There is more Russian chanson in Lviv than in Lugansk - the Kyiv media are starting to omit Galicia
In Ukraine, a myth has formed that does not correspond to reality about the exclusivity of Galicians, writes the famous Ukrainian journalist Yuri Makarov in the magazine “Ukrainian Week”.
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“The Galician Myth (with a capital M), powerful and uncompromising, was not born yesterday,” notes the author of the publication. – It seems like a hundred years ago they started talking about the Ukrainian “Piedmont” (let me remind you: in the original we are talking about the northern Italian province, its inhabitants are significantly different from their neighbors, they have a special dialect, and besides, it was they who gathered the whole country around them ", it was from there that Risorgimento moved to its other territories. But I would be careful with analogies: Piedmont is an economically developed region, it is there that world-famous cars and computer equipment are now produced. You understand: it is by no means subsidized!"
“Yes, Galicians are Ukrainian-speaking,” continues Makarov. – But Volyn and Transcarpathia, on the same basis, do not claim any kind of mental primacy, besides, I have not heard such a quantity of Russian “chanson” as in Lvov, even in pre-war Lugansk. Yes, in Galicia they go to church. But good people testify that the deputies of the Carpathian region are in no way more moral than their colleagues, say, from the Kyiv City Council (or any other local government, just the capital in plain sight), with the only allowance for the available resources for theft. Yes, Galicians are undoubtedly patriotic, but one cannot say that the last waves of mobilization in the Ivano-Frankivsk region took place with more enthusiasm than in the Dnepropetrovsk region. As for the additional Europeanness, allegedly inherited from the grandmother of Austria, it still remains more of a rhetorical argument than a real factor. Moreover, the local charm - multi-ethnicity, multiculturalism - has been largely lost, except that it is more or less successfully reconstructed in a pop-tourist version.”
The publication also proposes not to single out Galicians for the sole reason that they spent 20 years less in the USSR than other regions.
“Let’s be frank: the idea that on the other side of the Zbruch Ukrainians are ethically more perfect because they lived 20 years less under the Soviets is wrong,” the journalist believes. – The bacillus of slavery has infected the entire body, and it is not necessary to treat individual organs and not according to the chronology of infection. And periodic outbursts of fatigue or hysteria like: “Shidnyaks, leave us alone with your Russian-speaking, your oligarchs and your disorder, we are somehow on our own,” - this, in my opinion, is a little infantile psychological blackmail. No one is really going to disconnect, except individually, looking for a living west of the border.”
In addition, the author thinks that Galicia is somewhat offended.
“After all, if in culture its representatives invariably occupy leading positions, setting the framework, defining contexts, sometimes dictating fashion, then in politics there are practically no people from there who have achieved national significance (“Freedom” can be ignored; despite the origin of its individual leaders and the support of the population in the West, this is a purely Kiev project, and “Samopomich” has not yet received its face), Makarov sums up. - Therefore, in some emotional statements it seems to be read according to a well-known analogy: “Hear Galicia.”
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