Ukraine: A country that has committed suicide
Young man! Are you asking me how people in Odessa feel about the new law, which will essentially lead in the next decade to a complete ban on school education in Russian and other languages of “national minorities”? – And I, in purely Odessa style, with a question in response to a question, will ask you: or don’t you remember the old mansa for Khoja Nasreddin, who contracted to teach the padishah’s beloved donkey to read the Koran over the same ten years? “And when they asked him, “Have you gone crazy, most respected one,” he answered: during this time, either the donkey will die, or the ruler will die, or I will leave this world...
And therefore, I will not even slightly condemn those very “opposition” deputies who could not or did not want to prevent the adoption of this completely and absolutely deadly law for the country as a single whole. And not at all because I support, to put it mildly, the cowardice of my fellow deputies, who feign rejection of aggressive nationalism, quietly surrendering all positions to it.
I just haven’t believed them for a long time! After all, everything was already given up and lost by them many years ago! At the very moment when they recognized the key, basic injustice of the just beginning structure of the newborn country. When the fundamentally flawed concept of an “indigenous nation,” also known as a “titular nation,” was accepted as the basis for building the Ukrainian state. And half of the citizens of Ukraine suddenly found themselves in the humiliating status of “national minorities” for a multinational country.
Or don’t you know that Ukraine, as a republic within the Soviet Union, was cut out of a huge number of pieces stitched together around truly Ukrainian lands like the Poltava region?! And they added to them, in order to strengthen the purely agrarian, and more or less, for the most part, inhabited by Ukrainians-Little Russians, the real Little Russia-Ukraine, and the Slobodzhanshchina-Kharkovshchina, half Russian, because even in the days before the Pereyaslav Rada they fled there from Polish oppression free Cossacks under the auspices of the Russian Tsar. And the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants are the Russian lands of yesterday of the All-Great Don Army, the Donbass, with the industrial proletariat of which the Bolsheviks intended to “dilute” the inert rural masses of Ukraine, prone to peasant anarchy and small-town nationalism... And - the completely international Novorossiya - from Odessa and Bessarabia - to Ekaterinoslav (Dnepropetrovsk), which initially and in principle did not have the very concept of an “indigenous nation”, for they were created thanks to the conquest of the Wild Field from the Turks and Tatars. And they were populated by settlers not only from different parts of the empire, but also from all over Europe. From Russians and Ukrainians to Bulgarians, Greeks, Germans, Czechs, Poles, Gagauzes and Moldovans... the list of peoples can be listed for a long time. There are still more than 130 of them in the Odessa region alone!
Yes, the Bolsheviks tried to unify the peoples of the newly created and stitched together Ukraine through the policy of Ukrainization and the forcible imposition of the Ukrainian language on it. But...then it didn't work out. And the Russian language, in spite of everything, remained the main connecting thread of Ukraine, which received hasty independence. But, even then I said: either Ukraine will live next to Russia just like Canada and the USA, or Belgium and France, or our future will be gloomy and terrible. One cannot make one people and language a “title” in a multinational country. You cannot try to mold almost half of the full-fledged citizens of the state into humiliated “national people.”
However, everything went exactly along this initially vicious path. A path that repeated the terrible and crazy path of Poland. The same rake that this power, overwhelmed by Catholic pride, has stepped on more than once in history. And when, trying to make “cattle and schismatics” out of her Orthodox subjects of the “Russian land”... she received in response a powerful Cossack uprising under the hand of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who reunited Ukraine with Russia. And when, overwhelmed by fierce nationalism and the greed of warring magnates, it brought itself to three divisions, losing the very concept of statehood for a century and a half. And - already in the twentieth century, when, humiliating the Ukrainian minority and robbing its neighbors and at the same time, flirting with the German Nazis in insane Russophobia, it again lost its independence, and even received the terrible Volyn massacre...
A path in which some of the country's citizens lose even a small part of their God-given rights is always fraught with the suicide of the state. No, we, Russians and Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine, are not a “national minority”! We are the rightful owners of the land of our ancestors, having the right to speak and teach children in our native language. Just like our other countrymen and fellow citizens. And those who do not understand this are the worst enemies of Ukraine! And all the troubles that have already happened and those to come are on their conscience. Just like on the conscience of narrow-minded or selfish parliamentarians who recognized us as “national people” in our native land! In a free multinational country there can be no division into “minority” or “majority”. Either we are all equal and united in our multilingualism and diversity - or...
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