
“The Ukrainian movement is more dangerous to Russia than all other national movements put together. We are obliged to uphold the unity and inseparability of the Russian people as well as that of the state. The Ukrainian movement alone threatens this citadel1 of ours, and that is why this appears to be the greatest national threat to the state.”
With these words the chauvinist Russian newspaper has only echoed those views which have always dominated the Russian statesmen and the Russian bureaucracy. No other people in the Russian Empire was persecuted as bloodily and ruthlessly as the Ukrainians. Tsar Peter the Great banned the Ukrainian language as a literary language in 1720. Tsarina Catherine II banned the use of the Ukrainian language in public life and destroyed the autonomy of Ukraine with the most severe means of violence. Even the word Ukraine was frowned upon and the country was renamed “Little Russia.” The bloody persecution of the Ukrainian people, their literature and language runs like a red thread through the whole of Russian history from Peter I up to the present time. The greatest poet of the revived Ukraine, Taras Shevchenko, spent his best years in the Peter and Paul Fortress and in exile in the Urals because of his writing activities, until he — physically broken — returned to his homeland shortly before his death. The greatest poet of the revived Ukraine was soon followed by others, and finally the notorious Ukaz of 18762 (a disgrace of the 19th century!) appeared, with which the Ukrainian literary language was forbidden and Ukrainian literature was outright banned in the Tsarist Empire.
The fear of Ukraine and the related bloody persecution of the Ukrainian people will be easily understood if we consider the importance of Ukraine to Russia. Through the Ukraine alone, the Muscovite state of Ivan III became a major European power, without the Ukraine it would have shrunk to a second-degree state with no influence.
By acquiring the Ukrainian territories, the Russian Empire reached as far south as the Black Sea.
Until the second half of the 13th century, until the unification of Lithuania and Poland in 1569, the Ukraine was largely independent in all its areas and presented itself as a powerful state, whose possessions stretched from the San River in present-day Galicia to the Don and to the Black Sea, and whose economic and political relations extended as far as Constantinople and beyond to Asia Minor. At the head of this powerful state was the Grand Duke of Kyiv3 (Kiev in Russian), to whom the other principalities subordinated themselves and followed in all important undertakings. In particular, the Grand Duke Vladimir the Great, who adopted the Christian faith with his people in 988, and Jaroslav the Wise, to whom the Ukrainian principalities owe the first codification of public and private law and the completion of the state organisation, became famous. With the Greeks, who established important colonies on the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea, such as B. Tiras, Olvia and Kherson, the first international trade treaties were concluded, which contributed to the fact that the trade from Kyiv expanded more and more to the Balkans and Asia and took on a firm form as early as the 11th century. Prince Sviatoslav, the father of Vladimir the Great, even occupied the Bulgarian lands for a while, and the power of the Ukrainian states in eastern and south-eastern Europe was so great that the Black Sea was called “Mare Ruthenum.”4 The first incursions of wild Asiatic hordes, the Cumans and Pechenegs, which fell in the first half of the 12th century, disrupted the further development of Kyiv and brought about the shift more to the west over the course of the 12th century for the metropolis of Ukrainian cultural and state life, from the Dnieper river to the area of the Dniester river. But even this shift in power, forced by unfavourable international conditions, was far from capable of destroying the state independence of the Ukrainian lands in one blow. In Halych, the residence of Prince Danilo, the power and splendor of Ukrainian independence revived. Danilo himself was held in such high regard that in 1253 Pope Innocent IV, through an envoy, crowned him King of Halych and Vladimir (today's Austrian East Galicia) and as ruler of the entire Ruthenian Empire. At that time, the Ukrainian kingdom of Danilo stretched from the San River near Peremyschl (renamed in Polish to Przemysl) to across the Dnieper to the Black Sea and was divided into three principalities, which were ruled by Danilo's brother, Prince Vasylko, and his two sons, Lew and Szwarno, and were subject to Danilo, who resided in Cholm (vulgate Chelm), as the head.
It was not long before the adverse consequences of the westward shift of state power caused by repeated raids by Mongol hordes and the consequent abandonment of the Dnieper Basin by the Ukrainian rulers were felt. The neighbouring peoples in the north and west, Poles and Lithuanians, were gradually pushed out of their possessions on the Elbe and the coast of the Baltic Sea by the culturally superior Germanic tribes and pushed to the southeast, and the result was that the Ukrainian principalities with their metropolises, Vladimir and Halych, were taken under fire. Because the Poles and Lithuanians were penetrating from the north and west, and the Tatars soon came from the south, who made their first devastating march into the Ukrainian lands as early as 1224 and from then on, with only very insignificant interruptions, carried out their terrible devastation far up to Lemberg ( Lwow). The Ukrainian Empire, which as the actual bulwark of Christianity was left without any protection and help, was unable to withstand this crossfire for any length of time. The first to fall was the principality of Halych, which was mostly exposed to the Polish incursion and which came to Poland in the second half of the 14th century, while the other Ukrainian principalities tried to save their independence by merging with Lithuania into one state united on the basis of full autonomy. But even this relative independence did not last long; already in 1569 the notorious (Lublin) union of Lithuania and Poland took place, through which the Ukrainian areas were incorporated into the Kingdom of Poland without any rights and handed over to the Polish tyranny like a conquered country.
In the Middle Ages, the Ukrainians played a decisive role in Eastern Europe as an independent state alongside Byzantium for a full five, relatively even a full eight centuries, at a time when there was still no talk of Russia in the sense of the political supremacy of the Muscovite tribes. At that time the Muscovite tribes formed only the two very insignificant principalities of Suzdal and Moscow, which, located in the far north, eked out a life almost unnoticed and exercised no influence at all on Eastern Europe. Only the defeat of Ukrainian state independence and the struggle for access to the Baltic and Black Seas that began soon after, which took several centuries and destroyed the Ukraine in torrents of blood, made Russians a power, thanks to their favourable geographic location and gave it that position in the family of nations that the Russian Tsarist Empire has held since the 17th century, since Peter I and Catherine II.
After the forced union with Poland in 1569, the Ukrainian people, deprived of their autonomy, created from themselves a new power intended to protect them against numerous enemies and regain state independence — the Cossacks. This military-republican organisation, headed by the elected hetman — in a sense modeled on the medieval order of knights — fought for the state independence of Ukraine with unprecedented tenacity and heroism for a full two and a half centuries — but heroic deeds and efforts alone were unable to stop the push of the Poles and Lithuanians from the west, the Muscovites from the north, and the Tatars and Turks from the south. The struggle for access to the Baltic and Black Seas had to be fought out among these peoples at all costs, and the Ukrainian territories formed the terrain on which this struggle lasted almost uninterruptedly for a full three centuries. It did not help that the brilliant Cossack hetman of the Ukraine, Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, won a series of brilliant victories over the Poles in the years 1648-1654, defeated all of Poland and even captured the then Polish king Casimir; and it didn't help that the second, highly talented Cossack hetman Peter Doroshenko defeated the Polish and Muscovite armies and, on the basis of the treaty with Turkey (1672), was even able to achieve full state independence for the Ukraine for a short time. Ukraine could not completely annihilate its numerous enemies, and — as already mentioned — enemy armies kept coming to the Ukrainian territories in order to start the world struggle for the territories from the Baltic to the Black Sea, on Ukrainian soil through torrents of blood the decision would have to be decided.
The end of this long-standing world war, which was fought only with very short interruptions, is in any case generally known. The struggle for the possessions on the Baltic Sea, in which the Poles, Swedes and Russians took part, ended for the Poles in 1721, and even as soon as 1660 with their complete defeat. After the Oliva Treaty of 1660, the Poles were left with only a very small strip of the Baltic Sea provinces, and with the Treaty of Nystedt of 1721, this possession was lost to the Poles once and for all. For a time the Baltic provinces of Courland, Estonia, Ingria and Karelia remained with Sweden, however, after the unfortunate war with Russia, especially after the Battle of Poltava in 1709 (in which battle the Cossack hetman Ivan Mazeppa took part with his troops on the side of the Swedes!), Sweden could no longer claim the Baltic provinces. In 1721 these passed to Russia, which they have managed to keep to this day. The struggle for possessions on the Black Sea, for the basins of the Dnieper and the Dniester, required a considerable amount of time and did not come to a temporary conclusion until the end of the 18th century. The Ukrainians, attacked by Poles, Turks, and Moscow, always tried to regain their independence, sometimes joining the Poles, sometimes the Russians, and even the Turks. The purpose of these unions was to liberate oneself from at least one enemy in an unequal struggle. But even these diplomatic ways out ultimately led to no success. In the Pereyaslav treaty of 1654, the Ukrainians united with Moscow as a completely independent state on the basis of a personal union, but already in 1667 in the Adrusov treaty, after a secret agreement between the rulers of both states, Ukraine was divided between Poland and Moscow. In this sad, difficult situation the Ukrainians still tried, with the help of the Turks and Swedes, to assert themselves against Poland and Moscow and regain their independence, but the attempt failed after a short interruption due to the unfavourable battles at Zurawno (1676) and Poltava (1709), which completely exhausted the Ukrainian people and left them helpless at the mercy of their opponents. In the course of the 18th century, the Ukrainian areas were repeatedly divided between Turkey, Poland and Russia, until finally, with the partition of Poland, the Ukrainian areas, with the exception of Galicia, passed completely to Russia. And with that the great world struggle in western Europe5 finally came to an end. Russia, after much effort and struggle, came into possession of the Ukraine and the Black Sea, areas which extended the possessions of the once small Muscovite principality from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and which gave the Russian Empire established by Peter the Great that position of power procured, which Russia still occupies in Eastern Europe until now.
If one considers the current world war, especially with regard to its Eastern European scene, one cannot help but become aware of the analogy between the current world war and the described battles of the Middle Ages and modern times in Eastern Europe. The purpose of the present war is nothing other than a new distribution of forces in the area from the Baltic to the Black Sea, a new regulation of that question which was decided in favour of Russia at the end of the 18th century, but whose solution was such conditions in Eastern Europe which have been increasingly threatening the European equilibrium and which the central powers of Europe, in their own interest as well as in the interest of maintaining general peace, must no longer tolerate.
Staatszitadelle
Kijiw
Sea of the Ruthenians
im Westen Europas