UKRAINA
The Origins of Ukraine and Ukrainian Language
I am originally from Moscow, Russia and I am one quarter Ukrainian by my grandmother, so I know a little bit about my history and roots, more so than many other people who offer their opinions on the situation in Ukraine, Crimea, and Russia.
Ruslo is Russian for the riverbed, the Rus people are the folks living along the rivers, similarly the Pollaks/Polish are the field people, pole means the field. When the Jewish Vikings arrived by the rivers from Northern Europe they found that all cities in the region such as Kiev were paying protection tributes to the Turkish nomads of the Ottoman empire. The Vikings have offered their protection instead and have set up the Rurikid dynasty or Rurikids, which was a noble lineage founded by the Varangian prince Rurik, who established himself in Novgorod around the year AD 862, the New City so called because it was built specifically for the Vikings and other foreigners.
The Rurikids were the ruling dynasty of Kievan Rus' (after the conquest of Kiev by Oleg of Novgorod in 882) before it finally disintegrated in the mid-13th century, as well as the successor Rus' principalities and Rus' prince republics of Novgorod, Pskov, Vladimir-Suzdal, Ryazan, Smolensk, Galicia-Volhynia (after 1199), Chernigov, and the Grand Duchy of Moscow (from 1263).
When the capital of Kievan Russ was moved to Moscow, closer to the Northern Europe with whom the Vikings were trading, the original Kievan region became known as Ukraina, meaning at the edge of the region, of Russ confederation that is, krai means the region and border, edge, thus u krai na is literally means being at the edge of the region, as reference to the original place where the Russian confederation of the city states started, Kiev being its first capital.
Kievan Russ was also named so after the river Ros*2 in the region, which was always occupied by ethnic Russian-speaking Slavs, until Austro-Hungarian empire invasion of the Western Ukraine, and is a military alliance of city states, like modern day NATO, organized to repel taxing and raids of the Ottoman empire and other nomadic tribes since Kiev was at the heart of ancient trade routes to an extent that the Great Duchess Anna Yaroslavna of Kievan Russia famously married Luis I of France.
At the end of the 18th century, The House of Habsburg of Austro-Hungarian empire has set up many committees stuffed with the Polish linguists who made up the official Ukrainian language by replacing the Russian sounding words in the local Western Ukrainian regional Slavonic dialects, under the Austro-Hungarian empire occupation and control during that time, with the words taken from Polish, Czeh, Slovak, Borgarian, and other Easter European languages.
It was Lenin and Bolsheviks who first drew up the Ukrainian borders, stared publishing and popularizing first Ukrainian literature, and set up Ukrainization*1 by the Soviet Union of Ukraine, making it into a distinct culture, apart from other Russian-speaking regions.
Later, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, aka Joseph Stalin, carried out the public trials of the originally polish-influenced linguists who have kept the sabotage of the Russian language regional dialects by producing and maintaining the Ukrainian language based more on Polish, Czeh, Slovak, Borgarian words than the original Russian counterparts and then publicly executed them.
At the same time Stalin on one hand was exterminating Ukrainian villages with the Holodomor hunger blockades, my mother's mother was the only survivor from such a village near Kiev, and on the other hand executing and finishing the industrialization and Ukrainization plan set by Lenin of what was and is indigenous Russian-speaking territory and cradle of the ancient Kievan Russia.
Without the contribution of the Austro-Hungarian empire and Polish linguists, also the founding Grandfather Lenin and Father Stalin, the whole Ukrainian self identity would have been still purely Slavonic Russian with regional dialectic differences, such as Sicilian vs Rome, different enough to not being able to understand each other, same goes for some Germanic tribes, English, Catalonia in Spain and most other countries, where in the cities people speak the literary official language and in surrounding villages they speak in dialects, some different enough to be incomprehensible to others.
Out of modern day Ukraine, there are only two regions that come to mind as Ukrainian-speaking based on the Astro-Hungarian Polish linguists handiwork: the Galicia and Bukovina. Lviv in Galicia is 50/50 Ukrainian / Russian speaking, while Chernivtsi has laso large Ukrainian - speaking population because it was traditionally part of Bukovina which was occupied by Austro-Hungarian empire.
Then to the South to Carpathian mountains is Uzhhorod, predominantly Russian-speaking, and the rest of the Ukraine, the whopping 90% of it is purely Russian - speaking and has been since the dawn of Russia herself, with most cities speaking literary Russian language: Odessa, Donetsk, Kharkov, and of course old Kiev are all Russian-speaking and always were.
The Western Ukrainian neo-nationalists tried to convert Kiev from Russian - speaking to a recently created (18th century) Ukrainian language without success for the last twenty years. In summary, the independent from Russia Ukrainian culture is pure mythology and fantasy. Ukraine was and will always be inherent part of Russia and historical Kievan Russia, Russian culture and history. So this story goes, from Russia with Love.
*1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainization
*2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ros_River
20 Mar 2014, 12:46, Updated 6 Nov 2020, 05:44.
