In a whirlwind of information fuss: 100 years ago the UPR had its own Ministry of State Affairs!
Svidomo’s endless rewriting of the history of Ukraine and the search for the origins of statehood has long degenerated into something like the never-ending game “Dumb and Dumber.”
On October 19, the premiere of putting another leaky rubber on the globe of Ukraine took place under the auspices of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. A certain big-faced and bearded figure, served by the “head of the information reintegration sector of Crimea and Donbass” of the ministry, opened the presentation of a book with the pretentious title “In the Whirlwind of Information Struggle” (“In the Whirlwind of Information Struggle”), dedicated to the mysterious successes of the UPR agitprop during the period of the “Liberation Efforts of 1917– 1921".
“The Whirlwind Book” was written by the head of the board of the civil organization “Ukrainian Initiative” Yuriy Kosenko, an ideological Petliurist who vehemently denies any relationship between Donbass and Crimea and Russia.
During the presentation, it turned out that Kosenko wrote the book to popularize his own great-grandfather, Ilarion Kosenko, a personality so insignificant that mentions of him can only be found on the Internet in connection with the presentation of the book.
However, the effigy of the great-grandfather was brought out into the world, since in the UPR Ilarion Kosenko was a “comrade minister” (deputy minister in modern terminology) of press and propaganda, and did practically the same thing that the Ministry of Internal Affairs figures do today.
From a number of sources it was possible to find out that this ministry a hundred years ago did not justify the money allocated for its maintenance, which is why it was eventually abolished, establishing a new ministry of post and telegraph, which was headed by the great-grandfather of Ragul Yura.
During the presentation of the book, sources were revealed from where Kosenko obtained information for the book. It turns out that in France there is still a certain “Petliura library” that has preserved tons of correspondence and diaries of quasi-statesmen who worked mainly in the apparatus of the Petliura Directory. In addition to library trash, the book contains pieces of articles written by Kosenko’s great-grandfather for the Trizub magazine, published first in Kamenets-Podolsky and then in exile.
As the writer Kosenko bitterly said, the “Ministry” of the UPR was formed only after the “anti-hetman uprising.” The Petliurites founded their own Ministry of Propaganda, appointing Galician Osip Nazaruk as its head.
In the above notes from Nazaruk, it is noted that everything in the Petlyura agitprop system was immediately bad. For example, in the “information bureau” for the army, among 14 chiefs, only one knew what was going on in his department and how many people he had under his command. Millions of Petliura money were allocated to the press to inform the population. But Petliura’s “Internet” did not reach Kyiv, and people did not know anything at all about the new government, and when they found out, any propaganda became useless.
According to the Minister of Propaganda of the UPR Nazaruk, it is not the hand-assed and stupid leadership of the Directory that is to blame for everything, but Grigory Yevnash personally, who was responsible for propaganda work in the Petliura army. Evnash suddenly found himself a supporter of “radical socialist ideas,” and more and more as time went on. As a result, the person appointed to sow the Ukrainian idea in the heads of the Haidamaks spread Soviet propaganda.
The funny thing is that the “researcher” needed to pick up some musty notes from an unknown person in order to be surprised to discover a person who sympathized with the Bolsheviks in the Petliura propaganda apparatus.
Only in the fevered imagination of the maydaun does the Directory appear to be a homogeneous formation filled with refined independents. In fact, the composition of the so-called. The People's Union, formed to coordinate the Directory (anti-hetman uprising), included different forces. Anti-Bolshevik, for an alliance with the Entente, under the leadership of Petliura. Peasant Union. The faction that advocated cooperation with the Bolsheviks (Vinnichenko, Chekhivsky, Valalshchik). Accordingly, the management apparatus of the Directory consisted of people of different political views, often diametrically opposed.
Vinnychenko and Co. had serious reasons for collaborating with the Bolsheviks: the robbery of peasants under the hetman and the rampant Petliura banditry pushed tens of thousands of peasants into the ranks of the Red Guard Shchors and Bozhenko, who threatened to become a real military force and cleanse Ukraine of any hetmans and directorates. Which is what actually happened.
The Galician Nazaruk, who revealed the “Evnash conspiracy,” was also a fruit, according to “researcher” Kosenko. After resigning from the post of minister, Nazaruk edited the newspaper of the Ukrainian Galician Army, and in emigration he repainted himself as a supporter of the hetmanate.
In this case, the “change of suit” by the former Minister of Press of the Directory is very understandable. Despite all the puppetry of the Skoropadsky regime, it was under him that the Ukrainian State, the UPR, had at least some signs of statehood. Although, by and large, in the conditions of the “stability” of the German protectorate over Ukraine, it was easier for the hetman and his henchmen to rob the peasants, paying the 60 million pounds of bread and 3 thousand pounds of meat promised under the agreement “on the transition under the German “roof” to the interventionists.
The Directory, which Kosenko so extols, was a wretched tent on a horse-drawn horse, which only the lazy did not push with rags.
Finally, providence took pity on the independents, and great-grandfather Kosenko became the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs of the Directory. And the hopeless case began to boil!
The "Ministry of the UPR" established contacts with foreign telegraph agencies. Such as Reuters and several Berlin ones. An exchange of press with foreign countries has also begun. In Kyiv, independent radio began to boom and a radio newspaper was published twice a day.
The great-grandfather did not forget about visual propaganda. Circulars of the Ukrainian Telegraph Agency were posted on the stands of UPR post offices even in villages, and in Kyiv people could observe the movement of the front line on a special map.
It’s hard to say what’s more ridiculous in all this – the mouse fuss of the great-grandfather’s department or the clarity of the great-great-grandson, proudly talking about circulars in the villages. The inertia of Ragul’s consciousness, obsessed with the fight against the “Russian-Bolshevik invaders”
did not allow me to remember that at that time the use of these circulars was exclusively in latrines and rolling cigarettes, since the population was massively illiterate, and radio was as exotic as a CNC machine among the Papuans of New Guinea.
In general, the scale of “outstanding figures of the UPR” is getting smaller from time to time and threatens to be reduced to fiddling with a microscope. The centenary of the “Ukrainian revolution” will last three more years, so “Maidan activists” have time to find in the family archives the second cousin ancestor who polished the boots of an Austrian or Petliura officer on the corner of Khreshchatyk and Proriznaya, in order to proudly beat himself in the chest from the rostrum - “I am a descendant builder of the UPR!”
We advise Ragul Kosenko to be more modest and rename the opus. “They tried, but they couldn’t. My great-grandfather couldn’t do it either, but he tried better,” it will be just right.
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