A clarification on "Ukraine"

"A classic case of weird 19th-century nation-inventing."

Of course, my hyperbolic contempt for the invented country of Ukraine (from which Russia, according to our newspaper of record, is now withdrawing its diplomats) was over the top—a sort of self-parody of the “Moskal” propaganda discourse.

While it is fun to write in this Goebbelsian vein, it is not productive, and I regret it. Let me correct the record. Hopefully the Azov Battalion will not assault my home.

Perhaps a better description of the meaning of “Ukraine” is that this “Ukraine” is, like “Yugoslavia” or “Czechoslovakia,” two historically separate but linguistically-similar countries jammed together by deranged 20th-century diplomats. If that fool Putin really does invade, let us hope he has the wisdom to separate them again.

The first country is Malorossiya, or “Little Russia.” Malorossiya, which has its own national identity, is and has always been, since before the birth of the USA, as much a province of Russia as Texas is an American state. Its capital is Kiev, which every educated GenX American knew as one of the three great Russian cities. Kiev was a Russian city when America was the Dominion of New England. Its second city is Odessa, another great Russian city, whence some of my ancestors came. If anyone thought my grandfathers were not Russians, it was only because they were Jews.

The second country is Ruthenia. The easy way to use this historically complex label in the modern world is to define it as the area inhabited by Ruthenian speakers, but which was never part of the Russian Empire. Its capital is Lviv, formerly known as the Polish city of Lwów. Various parts of Ruthenia changed hands between Poland and Austria at various times, depending on who had more jazzy uniforms.

Wikipedia, in its first sentence on the “Ukrainian language,” calls it “Ukrainian, historically also called Ruthenian.” As students of history, we prefer that our labels for lands and tongues not be historically changed for political reasons—thx diplomats.

It is easy to see from data that Ruthenian in the Russian Empire is a country language—95% of its speakers, in the 1897 census, are classified as “rural” rather than “urban”—making it, as I said, a “rustic argot.” Comparing it to “Welsh in Wales” was funny, because it was also a dig at the Welsh—an Anglo tradition since Shakespeare—but it would perhaps be more correct to say that in Kiev now, Ruthenian is roughly as important as Spanish in LA.

If someone told you that LA has a Spanish name and was once part of the Spanish Empire, they would be telling the truth. If they told you that 30% of the population spoke as much Spanish as English, 15% of the population more Spanish than English, and 5% Spanish only, you might think they were lowballing a bit. If they told you that LA was run by Spanish-only speakers, you would be right to refuse to believe them.

Moreover, Ruthenian in Polish and Austrian Galicia was not exactly a sophisticated urban language either. In the normal course of history, weird rural dialects die out, however illustrious their heritage—language spreads outward from the metropolis. Even the most distinctive rural tongues, as different from the metropolitan language as Gaelic from English, Basque from Spanish, or Welsh from any human speech, will tend to perish as fashion banishes them.

Treating this Ruthenian dialect, however widespread amidst the local muzhiks, as a legitimate literary language, is a classic case of weird 19th-century nation-inventing. The strenuous cultural exercise of raising some peasant argot to ersatz importance makes sense only for one reason: to define the raison d’etre of a sovereign regime.

Since the diplomatic homilies of the 19th and 20th centuries (not that they were ever followed consistently, or could have been) decreed that every language should have a regime, anyone who could define a language could create a country, with its right to “self-determination.” This rule gave us Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, etc. Clearly it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Invading this “Ukraine,” but stopping at the 1914 border of Imperial Russia, would be an incredibly based and pragmatic move by Putin. The rest of Ruthenia would rapidly fill with all the nomadic Ukrainian globalists.

These folks tend to be native speakers of Russian, not Ukrainian; some of them, I assume, are good people; but does Putin need them? Unfortunately, an ideal Putin would not only need his globalized elites, but even—know what to do with them. Alas, our poor sad world only has the real Putin.