The second cause of ignorance as to the anthropogeography of Russia lies in the subject itself. The Eastern European family of races inhabiting Russia is so different from that of Western and Central Europe in its evolution and composition, that the anthropogeographical laws and methods which (as far as civilized peoples are concerned) are based upon Western European conditions, do not apply in the least in Eastern Europe. A difficulty confronts anthropogeography here, analogous to the difficulty which confronted geologic science when, fitted out with European stratigraphy, it sought to explore South Africa or India. The geologists, as representatives of a natural science, were readily able to find the way out, but the anthropogeographers, whose field is more that of a psychic science, have lost themselves in false assumptions and in commonplaces.
We must not wonder, therefore, if every critical reader of the preceding chapter is assailed by a host of questions: Why in the world are the Ukrainians, this second largest [[150]]Slavic nation of the whole world, so utterly unknown? Perhaps Ukraine is only an ethnographic conception, and the Ukrainians only a branch of the Russian race, just as the Bavarians or Saxons are branches of the German people? Or are the terms “Ukraine,” “Ukrainian”, only outgrowths of the idle imagination of a few belated enthusiasts, who rave about a glorious past and a brilliant future, and represent what they are striving after as a fait accompli, and so forth.
Such questions, based upon deep ignorance of the anthropogeography and history of Eastern Europe, come up in this very 20th Century, even in the learned circles of scholars, publicists and politicians. To answer these and similar questions correctly, this little book has been written.
The Ukrainians are quite as independent a Slavic nation as the Czechs, Poles, White Russians, Russians, Serbs or Bulgarians. The historic roots of the Ukrainian nation extend just as far back into the early middle ages as the roots of the German, French or English nations. The old Ukrainian Empire of Kiev is of the same age as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. But, while the evolution of the great European nations was steady and uninterrupted, the Ukrainian Nation was hindered in its development by reason of its geographical position on the threshold of Asia. The Mongolian attack in the 13th Century shattered the state of Kiev and introduced the 500 years’ Tartar scourge. Weakened by the continual expeditions and slave-hunts of the Crimean Tatars, the Ukraine fell under the rule of Lithuania and Poland, who not only could not relieve the land of the Tatar menace but even added national, social and religious pressure. The instinct of self-preservation led the Ukrainian nation, in that troubled time, to create the splendid [[151]]military organization of the Ukrainian Cossacks, and about the middle of the 17th Century, in a victorious war, to shake off the Polish yoke. Thus, the second Ukrainian state, the Cossack Republic, came into existence. By the Treaty of Pereyaslav (1654) it was ceded as a vassal state to Russia, which was related to it in religious faith. But Russia broke the treaties of suzerainty, shared the desolated Ukrainian land with Poland, and, after a century and a half, changed the autonomy of the Ukraine into abject serfdom. After Russia, in the partitions of Poland, had united almost the entire Ukrainian territory under its rule (with the exception of Eastern Galicia, Northwestern Bukowina, and Northeastern Hungary), it set all forces to work to destroy the national independence of the Ukrainians as well. In the 17th and 18th Centuries the Ukrainian Nation lost its upper classes—the aristocracy, the lesser nobility, the wealthy burghers—first thru Polonization, then thru Russification. It had left only its minor clergy, its lower middle class, and a completely downtrodden peasantry. Thus, at the end of the 18th Century, it seemed as if the last hour of the Ukrainian people had struck.
It is therefore easy to explain that in the 19th Century, when the national question became one of the most important problems of humanity, the two neighbor nations of the Ukraine, the Poles and the Russians, believed they had solved the “Ukrainian question.”
The views of Poles and Russians coincide absolutely in emphasizing one statement: “There is no such country as the Ukraine; no such people as the Ukrainians; there are only Poland and Russia; a Polish nation and a Russian nation.”
This complete agreement of both nations, whose giant states fought for two centuries for domination in Eastern Europe, may be easily understood. The Ukraine has always [[152]]been the richest region of Eastern Europe in natural resources, the Ukrainians the second largest nation, the Ukrainian question the most important problem in every state commanding Eastern Europe. Now the Ukrainian nation was completely exhausted by half a thousand years of Tatar oppression and an equally long period of serfdom. So that it seemed an easy matter to the mighty neighbor nations to even deny the existence of the Ukrainian nation, to hold up its development, and gradually to absorb it.
The Poles, since their country lost its independence, have made heroic attempts to win back their freedom by armed uprisings. Despite all defeats, they have never given up their hopes of re-establishing the Polish Kingdom. But these hopes were never confined to the ethnographic territory of the Polish nation. The future Polish Kingdom was to have the old boundaries of the historic Poland—the Baltic and the Black Sea. Hence, the geographical conception of Poland, even to the scientific Polish geographers, still includes, besides the entire Polish ethnographic territory, Lithuania, White Russia and all of the Ukraine, as far as the Dnieper River and the Black Sea.
How could this historico-geographical conception of Poland be made to harmonize with the ethnographic conception of the Ukraine? The solution of this question seemed very easy to the Polish scholars and politicians. They simply proved that the Ukrainians constituted a part of the Polish nation, that their language was a provincial dialect of the Polish language, and that only the religious faith, a number of manners and customs, songs, etc., were slightly different from those of the Poles; these slight differences the common country folk might retain, likewise the educated Ukrainian might be permitted to keep his language and customs in private life, but in his political sentiments, in his culture, in his literary language, he must be and remain a Pole. [[153]]