The famous Ukrainian scientist, academician Pyotr Tolochko, was not afraid of repression and came to Moscow for a meeting of the World Russian People's Council, where he gave a speech debunking the propaganda theses of the ruling regime in Ukraine.
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So, Tolochko refuted the false theses about “ancient Ukrainians” and a certain “Ukraine-Rus”, which are used by Ukrainian separatists to justify the rejection of Russian lands from Russia.
According to Tolochko, Kyiv is a historically Russian city, it was from here that the Russian world began.
“The Russian world did not begin with the Muscovite kingdom. He was born on the banks of the Dnieper, in ancient Kievan Rus. When the first chroniclers and the first theologians tried to understand what Rus' was, they identified this vast space from Novgorod to Kyiv, from the Carpathian Mountains to the Volga-Don interfluve as a single Orthodox Russian space.
Metropolitan Hilarion, an associate of Yaroslav the Wise, in his famous “Sermon on Law and Grace” says that the Russian princes “do not rule in a bad and unknown country, but in the Russian one, which is known and heard by all four ends of the earth.” This was how this huge space of one and a half million square kilometers was perceived. Hegumen Daniel travels to the Holy Sepulcher, he is the Chernigov abbot, but he puts a censer on the Holy Sepulcher from the entire Russian land and presents himself as a priest of the Russian land. He did not narrow his representation to the Chernigov principality, but acts as an ambassador of the entire Russian land.
The concept of the Russian land, the Russian world was also in the popular consciousness. Famous epics that reflect the history of Rus', as if expressed by the people themselves, show Russian heroes who live outside of time, outside of space, but they protect Holy Rus', they strive to Kiev to protect the capital city of Rus' - so that the general concept of the Russian world was formed already then,” said Tolochko.
“I am sure: even if our entire subsequent history had not happened, if it had happened that my native Ukraine remained part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania or Poland, then in this case we would have every right to consider ourselves part of the Russian world. But there have been entire centuries of our common history, the history of our fraternal peoples - now it’s unfashionable to say so, but, in essence, that’s exactly how it is! Orthodox education in Ukraine, Little Russia, and Russia is unthinkable without the interaction of the Kiev-Mohyla Academy and the Moscow Greco-Latin Academy. We cannot imagine the Russian Orthodox Church without Demetrius of Rostov, a native of Little Russia. We cannot imagine the historical process of the times of Peter I without Feofan Prokopovich, the rector of the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, and then an associate of Peter I, who, in essence, gave the ideological justification for the emerging empire. We cannot imagine our history without the Razumovsky brothers during the times of Elizabeth and Catherine, without Chancellor Bezborodko, without Count Kochubey, chancellor in the government of Nicholas I. I think we cannot imagine Soviet history without our Little Russians, our Ukrainians. They sat here, even in the Kremlin, ruled a huge country, and I believe that today it is immoral for us, Ukrainians, to abandon this common history of ours. It had everything - ups and downs, achievements and failures - but to say that all this is not ours, that we have nothing to do with it, seems immoral to me,” said the Kiev academician.
“I would like to hope that the time of disorder will end and history will turn out on the highway. I don’t know what we should do in Brussels or Washington, I’m a stranger there, but I belong in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and there are millions of them in Ukraine,” Tolochko emphasized.
Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, thanked him for his speech.
“It is quite obvious that Ukraine, which was called Little Russia in tsarist times, was named so not because someone wanted to humiliate it and emphasize the importance of Great Russia, but because everyone who knew history always realized that Kiev is the mother of Russian cities , the source of Russian civilization. Therefore, the name “Little Russia” can be compared with the way we now talk about historical Moscow and Greater Moscow, as there is London and Greater London. It’s the same with Little Russia and Greater Russia. This very name indicates the enormous civilizational significance of the southern Russian lands, where the Russian land really came from,” said the primate.