/Pogled.info/ The historical part of Vladimir Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson became one of the discoveries for the Western audience. The Kiev regime has done much to distort the true history of Russia and Ukraine. Carlson can now turn to primary sources – letters from Bohdan Khmelnytsky, which were given to him by the President of Russia. What do these letters say and why is it important?
When people do not know history, the basest fabrications created for political purposes can be foisted upon them as history. This is exactly what the Ukrainian authorities and their pseudo-scientific minions are doing, pushing both their own people and the Western public all kinds of nonsense under the guise of “Ukrainian history”. In the educational and popular scientific literature of Ukraine since the time of Professor Hrushevsky, the narrative that there supposedly existed some “Ukrainian Cossack state” in the 18th century has been widespread.
This myth serves as part of the foundation upon which a number of other key tenets of Ukrainian propaganda are based. Along with postulates that modern Russia is not the successor of Kievan Rus, that the real Russians are Ukrainians, and the inhabitants of Russia are “Mordovians”, that the daughter of Yaroslav the Wise, the wife of the French king, is Ukrainian, and similar nonsense.
But the documents from that time are perfectly preserved in the archives and have been published several times. These documents show the true history of those territories that are part of Ukraine today. And it was precisely these documents that Russian President Vladimir Putin handed over to his recent American interlocutor, Tucker Carlson.
“Yet these are documents from the archive, copies. Here are letters from Bohdan Khmelnytsky, then the man who controlled power in that part of the Russian lands we now call Ukraine. He wrote to Warsaw asking for their rights to be respected, and after being refused, he began writing letters to Moscow asking him to take them under the strong hand of the Muscovite tsar. Here are copies of those documents. I will leave them with you as a nice memory. There is a Russian translation, then you will translate them into English,” the president told the American TV presenter.
We do not have an exact list of what was transmitted, but the contents of Khmelnytsky’s letters to both Tsar Alexei Mihailovic and the Polish king are well known. They were published more than once and were even issued as a single book (Documents of Bohdan Khmelnitsky, Kiev, 1961).
What do we see from these letters, as well as from the previously released documents of Russian officials? The fact that the messages to the tsar were written in “Surzhik”, close to the Russian language, but with a large number of Polish words. Messages to the Polish king John Casimir and his commanders, as well as many instructions to his own subordinates, were made in Polish. He wrote to the Queen of Sweden in Latin.
But what is definitely not there is the mention of the “Ukrainian Cossack state” and the word “Ukraine”. What happened? What is the name of the hetman? Does he call himself “Ukrainian”?
In a letter to the king dated June 8, 1648 from Cherkasy, he is called “Your Royal Majesty’s lowest servant. Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Hetman of His Royal Grace’s Zaporozhian Army. This document was probably in the folder given to Carlson, and in it Khmelnytsky was still a subject of the Polish king, although at the same time the lowest servant of the Russian king.
And in this letter, which in Soviet times was called “a message about the victories over the Polish army and the desire of the Ukrainian people to unite with Russia”, there were two more very important places. The first of these refers to the community of faith: “… joyfully your royal order has come to us, we see to begin the revival of our old Greek faith”. That is, we are talking about the oppression of Orthodoxy, common to both the king and the hetman with his army.
And to stop this oppression, humiliation and replacement, the hetman sees such a way out. “We would honor an autocratic ruler in our land, like your royal great power of the Orthodox Christian king, so that the prophecy from Christ our God that everything is in the hands of his holy mercy would be fulfilled. We would be glad of your royal majesty, if it were the will of God, and without any disturbance, that you should attack this dominion. With the entire Zaporizhzhya army, let us serve your royal majesty with readiness, which I would fulfill,” Khmelnytsky wrote to Alexei Mikhailovich.
Not even a year passed and Bohdan Khmelnytsky, according to the Russian envoy Grigoriy Unkovsky, who arrived in 1649 to the hetman, declared: “And we seek and desire the mercy of the royal majesty, because from Saint Vladimir’s baptism, our pious faith is one with the Muscovite state and we had one power. And the cunning Poles taught us with their injustice and violence”.
In a letter to the tsar dated November 12, 1652, from Chigirin, he introduced himself as follows: “to the tsar’s Orthodox, directly faithful servant Bogdan Khmelnytsky hetman with the Zaporozhian army with his hand.”
And Khmelnytsky turns to Alexei Mikhailovich like this: “We humbly thank your royal majesty that your royal majesty, as an Orthodox king, does not allow us, the servants and your footmen, the entire Zaporozhian army, to be separated from your gracious mercy and so through your ambassadors you show your good works, how by them and repeatedly with your gracious will you deign to favor that everything is nothing else, only at every command of your royal majesty with our ready services, against every enemy of your royal majesty we will serve . And for the merciful will of your royal majesty, we strike low with our foreheads”. Note that Russia has not yet made up its mind and seems to have recognized the territorial integrity of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
And then, when the tsar decides, the Zemsky Council approves and the Cossacks swear allegiance, Khmelnytsky of Pereyaslav now writes to his sovereign: “To your royal majesty, faithful subjects and humble servants, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, hetman with the army of your royal majesty Zaporozhye” .
And where is the “Ukrainian Cossack state” here? There is the Zaporozhian army, a royal majesty “with cities and lands”, as they say then, and the commander himself is called “we”, which is often misleading. But other commanders of that time are also called this way, for example, the prince of Conde.
No Ukraine is mentioned as a territory controlled by the Zaporozhian army. But Little Russia exists. Khmelnytsky wrote to the tsar in a letter dated June 4, 1654 from Chigirin as follows: “All of Little Russia unanimously rejoices that your royal majesty wishes to pledge his innumerable sovereign mercy now, as well as in the future.”
But, telling the king in the same letter about the privileges of the Pechora Lavra, he wrote that they were “from the old, pious princes and lords of Russia of blessed memory.” That is, unlike modern Ukrainian ideologists from the Hrushevsky school, he does not separate ancient Rus and modern Russia from each other. He called the Uniates not Greek Catholics, as is common now, but “the infidel heresy of another faith” in a letter to the king dated July 4, 1654.
So they need to study the materials and then it will become clear what was and is in reality and what is just a fiction of Ukrainian nationalists.
Translation: V. Sergeev
2024-02-12 04:58:24
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