Building a Ukrainian National Language

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 215-218:

AMONG THE UKRAINIANS prepared to fight Napoleon with arms in hand was the founder of modern Ukrainian literature, Ivan Kotliarevsky. A native of the Poltava region in the former Hetmanate, he formed a Cossack detachment to join the struggle. The son of a minor official, Kotliarevsky studied in a theological seminary, worked as a tutor of children of the nobility, and served in the Russian imperial army, taking part in the 1806–1812 Russo-Turkish War. In 1798, while on military service, the first part of his poem Eneïda appeared in print, a travesty based on Virgil’s Aeneid, whose main characters were not Greeks but Zaporozhian Cossacks. As one would expect of true Zaporozhians, they spoke vernacular Ukrainian. But the choice of language for the poem seems logical only in retrospect. In late eighteenth century Ukraine, Kotliarevsky was a pioneer—the first to write a major poetical work in the vernacular.

...

Kotliarevsky wrote the first part of Eneïda when the shell of Church Slavonic, which had dominated Russian imperial literature of the previous era, was crumbling and falling apart, allowing literatures based in one way or another on the vernacular to make their way into the public sphere. Russia found its first truly great poet in Alexander Pushkin; Ukraine got its own in the person of Kotliarevsky. Whatever his original motives for using Ukrainian, Kotliarevsky never regretted his choice. There would be five more parts of Eneïda. He would also author the first plays written in Ukrainian, among them Natalka-Poltavka (Natalka from Poltava), a love story set in a Ukrainian village. The language of Kotliarevsky’s homeland, the Poltava region of the former Hetmanate, would become the basis of standard Ukrainian for speakers of numerous Ukrainian dialects from the Dnieper to the Don in the east and to the Carpathians in the west. With Kotliarevsky, a new literature was born. The language received its first grammar in 1818 with the publication of the Grammar of the Little Russian Dialect by Oleksii Pavlovsky. A year later, the first collection of Ukrainian folk songs by Mykola (Nikolai) Tsertelev appeared in print.

...

The birthplace of Ukrainian romanticism was the city of Kharkiv, where the imperial government opened a university in 1805, inviting professors from all over the empire to fill vacant positions. Being a professor at that time often meant taking an interest in local history and folklore, and Kharkiv had a rich tradition. It served as the administrative and cultural center of Sloboda Ukraine, settled by Ukrainian Cossacks and runaway peasants in the times of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this land was often referred to as “Ukraine.”

...

The centrality of the Cossack past to romantic literary interests, already manifested by Kotliarevsky’s Eneïda, was further evidenced by the Kharkiv romantics’ readiness to embrace and popularize by far the most influential Ukrainian historical text of the period, Istoriia rusov (The History of the Rus’).

Well, my Kindle app has informed me that I've nearly reached the publisher's limit in copying from the text of this book, and this seems a good place to end this series of excerpts—at the point where a national language begins to develop. So I have decided to buy the latest book by the same prolific author, and begin reading and posting excerpts from The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History (W. W. Norton, 2023), the first chapter of which summarizes many of the highlights that I have excerpted from this book.

Polish & Ukrainian Anthems

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 213-214:

THE UKRAINIAN NATIONAL anthem begins with the words “Ukraine has not yet perished,” hardly an optimistic beginning for any kind of song. But this is not the only anthem whose words do not inspire optimism. The Polish national anthem starts with the familiar line “Poland has not yet perished.” The words of the Polish anthem were written in 1797 and those of the Ukrainian one were penned in 1862, so it is quite clear who influenced whom. But why such pessimism? In both cases, Polish and Ukrainian, the idea of the death of the nation stemmed from the experience of the late eighteenth century—the partitions of Poland and the liquidation of the Hetmanate.

Like many other anthems, the Polish one was originally a marching song written for the Polish legions fighting under the command of the future emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, in his Italian campaigns. The song was originally known as the “Dąbrowski mazurka,” named for a commander of the Polish troops, Jan Henryk Dąbrowski. Many of the Polish legionnaires, including the commander himself, had taken part in the Kościuszko Uprising, and the lyrics were meant to lift their spirits after the destruction of their state by the partitioning powers. The song’s second line asserts that Poland will not perish “as long as we are alive.” By associating the nation not with the state but with those who considered themselves its members, the Polish anthem gave hope not just to the Poles but also to representatives of other stateless nations. A new generation of patriots in Poland and Ukraine refused to accept the disasters of the previous century as the final verdict on their nations. Both Polish and Ukrainian activists promoted a new understanding of a nation as a democratic polity made up of citizen patriots rather than a territorial state.

IN THE FIRST decade of the nineteenth century, Napoleon and his soldiers brought the ideas of nation and popular sovereignty to the rest of Europe in their songs and at the points of their bayonets. In 1807, the dream of the Polish legionnaires came a step closer to realization when, after defeating Prussia, the French emperor created the Duchy of Warsaw out of territories annexed by that country during the partitions of Poland. To the Poles, this offered the exciting prospect of the restoration of their homeland. In 1812, after Napoleon’s invasion of the Russian Empire, Poles under Russian rule rose in support of the French invader, whom they considered a liberator. Adam Mickiewicz, the foremost Polish poet of the era, reflected the Polish nobility’s excitement at the advance of the French army into today’s Belarus in his epic poem Sir Thaddeus, which is still required reading in today’s Polish (but not Belarusian) schools. “Glory is ours already,” says one of the poem’s Polish characters, “and so we shall soon have our Republic again.”

In 1815, when entering the University of Vilnius, the sixteen-year-old Mickiewicz gave his name as Adam Napoleon Mickiewicz. By that time, Polish hopes of having “our Republic again” had been crushed. Napoleon, Dąbrowski, and their French and Polish troops had retreated from the Russian Empire in defeat.

Polish Realia: Italian Pizza

Here are some informative paragraphs from the placemats at Tutti Santi, home of "legendary Italian pizza" in Kielce, Poland.

Włosaka pizza to setki lat historii. Na to, jak smakuje, ma wpływ jakość produktów, ale tez wiele lat poszukiwan, odkryc i zaangażowania ludzi, dla których pizza stała się życiową pasją. Zamów swoją ulubioną pizzę i rozsmakuj się w tej wyjątkowej historii.
Italian pizza embodies centuries of history. Its taste is shaped not only by the quality of the ingredients but also by years of exploration, discovery, and the dedication of people for whom pizza has become a lifelong passion. Order your favorite pizza and savor this unique story.

Włoskie Rzemiosło Italian Craftsmanship
Przepis na prawdziwą, włoska pizzę to tajemnica, do której dostęp mają tylko nieliczni. Tutti Santi to jedyna restauracja w Polsce, w której spróbujesz pizzy według receptury Mistrza Włoch i Europy Valerio Valle. Ciasto jego autorstwa jest delikatne, cienkie i lekko chrupiące.
The recipe for authentic Italian pizza is a secret accessible to only a few. Tutti Santi is the only restaurant in Poland where you can taste pizza made according to the recipe of Italian and European Champion Valerio Valle. The dough he created is delicate, thin, and slightly crispy.

Cierpliwość Patience
Ciasto według autorskiej receptury Mistrza Valerio Valle wymaga czasu i cierpliwości. Dojrzewanie ciasta trwa 48 godzin, w tym czasie zachodzą w nim niezbędne procesy, dzięki którym zawsze jest pyszne i lekkostrawne.
The dough, based on Master Valerio Valle’s original recipe, requires time and patience. The dough undergoes a 48-hour maturation process, during which essential changes occur that ensure it is always delicious and easy to digest.

Pomidory Tomatoes
Pomidory nie zostały odkryte we Włoszech, ale to Włosi odkryli ich potencjał i zamienili je w symbol włoskiej kuchni. Nasz sos tworzymy tylko z włoskich pomidorów, które dojrzewają w gorącym słońcu południa, co daje im wyątkową słodycz.
Tomatoes were not discovered in Italy, but it was the Italians who discovered their potential and turned them into a symbol of Italian cuisine. We make our sauce exclusively from Italian tomatoes ripened in the hot southern sun, which gives them exceptional sweetness.

Mąka - Sekret Ciasta Flour - Secret to the Dough
Wyselekcjonowaliśmy specjalny rodzaj włoskiej mąki o odpowiedniej zawartości białka. Mąkę sprowadzamy prosto z włoskich młynów, które od blisko 200 lat należą do jednej rodziny, gdzie przez pokolenia przekazuje się najlepsze tradycje i wielowikowe doświadczenie.
We have selected a special type of Italian flour with the appropriate protein content. We source our flour directly from Italian mills that have belonged to the same family for nearly 200 years—mills where the finest traditions and centuries of experience have been passed down through generations.

Naturalny Ogień Natural Fire
Nasze pizze wypiekamy w specjalnych kopułowych piecach opalanych drewnem. Od czterech pokoleń są one produkowane przez jedną rodzinę Valoriani. Od ponad 100 lat specjalizuje się ona w tradycyjnych piecach chlebowych, wykorzystując moc ognia, właściwości lawy wulkanidznej i widzę na temat rzemieślniczych metod wypieku ciasta.
We bake our pizzas in special wood-fired dome ovens. For four generations, they have been produced by the Valoriani family. For over 100 years, they have specialized in traditional bread ovens, harnessing the power of fire, the properties of volcanic lava, and expertise in artisanal baking methods.

Unikalne Smaki Unique Tastes
Do przygotowania każdej pizzy w Tutti Santi wykorzystujemy selektywnie wybrane produkty, które sprowadzamy bezpośrednio z Włoch od regionalnych, rzemieślniczych producentów. W naszym menu znajdziecie m.in. szlachetną szynkę San Daniele, Mozzarellę di Bufala z mleka bawolego, sery Stracchino, Provolone i wiele innych regionalnych produktów!
To prepare every pizza at Tutti Santi, we use carefully selected products imported directly from Italy from regional, artisanal producers. Our menu features, among other things, premium San Daniele ham, buffalo milk Mozzarella di Bufala, Stracchino and Provolone cheeses, and many other regional products!

Russia Closes the Steppe Frontier, 1774

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 204-205:

The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarjae, signed in 1774, looked like a setback for Russian aspirations in the Black Sea region. Imperial troops had to leave the Danube principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. St. Petersburg also had to remove its troops from the Crimea. The reason was simple: a number of European powers were unhappy with the sudden growth of Russian influence in the region. But the treaty benefited the Russian Empire in other ways. It effectively expelled the Ottomans from the northern Black Sea region and the Crimea. Russia established its outposts on the Azov and Black Seas. The Crimean Khanate was now declared an independent state. That was a one-sided description: while the peninsula became independent of Istanbul, it now depended on St. Petersburg.

The formal annexation of the Crimea to the Russian Empire took place in 1783, with the Russian army entering the peninsula and sending the last Crimean khan into exile in central Russia. Bezborodko, by then a leading architect of Russian foreign policy, played an important role in this development. He was also an author of the so-called Greek Project, a plan to destroy the Ottoman Empire and establish a new Byzantium under Russian control, as well as to create Dacia, a new country on the Danube consisting of Moldavia and Wallachia. The project never came to fruition, but its echoes still resonate in the Greek names given by the imperial authorities to the Crimean towns, including Simferopol, Yevpatoria, and the most famous of them, Sevastopol—the Russian naval base established on the peninsula two years after its annexation.

Alarmed by Catherine’s trip to the Crimea in 1787 and rumors of the Greek Project, the Ottomans began a new war for control of the northern Black Sea coast. They lost once again, this time to allied Russian and Austrian troops. According to the peace treaty signed at Jassy in 1792 by Oleksandr Bezborodko, the Russian Empire extended its control to all of southern Ukraine. The Ottomans now recognized both the Crimea and the Kuban region across the Strait of Kerch as Russian territories. With a stroke of Bezborodko’s pen, the Russian Empire had closed the Ukrainian steppe frontier. The cultural frontier, however, remained in place, simply becoming an internal one.

Aftermath of Poltava, 1709

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 178-179:

THE COSSACK HETMANATE, which survived under the suzerainty of the Muscovite tsars only on the Left Bank of the Dnieper, served as a construction site for a number of nation-building projects. One of them, closely associated with the name “Ukraine” and a view of the Hetmanate as a distinct Cossack polity and fatherland, became the foundation for the development of modern Ukrainian identity. Another, associated with the official Russian name of the Hetmanate, “Little Russia,” laid the basis for what would later become known as “Little Russianism,” the tradition of treating Ukraine as “Lesser Russia” and the Ukrainians as part of a larger Russian nation.

Both intellectual traditions coexisted in the Hetmanate before the last major Cossack revolt, led by Hetman Ivan Mazepa in 1708. Mazepa’s revolt targeted Muscovy and the official founder of the Russian Empire, Tsar Peter I. It ended in defeat as the Russians overcame the Swedish army, which Charles XII led into Ukraine. The Battle of Poltava in 1709 profoundly changed the fate of the Cossack Hetmanate and Ukraine as a whole. The loss for Charles was a double loss for Mazepa and his vision of Ukraine as an entity separate from Russia. In subsequent years, the Little Russian interpretation of Ukrainian history and culture as closely linked to Russia would become dominant in the official discourse of the Hetmanate. The idea of Ukraine as a separate polity, fatherland, and indeed nation did not disappear entirely but shifted out of the center of Ukrainian discourse for more than a century.

Ukraine's Magna Carta?

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 161-164:

WHATEVER THE LEGAL and ideological underpinnings of the Pereiaslav agreement, the tsar honored Buturlin’s promise and gave the Cossacks what the Polish king had never agreed to: recognition of Cossack statehood, a Cossack register of 60,000, and privileged status for the Cossack estate. He also recognized the liberties enjoyed by other social strata under the Polish kings.

First and foremost, however, the agreement laid the foundations for a military alliance. It established no western boundary for the Cossacks’ territory—they could go as far as their sabers would take them. The Muscovite and Cossack armies entered the war against the commonwealth on their separate fronts: the Cossacks, assisted by a Muscovite corps, led the offensive in Ukraine, within the boundaries of the Kingdom of Poland; the Muscovite troops launched an offensive near Smolensk and moved west through Belarus and then into Lithuania, north of the Lublin border between the grand duchy and the kingdom. The joint offensive of Muscovite and Cossack troops brought unexpected results. Whereas in 1654 the Polish and Lithuanian troops, assisted by the Crimean khan, had managed to resist the offensive from the east, in the summer and fall of 1655 the Polish-Lithuanian counteroffensive collapsed: the Cossacks once again besieged Lviv, and Muscovite troops entered Vilnius, the capital of the grand duchy.

This was the beginning of the era known in Polish history as the Deluge. Not only did the Muscovite and Cossack armies move deep into the commonwealth, but in July 1655 the Swedes launched an offensive of their own across the Baltic Sea. By October, both Warsaw and the ancient Polish capital of Cracow were in Swedish hands. Alarmed by the prospect of a complete Polish collapse and a dramatic expansion of Sweden, which now claimed the parts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania conquered by Muscovite troops, in the fall of 1656 Muscovite diplomats concluded an agreement with the commonwealth in Vilnius that put an end to Polish-Muscovite hostilities. Khmelnytsky and the Cossack officials were enraged at being denied access to the negotiations. The separate peace with Poland was leaving the Cossacks one on one with their traditional enemy. As far as they were concerned, the tsar was reneging on his main obligation under the Pereiaslav agreement—the military protection of his subjects.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky ignored the Muscovite-Polish deal and sent his army to help an ally of Sweden, the Protestant ruler of Transylvania, fight the Poles. Now, even the military alliance between the tsar and the Cossacks came into question. Khmelnytsky had been looking for new allies since Sweden’s entry into the war with Poland. The Swedes seemed determined to destroy the commonwealth, which Khmelnytsky also wanted. Negotiations to conclude a Ukrainian-Swedish agreement that would put an end to the commonwealth and guarantee the inclusion not only of Ukraine but also parts of what is now Belarus in the Cossack state gained new impetus from what the hetman regarded as the tsar’s betrayal of Ukraine.

Khmelnytsky, however, did not live to see the conclusion of this new international alliance. He died in August 1657, leaving the state he had created and the Cossacks he had led at a crossroads. Although Khmelnytsky believed that his alliance with the tsar had already run its course, he formally abided by the deal he had made in Pereiaslav. Events there became an important part of the old hetman’s large and contradictory legacy. Cossack chroniclers of the eighteenth century celebrated him very much in the same vein as the professors and students of the Kyivan College had done on his entrance into Kyiv in December 1648. They extolled him as the father of the nation, the liberator of his people from the Polish yoke, and the hetman who had negotiated the best possible arrangement with the tsar: they considered the Articles of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, approved by the tsar after Pereiaslav, a Magna Carta of Ukrainian liberties in the Russian Empire.

Cossacks Join the Tsar, 1654

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 159-161:

THE TURNING POINT in the internationalization of the Khmelnytsky Revolt took place on January 8, 1654, in the town of Pereiaslav. On that day, Bohdan Khmelnytsky and a hastily gathered group of Cossack officers swore allegiance to the new sovereign of Ukraine, Tsar Aleksei Romanov of Muscovy. The long and complex history of Russo-Ukrainian relations had begun. In 1954, the Soviet Union lavishly celebrated the tricentennial of the “reunification” of Ukraine and Russia. The implication was that all of Ukraine had chosen at Pereiaslav to rejoin Russia and accepted the sovereignty of the tsar. What actually happened at Pereiaslav in 1654 was neither the reunification of Ukraine with Muscovy (which would be renamed “Russia” by Peter I) nor the reunion of two “fraternal peoples,” as suggested by Soviet historians. No one in Pereiaslav or Moscow was thinking or speaking in ethnic terms in 1654. Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s speech at the council of Cossack officers, recorded in the materials of the Muscovite embassy, gives some idea of how the Ukrainian hetman presented and explained his actions:

We have convened a council open to the whole people so that you, together with us, might choose a sovereign for yourselves out of four, whomever you wish: the first is the Turkish tsar [sultan], who has often appealed to us through his envoys to come under his rule; the second is the Crimean khan; the third is the Polish king, who, if we wish, may still take us into his former favor; the fourth is the Orthodox sovereign of Great Rus’, the tsar, Grand Prince Aleksei Mikhailovich, the eastern sovereign of all Rus’, whom we have now been entreating for ourselves for six years with incessant pleadings. Now choose the one you wish!

No doubt, Khmelnytsky was playing games. The choice had already been made: he and the Cossack officers had decided in favor of the sovereign of Muscovy. According to the ambassadorial report, the hetman made his argument by appealing to the Orthodox solidarity of his listeners. Those taking part in the council shouted their desire for the “Eastern” Orthodox tsar as their ruler.

It sounded like one of the many religion-based alliances of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation: the Thirty Years’ War, in which the countries of Europe lined up largely on the basis of their religious identities, had ended only five years earlier. There is no need to blame either the Muscovite elites or their Ukrainian counterparts for not considering each other brothers and members of the same Rus’ nation. The two sides needed interpreters to understand each other, and Khmelnytsky’s letters to the tsar survived in the Russian archives largely in translations prepared by such official interpreters. The tradition of Kyivan Rus’ as represented by historical memory and religious belief still existed, but it was embodied only in a few handwritten chronicles.

Four centuries of existence in different political conditions, under the rule of different states, had strengthened long-standing linguistic and cultural differences that divided the future Belarus and Ukraine from the future Russia. Those differences came to the fore when Khmelnytsky and the colonels wanted to discuss conditions of the agreement with the Russian envoy, Vasilii Buturlin; he told them that the tsar would treat them better than the king had but refused to negotiate. Khmelnytsky objected, saying that they had been accustomed to negotiating with the king and his officials, but Buturlin responded that the Polish king, being an elective monarch, was not the equal of the hereditary Russian tsar. He also refused to take an oath with regard to the broad promises he had made to the Cossacks: the tsar, said Buturlin, swears no oath to his subjects. Khmelnytsky, who wanted Muscovite troops in battle as soon as possible, agreed to swear allegiance to the tsar with no reciprocal oath.

The Cossacks thought of the Pereiaslav agreement as a contract with binding obligations on both sides. As far as Khmelnytsky was concerned, he and his polity were entering into a protectorate under the tsar’s authority. They promised loyalty and military service in exchange for the protection offered by Muscovy. The tsar, however, perceived the Cossacks as new subjects toward whom he would have no obligations after granting them certain rights and privileges. As for his right to the new territory, he thought in dynastic terms. As far as he and his chancellery were concerned, the tsar was taking over his patrimony: the cities of Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Pereiaslav.

Polish Realia: Dogs & Computers

Psine.pl, a computer repair shop in our Kielce neighborhood, has some interesting word usage.

The first item is the name of the company itself. Google translates psine as 'doggie'. (It also translates Eng. doggone as Pol. cholera, which it translates back into Eng. 'damn'.) Polish pies 'dog' has a very irregular declension: psy 'dogs', do psa 'to the dog', do psów 'to the dogs', z psem 'with the dog', z psami 'with the dogs', o psie 'about the dog', o psach 'about the dogs'.

Pol. szczeniak 'puppy' is a little bit more regular: szczenięta 'puppies', do szczeniaka 'to the puppy', do szczeniąt 'to the puppies', ze szczeniakiem 'with the puppy', ze szczeniakami 'with the puppies', o szczeniaku 'about the puppy', o szczeniętach 'about the puppies'.

The recent loanwords listed on Psine's storefront have very regular nominative plurals: laptopy, smartfony, tablety, komputery. Other recent loans have similar plurals: bestsellery, burgery, filtry, gofry (< gaufre 'waffles'), pantsy, szorty, (jar for) tipsy, toalety, turysty.

But, in construction with serwis 'service' or naprawa 'repair', the same tech loans take different plurals: (serwis/naprawa) laptopów, smartfonów, komputerów. 

For 'game console', Psine.pl writes singular konsol do gier and plural konsoli do gier. Google translates 'console' into singular konsola and plural konsole. The word translated gier is related to a whole etymological rabbit-hole full of nouns and verbs: gra 'game', gry 'games', gracz 'gamer'; grać 'to play (games), graj w gry 'play (at) games', graj w piłkę nożną 'play (at) football, wygrywaj mecze 'play matches', graj na skrzypcach 'play on a violin' (lit. 'on horsetails'?), etc.

Cossacks & Tatars vs. Poles & Jews

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 151-153:

Up to that point, developments resembled those of previous Cossack uprisings, but Khmelnytsky changed the familiar pattern. Before marching northward, capturing towns, and confronting the commonwealth army, he went south in search of allies. In a dramatic reversal of established steppe politics, he offered the Crimean khan his friendship and an opportunity. The cautious khan allowed his vassals, the Noghay Horde north of the Crimea, to join the Cossacks. For Khmelnytsky and the Cossack rebels, this was a major coup. While the popular image of the Cossack nowadays is a man on horseback, in the mid-seventeenth century most Cossacks were in fact infantrymen. They lacked a cavalry of their own because maintaining one was too expensive: only nobles could afford to keep a battle-ready horse, often more than one. Khmelnytsky’s new alliance with the Tatars, who fought on horseback, solved the cavalry problem. From then on, the Cossacks could not only take poorly fortified borderland towns or defend themselves in fortified camps but also confront the Polish army in the field.

It did not take long for the alliance to prove its worth. In May 1648, Cossack and Tatar forces defeated two Polish armies, one near the Zhovti Vody (Yellow Water) River near the northern approaches to the Zaporozhian Sich, the other near the town of Korsun in the middle Dnieper region. A key to Cossack success, apart from the participation of Noghay cavalry (close to 4,000 horsemen) in both battles, was the decision of some 6,000 registered Cossacks to switch sides, abandon their Polish masters and join the Khmelnytsky revolt. The Polish standing army was completely wiped out. Its two chief commanders, the Crown grand hetman and the Crown field hetman, as well as hundreds of officers, ended up in Tatar captivity.

While the Cossacks’ sudden success shocked the commonwealth, Khmelnytsky and his closest supporters could not believe their luck. The hetman did not know what move to make next. In June 1648, with the Polish armies gone and the commonwealth in disarray, Bohdan Khmelnytsky took something of a summer hiatus and retired to his native Chyhyryn to consider what to do. But the rebels refused to take any breaks. With the old registered Cossacks gathered near Bila Tserkva, a town south of Kyiv, the popular uprising began in earnest in the rest of Ukraine. Inspired by the news of Cossack victories, the peasants and the townspeople took matters into their own hands, attacking the estates of large landowners, harassing their retreating private armies, settling scores with nobles, and hunting down Catholic priests. But those who suffered most from the peasant revolt in the summer of 1648 were the Jews of Ukraine.

The first letters that Khmelnytsky sent to the authorities as the revolt began already mentioned Jewish leaseholders. The Cossack hetman complained of the “intolerable injustices” that the Cossacks were suffering at the hands of the royal officials, the colonels—Polish commanders of the registered Cossacks—and “even” the Jews. Khmelnytsky mentioned the Jews in passing, placing them in the third or even fourth echelon of Cossack enemies, but the rebels in Right-Bank Ukraine, where Jews began to suffer attack en masse in June 1648, had their own priorities. They assaulted and often killed Jews (especially men), leading to the destruction of entire communities, which they all but wiped from the map in the course of three summer months of 1648. We do not know the number of victims, as we do not know the number of Jews living in the region before the revolt, but most scholars estimate Jewish losses at 14,000 to 20,000 victims—a very high number, given the time and place. For all its rapid economic development, seventeenth-century Ukraine was relatively sparsely settled.

Twentieth-century Jewish and Ukrainian historians have placed considerable emphasis on the underlying social causes of anti-Jewish antagonism in Dnieper Ukraine of that period. Rivalry between Jewish and Christian merchants and artisans in the cities and towns, as well as the Jewish leaseholders’ role as middlemen between nobles and peasants, did indeed contribute to the violence unleashed by the Cossack revolt. But one should not lose sight of religious motives in the attacks on Ukrainian Jewry. Religion was essential to social identity on both sides of the Christian-Jewish divide. It was not for nothing that the best-known Jewish chronicler of the massacres, Nathan Hannover, called the attackers “Greeks,” referring to their Orthodox religion, not their nationality. Some rebels felt that they were on a religious mission to convert those Jews who had escaped the massacre. Forced conversion to Christianity saved the lives of many Jewish men. Some of them joined the Cossack ranks, while others returned to Judaism once the threat of annihilation was over.

Poles & Cossacks vs. Ottomans

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 127-131:

The Ukrainian Cossacks, who had begun their international career in the 1550s by serving the tsar of Muscovy, Ivan the Terrible, paid an unsolicited visit to Moscow during the first decade of the seventeenth century. Muscovy was then in turmoil because of an economic, dynastic, and political crisis known as the Time of Troubles. It began at the turn of the seventeenth century with a number of devastating famines caused in part by what we today call the Little Ice Age—a period of low temperatures that lasted half a millennium, from about 1350 to 1850, peaking around the beginning of the seventeenth century. The crisis afflicted Muscovy at a most inopportune time, when its Rurikid dynasty had died out and a number of aristocratic clans contested the legitimacy of the new rulers. The dynastic crisis came to an end in 1613 with the election to the Muscovite throne of the first Romanov tsar. But before the crisis was resolved, a number of candidates for the throne, some of them “pretenders” claiming to be surviving relatives of Ivan the Terrible, tried their political luck, opening the door to foreign intervention.

During the lengthy interregnum, the Cossacks supported the two pretenders seeking the Muscovite throne, False Dmitrii I and False Dmitrii II. Up to 10,000 Cossacks joined the army of Field Crown Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski of Poland when he marched on Moscow in 1610. The election to the Muscovite throne three years later of Tsar Mikhail Romanov, founder of the dynasty that lasted until the Revolution of 1917, did not end Cossack involvement in Muscovite affairs. In 1618, a Ukrainian Cossack army of 20,000 joined Polish troops in their march on Moscow and took part in the siege of the capital. The Cossacks helped end the war on conditions favorable to the Kingdom of Poland. One of them was the transfer to Poland of the Chernihiv land, which the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had lost in the early sixteenth century. By the mid-seventeenth century, Chernihiv would become an important part of the Cossack world. As always, however, the Cossacks both helped and hindered the Polish kings in advancing their foreign-policy agenda. In its war with Muscovy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth never got the support it hoped for from the Ottoman Empire, partly because of continuing Cossack seagoing expeditions and attacks on the Ottoman littoral.

In 1606, descending the Dnieper and entering the Black Sea on their longboats, called “seagulls” (chaiky), the Cossacks stormed Varna, one of the strongest Ottoman fortresses on the western Black Sea shore. In 1614 they pillaged Trabzon on the southeastern shore, and in the following year they entered the Istanbul harbor of the Golden Horn and pillaged the suburbs, much as the Vikings had done some 750 years earlier. But whereas the Vikings had also traded with Constantinople, the Cossack expeditions were akin to pirate attacks on seashores from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. They came to rob, take revenge, and, as Ukrainian folk songs related, liberate long-suffering slaves. In 1616, they attacked Kaffa, the main slave-trading center on the Crimean coast, and liberated all the captives.

The sultan, his court, and the foreign ambassadors who witnessed one Cossack attack after another on the mighty Ottoman Empire were stunned. The Christian rulers could now take the raiders seriously as potential allies in a war against the Ottomans. The French ambassador in Istanbul, Count Philippe de Harlay of Césy, wrote to King Louis XIII in August 1620, “Every time the Cossacks are near here on the Black Sea, they seize incredible booty despite their weak forces and have such a reputation that strokes of the cudgel are required to force the Turkish soldiers to do battle against them on several galleys that the grand seigneur [the sultan] sends there with great difficulty.”

While Count Philippe was informing his king about the inability of the Ottomans to curb the Cossack seagoing expeditions, advisers to sixteen-year-old Sultan Osman II were considering how to wage war on two fronts: against the Polish army on land and the Cossacks at sea. In the summer of 1620, the Ottoman army marched toward the Prut River in today’s Moldova against the commonwealth, whose troops included private Cossack armies of Polish and Ukrainian magnates. The campaign aimed ostensibly to punish the commonwealth for not curbing Cossack attacks on the Ottomans. In reality, the agenda was much broader. The Ottomans were trying to protect their vassals in the region from the growing influence of the commonwealth. The Polish army, numbering some 10,000 soldiers, and the Ottoman force, twice as large according to some estimates, clashed in September 1620 near the town of Ţuţora on today’s Moldovan-Romanian border. The battle went on for twenty days, ending with a crushing defeat for the commonwealth.

Since the commonwealth had no standing army, the court and the entire country panicked. Everyone expected the Ottomans to continue their march on Poland. Indeed they did. In the following year, a much larger Ottoman army, estimated at 120,000 soldiers and led by the sultan himself, passed through Moldavia on its way to the commonwealth. The Ottomans met a commonwealth force approximately 40,000 strong, half of it made up of Ukrainian Cossacks, led by Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, hero of the Cossacks’ raid of 1616 on Kaffa and commander of their march on Moscow two years later. The battle lasted a whole month, waged on the banks of the Dniester River near the fortress of Khotyn, which the Ottomans besieged.

The Battle of Khotyn ended with no clear victory for either side, but that uncertain outcome was regarded in Warsaw as a triumph for the Kingdom of Poland. The Poles had stopped the huge Ottoman army at their borders and signed a peace treaty that involved no territorial losses. Everyone understood that this result would have been all but impossible without the Cossacks. For the first time—and a short time at that—the Cossacks became the darlings of the entire commonwealth. Books that appeared soon after the battle would lionize Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, whose monument stands today in the Podil district of Kyiv at the head of the street named after him, as one of the greatest Polish warriors.

Slave Trade on the Steppe

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 118-121:

IN THE COURSE of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Ukrainian steppes underwent a major political, economic, and cultural transformation. For the first time since the days of Kyivan Rus’, the line of frontier settlement stopped retreating toward the Prypiat marshes and the Carpathian Mountains and began advancing toward the east and south. Linguistic research indicates that two major groups of Ukrainian dialects, Polisian and Carpatho-Volhynian, began to converge from the north and west, respectively, shifting east and south to create a third group of steppe dialects that now cover Ukrainian territory from Zhytomyr and Kyiv in the northwest to Zaporizhia, Luhansk, and Donetsk in the east and extending as far to the southeast as Krasnodar and Stavropol in today’s Russia. This mixing of dialects reflected the movement of population at large.

The origins of that profound change were in the steppe itself. The struggle that began in the mid-fourteenth century within the Golden Horde, also known as the Kipchak Khanate, led to its disintegration by the mid-fifteenth century. The Crimean, Kazan, and Astrakhan khanates became successors to the Horde, none of them capable of uniting it and some even losing their independence. The Crimea became independent of the Golden Horde in 1449 under the leadership of a descendant of Genghis Khan, Haji Devlet Giray. The Giray dynasty, established by Haji Devlet, would last into the eighteenth century, but his realm would not remain independent. By 1478, the khanate had become a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire—the huge Turkic-dominated Muslim polity that replaced Byzantium as the major power in the western Mediterranean and Black Sea regions in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Ottomans, who made Istanbul, the former Constantinople, their capital in 1453, took direct control over the southern shores of the Crimea, establishing their main center in the port city of Kaffa, today’s Feodosiia. The Girays controlled the steppelands of the Crimea north of the mountains, as well as the nomadic tribes of southern Ukraine, with the Noghay Horde becoming the most powerful of those tribes in the sixteenth century.

Security concerns and commercial interests attracted the Ottomans to the region. In particular they were interested in slaves. The slave trade had always been important in the region’s economy, but it now became dominant. The Ottoman Empire, whose Islamic laws allowed the enslavement only of non-Muslims and encouraged the emancipation of slaves, was always in need of free labor. The Noghays and the Crimean Tatars responded to the demand, expanding their slave-seeking expeditions to the lands north of the Pontic steppes and often going much deeper into Ukraine and southern Muscovy than the frontier areas. The slave trade supplemented the earnings that the Noghays obtained from animal husbandry and the Crimeans from both husbandry and settled forms of agriculture. Bad harvests generally translated into more raids to the north and more slaves shipped back to the Crimea.

All five routes that the Tatars followed to the settled areas on their slave-seeking raids went through Ukraine. Two of them east of the Dniester led to western Podolia and then to Galicia; two on the other side of the Southern Buh River led to western Podolia and Volhynia, then again to Galicia; the last passed through what would become the Sloboda Ukraine region around Kharkiv to southern Muscovy. If the demand for cereals led to the incorporation of the Ukrainian lands of the sixteenth century into the Baltic trade, their connection to the Mediterranean trade was due largely to Tatar raiding for slaves. Ukrainians, who constituted an absolute majority of the population of the steppe borderlands north of the Black Sea and moved into the steppes in search of grain, became the main targets and victims of the Ottoman Empire’s slave-dependent economy. Ethnic Russians northeast of the Crimea were a close second.

Michalon (Michael) the Lithuanian, a mid-sixteenth-century author who visited the Crimea, described the scope of the slave trade by quoting from his conversation with a local Jew who, “seeing that our people were constantly being shipped there as captives in numbers too large to count, asked us whether our lands also teemed with people, and whence such innumerable mortals had come.” Estimates of the numbers of Ukrainians and Russians brought to the Crimean slave markets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries vary from 1.5 million to 3 million. Children and adolescents brought the highest prices. The fates of the slaves differed. Most of the male slaves ended up on Ottoman galleys or working in the fields, while many women worked as domestics. Some got lucky, but only in a matter of speaking. Talented young men made careers in the Ottoman administration, but most of them were eunuchs. Some women were taken into the harems of the sultans and high Ottoman officials.

One Ukrainian girl known in history as Roxolana became the wife of the most powerful of the Ottoman sultans, Suleiman the Magnificent, who ruled from 1520 to 1566. Her son became a sultan under the name Selim II. Under the name Hürrem Sultan, Roxolana sponsored Muslim charities and funded the construction of some of the best examples of Ottoman architecture. Among these is the Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı, a public bathhouse not far from Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, constructed by the best-known Ottoman architect, Mimar Sinan. In the course of the last two hundred years, Roxolana has figured as the heroine of novels and a number of television dramas in Ukraine and Turkey. To be sure, her life and career were the exception, not the rule.

The Tatar attacks and the slave trade left deep scars in Ukrainian memory. The fate of the slaves was the subject of numerous dumas—Ukrainian epic songs that lamented the fate of the captives, described their attempts to escape from Crimean slavery, and glorified the men who saved and freed slaves. Those folk heroes were known as Cossacks. They fought the Tatars, undertook seagoing expeditions against the Ottomans, and, indeed, freed slaves from time to time.

Royals vs. Nobles, 1500s

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 107-109:

ALL OVER EUROPE, the sixteenth century was marked by the strengthening of royal authority, centralization of the state, and regularization of political and social practices. The other side of the coin was increasing aristocratic opposition to the growth of royal power, which in the Polish-Lithuanian case came from the aristocratic houses of the grand duchy, many of them deeply rooted in the princely tradition of Kyivan Rus’ and Galicia-Volhynia. But in the mid-sixteenth century, elite opposition to increasing royal power diminished in response to the growing external threat to the grand duchy, which it could meet only with the help of Poland. The threat came from the east, where in the course of the fifteenth century a major new power had been rising: the Grand Duchy of Muscovy.

In 1476 Grand Prince Ivan III, the first Muscovite ruler to call himself tsar, declared the independence of his realm from the Horde and refused to pay tribute to the khans. He also launched a campaign of “gathering the Rus’ lands,” taking Novgorod, Tver, and Viatka and laying claim to other Rus’ lands outside the former Mongol realm, including those of today’s Ukraine. In the last decades of the fifteenth century, the newly created Tsardom of Muscovy and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania entered into a prolonged conflict over the heritage of Kyivan Rus’. Muscovy was on the offensive, and by the early sixteenth century the grand dukes had to recognize the tsar’s rule over two of their former territories, Smolensk and Chernihiv. It was the first time that Muscovy had established its rule over part of what is now Ukraine.

The westward advance of Muscovy, stopped by the grand dukes at the beginning of the sixteenth century, resumed in the second half. In 1558, Ivan the Terrible, the decisive and charismatic but also erratic, brutal, and ultimately self-destructive tsar of Muscovy, attacked Livonia, a polity bordering on the grand duchy that included parts of what are now Latvia and Estonia, starting the Livonian War (1558–1583), which would last for a quarter century and involve Sweden, Denmark, Lithuania, and eventually Poland. In 1563, Muscovite troops crossed the borders of the grand duchy, taking the city of Polatsk and raiding Vitsebsk (Vitebsk), Shkloŭ (Shklov), and Orsha (all in present-day Belarus). This defeat mobilized support for the grand duchy’s union with Poland among the lesser Lithuanian nobility.

In December 1568 Sigismund Augustus, who was both king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania, convened two Diets in the city of Lublin—one for the kingdom, the other for the grand duchy—in the hope that their representatives would hammer out conditions for the new union. The negotiations began on a positive note, as the two sides agreed to the joint election of the king, a common Diet, or parliament, and broad autonomy for the grand duchy, but the magnates would not return the royal lands in their possession—the principal demand of the Polish nobility. The Lithuanian delegates packed their bags, assembled their retinues of noble clients, and left. This move backfired. Unexpectedly for the departing Lithuanians, the Diet of the Kingdom of Poland began to issue decrees, with the king’s blessing, transferring one province of the grand duchy after another to the jurisdiction of the Kingdom of Poland.

The Lithuanian magnates who had feared losing their provinces to Muscovy were now losing them to Poland instead. To stop a hostile takeover by their powerful Polish partner, the Lithuanians returned to Lublin to sign an agreement dictated by the Polish delegates. They were too late. In March 1569, the Podlachia palatinate on the Ukrainian-Belarusian-Polish ethnic border went to Poland. Volhynia followed in May, and on June 6, one day before the resumption of the Polish-Lithuanian talks, the Kyivan and Podolian lands were transferred to Poland as well. The Lithuanian aristocrats could only accept the new reality—they stood to lose even more if they continued to resist the union. In his magisterial depiction of the Lublin Diet, Jan Matejko, a famous nineteenth-century Polish artist, portrayed the chief opponent of the union, Mikalojus Radvilas, on his knees but with his sword drawn in front of the king.

The Union of Lublin created a new Polish-Lithuanian state with a single ruler, to be elected by the nobility of the whole realm, and a single Diet. It extended the freedoms of the Polish nobility to their counterparts in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which maintained its own offices, treasury, judicial system, and army. The new state, called the Commonwealth of Both Nations—Polish and Lithuanian—was a quasi-federal polity dominated by the geographically expanded and politically strengthened Kingdom of Poland. The kingdom incorporated the Ukrainian palatinates not as a group but one by one, with no guarantees but those pertaining to the use of the Ruthenian (Middle Ukrainian) language in the courts and administration and the protection of the rights of the Orthodox Church.

Rus' Elites Lose to Poland-Lithuania

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 105-107:

FROM THE VIEWPOINT of the Rus’ elites of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the unions with the Kingdom of Poland had caused nothing but trouble. The immediate outcome of the Union of Kreva was the loss of Rus’ influence on the grand prince, who not only moved out of the duchy but also became a Catholic, setting a precedent for his brothers, some of whom were Orthodox. The Orthodox hierarchs’ hope of establishing Byzantine rather than Latin Christianity in the last pagan realm in Europe were dashed.

But the real challenge to Rus’ political status came in 1413, when the Union of Horodło, which historiography treats as a dynastic union, enhanced the Union of Kreva, a personal union between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Concluded between Jogaila, now king of Poland, and his cousin Vytautas, the grand duke of Lithuania, the new agreement extended many of the rights and privileges of the Polish nobility, including the right to unconditional ownership of land, to the Lithuanian nobility. Close to fifty Polish noble families offered to share their coats of arms with the same number of families from the grand duchy. But there was a catch: only Lithuanian Catholic families were invited to the party. The new rights and privileges were not accorded to the Orthodox elite. This was the first instance of discrimination against the Rus’ elites at the state level. Denied the new privileges, the Orthodox aristocrats were thus barred from holding high office in the central administration of the grand duchy. To add insult to injury, the Union of Horodło came on the heels of the curbing of Rus’ autonomy by one of the authors of the new union, Grand Duke Vytautas, who replaced the prince of Volhynia and rulers of some other lands with his own appointees.

An opportunity for the Rus’ elites to express their unhappiness with this encroachment on their status came soon after Vytautas’s death in 1430. In the succession struggle for the Lithuanian throne, which deteriorated into a civil war, the Rus’ nobles, led by the Volhynian boyars, supported their own candidate, Prince Švitrigaila. His rival, Prince Žygimantas, responded in 1434 by extending the rights and privileges guaranteed by the Union of Horodło to the Orthodox elites of the grand duchy, turning the tide of war in his favor. Although the Rus’ princes and nobles of Volhynia and the Kyiv Land remained suspicious of the intentions of Žygimantas, their support for Švitrigaila declined, allowing the grand duchy to return to a state of relative peace. With religion eliminated as a source of grievance among the Rus’ elites, the Lithuanian court had more room to maneuver in its continuing efforts to restrict the autonomy of the Rus’ lands and principalities.

In 1470, the grand duke and king of Poland, Casimir IV, abolished the last vestige of the princely era: the principality of Kyiv itself. Ten years later, the Kyivan princes conspired to kill Casimir and install one of their candidates, but their plot failed, leading to the arrest of the ringleaders and forcing the other conspirators to flee the grand duchy. With their departure came an end to the last hopes of restoring the way of life associated with the princely traditions of Kyivan Rus’. By the turn of the sixteenth century, not only Ukraine’s political map but also its institutional, social, and cultural landscape showed few traces of the period two centuries earlier when Galicia-Volhynia had striven to throw off Mongol suzerainty and become a fully independent actor in the region. While Rus’ law and language remained well established, they began to lose their previous dominance. These essentials of Rus’ culture could no longer compete with latinizing influences and the Polish language, which took pride of place in the grand duchy after the Union of Kreva.

Three Polities of Kyivan Rus'

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 83-86:

THE AUTHORS OF the Primary Chronicle (the laborious task of recording events and commenting on them passed from one generation of monks to another) had to reconcile three different historical identities in their narrative: the Rus’ identity of the Scandinavian rulers of Kyiv, the Slavic identity of the educated elites, and local tribal identity. While the Kyivan rulers and their subjects adopted the name Rus’, the Slavic identity associated with that name, not the Scandinavian one, became the basis of their self-identification. Most subjects of the Rurikids, who ruled their realm from the Slavic heartland, were Slavs. More importantly, the dissemination of Slavic identity beyond the Kyiv region was closely associated with the acceptance of Christianity from Byzantium and the introduction of Church Slavonic as the language of the liturgy, sermons, and intellectual discourse of Rus’. Christianity appeared in both the Slavic and non-Slavic parts of the Kyivan realm in the garb of Slavic languages and Slavic culture. The more Rus’ became Christian, the more it turned Slavic as well. The Kyivan chroniclers incorporated local history into the broader context of the development of the Balkan Slavs and, more broadly still, into the history of Byzantium and world Christendom.

On the local level, tribal identity gave way slowly but surely to identification with local principalities—the centers of military, political, and economic power associated with Kyiv. Chronicle references to the lands surrounding princely towns replaced references to indigenous tribes. Thus, the chronicler refers to the army that sacked Kyiv in 1169 as consisting of people from Smolensk instead of Radimichians, residents of Suzdal instead of Viatichians or Meria, and natives of Chernihiv instead of Siverians. There was a sense of the unity of all the lands under the rule of the Kyivan rulers, and despite conflicts and wars between Rurikid princes, the inhabitants of those lands were considered “ours,” as opposed to foreigners and pagans. The key issue was recognition of the authority of the Rus’ princes, and when some of the Turkic steppe nomads accepted that authority, they became referred to as “our pagans.”

The political and administrative unification of the diverse tribal territories entailed the standardization of their social structure. At its very top were the princes of the Rurikid dynasty, more specifically the descendants of Yaroslav the Wise. Under them were members of the princely retinue—originally Vikings but also increasing numbers of Slavs who merged with local tribal elites to form the aristocratic stratum called the boyars. They were warriors, but in times of peace they administered the realm. The boyars were the main landholding class, and depending on the principality, they had greater or lesser influence on the actions of the prince. Church hierarchs and their servants were also among the privileged.

The rest of the population paid taxes to the princes. The townspeople, who included merchants and artisans, had some political power that they exercised at town meetings, where they decided matters of local governance. Occasionally, as in Kyiv, or quite regularly, as in Novgorod, such meetings influenced the succession of local princes. The peasants, who accounted for most of the population, had no political power. They were divided into free peasants and semifree serfs. The latter could lose their freedom, usually because of debts, and reclaim it once they had paid their debts off or after a certain period. Then there were the slaves—warriors or peasants captured in the course of military campaigns. The enslavement of warriors could be temporary, but that of peasants was permanent.

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The change in the geopolitical aims of the Kyivan princes, from Yaroslav the Wise to Andrei Bogoliubsky, reflects the reduction of their political loyalties from the entire realm of Kyivan Rus’ to a number of principalities defined by the term “Rus’ Land” and eventually to peripheral principalities that grew strong enough to rival Kyiv in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Historians look to those principality-based identities for the origins of the modern East Slavic nations. The Vladimir-Suzdal principality served as a forerunner of early modern Muscovy and, eventually, of modern Russia. Belarusian historians look to the Polatsk principality for their roots. And Ukrainian historians study the principality of Galicia-Volhynia to uncover the foundations of Ukrainian nation-building projects. But all those identities ultimately lead back to Kyiv, which gives Ukrainians a singular advantage: they can search for their origins without ever leaving their capital.

Volodymyr Goes Full Byzantine

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 67-70:

VOLODYMYR TOOK THE throne in 980. He spent the first decade of his rule on warfare, ensuring that the realm created by his predecessor stayed together. Following in Sviatoslav’s footsteps, he again defeated the Khazars and the Volga Bulgars, reasserted his power over the Viatichians in the Oka basin, and pushed westward to the Carpathians, taking a number of fortresses from the Poles, including the town of Premyshl (Przemyśl) on today’s Polish-Ukrainian border. His main concern, however, was the southern frontier, where the Rus’ settlements were under continual attack by the Pechenegs and other nomadic tribes. Volodymyr strengthened border defenses by building fortifications along the local rivers, including the Sula and the Trubizh. He settled those areas with prisoners of war and subjects from other parts of the realm. Rus’, born of conquest, now sought stability by defending its borders instead of attacking the frontiers of other states.

Under Volodymyr’s rule, Kyiv’s relations with Byzantium were also changing. Whereas his predecessor on the Kyivan throne, Helgi, allegedly had sent troops against Byzantium to obtain trade preferences, and Sviatoslav did the same to acquire new territory in the Balkans, Volodymyr invaded the Crimea in the spring of 989 in pursuit of marriage, if not love. He besieged the Byzantine town of Chersonesus, demanding the hand of the sister of Emperor Basil II. A few years earlier, the emperor had asked Volodymyr for military assistance, promising the hand of his sister Anna in return. Volodymyr sent his troops to help up the emperor. But Basil was in no hurry to fulfill his promise. After receiving this slap in the face, Volodymyr refused to turn the other cheek and instead attacked the empire. His tactic worked. Alarmed by news of the fall of Chersonesus, Basil dispatched his sister Anna to the Crimea. She arrived with a retinue that included numerous Christian clerics.

Volodymyr’s request for marriage was granted in return for an assurance that the barbarian chieftain (as the ruler of Kyiv was regarded in Constantinople) would accept Christianity. Volodymyr went along. His baptism would start the process of the Christianization of Kyivan Rus’ and open a new chapter in the region’s history. Once the wedding party had moved back to Kyiv, Volodymyr removed the pantheon of pagan gods, including the most powerful of them—Perun, the god of thunder—from a hill above the Dnieper and put the Christian clergymen to work baptizing the population of Kyiv. The Christianization of Rus’ had begun—a long and difficult process that would take centuries to complete.

Our main source on the baptism of Rus’, the Kyivan chronicler, writes that Muslim Bulgars, Jewish Khazars, Christian Germans representing the pope, and a Greek scholar who spoke on behalf of Byzantine Christianity, the religion that Volodymyr chose, had all importuned Volodymyr. The story of the choice of faith as told in the Primary Chronicle is of course naïve in many ways. But it reflects certain real alternatives facing the Kyivan ruler, for he indeed did the picking and choosing. Volodymyr chose the religion of the strongest country in the region, in which the emperor was no less important an ecclesiastical figure—more important, in fact—than the patriarch. By choosing Christianity, he gained the prestige of marrying into an imperial family, which promptly elevated the status of his house and realm. Volodymyr’s choice of Christian name sheds additional light on his reasons for accepting Christianity. He took the same name as the emperor, Basil, indicating that in Byzantium he had found a political and religious model to emulate at home. A generation later, Kyivan intellectuals such as Metropolitan Ilarion would compare him and his baptism of Rus’ to Emperor Constantine and his role in establishing Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire.

To be sure, the Byzantine political and ecclesiastical elite helped Volodymyr make the “right choice.” They were unhappy with the marriage but not with the conversion. The Byzantines had begun sending missionaries to the region soon after the Rus’ Vikings attacked Constantinople in 860. Back then, Patriarch Photius of Constantinople, the same clergyman who left us the description of the Viking attack, had sent one of his best students, Cyril of Thessalonica, to the Crimea and then to the Khazar kaganate. Along with his brother Methodius, Cyril devised the Glagolitic alphabet to transcribe Christian texts into the Slavic languages. The two men subsequently became known as the apostles to the Slavs and gained sainthood. Attempts to convert Kyivan rulers were undertaken long before Volodymyr’s conversion, as attested by the story of his grandmother, Olha, who became the first known Christian ruler and the first Christian woman in Kyiv named Helen. Apart from propagating Christianity, the Byzantine elites began to gain influence over the “barbaric” rulers and peoples, who had no fancy genealogies and little in the way of sophisticated culture but a great deal of destructive power.

After Volodymyr’s conversion, the patriarch of Constantinople created the Metropolitanate of Rus’, one of few ecclesiastical provinces named after its population and not the city where the bishop or metropolitan would reside. The patriarch reserved for himself the right to appoint metropolitans to head the Rus’ church—most of them would be Greeks. The metropolitan in turn controlled the appointment of bishops, most of whom would come from the ranks of the local elite. The first monasteries were established, using a Byzantine statute. Church Slavonic, the first literary language of Kyivan Rus’, initially functioned predominantly as a translation tool, making Greek texts understandable to local elites. Volodymyr issued regulations defining the rights and privileges of the clergy and gave one-tenth of his income to the church. Christianity in Kyivan Rus’ began at the top and moved slowly down the social ladder, spreading from center to periphery along rivers and trade routes. In some remote areas, especially northeastern Rus’, pagan priests resisted the new religion for centuries, and Kyivan missionaries who ventured there would end up dead as late as the twelfth century.

Volodymyr’s choice would have a profound impact on his realm and on the history of eastern Europe as a whole. Instead of continuing warfare with Byzantium, the new Rus’ polity was entering into an alliance with the only surviving part and continuator of the Roman Empire and thereby opening itself to the political and cultural influences of the Mediterranean world. It would prove fateful that Volodymyr not only brought Rus’ into the Christian world but also made it part of Eastern Christianity. Many of the consequences are as important today as they were at the turn of the second millennium.

Kyiv as Byzantium North

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 65-66:

FROM THE VERY first reports about the Rus’ princes on the Dnieper River, we hear of their attraction to the Byzantine Empire. The same thing that had attracted the Huns and Goths to Rome drew the Viking merchant warriors to the Byzantine capital, Constantinople: earthly riches, along with power and prestige. The Vikings never set out to topple Byzantium, but they tried to get as close to the empire and its capital as possible, launching a number of expeditions to capture Constantinople.

Sviatoslav’s death in 972 closed an important period in the history of Rus’ and its relations with its powerful southern neighbor. To the next two generations of Kyivan rulers, association with Constantinople was no less desirable than it had been for Sviatoslav. But Sviatoslav’s successors were concerned not only with money and commerce but also with the power, prestige, and high culture emanating from Byzantium. Instead of conquering Constantinople on the Bosphorus, as their predecessors had attempted to do, they decided to reproduce it on the Dnieper. This turn in Rus’ relations with the Byzantine Greeks and the new expectations of the Kyivan princes came to the fore during the rule of Sviatoslav’s son Volodymyr and the latter’s son Yaroslav. The two ran the Kyivan realm for more than half a century and are often credited with turning it into a true medieval state—one with a more or less clearly defined territory, system of government, and, last but not least, ideology. Much of the latter came from Byzantium.

As a prince of Kyiv, Sviatoslav’s son, Volodymyr, was less bellicose and ambitious than his father but turned out to be more successful in achieving his goals. Fifteen years old when his father died near the Dnieper rapids, Volodymyr had brothers who wanted the throne for themselves, and a new wave of Scandinavian arrivals eased his path to power. Before wresting the Kyivan throne from one of his brothers, Volodymyr spent more than five years as a refugee in Scandinavia, the ancestral homeland of his clan. He returned to Rus’ with a new Viking army. The Kyivan chronicler tells us that after Volodymyr took Kyiv, his soldiers asked for payment. Volodymyr promised to give them tribute from the local tribes but was unable to deliver. Instead, he recruited the Viking commanders as his local administrators in forts that he built on the steppe frontier, allowing the rest of the army to engage in an expedition against Byzantium. He also ordered his people not to let that army into their towns and to prevent them from returning.

Slavs Meet Byzantium

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 43-45:

THE SLAVS FIRST came to general attention in the early sixth century AD, when they showed up en masse on the borders of the Byzantine Empire, which had been weakened by the Goths and Huns, and moved into the Balkans. Jordanes, a sixth-century Byzantine author of Gothic descent, distinguished two major groups among the Slavs of his day. “Though their names are now dispersed amid various clans and places,” he wrote, “yet they are chiefly called Sclaveni and Antes.” He placed the Sclaveni between the Danube and the Dniester, reserving for the Antes the lands between the Dniester and the Dnieper, “in the curve of the sea of Pontus.” Linguistic data suggests that the ancestral homeland of the Slavs lay in the forests and forest-steppe zone between the Dnieper and the Vistula, mainly in Volhynia and the Prypiat marshes of today’s Ukraine. By the time Jordanes wrote, the Slavs must have moved from their forest recesses into the steppes, creating a serious problem for Emperor Justinian the Great.

Justinian ruled the Byzantine Empire between 527 and 567 and was ambitious enough to attempt a restoration of the Roman Empire in its entirety, both east and west. On the Danube frontier, where the empire faced unceasing attacks from local tribes, Justinian decided to take the offensive. Procopius, a sixth-century Byzantine author who left a detailed account of Justinian’s wars, writes that in the early 530s Chilbudius, a commander personally close to the emperor, was sent to wage war north of the Danube. He scored a number of victories over the Antes, which allowed Justinian to add “Anticus” (conqueror of the Antes) to his imperial title. But the success was short-lived. Three years later Chilbudius was killed in battle, and Justinian returned to the old policy of defending the border along the Danube instead of trying to extend it.

Justinian brought back the old Roman tactic of “divide and rule.” By the end of the 530s, not without Byzantine encouragement and incentives, the Antes were already fighting the Sclaveni, while Byzantine generals recruited both groups into the imperial army. Even so, the Slavic raids continued. While at war with the Sclaveni, the Antes managed to invade the Byzantine province of Thrace in the eastern Balkans. They pillaged the land and took numerous slaves, whom they brought back to the left bank of the Danube. Having manifested their destructive potential, the Antes offered their services to the empire. Justinian took them under his wing and designated the abandoned Greek city of Turris, north of the Danube, as their headquarters.

Like many other enemies of the empire, the Antes became its defenders in exchange for regular payments from the imperial treasury. They tried to enhance their status by claiming to have captured the emperor’s best general, Chilbudius, whom they wanted to recognize as their leader. Since Justinian had granted Chilbudius the title of magister militum, or commander of all the imperial troops in the region, such recognition would have made them legitimate citizens of the empire, not merely its gatekeepers. The plot did not succeed. The true Chilbudius was, of course, long dead, his impostor was captured and sent to Justinian, and the Antes had to accept the status of foederati—allies rather than citizens of the great empire.

Classical Pontic Steppe Divisions

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 39-41:

Ovid’s contemporary Strabo, author of the acclaimed Geographies, knew more about the Pontic steppe than did the famous Roman exile. From Strabo we learn the names of the Sarmatian tribes and the areas under their control. According to him, the Iazyges and Roxolani were “wagon dwellers,” or nomads, but the famous geographer gives us literally nothing about the sedentary population of the forest-steppe areas around the Dnieper, not to mention the wooded areas farther to the north. Unlike Ovid, however, he did not live among the peoples of the region; nor were his sources as good as those of Herodotus. They knew nothing about the “northerners,” and Strabo complained about the ignorance that prevailed “in regard to the rest of the peoples that come next in order in the north; for I know neither the Bastarnae, nor the Sauromatae, nor, in a word, any of the peoples who dwell above the Pontus, nor how far distant they are from the Atlantic Sea, nor whether their countries border upon it.”

Strabo’s informants came from one of the colonies, but if Herodotus made numerous references to the Dnieper, Strabo seemed more familiar with the Don. His sources likely came from Tanais, a Greek colony at the mouth of the Don that belonged to the Bosporan Kingdom, the most powerful union of Greek colonies revived with the arrival of the Romans. For Strabo, the Don had a special meaning. It served as the easternmost boundary of Europe, the term used in the Aegean homeland to describe the expanse of the Greek presence in the outer world. Europe lay to the west of the Don, while Asia began to the east of it.

Thus, at the beginning of the first millennium AD, when the Romans came to the Pontic colonies, the Ukrainian territories found themselves once again at the very edge of what would become Western civilization. The northern frontier of the Hellenic world had now become the eastern boundary of Europe. There it would remain for almost two thousand years, until the rise of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century redrew the map of Europe, moving its eastern boundary all the way to the Urals.

The division of the Pontic steppes into European and Asian parts did not mean much in the time of the Romans. Strabo wrote about the Sarmatians on both the left and right banks of the Don, and Ptolemy, one of his successors, wrote in the second century AD about two Sarmatias, one European, the other Asian—a division that would remain constant in the works of European geographers for another millennium and a half. More important than the imagined eastern boundary of Europe was the real civilizational frontier between the Mediterranean colonies on the northern shore of the Black Sea and the nomads of the Pontic steppes. Unlike the Greek colonies with their surrounding fortifications, that frontier was never set in stone, creating instead a broad zone of interaction between colonists and locals in which languages, religions, and cultures intermixed, producing new cultural and social realities.

The all-important boundary between the steppe nomads and the agriculturalists of the forest-steppe areas that was known to Herodotus became invisible for Strabo. Whether it disappeared altogether or Mediterranean writers simply did not know about it is hard to say. Geography and ecology stayed the same, while the population probably did not. It certainly refused to stay put in the middle of the first millennium AD, when we next encounter references to the region in the writings of learned Greeks.

Herodotus on Ukraine

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 29-30:

THE FIRST HISTORIAN of Ukraine was Herodotus, the father of history himself. This honor is usually reserved for the histories of countries and peoples belonging to the Mediterranean world. Ukraine—a stretch of steppes, mountains, and forests north of the Black Sea, which was known to the Greeks as the Pontos euxeinos (Hospitable Sea, latinized by the Romans as Pontus euxinus)—was an important part of that world. Its importance was of a particular nature. The world of Herodotus was centered on the city-states of ancient Greece, extending to Egypt in the south and the Crimea and the Pontic steppes in the north. If Egypt was a land of ancient culture and philosophy to study and emulate, the territory of today’s Ukraine was a quintessential frontier where Greek civilization encountered its barbaric alter ego. It was the first frontier of a political and cultural sphere that would come to be known as the Western world. That is where the West began to define itself and its other.

Herodotus, known in Greek as Herodotos, came from Halicarnassus, a Greek city in what is now Turkey. In the fifth century BC, when he lived, wrote, and recited his Histories, his birthplace was part of the Persian Empire. Herodotus spent a good part of his life in Athens, lived in southern Italy, and crisscrossed the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds, traveling to Egypt and Babylon among other places. An admirer of Athenian democracy, he wrote in Ionic Greek, but his interests were as global as they could be at the time. His Histories, later divided into nine books, dealt with the origins of the Greco-Persian wars that began in 499 and continued until the mid-fifth century BC. Herodotus lived through a good part of that period and researched the subject for thirty years after the end of the wars in 449. He depicted the conflict as an epic struggle between freedom and slavery—the former represented by the Greeks, the latter by the Persians. Although his own political and ideological sympathies were engaged, he wanted to tell both sides of the story. In his own words, he set out “to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements of both the Greeks and the Barbarians.”

Herodotus’s interest in the “barbarian” part of the story turned his attention to the Pontic steppes. In 512 BC, thirteen years before the start of the wars, Darius the Great, by far the most powerful ruler of the Persian Empire, invaded the region to avenge himself on the Scythians, who had played a trick on him. The Scythian kings, nomadic rulers of a vast realm north of the Black Sea, had made Darius march all the way from the Danube to the Don in pursuit of their highly mobile army without giving him a chance to engage it in battle. This was a humiliating defeat for a ruler who would pose a major threat to the Greek world a decade and a half later. In his Histories, Herodotus spared no effort in relating whatever he knew or had ever heard about the mysterious Scythians and their land, customs, and society. It would appear that despite his extensive travels, he never visited the region himself and had to rely on stories told by others. But his detailed description of the Scythians and the lands and peoples they ruled made him not only the first historian but also the first geographer and ethnographer of Ukraine.

Defining Ukraine and Ukrainian

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 24-27:

Nation is an important—although not dominant—category of analysis and element of the story that, along with the ever changing idea of Europe, defines the nature of this narrative. This book tells the history of Ukraine within the borders defined by the ethnographers and mapmakers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which often (but not always) coincided with the borders of the present-day Ukrainian state. It follows the development of the ideas and identities linking those lands together from the times of the medieval Kyivan state, known in historiography as Kyivan Rus’, to the rise of modern nationalism and explains the origins of the modern Ukrainian state and political nation. In doing so, the book focuses on Ukrainians as the largest demographic group and, in time, the main force behind the creation of the modern nation and state. It pays attention to Ukraine’s minorities, especially Poles, Jews, and Russians, and treats the modern multiethnic and multicultural Ukrainian nation as a work in progress. Ukrainian culture always existed in a space shared with other cultures and early on involved navigating among the “others.” The ability of Ukrainian society to cross inner and outer frontiers and negotiate identities created by them constitutes the main characteristic of the history of Ukraine as presented in this book.

Politics, international and domestic, provide a convenient storyline, but in writing this book, I found geography, ecology, and culture most lasting and thus most influential in the long run. Contemporary Ukraine, as seen from the perspective of longue durée cultural trends, is a product of the interaction of two moving frontiers, one demarcated by the line between the Eurasian steppes and the eastern European parklands, the other defined by the border between Eastern and Western Christianity. The first frontier was also the one between sedentary and nomadic populations and, eventually, between Christianity and Islam. The second goes back to the division of the Roman Empire between Rome and Constantinople and marks differences in political culture between Europe’s east and west that still exist today. The movement of these frontiers over the centuries gave rise to a unique set of cultural features that formed the foundations of present-day Ukrainian identity.

One cannot tell the history of Ukraine without telling the story of its regions. The cultural and social space created by the movement of frontiers has not been homogenous. As state and imperial borders moved across the territory defined by Ukrainian ethnic boundaries, they created distinct cultural spaces that served as foundations of Ukraine’s regions—the former Hungarian-ruled Transcarpathia, historically Austrian Galicia, Polish-held Podolia and Volhynia, the Cossack Left Bank of the Dnieper with the lower reaches of that river, Sloboda Ukraine, and finally the Black Sea coast and the Donets basin, colonized in imperial Russian times. Unlike most of my predecessors, I try to avoid treating the history of various regions (such as the Russian- and Austrian-ruled parts of Ukraine) in separate sections of the book but rather look at them together, providing a comparative perspective on their development within a given period.

In conclusion, a few words about terminology. The ancestors of modern Ukrainians lived in dozens of premodern and modern principalities, kingdoms, and empires, and in the course of time they took on various names and identities. The two key terms that they used to define their land were “Rus’” and “Ukraine.” (In the Cyrillic alphabet, Rus’ is spelled Pycь: the last character is a soft sign indicating palatalized pronunciation of the preceding consonant.) The term “Rus’,” brought to the region by the Vikings in the ninth and tenth centuries, was adopted by the inhabitants of Kyivan Rus’, who took the Viking princes and warriors into their fold and Slavicized them. The ancestors of today’s Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians adopted the name “Rus’” in forms that varied from the Scandinavian/Slavic “Rus’” to the Hellenized “Rossiia.” In the eighteenth century, Muscovy adopted the latter form as the official name of its state and empire.

The Ukrainians had different appellations depending on the period and region in which they lived: Rusyns in Poland, Ruthenians in the Habsburg Empire, and Little Russians in the Russian Empire. In the course of the nineteenth century, Ukrainian nation builders decided to end the confusion by renouncing the name “Rus’” and clearly distinguishing themselves from the rest of the East Slavic world, especially from the Russians, by adopting “Ukraine” and “Ukrainian” to define their land and ethnic group, both in the Russian Empire and in Austria-Hungary. The name “Ukraine” had medieval origins and in the early modern era denoted the Cossack state in Dnieper Ukraine. In the collective mind of the nineteenth-century activists, the Cossacks, most of whom were of local origin, were the quintessential Ukrainians. To link the Rus’ past and the Ukrainian future, Mykhailo Hrushevsky called his ten-volume magnum opus History of Ukraine-Rus’. Indeed, anyone writing about the Ukrainian past today must use two or even more terms to define the ancestors of modern Ukrainians.

In this book, I use “Rus’” predominantly but not exclusively with reference to the medieval period. “Ruthenians” to denote Ukrainians of the early modern era, and “Ukrainians” when I write about modern times. Since the independent Ukrainian state’s creation in 1991, its citizens have all come to be known as “Ukrainians,” whatever their ethnic background. This usage reflects the current conventions of academic historiography, and although it makes for some complexity, I hope that it does not lead to confusion.

PCV Exit Interviews in Moldova

From Lenin's Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 239-241:

The COS [Close-of-Service] conference convened on a spring weekend at a campground that wealthy Russians used as vacation property. The Peace Corps staff had reserved us several cabins that overlooked the river separating Moldova and Ukraine. For the first time in two years, the entire group of remaining volunteers was in the same place at the same time. Our original class had dwindled from thirty-seven to twenty-two. The meetings were brief and confusing. Our boss, the Country Director, described how we should avoid areas like shopping malls and rock concerts when we returned to America; large groups of people would probably unnerve us. He read updates from the previous volunteers who had quit or been evacuated; Callie was teaching English in Turkey and Paul was completing his first year of law school in Cincinnati. They were happy. We listened less to their advice for readjustment, and more to where these people lived. America was a big place. Jesse would live in Minnesota, Colin in Virginia, Will in North Carolina. And Sadie would be in New Jersey. I wouldn’t be anywhere near those places. The medical officer asked that those of us who’d contracted ailments continue our medications when we returned home. Jesse—in direct relation to his refusal to ever seek medical treatment—was awarded recognition as the group’s healthiest volunteer over the two-year period. The safety officer asked that we not celebrate our final days in country with binge drinking; our final benefit package would be delayed if we were arrested and deported from the country at the last minute.

The lecture portion of the conference now concluded, the necessary advice for readjustment into American life dispensed, the Country Director congratulated us and excused us to our exit language interviews.

* * *

The Country Director’s secretary was the only one in the office who spoke Russian well enough to test Jesse and me. I waited outside as Jesse spoke with her for ten minutes. He came outside smiling and said, “Piece of cake.” The secretary had given him an advanced mark.

Inside the cabin, I found the secretary sitting on the bed, her feet not touching the floor. She pointed to a chair in the corner and asked me to sit. She asked me to spell my name and then we began. We talked about transportation using verbs of motion, of food preparation, of my likes and dislikes and specific events in the past and future. It took five minutes to finish her checklist of language proficiency.

“So,” said the secretary. “We have some time to kill. What shall we talk about?”

I shrugged my shoulders and said, “It’s all the same to me.” The secretary giggled.

“Your accent is good. Your body language is good, also. Very Russian, it seems to me.”

I nodded, brushing aside the compliment.

“You live with Russians, I must guess. Is this true?” 

I nodded. 

“Tell me about them.”

“Not much to tell. Very good people. They treat me well.”

“Do you respect them?”

“Of course.”

“What do you mean by, ‘Of course?’”

We sat in silence for a moment as the secretary allowed me to compose my thoughts. My mind returned to my imagining Dima working across the border in Romania, taking orders in a language he hated. And in Bulgaria the women drank coffee on the street corners, I thought. Dima would never be happy anywhere else.

“I spend most of my time in family with the father, Dima. He’s a baker and enjoys working, perhaps not the amount that he must, but the work itself.”

I paused to see if the secretary understood me. She nodded encouragement and waved her hand in a rolling circle to keep me going.

“Like this there is happiness, which I respect. In Riscani, where we live, the streets are clean and pleasant; there is always someone to stop and chat with along the way on these roads. The purpose of life is open and understood, I think. Every day, life has a simple and direct purpose. Walk to work, don’t hurt anyone along the way, and get back home at night for a drink and a sleep.” The secretary nodded and then dismissed me from the cabin. She scored me advanced as well.

Patron Saint's Day in Moldova

From Lenin's Asylum: Two Years in Moldova, by A. A. Weiss (Everytime Press, 2018), Kindle pp. 193-195:

Riscani’s town birthday, a day festival called hram, fell on a Tuesday.

Only a handful of students had come to school; none of the kids higher than sixth grade or any of the village classes showed up that day. I was thankful that my older kids had taken the day off. They would have certainly arrived to class intoxicated. Instead, they wandered the streets with cans of beer, toasting anyone they recognized.

My fifth grade girls asked if I’d be celebrating in the town center. I assured them I wouldn’t be drunk.

“Why not?” asked Olia. “It is hram.”

“Do you realize that drinking so much can damage your health?”

“You are not little,” the class explained. “You can drink without problems.”

After school, I called my friends. I wouldn’t be going out into the hram without backup. Michael was in the capital, so he couldn’t help. With such short notice, Colin was the only one who could make it there in time. He was in Riscani an hour after I called, ready to take on the best the Russians could offer.

Colin was in the apartment for ten minutes before I realized he’d arrived. Dima had met him at the door and taken him to the kitchen for a shot of vodka in honor of Riscani. I walked into the kitchen and found Dima talking to Colin in broken Romanian. Dima pushed out a chair for me, explaining that he and Colin had started while I finished my nap. “Dude,” said Colin, his cheeks flushed. “I really like your father.”

Dima poured three more shots of vodka. We drank. Then Dima reached down to the cabinet below the sink and produced five different bottles: apple garilka, Moldovan samagon [самогон, self-distilled, i.e., homemade moonshine], cognac, high-class vodka, and red wine. We took a shot from each bottle. Then Dima took a bottle of cold beer from the ice box and we drank that. Colin had been a bartender in Virginia before joining the Peace Corps. Now he offered his professional commentary: “Dude, we just drank ten shots of alcohol in twenty minutes.”

“Go enjoy yourselves in the street,” said Dima. “It’s a party.”

...

Colin was already something of a celebrity in Riscani. The town folk who’d met him on his first visit recalled meeting the tallest man in the world. Those who hadn’t seen him carried in their minds an image akin to Big Foot.

From my front door we followed the techno music to its source at the Lenin statue. A crowd of a thousand cheered when we arrived. People hugged me and shook Colin’s hand, took pictures of us with their cell phones. In Russian, Colin said, “Good evening, Riscani,” and the crowd lost it. Students appeared holding beers for us to drink. I refused and told Colin not to accept anything from a minor—even former students like Edgar. Soon enough adults gave us drinks. The Riscanians gyrated to the techno music in disorganized, Russian-head-bobbing, non-circle dancing. Dariya appeared, only the second time I’d seen her since she went off to college. She’d dyed her hair black and wore even tighter clothes than she’d worn in high school. She kissed me on the cheek without her previous childhood awkwardness, whispered she’d see us back at the apartment, and then disappeared into the crowd.

...

Soon after hram, a well-known student from the Moldovan lyceum passed away from illness. My ninth graders had played with him as kids and weren’t in the mood to study, so I let class out early. With a handful of sunflower seeds, I walked down the main street. Live music carried through the air, trumpets and drums. I said hello to Katya at the bazaar and ate one of her sugar rolls. Outside the bazaar, I stepped into a tractor-trailer that had been converted into a shooting range, and I paid five lei to shoot twenty bee-bees at paper targets. I only hit one. Back on the main street, I decided to have a beer. As I walked toward the lake, the live music grew louder. The drumming vibrated my stomach. Then the funeral procession for the dead boy turned a corner into my view. Pedestrians stopped walking and removed their hats; I did the same. The casket was carried on the back of a flat-bed truck. His body was open to the air and slightly blue. Some type of jelly made his face look shiny. The priest walked directly behind; he made eye contact with me and smiled, placed his hand over his heart and bowed his head. I mirrored him, placing my hand on my heart and bowing my head. Several of my students were in the procession following the casket and the priest. They waved to me. Everyone looked sad, but no one cried. I continued on to the lake. The sounds of the trumpets and drums diminished until I only heard them in memory. At the bar they only had liters in the fridge, so that’s what I drank.