A “Peasant Defender” from Kyiv

FRANCISZEK DUCHINSKI

Franciszek Duchinski (1816-1893), a historian, ethnographer, pedagogue, Polish patriot. He liked calling himself Kijowianin (Kyivite), for he came from a Polish-Ukrainian family, sympathized with “peasant defenders” and dreamed of uniting the Poles and the Ukrainians in the struggle against Russian autocracy for the restoration of an independent Polish state in which justice will prevail for all its citizens. Duchinski spent most of his lifetime in emigration and died very far from his homeland. Although modern historical research has not accepted some of the things he wrote, one must remember that his life and scholarship coincided with the time when Moscow had forcibly subjugated Poland and crushed two Polish uprisings, and that restoring Polish statehood was the only goal Franciszek Duchinski pursued.

THE BEGINNING

Franciszek Duchinski (1816-1893) was born in Right Bank Ukraine to a Ukrainian-Polish family. In 1834 he came to Kyiv to continue his education at the just- established Kyiv University, a nursery of liberal ideas, where the Polish and Ukrainians could easily find a common language. That was a time when the Polish intelligentsia nurtured the idea of joining forces with the Ukrainians (“Little Russians”) to combat Russia and restore the “common fatherland,” i.e., the Polish state (Rzeczpospolita). After Tsar Nicholas I stripped Kyiv of the Magdeburg Law in 1835, young Duchinski began to seriously study the history of relations between the Ukrainians (Ruthenians) and the Poles, on the one hand, and Moscow, on the other.

In 1846, fearful of an arrest, Duchinski left the Russian Empire and lived in Turkey, France, and Italy. During the Crimean War, he volunteered for active service as a quartermaster in the British expeditionary corps. The only reason why Duchinski did so was a desire to put across his ideas of restoring the Polish state to the governments of Britain, France and Turkey via their military servicemen. When the war was over, Duchinski settled in France.

ABROAD

In France, Duchinski taught history and did extensive historical research at the Paris-based Polish Higher School. One of his first works, published in Trzecim Maja, was about the Pereyaslav Rada. He also highly appreciated the merits of Taras Shevchenko, Mykola Kostomarov and Panteleimon Kulish, who were arrested soon after his departure abroad. While in Kyiv, Duchinski maintained no direct contacts with them but always showed interest in the proceedings and ideas of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood. When Duchinski learned about the arrest and conviction of the Ukrainian writers, he wrote about their activities and oeuvres in European publications and often cited their ideas. His writings are really full of respect and love for those people.

It is also important that Duchinski was perhaps the first to acquaint Western readers and scholars with the situation in Little Russia, especially in Kyiv. Duchinski’s further historical opuses at least convinced many French historians that the Russian Empire’s Slavs are not a single monolithic people. Moreover, under the influence of his works and public speeches, French schools began in 1870 to teach the history of Rus’ and of Moscow as two different courses.

When the second Polish uprising broke out in 1863, Duchinski published A Supplement to the Three Parts of the History of Slavs and Muscovites in Paris, calling in the foreword upon the eastern Slavs to wage a joint struggle against Moscow. The call was signed “Duchinski de Kiew.”

In 1872 Duchinski assumed the office of curator of the Polish National Museum in Rappersville (Switzerland), where he also chose to live.

A HYPOTHESIS

On November 7, 1857, Duchinski delivered a lecture in Paris, titled “On the Necessity of Reforming the Scholarly Exposition of Polish History” and later published under the name “On the Relations of Rus’ and Poland with Moscow, Now Called Russia.” He put emphasis on the difference between such things as “Rus’” and “Moscow.” From then on, he published more than 50 studies that focused on comparing the European and Asian civilizations as well as searching the proof that the Poles and Ukrainians, on the one hand, and the Russians, on the other, belonged to different civilizations. He was sure that Moscow and Muscovites were of non-Slavic origin and were an Asian people in spite of their “Slavic attire” (A Concise History of Poland, Other Slavic Countries, and Moscow). The author emphasizes a lot of positive features in what he calls Muscovites but stops short of recognizing them as Europeans. To prove this, Duchinski points out such characteristic features of the Moscow lifestyle as diehard conservatism and predilection for an autocratic setup, which has entirely suppressed human rights and stopped the moral and material development of man.

Duchinski says that the oriental variety of administration and public life suits the “Muscovites” very well but is not typical at all of the European peoples which have absorbed such notions as individualism, private property, and individual freedom. Therefore, Europeans feel unhappy in the environment of old-style despotism which has grown out of the old-style communism (a 19th-century definition!).

By studying Slavonic ethnography, Duchinski attained fame not only among the Poles but also among French scholars. In the early 1860s some French academics (Paul de Saint Vincent, Baron d’Avril, Steinbach) issued a number of publications in support of Duchinski’s theory. The French historian Henri Martin so much favored his ideas that he published in 1866 the oeuvre La Russie et l’Europe quite in the spirit of Duchinski’s doctrine.

It should be noted that it is not the Poles, as some people think, and in no way Duchinski who authored the theory that the Russians belong to Asian peoples. Back in 1684 the French Journal des Savants presented one of the first classifications of humankind, with Muscovy missing from the map of Europe. Further on, some other European scholars would also discriminate between the “Slavs” and the “Muscovites,” referring the latter to oriental Asian peoples. The idea of an affinity between Muscovite and Asian civilizations was expressed not only by the Poles and Ukrainians (as many Russian academics, such as Leonid Sokolov and Nikolai Ulyanov, think) but also by the Russians themselves. For instance, the well-known “Eurasianist” Prince Trubetskoi (20th century) believed that “12th-century Kyivan Rus’ was not all the ancestor of today’s Russia” and tried to prove that “in the 13th century Moscow princes turned into self-perpetuating and hereditary Russian provincial governors in the Tatar realm and enjoyed the same rights as the khans, rulers of other, non-Russian, provinces, did. And in 1480 (after the Battle of Kulikov) the khan moved his headquarters to Moscow (!!!).” In his book The Rhythms of Eurasia, Lev Gumilev also gives quite an interesting account of the “friendly unification” of Rus’ and the Golden Horde in 1247 and says that in 1312 many “Christian Mongols emigrated to Rus,’ signed up for service in the Russian principalities, and married Rostov, Riazan and Moscow beauties. Can there be any question of the ‘yoke’ and did the ancient Ruthenians know the very word ‘yoke?’ And how can we apply this word to, say, the Grand Principality of Vladimir which voluntarily joined the Golden Horde in 1263 at the will of Saint Alexander Nevsky?”

HISTORY AND POLITICS

An anonymous biographer of Duchinski, who lived in Russia and had to use the pen name A. G., writes that Moscow’s imperial politicians have never accepted, for some reason, the theories that proved Asian origin of the Russian people. Moreover, they have always demanded that historians furnish facts that could confirm the Russian people’s Slavic nature and its right to dominate over the Slav lands. Historical facts reveal that tsarist ukases dealt not only with police-state matters but also with what and how historians must write. “The scholars who refused to accept the viewpoints of a tsar or a tsarina,” A. G. says, “were slapped on the face or whipped in the 18th century, and in our, 19th, century such historians are stripped of their offices, eke out a miserable existence, or are exiled to Siberia.” Then he cites a few examples.

Empress Catherine II, furious over the views of a well-known publisher Ivan Stritter on the “Finnish origin of the Russians,” wrote a special note to a commission in charge of these matters. She set out hard-and-fast rules as to how scholars should write the history of the Russian people. As for Stritter, he was just in the wake of some well-known 16th-17th-century writers who claimed on the basis of ancient chronicles that the history of the Moscow Principality began in Suzdal, not in Novgorod or Kyiv. Stritter fell into disgrace and his works were destroyed. A no better lot fell on Gerard Friedrich Miller, the historiographer of tsarinas Elizabeth and Catherine II, member of St. Petersburg’s Academy of Sciences, one of the authors of the Norman theory. Historian Nikolai Karamzin writes, “It is now difficult to believe that Miller suffered relentless persecution for his studies. The already printed work The Origin of People and Names in Russia (1749) was burnt down and the author fell ill from anguish.”

Determined to root out the “liberties” of academics, Catherine II issued a formal ukase that said in no uncertain terms, “The Russians are European and Slavic.” This, naturally, dispelled all doubts: the ukase was a law for Russian historians. In Europe, though, far from all accepted the injunction of “Northern Semiramis.” For example, the Count of Mirabeau wrote ironically, “Now we know for sure that the Russians are European because tsarina Catherine herself lays it down!”

In the 19th century, Emperor Nicholas I also issued a similar ukase which claimed that the Great, Little and White Russians, as well as the Lithuanians were identical. “It has been proved historically that the Great Russians have the same origin as the residents of Wilno, Kovno, Grodna, Minsk, Vitebsk, Volyn, Podol and Ukraine,” the ukase said. Karamzin was also forced to toe the Romanovs’ historical line. (Incidentally, the Soviet government also attached great importance to history and never let it go its own course by offering the scholars compulsory “Party-approved” concepts and formulas.) The purpose of his meddling into scholarship was always the same: to doom the conquered peoples to political death, having “proved” the unity of the Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians by historical, ethnographic and linguistic means. The “unity” was also used to justify bans on printing books and teaching in the mother tongue, proliferation of the Muscovite Old Church Slavonic language all over the empire, and, what is more, this excluded any possibility of political self-sufficiency. A. G. says, “A strange ‘brotherhood’ indeed, when a brother is being stifled and stripped of his rights, faith, and language.”

In 1862 Russia celebrated the “1000th anniversary of Russia:” The Tale of Bygone Years records 862 as the year when the Varangians Rurik, Sineus and Truvor were invited, quoting the famous phrase ‘Come and rule us!’ Again and finally, the history of Kyivan Rus’ was made part of that of the Russian Empire. A. G. notes that there was only one voice in protest — that of Duchinski from Paris. He tried to convince the Europeans that the monument “1000 Years of Russia” perpetuated the lies fabricated by obedient historians by order of the Romanovs. For the Muscovite Tsardom originated not in Novgorod in 862 but in the 12th century, a fact convincingly proved by a chronicle that says that Moscow was founded in 1147.

CONCLUSION

It is quite possible that one of the inexplicable and even mysterious reasons why, contrary to the Muscovite state’s efforts (by stick and carrot), the Ukrainians never merged with the Russians into one nation is the real difference — at a genetic level — between these neighboring peoples. Although the two peoples had been living side by side for centuries, mixing and having many things in common, they never managed to forgo their difference. The historically irrefutable fact of Ukraine’s perennial yearning for independence amply proves that Duchinski’s theory is not exactly based on shaky ground.

It is also undeniable that the life in Russia never seemed attractive to foreigners (the Poles and Ukrainians were always considered “foreign” there). What always struck both the Russians and the foreigners was the abject poverty of citizens (if this word is appropriate here), a dark, hard and non-esthetic lifestyle, overall indifference to civil freedoms, and inborn disrespect for the personality. (Suffice it to recall the subtle and brilliant way Lesya Ukrainka conveyed this atmosphere in her Boyarynia!) Even the ordinary Ukrainians were always aware of this, at least at a subconscious level, and considered themselves different.

Many critics, Ukrainian and especially Russian, reproach Duchinski and other 19th-century Ukrainian-Polish “peasant defenders” for allegedly tackling the Ukrainian problem and establishing contacts with Ukrainian intellectuals for the only selfish purpose: they wanted to talk them into participating in Polish uprisings, in the joint struggle for independence against Russian autocracy. There is not a shadow of a doubt that this is true. Yet, this raises an entirely different question of paramount importance: Why did the Ukrainians, the Ukrainian intelligentsia, not choose to use the Poles for the same purpose?

Let me emphasize in conclusion that I hold no prejudice against any human race or culture, and I respect the Hungarians and the Finns no less than I do the Poles or the French.