Slavic philology passes a different judgment. With the exception of a few Pan-Russian philologists (Florinsky.etc), who, as a matter of fact, are not capable philologists at -all, the entire philological profession is decided on the point that the Ukrainian language is related to the Russian and the Polish only to the extent that the Serbian and Bulgarian are, for instance, or the Polish and Czechic. The investigations of Miklosich, Malinovsky, Dahl, Maksimovich, Potebnia, Zitetsky, Ohonovsky, Shakhmatov, Broch, Baudouin de Courtenay, Fortunatov, Korsh,Krimsky,Satotsky, and others, have proved beyond a doubt that the Ukrainian language is not a dialect of the Russian language, but an independent language of equal rank with the Russian. The same opinion has been expressed most forcibly by the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in its famous official decision, "Concerning the Removal of the Restrictions on Little Russian Publications, St. Petersburg, 1905." The Academy emphasized expressly that the Russian and Ukrainian languages are two independent languages of equal rank. The Russian written language is not built up on a general East Slavic, but only on a Great Russian foundation. Hence, it cannot be forced upon the Ukrainians, since they have a completely developed written language at their command.
It is very likely that, in a far distant prehistoric time, all Eastern Slavic tribes, the ancestors of the present Ukrainians, White Russians and Russians, spoke a common tongue. But soon after the beginnings of historical life in Eastern Europe we see these Slavic races divided lingually into three groups. In the 11th Century, the differences between the language spoken in Kiev or Halich on the one hand, and Vladimir on the Klasma or Sugdal on the other, were already distinct. The political unification of all the Eastern Slavic tribes in the Kiev Empire could not eradicate these differences between North and South, and they are very evident in the literary monuments of that time. The disruption of the Empire of Kiev into loosely connected principalities, the formation of the Muscovite political center, the decline of Kiev — all went to strengthen the lingual antitheses between the ancestors of the Ukrainians and those of the Russians. The Tatar oppression finally separated the Muscovite group permanently from the Ukrainian, forcing each to lead a separate historical life. The Ukraine fell under Lithuanian, then Polish rule; Muscovy gradually developed into the Russian Empire. The differences in language, which in the 14th Century were already appreciable, increased so strongly thru the independent development of each language that in the 18th Century, when Russia received the greatest part of the Ukraine beneath her dominion, the Russian and Ukrainian languages confronted one another as entirely independent languages.
According to the investigations of Stozky and Gartner, the Ukrainian language, from a philological point of view, is related to the Russian only to about the same extent that it is related to the Polish or Czechic. Of all Slavic languages the nearest to the Ukrainian is theSerbo-Croatian. From this it follows that the Ukrainians must at one time have had a much closer community with the Serbo-Croations than with the Russians.
We see here a fine example of how relationship of languages goes hand in hand with anthropological relationship. (Incidentally, proof is herewith presented that the anthropological characteristics in the peoples of Eastern Europe have an entirely different significance from the same in Western and Central Europe). This coincidence of two sciences, entirely independent of one another, causes the Ukrainians to appear to us a very peculiar independent unit in the Slavic family of races. Only the restriction of the knowledge of Ukrainian among Slavists, the interpretation of Eastern European history always from the Russian point of view, the common church language, which, for a long time, was the basis of the written language as well, the unfortunate confusion due to the name Russ, Russki, which as ancient state designations for the Empire of Kiev were usurped by the Muscovite Empire and applied to all Eastern Slavic nations; these things have made it possible to conceal the real state of affairs from the eyes of European science and have helped establish the Russian unity theory.