Vasily Shulgin: Reflections on the origin of Rus and the Ukrainian question (based on the emigre journalism)

Abstract

The author analyses the works of the prominent politician and memoirist Vasily Shulgin published in the emigre periodicals to examine his views on the origin of the Slavic people and the Ukrainian question. Trying to prove the “Russianness” of the Ukrainian people, Shulgin often referred to historical sources as a journalist, not as a scholar (although Shulgin remarked ironically, “Sure, I am not a historian, but I have an affinity for history - a sort of the disease.”) Speculating about the origin of Rus, Shulgin repeatedly told the theory championed by General Grigory Yanushevsky based on the legend of three brothers - Czech, Lech, and Rus. According to this legend, they came from the Roman Pannonia in the 3rd century to settle down in Czechia, Poland, and Galicia. They became “the progenitors of the Czech, Polish (Lachian) and Russian people” Since there was no “brother Ukr” in the legend, Shulgin considered it a strong argument supporting the artificial construction of the Ukrainian nation. In his opinion, Poles invented the term “Ukrainians” in the 18th century, and before that there had been no nation with such name, so the term had been used to denote the residents of the borderlands. Thus, the term referred to the territory and did not mean a nation. In his journalism, Shulgin argued against the “political Ukrainism” that was striving for separatism and imposition of “Grushevsky's language ”, though he never denied the local cultural tradition. He saw the solution to the Ukrainian question in recognizing that the path chosen once by Bohdan Khmelnitsky was the right one.