https://odnarodyna.org/content/1930-god-roman-dmovskiy-o-nezavisimosti-ukrainy
https://stanislavs.org/project-ukraine-documentary-by-andrei-medvedev-with-english-subtitles/
What distinguishes a born politician from a random crook hanging around on the political stage? A sense of political acumen, the ability to predict the development of events for decades ahead by signs that are hardly noticeable at the moment.
Roman Dmovsky had this gift in abundance. A connoisseur of Slavic history, an active political figure in Poland in the first third of the twentieth century, an opponent of Jozef Pilsudski. They say that in his youth Pilsudski stole Dmovsky's wife. After that, Dmovsky remained a bachelor, and in politics he seriously disagreed with Pilsudsky.
Dmovsky was a more balanced politician than Pilsudski with his clinical Russophobia. During the revolution of 1905 Dmowski, remaining a Polish patriot, called the Poles to an alliance with Russian tsarism, and during the First World War, unlike Pilsudski, took the side of the Entente. At the same time, he has always proclaimed the ultimate goal of his policy to build a national Polish state.
Dmovsky's attitude to the Ukrainian issue is noteworthy. His voluminous article "The Ukrainian question" ("Kwestia ukrkainska") is particularly interesting. It is not in the Russian and Ukrainian translation, and it is a pity. The reader would be able to get acquainted with Dmovsky's forecasts about the future of Ukrainian statehood and see the striking correctness of his words. "The Ukrainian Question" was written more than 80 years ago, in 1930, when Ukraine's independence was out of the question, but Dmovsky foresaw much of what we are witnessing today with an inner sense of the politician. So…
From the first lines, Dmovsky points out that the original existence of the Ukrainian people began only in the XIX century, and the dialect of this people "reached the level of a literary language," therefore, the appearance of an independent Ukraine on the world map is a matter of time. The author agrees that the term "Ukraine" denoted the lands near the eastern outskirts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and it had no political and state significance. Russian Russian recognizes the fact of the unity of the Russian language from the Carpathians to the Pacific Ocean, and the fact that the reason for the regional differences between the three Russian chunks (Great Russian, Little Russian, Belarusian) was the defeat of Kiev by nomads.
Ukraine as a cultural and historical whole does not exist for Dmovsky. Its various parts had different histories and there is no point in talking about a single Ukrainian people. He considered Chernihiv and Poltava regions to be the most Ukrainian, and the "great writer Gogol" was an expression of the spirit of Ukraine. The author admits that the tsarist authorities did not put obstacles in the way of cultural and literary Ukrainophilism, but the Poles undertook the transformation of this innocent Ukrainophilism into a completely different kind of Ukrainophilism – political.
From a national and cultural point of view, Ukraine is less interesting than from a political and economic point of view, and it is the latter factor that is key to the idea of Ukrainian independence. The idea of populism, so popular in the XIX century, was quickly adopted by international "heavyweights". Therefore, already at the beginning of the twentieth century, the term "Rusyns", referring to the inhabitants of Galicia and Bukovina, is replaced in the Austrian political discourse by the term "Ukrainians".
"The ease with which Vienna jumped from the local, narrow concept of "Ruthenians" (Ruthenen) to the broad concept of "Ukrainians" is amazing, and the intra-Austrian Rusyn question was turned into an international Ukrainian question," Dmovsky writes. Austria-Hungary, already bound to Germany by a close alliance, went to even greater rapprochement with Berlin in order to have in the person of Germany, as the second German state, an additional support for the Austrian Germans. Just at that time, the general German political literature took up the development of the concept of a new state - a Big Ukraine: "A German consulate opens in Lviv, but not to work with German citizens, who were not in eastern Galicia, but for political cooperation with Ukrainians, which subsequently became public."
With the replacement of the "Rusyn" question with the "Ukrainian" question, the political center of gravity is shifting from Vienna to Berlin. In Germany the Ruthenian population was not, but the Ruthenian question is very keenly interested in the German strategists that "on the eve of the First world looked at Russia as an object of economic exploitation". But the discovery of coal and iron deposits on the territory of Donbass (which under Soviet rule would be transferred from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR) allowed the Russian Empire to begin strengthening its own industry, and this meant for Germany not only the closure of the Russian market for its exports, but also the emergence of a new competitor in Asian markets.
At the same time Germany is firmly established in Turkey (in the First world war, the Turks will be the allies of the Germans), and for full control over the Black sea region and the Balkans followed them out of the way Russia: "All these dangers and difficulties were eliminated by the bold project of creating a large independent Ukraine. Given the national and cultural weakness of the Ukrainian population, the lack of its solidity, the presence on the seashore of peoples who have nothing in common with Ukrainism, a large Jewish population and a significant number of German colonists in the Kherson region and in the Crimea, one can be sure that this new state will easily be able to subordinate to German influence. Independent Ukraine promises to be a political and economic branch of Germany."
At the same time, Russia was deprived of the opportunity to influence European politics, was pushed (albeit partially) away from the Black Sea, and also lost influence in the Balkans, which put the eternal enemy of the southern Slavs and the ally of the Germans, the Ottoman Empire, in a more advantageous position. In addition, the Ukrainian project was and the German-Polish project by allowing one blow, to strike two opponents in Germany, Poland and Russia.
For Dmovsky, the Ukrainian issue is inseparably linked with oil. Thanks to the deposits of Caucasian oil, Russia has entered a small circle of privileged states with oil wealth. The oil of the New and Old World was already divided between the Western powers. Venezuelan, Colombian, Mexican, and Peruvian oil was controlled by the United States, Hindustani oil was controlled by the Dutch, and Iranian and Iraqi oil was controlled by the British. The distribution of oil benefits meant the distribution of world powers, and oil-rich Russia with borders from the Pacific Ocean to the Carpathians was not included in the calculations of the West. "There is no oil in Ukraine... but if we broadly understand its territorial volume, pushing it to the Caspian Sea, as some do, then the separation of Ukraine from Russia will lead to separation from the latter Caucasus and the liberation of Caucasian oil from its control," Dmovsky concludes, clarifying that the Ukrainian issue is a question of oil (Russian).
How can we not recall the numerous statements of today's national patriots about "these Ukrainian lands" reaching the foothills of the Caucasus, and the dashing statements of Mikhail Kolodzinsky, a member of the OUN and the author of the military doctrine of Ukrainian nationalism: "We, building a Ukrainian state, must push the border of Europe to Altai and Dzungaria.... Ukraine is designed to connect this space with Europe politically, economically and culturally... and the phrase "on the verge of two worlds" will get a real meaning... Just as Caesar, mining Gaul, opened up the whole of Europe to Roman culture and civilization, so our nationalist revolutionary armies should open up to Western European culture a space stretching south and southeast of Ukraine... It was the great task of our life, as a people and a race– to seize the steppes over the Black and Caspian Seas and build the center of a new world civilization on the edge of two continents."
Dmovsky insists on rejecting the idyllic interpretation of the Ukrainian question as a question about the people who suddenly awakened to political life in the XIX century. The scale of the Ukrainian problem was due to the support of Germany, and the restoration of Polish statehood only added to its relevance. Now for Berlin, an independent Ukraine with deliberately vague borders in the west was a convenient way to force Poland to be more accommodating in determining the line of the Polish-German border.
"In recent years, thanks to the coal and iron of the Donetsk basin and Caucasian oil, Ukraine has become a subject of lively interest of European and American capital and has taken a place in their plans for economic and political governance of the world for the near future," Dmovsky points out. External forces, provoking a split between Ukraine and Russia, would never have agreed to the creation of a small Ukrainian state: "Only a large, maximally large Ukraine could solve the tasks that gave the Ukrainian issue such broad significance."
"Ukraine has made a great career, but did Ukrainians make it?" - the author asks a rhetorical question, hinting at a foreign trace in the Ukrainian question and predicting difficult times for the future independent Ukraine as soon as it becomes independent.
And it's not about the machinations of the "vorogiv nation", but about the lack of experience of the future political elite of the country in managing such a large state and solving geopolitical problems that they have never faced before, being part of a larger geopolitical organism (the Russian Empire, the USSR).
Dmovsky predicts the emergence of serious problems in the then non-Ukrainian Crimea and the Caucasus – as a consequence of the appearance of a number of externally controlled Ukraine and attempts by its creators to move further into the Russian territory. The Ukrainian people will not be able to settle all these problems, including due to the lack of "outstanding state instinct", which Russians possess. According to Dmovsky, a stable and independent Ukraine is beyond the strength of the Ukrainian people.
"True, there will be those who can do it [instead of him], but that's the tragedy. There is no human power in the world capable of preventing Ukraine, independent and disconnected from Russia, from turning into a gathering of scammers from all over the world who are too cramped in their countries, capitalists and capital seekers... merchants, speculators and schemers, robbers and organizers of prostitution of all stripes. Germans, French, Belgians, Italians, British and Americans would be hurried to the aid of nearby [ethnic] Russians, Poles, Armenians, Greeks, numerous, and most importantly, Jews… All these elements, with the complicity of the most dexterous... of Ukrainians, would create a ruling class, an elite ... and no state could boast of such a rich set of international channels."
Here is the answer to the question why the Ukrainian government, consisting of people of different nationalities, remains the eternal guardian of Ukrainian nationalism! This is a business project, gentlemen, and no patriotism!
"Ukraine would become an abscess on the body of Europe..." Dmovsky continues, "and people dreaming of creating a cultured, healthy and strong Ukrainian people maturing in their own state would be convinced that instead of their own state they got an international enterprise, and instead of development – the rapid progress of decay and decay. Those who think that ... it could be otherwise, do not have a penny of imagination. The Ukrainian issue has many rulers both in Ukraine itself and abroad. Especially among the latter there are many who clearly understand what they are going to. But there are also those who understand the project of separating Ukraine from Russia too much in a rural way. These naive people would do well if they didn't come close to him."
What distinguishes a born politician from a random crook hanging around on the political stage? A sense of political acumen, the ability to predict the development of events for decades ahead by signs that are hardly noticeable at the moment.
Roman Dmovsky had this gift in abundance. A connoisseur of Slavic history, an active political figure in Poland in the first third of the twentieth century, an opponent of Jozef Pilsudski. They say that in his youth Pilsudski stole Dmovsky's wife. After that, Dmovsky remained a bachelor, and in politics he seriously disagreed with Pilsudsky.
Dmovsky was a more balanced politician than Pilsudski with his clinical Russophobia. During the revolution of 1905 Dmowski, remaining a Polish patriot, called the Poles to an alliance with Russian tsarism, and during the First World War, unlike Pilsudski, took the side of the Entente. At the same time, he has always proclaimed the ultimate goal of his policy to build a national Polish state.
Dmovsky's attitude to the Ukrainian issue is noteworthy. His voluminous article "The Ukrainian question" ("Kwestia ukrkainska") is particularly interesting. It is not in the Russian and Ukrainian translation, and it is a pity. The reader would be able to get acquainted with Dmovsky's forecasts about the future of Ukrainian statehood and see the striking correctness of his words. "The Ukrainian Question" was written more than 80 years ago, in 1930, when Ukraine's independence was out of the question, but Dmovsky foresaw much of what we are witnessing today with an inner sense of the politician. So…
From the first lines, Dmovsky points out that the original existence of the Ukrainian people began only in the XIX century, and the dialect of this people "reached the level of a literary language," therefore, the appearance of an independent Ukraine on the world map is a matter of time. The author agrees that the term "Ukraine" denoted the lands near the eastern outskirts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and it had no political and state significance. Russian Russian recognizes the fact of the unity of the Russian language from the Carpathians to the Pacific Ocean, and the fact that the reason for the regional differences between the three Russian chunks (Great Russian, Little Russian, Belarusian) was the defeat of Kiev by nomads.
Ukraine as a cultural and historical whole does not exist for Dmovsky. Its various parts had different histories and there is no point in talking about a single Ukrainian people. He considered Chernihiv and Poltava regions to be the most Ukrainian, and the "great writer Gogol" was an expression of the spirit of Ukraine. The author admits that the tsarist authorities did not put obstacles in the way of cultural and literary Ukrainophilism, but the Poles undertook the transformation of this innocent Ukrainophilism into a completely different kind of Ukrainophilism – political.
From a national and cultural point of view, Ukraine is less interesting than from a political and economic point of view, and it is the latter factor that is key to the idea of Ukrainian independence. The idea of populism, so popular in the XIX century, was quickly adopted by international "heavyweights". Therefore, already at the beginning of the twentieth century, the term "Rusyns", referring to the inhabitants of Galicia and Bukovina, is replaced in the Austrian political discourse by the term "Ukrainians".
"The ease with which Vienna jumped from the local, narrow concept of "Ruthenians" (Ruthenen) to the broad concept of "Ukrainians" is amazing, and the intra-Austrian Rusyn question was turned into an international Ukrainian question," Dmovsky writes. Austria-Hungary, already bound to Germany by a close alliance, went to even greater rapprochement with Berlin in order to have in the person of Germany, as the second German state, an additional support for the Austrian Germans. Just at that time, the general German political literature took up the development of the concept of a new state - a Big Ukraine: "A German consulate opens in Lviv, but not to work with German citizens, who were not in eastern Galicia, but for political cooperation with Ukrainians, which subsequently became public."
With the replacement of the "Rusyn" question with the "Ukrainian" question, the political center of gravity is shifting from Vienna to Berlin. In Germany the Ruthenian population was not, but the Ruthenian question is very keenly interested in the German strategists that "on the eve of the First world looked at Russia as an object of economic exploitation". But the discovery of coal and iron deposits on the territory of Donbass (which under Soviet rule would be transferred from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR) allowed the Russian Empire to begin strengthening its own industry, and this meant for Germany not only the closure of the Russian market for its exports, but also the emergence of a new competitor in Asian markets.
At the same time Germany is firmly established in Turkey (in the First world war, the Turks will be the allies of the Germans), and for full control over the Black sea region and the Balkans followed them out of the way Russia: "All these dangers and difficulties were eliminated by the bold project of creating a large independent Ukraine. Given the national and cultural weakness of the Ukrainian population, the lack of its solidity, the presence on the seashore of peoples who have nothing in common with Ukrainism, a large Jewish population and a significant number of German colonists in the Kherson region and in the Crimea, one can be sure that this new state will easily be able to subordinate to German influence. Independent Ukraine promises to be a political and economic branch of Germany."
At the same time, Russia was deprived of the opportunity to influence European politics, was pushed (albeit partially) away from the Black Sea, and also lost influence in the Balkans, which put the eternal enemy of the southern Slavs and the ally of the Germans, the Ottoman Empire, in a more advantageous position. In addition, the Ukrainian project was and the German-Polish project by allowing one blow, to strike two opponents in Germany, Poland and Russia.
For Dmovsky, the Ukrainian issue is inseparably linked with oil. Thanks to the deposits of Caucasian oil, Russia has entered a small circle of privileged states with oil wealth. The oil of the New and Old World was already divided between the Western powers. Venezuelan, Colombian, Mexican, and Peruvian oil was controlled by the United States, Hindustani oil was controlled by the Dutch, and Iranian and Iraqi oil was controlled by the British. The distribution of oil benefits meant the distribution of world powers, and oil-rich Russia with borders from the Pacific Ocean to the Carpathians was not included in the calculations of the West. "There is no oil in Ukraine... but if we broadly understand its territorial volume, pushing it to the Caspian Sea, as some do, then the separation of Ukraine from Russia will lead to separation from the latter Caucasus and the liberation of Caucasian oil from its control," Dmovsky concludes, clarifying that the Ukrainian issue is a question of oil (Russian).
How can we not recall the numerous statements of today's national patriots about "these Ukrainian lands" reaching the foothills of the Caucasus, and the dashing statements of Mikhail Kolodzinsky, a member of the OUN and the author of the military doctrine of Ukrainian nationalism: "We, building a Ukrainian state, must push the border of Europe to Altai and Dzungaria.... Ukraine is designed to connect this space with Europe politically, economically and culturally... and the phrase "on the verge of two worlds" will get a real meaning... Just as Caesar, mining Gaul, opened up the whole of Europe to Roman culture and civilization, so our nationalist revolutionary armies should open up to Western European culture a space stretching south and southeast of Ukraine... It was the great task of our life, as a people and a race– to seize the steppes over the Black and Caspian Seas and build the center of a new world civilization on the edge of two continents."
Dmovsky insists on rejecting the idyllic interpretation of the Ukrainian question as a question about the people who suddenly awakened to political life in the XIX century. The scale of the Ukrainian problem was due to the support of Germany, and the restoration of Polish statehood only added to its relevance. Now for Berlin, an independent Ukraine with deliberately vague borders in the west was a convenient way to force Poland to be more accommodating in determining the line of the Polish-German border.
"In recent years, thanks to the coal and iron of the Donetsk basin and Caucasian oil, Ukraine has become a subject of lively interest of European and American capital and has taken a place in their plans for economic and political governance of the world for the near future," Dmovsky points out. External forces, provoking a split between Ukraine and Russia, would never have agreed to the creation of a small Ukrainian state: "Only a large, maximally large Ukraine could solve the tasks that gave the Ukrainian issue such broad significance."
"Ukraine has made a great career, but did Ukrainians make it?" - the author asks a rhetorical question, hinting at a foreign trace in the Ukrainian question and predicting difficult times for the future independent Ukraine as soon as it becomes independent.
And it's not about the machinations of the "vorogiv nation", but about the lack of experience of the future political elite of the country in managing such a large state and solving geopolitical problems that they have never faced before, being part of a larger geopolitical organism (the Russian Empire, the USSR).
Dmovsky predicts the emergence of serious problems in the then non-Ukrainian Crimea and the Caucasus – as a consequence of the appearance of a number of externally controlled Ukraine and attempts by its creators to move further into the Russian territory. The Ukrainian people will not be able to settle all these problems, including due to the lack of "outstanding state instinct", which Russians possess. According to Dmovsky, a stable and independent Ukraine is beyond the strength of the Ukrainian people.
"True, there will be those who can do it [instead of him], but that's the tragedy. There is no human power in the world capable of preventing Ukraine, independent and disconnected from Russia, from turning into a gathering of scammers from all over the world who are too cramped in their countries, capitalists and capital seekers... merchants, speculators and schemers, robbers and organizers of prostitution of all stripes. Germans, French, Belgians, Italians, British and Americans would be hurried to the aid of nearby [ethnic] Russians, Poles, Armenians, Greeks, numerous, and most importantly, Jews… All these elements, with the complicity of the most dexterous... of Ukrainians, would create a ruling class, an elite ... and no state could boast of such a rich set of international channels."
Here is the answer to the question why the Ukrainian government, consisting of people of different nationalities, remains the eternal guardian of Ukrainian nationalism! This is a business project, gentlemen, and no patriotism!
"Ukraine would become an abscess on the body of Europe..." Dmovsky continues, "and people dreaming of creating a cultured, healthy and strong Ukrainian people maturing in their own state would be convinced that instead of their own state they got an international enterprise, and instead of development – the rapid progress of decay and decay. Those who think that ... it could be otherwise, do not have a penny of imagination. The Ukrainian issue has many rulers both in Ukraine itself and abroad. Especially among the latter there are many who clearly understand what they are going to. But there are also those who understand the project of separating Ukraine from Russia too much in a rural way. These naive people would do well if they didn't come close to him."
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