whose tongues differ from one another only dialectically. A common literary language, Russian, connects all the tribes; race, customs, history, political aspirations are the same for all three. Ukraine, Ukrainian, are only local names, which, however, bear a strong taint of separatism, and must, therefore, appear dangerous and inadmissible. In the spirit of this theory of the unity of the Russian nation, the politics of the Russian state have, for more than two centuries, aimed incessantly to hinder the development of the Ukrainian nation, by means of the most ruthless oppression, and to degrade it to an ethnographic mass which, thru its increasing denationalization, should strengthen the Russian state and support its political expansion.
In a later section we shall be able to follow the individual phases of Russian state politics in regard to the Ukraine. We shall turn, now, to consider the great injury which the Russian unity theory has done to the progress of the Ukrainians as a nation.
The internal injury of the Russian unity theory to the Ukrainian peasantry is comparatively slight. The Ukrainian peasant in Russia is much more highly conscious of his national individuality as opposed to the Russian than as opposed to the Pole. The ethnologic culture of the Ukrainian peasantry is so much higher than that of the Russian, that the Ukrainian looks down with contempt upon the "rough Katzap." This, as it were, ethnologic feeling of independence has protected the Ukrainian peasantry from Russification, not only within its national territory, but even in its distant Siberian or Turkestan colonies. Only a small part of the so-called village aristocracy, e. g., pensioned soldiers, village mayors, notaries, former city workmen who have learnt some Russian, try to murder the Russian language and to pass for Russians. The same is true of a part of the city proletariat. But the great mass is opposed to the Russian language and customs, and preserves its national individuality unchanged.
Far more serious injuries has the Russian unity theory caused among the upper classes of the Ukrainian nation. For the sake of office, honors and gifts of land, the Ukrainian nobility has, in the last two centuries, permitted itself to be Russified for the most part; likewise a host of government officials, military men, clergymen, etc. In the second half of the 19th Century the Russification of the educated Ukrainian circles has slackened its pace, altho, even now, there are in Russia a great many of the educated Ukrainians by birth who are completely Russified and the worst enemies of their own nation.
The Russian unity theory, in the sixties of the 19th Century, found its way into Austria-Hungary too, and founded the so-called "Russophile Party." Its educated retainers, with few exceptions, do not even command the Russian language. Nevertheless, they call themselves Russians, propagate "the unity of the Russian People from the Carpathians to the Kamchatka," and call their Ukrainian mother-tongue "a dialect of the Carpathian herdsmen and swineherds." They speak and write a remarkable jargon consisting of Ukrainian, Russian and Church-Slavic words (the so-called Yazichiye); only in very recent years have they begun to use a bad Russian. Supported by considerable subsidies of money from Russia, the educated Russophiles are developing an active agitation among the peasants of Eastern Galicia, the Bukowina and Northeastern Hungary. The Russophile peasants of these countries, whose number is insignificant, to be sure, constitute a remarkable type of a seduced mass. They also try to speak the Yazichiye, use the old-fashioned "thousand-year-old" orthography, which is entirely analogous to the Russian and, at least, partly hides the differences between the Ukrainian and Russian languages,
live in the illusion that the Czar speaks the same language that they speak, use the Russian national colors, and hate everything Ukrainian with the passion of the renegade.
These internal injuries of the Russian unity theory and the Russophile tide it has created are becoming slighter year by year. Ukrainian national consciousness is continually growing in the masses of the Ukrainian nation, and the Russophile wave would long since have disappeared if it were not for the Russian subsidies, and if certain Polish circles, frightened by the rapid advance of the Ukrainian national idea, were not working with all their might to prevent the fall of Russophilism.