In August 1948, the US National Security Council, at the request of Secretary of Defense John Forrestal, issued a memorandum (NSC 20/1 1948) on US goals with respect to Russia.
A significant part of the memorandum was devoted to Ukraine.
American analysts clearly stated that Ukraine is an organic part of Russia, it is extremely unlikely that Ukrainians will be capable of independent national existence, and most importantly, an attempt to support Ukrainian separatism will cause a sharply negative reaction from the Russian nation.
“The economy of the Ukraine is inextricably intertwined with that of Russia as a whole… To attempt to carve it out of the Russian economy and to set it up as something separate would be as artificial and as destructive as an attempt to separate the Corn Belt , including the Great Lakes industrial area, from the economy of the United States…
Finally, we cannot he indifferent to the feelings of the Great Russians themselves… They will continue to be the strongest national element in that general area, under any status… The Ukrainian territory is as much a part of their national heritage as the Middle West is of ours, and they are conscious of that fact.
A solution which attempts to separate the Ukraine entirely from the rest of Russia is bound TO incur their resentment and opposition, and can be maintained, in the last analysis, only by force.”
What was obvious to US analysts and statesmen in the era when it became a superpower and had a monopoly on nuclear weapons has been forgotten by the modern American political establishment and media.
The White House and EU leaders believe they can use force or the threat of sanctions to get Russians to think of Ukraine as a different country than Russia.
And if the West succeeds in "containing" Russia, then its reward will be the accumulation of long-term hostility of the Russians, for whom the West, the USA, NATO, the EU will be perceived in a single optics - as a force that prevents the Russians from owning and disposing of a significant part of their land and of their heritage and to be close, in one country, together with loved ones.
Why do Russians perceive Ukraine as Russia?
First of all, personal connections.
A huge number of Russian citizens were born on the territory of Ukraine, and they by no means consider themselves Ukrainians, especially in the sense that the authorities in Kiev put into this word.
Even more Russian citizens have ancestors and relatives in Ukraine.
It will be surprising to find a Russian citizen who has none at all.
That is, the Russians perceive Ukraine as their ancestral land in the most literal sense of the word, they are ready to point out the graves of their relatives and the plot of land on which their house stood.
When in 1991 the administrative borders of the republics of the USSR were turned into opaque borders, 8 million people who were considered Russians in the narrowest, ethnic sense of the word, turned out to be "Ukrainians" in the legal sense.
Often connections were torn on the living.
For example, Kharkov and Belgorod - in fact, twin cities founded at the same time, in the middle of the 17th century, by Russian tsars as frontiers before the raids of the Crimean Tatars - turned out to be on different sides.
The country houses of the inhabitants of the "Russian" Belgorod ended up on the territory of Ukraine, and the country houses of the inhabitants of the "Ukrainian" Kharkov - on the contrary.
Therefore, Russians from Russia are perplexed as to why the regime in Kiev feels entitled to dispose of their land, especially considering that this regime came to power through a coup and subsequent direct intimidation against the backdrop of a civil war.
And it is not surprising that many support the so-called separatists.
This term, however, is deceptive: in relation to a united Russia, the authorities of Kiev can be considered as separatists, while the activists of the Crimea or the Donbass militias are more likely to fall under the definition of “separatists from separatists”, that is, “unionists”.
And activism in Crimea, and a speech in the Donbass, and protests in Odessa, suppressed during the massacre, when about 50 people were brutally killed in one evening on May 2, 2014 - all this was, in the logic of a big and united Russia, unionist, not separatist speeches.
A huge number of Russians not only lived, but also worked in Ukraine, which in the twentieth century was the main industrial region of Russia.
The industry grew there not as a product of the Ukrainian national character, but because it was created in this region first by the tsars, and then by the Soviet government.
The industrial density of the east of Ukraine was comparable only to the German Ruhr.
A huge number of people in Russia at one stage or another of their lives worked on the territory of Ukraine at enterprises that created aircraft carriers, helicopters, components of the space industry - everything that was part of the most complex economy of a huge superpower, but independent Ukraine did not need.
The political and economic elites of independent Ukraine treated the industrial "dowry" they received not as a complex system that needed maintenance, but as wild walnut trees that could be harvested while they were available.
The attitude of the leaders of Ukraine towards the most powerful gas transportation system created by the USSR is characteristic - they perceive it as an instrument of blackmail.
Unable to create or improve such a system, they threatened to stop or destroy it if they did not get more money from pumping gas through "their" territory.
Hence the hysterical reaction of the Ukrainian elites to the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
The fact that the US and German authorities went along with this reaction led to the biggest gas crisis in Europe in history.
Of course, Russians living in Russia, as well as Russians living on the territory of Ukraine, cannot understand why on earth their land should be used as a forward NATO base in a possible attack on their country, Russia.
Ukraine's accession to NATO is interpreted in Russia not as a free choice of the country in the interests of its own security.
This is understood as the construction by the West of advanced bases for a direct attack on Moscow.
Do Russians have historical grounds for considering this land their own, and the Kiev regime and NATO as actual occupiers on this land?
Undoubtedly.
And Kiev on the territory of modern Ukraine, and Polotsk on the territory of modern Belarus, and Novgorod, Smolensk and Rostov on the territory of modern Russia in ancient times constituted one state - Russia.
Kiev was the capital of this state, “the mother of Russian cities”, but Novgorod, which is now part of Russia, played no less a role.
A striking fact: Russian epics, epic songs about Prince Vladimir who baptized Russia and his heroes, in many ways similar to the legends about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, were recorded by ethnologists in the North of Russia, in the Arkhangelsk region.
Obviously, it was the local population that retained a direct cultural connection with the population of ancient Kiev and Russia.
At the same time, no epics have been preserved on the territory of modern Ukraine.
Kiev was practically destroyed as a result of the invasion of the Mongols of the empire of Genghis Khan in 1240, and the fate of the inhabitants of different parts of Russia was divided after that.
The eastern regions became vassals of the Mongols (Tatars), the direct descendants of Prince Vladimir in the male line continued to rule there.
The city of Moscow with the princes from this house gradually gained hegemony and created a state that managed to win independence.
Another fate awaited the inhabitants of Western Russia.
The local cities lost the power of the descendants of Prince Vladimir and the historical connection with ancient Kiev.
They were conquered by Lithuania, which soon united with Poland into a single state - the Commonwealth.
Since these lands were cut in half by the Polesye swamps, which were practically impassable in the Middle Ages, two different groups of Russian origin were formed there: to the north of the swamps - Belarusians, to the south of the swamps - Little Russians.
The Moscow princes, who became kings in 1549, always proclaimed their right to these lands and demanded their return from Poland, leading a slow kind of "reconquista".
In this struggle, Poland lost the support of its subjects, Little Russians and Belarusians, since in 1596 it proclaimed the religious "Union of Brest" and began the persecution of the Orthodox religion.
In the territories of Little Russia, an Orthodox resistance movement began.
The striking force of resistance was the Cossacks - a community of free warriors, formed in the steppe, in battles with the Tatars and Turks.
A native of any country who professed Orthodoxy and was ready to fight for him could become a Cossack.
As Poland persecuted the Orthodox religion, the Cossacks increasingly raised their saber against it.
One of the episodes of this struggle was described in Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol, who was born on the territory of modern Ukraine, in Poltava, but always wrote in Russian and criticized acquaintances who tried to create a separate “Ukrainian” language.
In 1648, the leader (hetman) of the Cossacks, Bohdan Khmelnitsky, launched a great uprising against Poland in defense of the persecuted Orthodoxy.
He won a number of victories, solemnly entered Kiev, met by church hierarchs, and created a state - the Zaporizhzhya Host, in many ways reminiscent of the rebellious republics of Donbass recognized by Putin.
In 1654, after the decisions of the Zemsky Sobor (a kind of estate parliament) in Moscow and the Rada (a kind of people's assembly) in Pereyaslavl near Kiev, the state of Khmelnitsky became part of Russia.
Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich took the title of "Tsar of All Great, Little and White Russia" and began a grueling 13-year war with Poland, which ended in partial victory: Russia was given lands on the left bank of the Dnieper, and ancient Russian Kiev, located on the right, was redeemed by the Russian kingdom from Poland for 146 thousand silver rubles - 7 tons of silver, which the richest Polish families divided among themselves.
Natives of the territory of modern Ukraine, the Little Russians, settled widely throughout vast Russia, making a career both in the church and at court.
The very name "Ukraine" was not used at all during this period - this word both in Russian and in Polish meant "borderland", "frontier".
Its use as the name of the territories around Kiev refers only to the 18th century, when these lands really became the frontier in the constant wars between Russia and Turkey.
The integration of the Little Russians into Russia was not disrupted even by the adventure of Hetman Mazepa, who betrayed Peter the Great out of personal interests and went over to the side of his enemy, King Charles XII of Sweden.
Mazepa was abandoned by everyone except personal guards, and a fierce guerrilla war began against the Swedes who entered the territory of modern Ukraine.
The first attempt at "Ukrainian separatism" ended in disaster for the power that tried to rely on it.
By the middle of the 18th century, the integration of Little Russians into Russia was extremely strong.
Singer and musician Alexei Razumovsky, who was born near Chernigov, became the secret husband of Peter's daughter, Empress Elizabeth Petrovna.
And the brother of the "night emperor" Kirill - the hetman of the Zaporizhzhya Army and at the same time the president of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
His numerous legitimate and illegitimate descendants formed an influential clan in the aristocracy of the Russian Empire.
The new Empress Catherine II abolished the Zaporozhye Host and resettled the remnants of the Cossacks in the Kuban, in the North Caucasus.
She also resolutely won the steppes of southern Russia from the Tatars and Turks and, together with her secret husband, Prince Potemkin, founded a new part of Russia there - Novorossia.
Its population was extremely motley - first of all, peasants from the "Great Russian" parts of the country, and along with them - Greeks, Serbs, many Germans invited by the Empress, who was born in a small German principality.
By contrast, Novorossiya's ties with old Little Russia were rather insignificant.
Novorossia was the Russian analogue of the New World, only not separated by an ocean.
It was a country of opportunities and new life chances.
In this New World, industry began to actively develop in the 19th century (as in the city now called Donetsk), and commerce (as in Odessa, founded by the Spanish nobleman De Ribas, who was in Russian service), and the resort area, whimsically mixed with a naval base , in the Crimea and Sevastopol.
Finally, Catherine II, during the three partitions of Poland, in which Russia participated together with Prussia and the Austrian Empire, finished the work of Alexei Mikhailovich.
Russia gathered almost all the lands that belonged to Ancient Russia, along with their peasant population, who preserved the Russian language and Orthodox traditions.
The process of returning the inhabitants of these territories to Russian identity began.
An example is the fate of the family of the great Russian writer Dostoevsky.
The writer's grandfather was a Uniate priest of the Catholic Church near Vinnitsa, in modern Ukraine.
After joining this territory to Russia, he returned to Orthodoxy.
The writer's father went to Moscow and made a brilliant career as a military surgeon.
And Dostoevsky himself became the greatest writer, who owns the aphorism: "The owner of the Russian land is only Russian (Great Russian, Little Russian, Belarusian - it's all the same)."
During these divisions of Poland, Russia never went beyond the borders of Ancient Russia and even ceded the ancient Russian Lvov to Austria.
However, all the privileged class on these lands considered themselves Poles, and this land - Poland.
They waged a stubborn struggle against the Russian government, underground and open, and part of this struggle was the promotion of the idea that the peasant population of Western Russia were not Russians, but "Ukrainians", a separate people, which is closer to the Poles.
Thus, Russia was deprived of the national right to these territories.
Some young Russian intellectuals adopted this idea in the era of the "spring of peoples" that shook Europe in the middle of the 19th century, when original nationalities were discovered, and even invented here and there.
Ukrainophiles collected Little Russian songs and wrote their poems in their likeness, like Taras Shevchenko, proclaimed the genius of Ukrainian literature.
The propaganda of the Ukrainophiles was hostilely received by both the Russian imperial government and the Russian society, which for a long time no longer felt any difference at all between the lands of Little Russia and the rest of Russia - the features of the life of the Little Russians did not seem something extraordinary against the backdrop of the much more colorful life of the Don, Kuban and Terek Cossacks .
And most importantly, most of its participants were disappointed in this propaganda.
When they realized that their propaganda was most beneficial to the Poles, they themselves pretty much lost interest in Ukrainophilism.
However, the Ukrainian idea survived thanks to Austria, which provided a chair in Lvov, which belonged to it, and rich subsidies to the historian Mikhail Grushevsky.
The interest of the Austrian Empire, torn apart by ethnic contradictions, was twofold.
Firstly, to prove that not Russians live in Galicia and its capital Lviv, but other people, Ukrainians and Russia do not have the right to claim this country.
Secondly, to prove to the Poles living in Lvov that they also have no right to this city.
Grushevsky began to construct a Ukrainian historical myth revolving around Galicia, and to publish a newspaper in Ukrainian, for each issue of which he invented several new "Ukrainian" words.
The moment of truth came during the First World War.
Austria carried out in Galicia a real genocide of those who adhered to the political and cultural orientation towards Russia.
More than 30 thousand "Muscovites" of Galicia and representatives of small ethnic groups who spoke their own versions of the Russian language - Rusyns and Lemkos - were thrown into the Talerhof and Terezin concentration camps, which became the predecessors of Auschwitz.
Thousands of people were tortured to death by Austrian guards, died of hunger and disease.
The Austrians, who were captured during the war, were placed in special camps in which Grushevsky's followers told them that they were Ukrainians.
The result, however, was a failure.
Vladimir Lenin, who himself had close contacts with the Austrian and German special services, described in a letter to his girlfriend Inessa Armand, according to an escaped prisoner, this “experiment”, in which 27 thousand people took part forcibly: “The Ukrainians were sent clever lecturers from Galicia .
Results?
Only de 2000 were for "independence" ... after a month of efforts of agitators !!
The rest fell into a rage at the thought of separating from Russia and going over to the Germans or Austrians.
Significant fact!
It is impossible not to believe ... The conditions for Galician propaganda are the most favorable.
And yet, proximity to the Great Russians prevailed!
And yet, having seized power in Russia, Lenin recognized the self-proclaimed Ukrainian People's Republic in Kiev, headed by Grushevsky, and then, during the Civil War against the whites - the defenders of "one and indivisible Russia", demanded that his associates emphasize or at least imitate the existence of an "independent communist Ukraine".
Perfectly aware of the unacceptability of Ukrainian propaganda for the masses, Lenin nevertheless insisted on the creation of Ukraine in order to weaken the “Great Russian bullshit,” as he called the leading ethnic group of the Russian Empire.
Precisely protecting Ukraine from the inevitable dissolution in Russia, Lenin rejected Stalin's plan to turn the outskirts into autonomous regions of Soviet Russia and insisted on the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which, according to its statutory documents, was a rather loose confederation with the right to secede.
It is to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR) created within the framework of this Leninist project that the present Ukraine ascends.
However, there were practically no Ukrainians in Soviet Ukraine.
And then the Soviet government takes an unheard of step: the ideological enemy, the former president of the Ukrainian People's Republic Mikhail Grushevsky, is invited to the Ukrainian SSR and entrusted with the leadership of the "Ukrainization" of public education.
For a decade and a half, schoolchildren had the opportunity to receive school education only in Ukrainian using Hrushevsky's textbooks.
No less tough was the campaign in the state apparatus.
Officials of ministries and departments, including those far from ideology, related to agriculture, for example, were required to study and use the Ukrainian language at work.
For his ignorance, and even more so for his unwillingness to study him, he was supposed to be dismissed from the service.
Interestingly, the number of dismissed was quite large.
That is, many people still resisted Ukrainization.
But, of course, not everyone resisted.
There were many chameleon officials in the Communist Party.
For example, Leonid Brezhnev, the future leader of the USSR during the Cold War years, indicated his ethnic origin as “Ukrainian” in some questionnaires, and “Russian” in others.
This proved, by the way, that there was no way to distinguish a “real Ukrainian” from a “real Russian” at the everyday level.
Stalin, having made sure that Ukrainization simply does not allow literate people who are well-versed in technology to leave schools (most of the scientific and technical literature always remained in the USSR in Russian), began to limit it.
The study of the Russian language became mandatory.
Enthusiastic propagandists of Ukrainianism began to be persecuted as "bourgeois nationalists".
However, even after this turn, the official Soviet regime diligently imitated the existence of an independent, separate from Russia, but “brotherly” Ukraine.
Ukraine was given a seat separate from the USSR in the UN (the Russian Federation was not).
The Kievskaya station was built in the Moscow metro, the mosaics of which created a kind of iconography of the “history of Ukraine”.
However, Soviet Ukraine faced a new problem.
In 1939, Stalin annexed to the Ukrainian SSR the regions of Western Ukraine, which were captured by Poland after the collapse of the Russian Empire.
And with them both Lviv and Galicia, which have never been part of Russia.
Under the influence of the tough national policy of the Polish government, a radical political movement was formed in these territories - the Ukrainian Insurgent Army *, led by Stepan Bandera.
Most of all, this political structure is similar to the "Khmer Rouge" Pol Pot, only not under the communist, but under the nationalist banner.
The first object of hatred of Bandera was the Poles - in 1942, using Hitler's patronage, they staged the horrific Volyn massacre of the Polish population.
As German collaborators, Bandera and his associates committed many crimes against Jews, Poles, and Russians during World War II.
As the Red Army advanced in the fight against Germany, the Bandera increasingly turned their weapons against it and transferred their hatred developed against the Poles and Jews to Russians and communists.
After the end of World War II, the Bandera people waged a fierce guerrilla-terrorist war in the West of the Ukrainian SSR for many years.
When the partisans were finally defeated, they went underground, but passed on their radical ideology to the younger generation of Ukrainian nationalists.
When the Soviet Union weakened and collapsed in 1991, three factors came together in Ukraine.
First, the official communist structures in Kiev were able to use the constitutional possibilities left by Lenin to create their own state.
Secondly, due to the complete ideological emptiness of this post-communist Ukraine, it was Bandera's heirs with their zoological racism directed at Russians who took up its ideological content.
At the same time, the majority of the population of Ukraine became the victims of this process: both those who were listed as Ukrainians in the documents, and those who were listed as Russians in the documents.
They are accustomed to perceive the USSR as a big Russia, in one of the corners of which they live.
They did not know and did not want to know any language other than Russian.
If their grandmothers taught them to speak the village Ukrainian dialect as children, they took it as an occasion for a joke.
And suddenly, these people were under powerful pressure from the recently communist totalitarian state, which, through school, through propaganda, through the speeches of politicians, began to demand that they be “Ukrainians”.
The Russian Federation experienced a long crisis of identity and national consciousness.
However, it was Ukraine that brought it out of this crisis.
Having learned that on a part of Russian territory, a part of the Russians were developing an understanding of themselves as “non-Russia” by means of propaganda, the Russians began, as analysts of the American NSS predicted in 1948, to become furious.
The beginning of the indignation of the hurt pride of Russians was laid back in Soviet times.
In 1954, the Soviet authorities, Malenkov and Khrushchev, transferred Crimea from the RSFSR (Russia) to the Ukrainian SSR (Ukraine), which was considered by the Russians as their own land, watered with blood in two heroic defenses of Sevastopol (1854-1855 and 1941-1942).
This transmission, although superficially limited to repainting the color of Crimea on maps from pink to green, was perceived by Russians in the USSR after World War II as an ethnic insult.
Sevastopol was the "city of Russian sailors" (as the famous song sang), and no one dared to argue with that.
When, in 1991, he became part of independent Ukraine, and it began to ban the Russian language there, Russian indignation reached a boiling point.
The phrase "You will answer for Sevastopol" from the popular film "Brother 2" has become a nationwide meme.
Several waves of forced Ukrainization in the 20th century convinced Russians that Ukrainian identity is not something that grows out of ancient history and culture, but something that is inculcated by propaganda.
Whether someone likes it or not, Russians from Russia perceive the hostility towards the Russians of the part of the inhabitants of modern Ukraine not as a free choice of ethnic self-consciousness, but as a disease that has arisen under the influence of propaganda, which should be treated.
The more assertively some Ukrainians declare that they are not brothers to the Russians, but enemies, that they want to join NATO, and not to Russia, the more the desire to save and cure grows on the opposite side, whatever that means.
The ploy of the West, appealing to the self-consciousness of the population of modern Ukraine, is only more dangerous for provoking conflict.
The Russian reaction to these appeals is similar to the reaction of the parents of a kidnapped child who is turned against them.
It's best not to get in their way.
Summarize.
Russians have many vital and historical reasons to consider Ukraine their land, and Ukrainians, even the most hostile to Russia, are part of their people in need of protection (including from brainwashing).
The claims of the West to exercise their hegemony over Ukraine under the pretext that “Ukraine is not Russia” are perceived by Russians as false and predatory, and the seizure is directed to lands that the Russians consider their own.
Resistance to the attempt to tear off Ukraine was one of the decisive factors in the ethnic awakening of Russians in the era of Vladimir Putin, and the president himself did not initiate this process, but accepted it as a fact.
There is no way at all, except for the most brute force, to force the Russians to come to terms with the separateness of Ukraine.
Russians will always perceive any world order that involves the separation of Ukraine from Russia as hostile.
By supporting an "independent Ukraine," the West will have a tireless and inexorable enemy in Russia and the Russians.
Why does he need it?
* An organization recognized as extremist and banned on the territory of Russia (decision of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of 11/17/2014).