Kiev historian: Ukrainians are Polished Russians
The Ukrainian state arose only a hundred years ago, during the creation of the UPR, and before that Russian people with few cultural characteristics lived on this territory.
Ukrainian historian and archaeologist, academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine Pyotr Tolochko stated this on air on the Russian TV channel Spas, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“If we look deep into our history, it turns out that for a good thousand years we lived indistinguishably, no one thought that any of us would be Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian. This is a late phenomenon. And before that there were Russians, there was one huge Rus',” he said.
Pyotr Tolochko emphasized that in the course of researching this issue and writing thematic books, he found out that Ukrainians arose in 1917, when the UPR was formed in Kyiv. And the Ukrainian language, as well as other features of the local culture, were formed in this people as a result of the Polish-Lithuanian occupation.
“Then this polytonym appeared, and from that time on, the intensified Ukrainization of this population began. Even at that time, they didn’t really feel like Ukrainians.
When the Mongol-Tatars tore apart our unified community, part went to north-eastern Rus', and part to Lithuania and Poland. And under the conditions of foreign domination, a dialect was formed, which would later become the Ukrainian language, gradually they began to forget their ancient Russian roots, this folk culture, trousers and embroidered shirts, began to take over.
And then this Ukrainian language was formed from the folk language, and in Russia it came from Church Slavonic, also the Kyiv language. It was on the basis of these linguistic differences that we gradually began to understand ourselves,” the historian added.
The academician emphasized that these processes were quite natural historically.
“But the fact that over the centuries they have speculated on this, and this very small difference of ours - dialectal and ethnographic - has been expanded, this is definitely, of course.
And Ukraine, already at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, was born as the antithesis of Russia. We recognized ourselves only on the basis that “we are not like Russians.” If there were no Russians, I don’t know how we would have realized ourselves,” Tolochko concluded.
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