Today, our knowledge of Ancient Russia is similar to mythology. Free people, brave princes and heroes, milky rivers with jelly banks. real story less poetic, but no less interesting for that.

"Kievan Rus" was invented by historians

The name "Kievan Rus" appeared in the 19th century in the writings of Mikhail Maksimovich and other historians in memory of the primacy of Kyiv. Already in the very first centuries of Russia, the state consisted of several separate principalities, living their own lives and quite independently. With the nominal subordination of the lands to Kyiv, Russia was not united. This system was common in the early feudal states Europe, where every feudal lord had the right to own land and all the people on them.

The appearance of the Kyiv princes was not always truly "Slavic" as it is commonly represented. It's all about subtle Kyiv diplomacy, accompanied by dynastic marriages, both with European dynasties and with nomads - Alans, Yases, Polovtsians. The Polovtsian wives of the Russian princes Svyatopolk Izyaslavich and Vsevolod Vladimirovich are known. On some reconstructions, Russian princes have Mongoloid features.

Organs in ancient Russian churches

In Kievan Rus, one could see organs and not see bells in churches. Although bells existed in large cathedrals, in small churches they were often replaced by flat beaters. After the Mongol conquests, the organs were lost and forgotten, and the first bell makers came again from Western Europe. The researcher of musical culture Tatyana Vladyshevskaya writes about organs in the Old Russian era. On one of the frescoes of the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, "Buffoons", a scene with playing the organ is depicted.

Western origin

The language of the Old Russian population is considered East Slavic. However, archaeologists and linguists do not quite agree with this. The ancestors of the Novgorod Slovenes and part of the Krivichi (Polochans) did not come from the southern expanses from the Carpathians to the right bank of the Dnieper, but from the West. Researchers see the West Slavic "trace" in the finds of ceramics and birch bark records. A prominent historian and researcher Vladimir Sedov is also inclined to this version. Household items and features of rituals are similar among the Ilmen and Baltic Slavs.

How Novgorodians understood Kyivans

Novgorod and Pskov dialects differed from other dialects of Ancient Russia. They had features inherent in the languages ​​of the Polabs and Poles, and even completely archaic, Proto-Slavic. Well-known parallels: kirki - “church”, hede - “gray-haired”. The remaining dialects were very similar to each other, although they were not such a single language as modern Russian. Despite the differences, ordinary Novgorodians and Kievans could understand each other quite well: the words reflected the life common to all Slavs.

"White spots" in the most prominent place

We know almost nothing about the first Ruriks. The events described in The Tale of Bygone Years were already legendary at the time of writing, and the evidence from archaeologists and later chronicles is scarce and ambiguous. Written treaties mention certain Helga, Inger, Sfendoslav, but the dates of the events in different sources diverge. The role of the Kyiv "Varangian" Askold in the formation of Russian statehood is not very clear either. And this is not to mention the eternal disputes around the personality of Rurik.

"Capital" was a border fortress

Kyiv was far from the center of Russian lands, but was the southern border fortress of Russia, while being located in the very north of modern Ukraine. Cities south of Kyiv and its environs, as a rule, served as centers of nomadic tribes: Torks, Alans, Polovtsy, or were predominantly defensive (for example, Pereyaslavl).

Russia - the state of the slave trade

An important article of the wealth of Ancient Russia was the slave trade. They traded not only captured foreigners, but also Slavs. The latter were in great demand in the Eastern markets. Arabic sources of the 10th-11th centuries describe in colors the way of slaves from Russia to the countries of the Caliphate and the Mediterranean. The slave trade was beneficial to the princes, the large cities on the Volga and the Dnieper were the centers of the slave trade. A huge number of people in Russia were not free, they could be sold into slavery to foreign merchants for debts. One of the main slave traders were Jewish radonites.

Khazars "inherited" in Kyiv

During the reign of the Khazars (IX-X centuries), in addition to the Turkic tribute collectors, there was a large diaspora of Jews in Kyiv. Monuments of that era are still reflected in the "Kiev letter", which contains the correspondence in Hebrew of Kyiv Jews with other Jewish communities. The manuscript is kept in the Cambridge Library. One of the three main Kyiv gates was called Zhidovskie. In one of the early Byzantine documents, Kyiv is called Sambatas, which, according to one of the versions, can be translated from the Khazar as “upper fortress”.

Kyiv - Third Rome

Ancient Kyiv, before the Mongol yoke, occupied an area of ​​​​about 300 hectares during its heyday, the number of churches went to hundreds, for the first time in the history of Russia, the planning of quarters was used in it, making the streets slender. The city was admired by Europeans, Arabs, Byzantines and called the rival of Constantinople. However, from all the abundance of that time, almost not a single building remained, not counting the St. Sophia Cathedral, a couple of rebuilt churches and the recreated Golden Gate. The first white-stone church (Desyatinnaya), where the people of Kiev fled from the Mongol raid, was destroyed already in the 13th century.

Russian fortresses older than Russia

One of the first stone fortresses of Russia was the stone-and-earth fortress in Ladoga (Lyubshanskaya, 7th century), founded by the Slovenes. The Scandinavian fortress that stood on the other side of the Volkhov was still made of wood. Built in the era of the Prophetic Oleg, the new stone fortress was in no way inferior to similar fortresses in Europe. It was she who was called Aldegyuborg in the Scandinavian sagas. One of the first strongholds on the southern border was a fortress in Pereyaslavl-Yuzhny. Among Russian cities, only a few could boast of stone defensive architecture. These are Izborsk (XI century), Pskov (XII century) and later Koporye (XIII century). Kyiv in ancient Russian times was almost completely wooden. The oldest stone fortress was Andrey Bogolyubsky's castle near Vladimir, although it is more famous for its decorative part.

Cyrillic was almost never used

The Glagolitic alphabet, the first written alphabet of the Slavs, did not take root in Russia, although it was known and could be translated. Glagolitic letters were used only in some documents. It was she who in the first centuries of Russia was associated with the preacher Cyril and was called "Cyrillic". The Glagolitic was often used as a secret script. The first inscription in the Cyrillic proper was a strange inscription “goroukhshcha” or “gorushna” on an earthenware vessel from the Gnezdovo barrow. The inscription appeared shortly before the baptism of the people of Kiev. The origin and exact interpretation of this word is still controversial.

Old Russian universe

Lake Ladoga was called the “Great Lake Nevo” after the Neva River. The ending "-o" was common (for example: Onego, Nero, Volgo). The Baltic Sea was called the Varangian, the Black Sea - the Russian, the Caspian - the Khvalis, the Azov - the Surozh, and the White - the Studyon. The Balkan Slavs, on the contrary, called the Aegean Sea the White (Bialo Sea). The Great Don was not called the Don, but its right tributary, the Seversky Donets. The Ural Mountains in the old days were called Big Stone.

Heir of Great Moravia

With the decline of Great Moravia, the largest Slavic power for its time, the rise of Kyiv and the gradual Christianization of Russia began. So, the annalistic white Croats got out from under the influence of the collapsing Moravia, and fell under the attraction of Russia. Their neighbors, Volhynians and Buzhans, have long been involved in Byzantine trade along the Bug, which is why they were known as translators during Oleg's campaigns. The role of the Moravian scribes, who were oppressed by the Latins with the collapse of the state, is unknown, but the largest number of translations of Great Moravian Christian books (about 39) was in Kievan Rus.

Alcohol and sugar free

There was no alcoholism as a phenomenon in Russia. Wine alcohol came to the country after the Tatar-Mongol yoke, even brewing in its classical form did not work out. The strength of drinks was usually not higher than 1-2%. They drank nutritious honey, as well as intoxicated or set (low alcohol), digests, kvass.

Ordinary people in Ancient Russia did not eat butter, did not know spices like mustard and bay leaves, as well as sugar. They cooked turnips, the table abounded with cereals, dishes from berries and mushrooms. Instead of tea, they drank decoctions of fireweed, which would later become known as “Koporsky tea” or Ivan tea. Kissels were unsweetened and made from cereals. They also ate a lot of game: pigeons, hares, deer, wild boars. Traditional dairy dishes were sour cream and cottage cheese.

Two "Bulgaria" in the service of Russia

These two most powerful neighbors of Russia had on her a huge impact. After the decline of Moravia, both countries, which arose on the fragments of Great Bulgaria, are flourishing. The first country said goodbye to the "Bulgarian" past, dissolving into the Slavic majority, converted to Orthodoxy and adopted Byzantine culture. The second, following the Arab world, became Islamic, but retained the Bulgarian language as the state language.

The center of Slavic literature moved to Bulgaria, at that time its territory expanded so much that it included part of the future Russia. A variant of the Old Bulgarian language became the language of the Church. It has been used in numerous lives and teachings. Bulgaria, in turn, sought to restore order in trade along the Volga, suppressing the attacks of foreign bandits and robbers. The normalization of the Volga trade provided the princely possessions with an abundance of oriental goods. Bulgaria influenced Russia with culture and literacy, and Bulgaria contributed to its wealth and prosperity.

Forgotten "megacities" of Russia

Kyiv and Novgorod were not the only major cities of Russia; it was not for nothing that it was nicknamed “Gardarika” (country of cities) in Scandinavia. Before the rise of Kyiv, one of the largest settlements in all of Eastern and Northern Europe was Gnezdovo, the ancestor city of Smolensk. The name is conditional, since Smolensk itself is on the sidelines. But perhaps we know his name from the sagas - Surnes. The most populated were also Ladoga, symbolically considered the "first capital", and the Timerevskoye settlement near Yaroslavl, which was built opposite the famous neighboring city.

Russia was baptized by the XII century

The annalistic baptism of Russia in 988 (and according to some historians in 990) affected only a small part of the people, mainly limited to the people of Kiev and the population of the most major cities. Polotsk was baptized only at the beginning of the 11th century, and at the end of the century - Rostov and Mur, where there were still many Finno-Ugric peoples. The fact that most of the common population remained pagans was confirmed by the regular uprisings of the Magi, supported by the smerds (Suzdal in 1024, Rostov and Novgorod in 1071). Dual faith arises later, when Christianity becomes a truly dominant religion.

The Turks also had cities in Russia

In Kievan Rus, there were also completely “non-Slavic” cities. Such was Torchesk, where Prince Vladimir allowed nomadic Torks to settle, as well as Sakov, Berendichev (named after the Berendeys), Belaya Vezha, where the Khazars and Alans lived, Tmutarakan, inhabited by Greeks, Armenians, Khazars and Circassians. By the 11th-12th centuries, the Pechenegs were no longer a typical nomadic and pagan people, some of them were baptized and settled in the cities of the “black hoods” union, subordinate to Russia. In the old cities on the site or in the vicinity of Rostov, Murom, Beloozero, Yaroslavl lived mainly Finno-Ugric peoples. In Murom - murom, in Rostov and near Yaroslavl - Merya, in Beloozero - all, in Yuryev - Chud. The names of many important cities are unknown to us - in the 9th-10th centuries there were almost no Slavs in them.

"Rus", "Roksolania", "Gardarika" and not only

The Balts called the country “Krevia” after the neighboring Krivichi, the Latin “Ruthenia” took root in Europe, less often “Roksolania”, Scandinavian sagas called Russia “Gardarika” (country of cities), Chud and Finns “Venemaa” or “Venaya” (from the Wends), the Arabs called the main population of the country "As-Sakaliba" (Slavs, Slavs)

Slavs outside the borders

Traces of the Slavs could be found outside the state of Rurikovich. Many cities along the middle Volga and in the Crimea were multinational and populated, including Slavs. Before the Polovtsian invasion, many Slavic towns existed on the Don. The Slavic names of many Byzantine Black Sea cities are known - Korchev, Korsun, Surozh, Gusliev. This speaks of the constant presence of Russian merchants. The Chud cities of Estland (modern Estonia) - Kolyvan, Yuryev, Bear's Head, Klin - with varying success passed into the hands of the Slavs, then the Germans, then the local tribes. Along the Western Dvina, the Krivichi settled interspersed with the Balts. In the zone of influence of Russian merchants was Nevgin (Daugavpils), in Latgale - Rezhitsa and Ochela. Chronicles constantly mention the campaigns of Russian princes on the Danube and the capture of local cities. So, for example, the Galician prince Yaroslav Osmomysl "locked the door of the Danube with a key."

Both pirates and nomads

Fugitive people of various volosts of Russia formed independent associations long before the Cossacks. Berladniks were known, who inhabited southern steppes, whose main city was Berlady in the Carpathian region. They often attacked Russian cities, but at the same time they participated in joint campaigns with Russian princes. Chronicles also introduce us to wanderers, a mixed population of unknown origin, who had much in common with Berladniks.

Sea pirates from Russia were ushkuyniki. Initially, these were Novgorodians who were engaged in raids and trade on the Volga, Kama, in Bulgaria and the Baltic. They even undertook campaigns in the Cis-Urals - to Yugra. Later, they separated from Novgorod and even found their own capital in the city of Khlynov on Vyatka. Perhaps it was the Ushkuyniki, together with the Karelians, who ravaged the ancient capital of Sweden, Sigtuna, in 1187.

Recently, the well-known Ukrainian journalist Aleksey Zuev took me an extensive interview, which all the publications to which he offered it categorically refused to publish. Do not disappear the same good? I'm posting it here, since the "free" Ukrainian press is so timid.

Not so long ago, your A new book"There was no Kievan Rus, or what historians hide". Most of this book is devoted to the history of Ukraine. Why does a historian, writer and journalist from the Russian Far East get such a keen interest in Ukraine?

I was born in the USSR, and I don’t consider Ukraine a foreign country, especially since people there speak the same language as me. Conversely, natives of Ukraine do not feel like foreigners in Russia. We even joke in the North that the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug should be correctly called Khokhl-Mansiysk, because only 2% of the Khanty live here, and almost every fourth Ukrainian lives here. So an interest in Ukraine is an interest in my great homeland (my small homeland- Siberia).

Now let's talk about the substance of the issue. Your new book looks sensational to a large extent, and this is not surprising - after all, it casts doubt on such historical events that for many years were considered reliable and undoubted by everyone. Let's try to objectively and impartially give more clarity to this issue and dot the "i". All the most famous and authoritative historians Russian Empire and the USSR, such as Tatishchev, Karamzin, Solovyov, Shakhmatov, Klyuchevsky, Academician Rybakov, Vernadsky and others, never questioned the long history of Russia. Is such a mass, collective, centuries-old delusion possible, and how can this be explained?

It is worth dividing ancient and modern historians. Until the 19th century, such a concept as "historical consciousness" did not exist, at least in Russia it began to take shape during the time of Pushkin. But even then, only the ruling class, roughly speaking, 1% of the population, was the carrier of historical consciousness. That is, the first historians in the truest sense of the word COMPOSED history, and this work had a specific customer. For example, a beautiful legend about Peter I was ordered by Catherine II, who personally edited it and even built architectural remodels, declaring them witnesses of the Petrine era. Actually, St. Petersburg is not the city of Peter, but the city of Catherine, not a single building came down from the "founder" (which is not surprising, because they were all wooden). But this is so, by the way.

You mentioned Karamzin. Actually, how did he become a historian? He was a writer, wrote a work of art "Martha the Posadnitsa", which the sovereign liked, and he appointed him court historiographer. For the rest of his life, Karamzin, abandoning versification, journalism, translations and literature, composed history. Of course, he approached the work precisely as a writer, that is, for him the exciting plot, the liveliness of the language and the beauty of the style were more important, and not at all the restoration of some kind of "historical truth". It must be understood that history was not considered a science then.

And this is how Pushkin assessed the result of Karamzin's works: “Everyone, even secular women, rushed to read the history of their fatherland, hitherto unknown to them. It was a new discovery for them. Ancient Russia seemed to be found by Karamzin, like America by Columbus." That is, the main achievement of Nikolai Mikhailovich was the formation of the FOUNDATION of Russian historical consciousness.

Why are the historians now canonized - Gizel, Lyzlov, Tatishchev, Shletser, Lomonosov, Shcherbatov - unable to form it?

For only one reason - Karamzin, unlike his predecessors, wrote a fascinating reading, and it, as they say, went to the masses. The authenticity of his writings is neither higher nor lower than that of his predecessors.

But after all, Karamzin himself did not suck the story out of his finger, did he rely on some sources? Otherwise, each historian would write his own unique and inimitable history of mankind.

The technology literally looked like this: first, after the invention of "Arabic" numerals and bit counting, chronological tables were created. The canon took shape in Western Europe around the 17th century, but changed for another 200 years, until it froze in the 19th century. Since Russia from the time of Peter the Great blindly adopted everything European (and even earlier Western trends dominated), when the need arose to compose history, it was formed on the basis of chronological tables adopted in Europe. Historians have already built meat on this skeleton, filling their works sometimes with the most insane nonsense. The main thing is that the outline of their description should be based on the data of generally accepted chronological tables. So Karamzin had something to build on. That is why his historical fantasies did not contradict the fantasies of his predecessors and fit into the canvas of the global Eurocentric historiography.

So, returning to your question about the possibility of a centuries-old mass delusion - there was none. The first historians were aware that they were engaged in the production of an actual version of ideas about the past by order of the ruling families, they were not scientists, but propagandists. But subsequent generations of historians (when history began to be called science) did not understand at all that when reading the works of the "founders", they were dealing with a multi-layered stratification of fantasies seasoned with interpretations in line with the current political situation.

- And who created these chronological tables in Europe?

The global chronology used today was created at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries by the French scientists Joseph Sakliger and Dionysius Petavius. The latter proposed the countdown of the years before the birth of Christ adopted today. The methodology of medieval chronologists was based on numerology, that is, belief in a mystical connection between numbers, physical phenomena and the fate of a person. Since everything that exists was explained by the manifestation of divine will, that is, God was a kind of main subject of the historical process, the principle of divine numbers was applied in chronology. The number of God is 9. Accordingly, chronologists tried to bring any date or period to this divine denominator. The main method is to reduce numbers to digits: all the decimal places of the number are added, if the number is 10 or more, the process is continued until an elementary number from 1 to 9 is obtained. Mathematically, this procedure is equivalent to replacing the original number with its remainder of integer division by 9 Let's say I was born in 1977. The numerological module of this number is 1+9+7+7=24; 2+4=6.

If we analyze from the point of view of numerology all the key dates of ancient history known to us or the duration of periods, for example, the time of reigns, then in the vast majority of cases we will come to the divine module 9, although we should get an approximately equal number of digits from 1 to 9. This pattern finally disappears only in the XVI-XVIII for different countries. In this way we can roughly calculate the period when history passes from an occult discipline into the quality of a documented chronology. The numerological analysis of dynasties (obtaining a numerological chain of periods of reign) makes it possible to identify virtual twin dynasties. That is, eras and names change, but the numerological skeleton remains unchanged. Vyacheslav Alekseevich Lopatin covered this issue in detail in the book "Scaliger's Matrix".

- How does numerology allow you to understand ancient Russian history?

Lopatin gives the following table:

Ivan IV the Terrible		Vladimir Monomakh
Fedor Ivanovich		Mstislav I
Vladimirovich Boris Godunov		Vsevolod II Olgovich
Fyodor Godunov		Igor Olgovich
False Dmitry		Izyaslav II
False Dmitry II		Izyaslav III
Vladislav		Vyacheslav Vladimirovich
Mikhail Fedorovich		Rostislav Mstislavich
Fedor-Filaret		Mstislav II
Izyaslavich Mikhail Fedorovich		Svyatoslav II Vsevolodovich
Fedor Alekseevich		Yaroslav II Vsevolodovich
		Alexander Nevskiy

The middle column shows the difference in the beginning of the reign dates between the indicated characters. Firstly, we clearly see a shift of 459 years in two-thirds of cases, and secondly, in all cases the numerological module of this shift is 9. If we analyze the biographies of numerological "twins", then even more frank parallels are found there, up to an exact match names of wives, children and major milestones of government.

If semi-official historians want to defend their dogma, they will have to try very hard to somehow explain the "accident" of almost mirror coincidences between entire dynasties separated by hundreds of years. But since they have absolutely nothing to cover, they simply remain silent. After all, it will be very funny if they have to admit that their "academic science" is based on the foundation created by numerologists, astrologers and other palmists.

It turns out that the ancient chronologists cheated, blindly transferring dynasties from one era to another, without changing the numerological skeleton. If they wanted to deceive posterity, they should have made some amendments. Well, let's say, even a loser knows that when copying an essay from an excellent student, you cannot copy it verbatim, otherwise the teacher will understand everything from the very first phrases, but you have to rewrite it in your own words, and then, at least formally, it will be difficult to prove plagiarism.

Chronologists did not try to deceive posterity at all. Why did they even need it? Any historical myths appear only when there is a utilitarian need for them. They were made counting on contemporaries, and only on contemporaries. This is the solution. Even 300-400 years ago, the consciousness of people (I mean the educated layer) was very different from ours, it was scholastic, mystical, occult. For example, they perceived time not linearly (from a reference point to infinity), but cyclically, that is, in their minds, everything in the world moves in a circle, everything repeats, like the seasons repeat, how day follows night, how biological, climatic and astronomical cycles. Accordingly, and historical eras also MUST BE REPEATED. If chronologists had composed a non-cyclical story, contemporaries who lived in the 16th-18th centuries would not have believed it.

But modern historians perceive time linearly and, in theory, should be critical of fictional cycles.

Professional historians are mentally handicapped people. They do not have the ability to think abstractly. These are not scientists in any, even in the medieval sense of the word, they are priests who worship dogma and impose their delusions on others. And since they receive money for this "work", they react to any attempt to doubt the truth of their dogma in the same way as the medieval church reacted to heretics. Unless they can't burn me, but with might and main they demand that criminal liability for "falsification of history" be introduced. And in some "civilized" countries, for example, in Germany, Austria, France, those who question the myth that the Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews in gas chambers. You can doubt that they starved to death 2.5 million captured Red Army soldiers as much as you like, but you can’t even think about the Jews! In the same way, voices are heard in Ukraine to punish those who dare to publicly doubt that the accursed Stalin killed 9 million Ukrainians with the Holodomor.

In your book you write that the beginning of the legend of Kievan Rus was laid by the Synopsis published in 1674, the first textbook on Russian history known to us now, and that all Russian historians, starting from the time of Catherine, wrote their works in line with of this edition: "The main stereotypes of ancient Russian history (the foundation of Kyiv by three brothers, the calling of the Varangians, the legend of the baptism of Russia by Vladimir, etc.) are laid out in the Synopsis in a slender row and accurately dated." But after all, besides the Synopsis, there are several older, ancient sources, to which the researchers of ancient Russia refer in their writings, including Karamzin mentioned by you.

There are no and never were these sources (I mean written ones). First, they made up a story, then concocted sources in order to somehow reinforce the formed canon. If we talk about ancient Russian history (the so-called pre-Mongolian period), then it relies on only one source - The Tale of Bygone Years, known in several lists. Don't be her - and there pitch darkness. But PVL has been at the disposal of Russian historians since the second half of the 18th century, and Gisel already knew everything almost a century earlier. What did he rely on? No matter what! In the first half of the 17th century, Kyiv was visited by a significant scientist for his time (in the usual sense of the word) and just a very inquisitive person Guillaume le Vasseur de Beauplan, a French engineer in the service of the Polish king, who wrote a book about his travels through the Ukrainian kingdoms (it was he who, with the second edition of his book, introduced the toponym "Ukraine" into European use). So, while in Kyiv, Beauplan communicated with the local, as we would say, intellectual elite, was interested in ancient books, asked about the past of this region. Nobody could satisfy his curiosity. He did not find any written sources, and from conversations with local "local historians" he found out that according to rumors, there used to be a sea on the site of Kyiv, and all the ancient manuscripts had burned down long ago.

It turns out that the Frenchman Beauplan failed to learn anything about the past of Russia, because the sources were ABSENT, and the German Gisel, a quarter of a century later, issues a fundamental work (without any reference to sources, of course), the main part of which is occupied by ... a chronological table in the spirit of the then European Maud. And a few decades later, the same chronological table pops up in the Tale of Bygone Years, and not as an integral part of the work, but as a sheet pasted right in the middle of the text. It doesn't take a genius of the deductive method to come to the conclusion that the matter is not clean.

What, in your opinion, Rurik, Prince Igor, the prophetic Oleg and the rest were invented by Gizel and never lived on the territory of modern Ukraine, and the rest of the historians only rewrote and supplemented the events and heroes invented by him? Who then lived there? And where did he get all these Ruriks and Olegs from?

Where the heroes of ancient history come from is clearly seen in the example of The Tale of Bygone Years. Its compiler took as the basis for the plot about the calling of the Varangians ... Scandinavian folk songs - sagas, but the original language was not familiar to him or was very poorly known. Therefore the words "Rurik honey blue hus ok true ver" he translated as "Rurik, Sineus and Truvor", appointing the latter two to reign in Belozero and Izborsk, while literally this phrase in Old Norse means "Rurik with his household and faithful squad." That is, Rurik in Russian history appeared from folklore (not Russian at all), and his brothers are generally the result of the illiteracy of the compiler of the PVL. Since historians in linguistics are usually ignorant, they did not attempt to question the dogma. This incident was discovered by a philologist who is fond of history, Vladimir Borisovich Egorov.

Ancient history is 99% mythology, artistic creation. As for the PVL, this is a remake, and not at all an ancient source. The only question is, on the basis of which the "Tale" stylized as antiquity was compiled. Some echoes of reality must remain in it.

Is it possible that the whole history of ancient Russia known to us was invented by one person and no one in Tsarist Russia and the USSR discovered this forgery for many years? And what about the Russkaya Pravda, Monomakh's teachings, Ipatievskaya and other chronicles, the notes of Konstantin Porphyrogenitus?

Why one? This is the result of teamwork. And to doubt the canon in the "academic environment" is generally not accepted. As for written sources, they are all of very late origin. The PVL according to the Radzivilov list has been known since the first half of the 18th century, and the Lavrentiev and Ipatiev Chronicles - since 1809 (both put into circulation by Karamzin). At the same time, it is quite obvious that they are of a later origin than the first list, because they reproduced the errors of the Radzivilov Chronicle, including even such specific ones as incorrect page numbering, which occurred through the fault of the binder. Thus, it cannot be ruled out that the Teaching of Vladimir Monomakh (an integral part of the Lavrentiev Code) is a remake, like the Tale of Igor's Campaign, especially since both of these works come from the collection of Musin-Pushkin, suspected of falsifying ancient manuscripts. Secondly, even if this is not the case, one can only guess what we are dealing with - with the original text, an artistic and journalistic work compiled on behalf of a certain historical character when it was written, how much the text was later distorted by scribes, etc.

But if we evaluate the reliability of the "Instruction" strictly mathematically, renouncing reverence for the old antiquity, then it is more likely that we have a remake, because it is known only in one copy. In theory, the more ancient the work, the more known lists should be, and over time, they should accumulate more and more discrepancies. In reality, we usually see the opposite: the more ancient the work, the more unique it has, which is completely illogical.

As for Porphyrogenitus, historians, claiming that he, as a contemporary, described the annalistic "path from the Varangians to the Greeks", categorically avoid quoting him. However, before the advent of the Internet, the writings of this Roman basileus were inaccessible to the average reader. Today, any inquisitive person can find his treatise “On the Management of the Empire” in a minute and make sure that there is not a word about the Varangians and trade in it, but it describes the passage of the Dnieper rapids on dugout boats of the Rosy robbers, who spend the winter in the forests, and in the spring they descend to plunder the rich trading cities of the Black Sea region. It is on such cheap forgeries that the history of Kievan Rus is built. Citizens, do not believe the liar historians, read the primary sources yourself!

- Why should the same Musin-Pushkin forge antiquity?

Why did Macpherson falsify the cycle of Ossian's poems? Perhaps only for the satisfaction of vanity and money. And the "Lay of Igor's Campaign" was written in defiance - they say, the Russians are also not born with a bast, we had our own Ossians in ancient times. By the way, many passages are borrowed from the Ossian poems in the Lay, which betrays a falsification. Today, after all, no one doubts that MacPherson himself composed the "ancient" poems. In general, counterfeiting antiquities is a more profitable business than counterfeiting banknotes, but at the same time it is completely safe from the point of view of criminal law. Museums are just full of fakes masquerading as antiquity. The situation is the same in literature. As soon as there was a rush demand for antiquity, so ancient parchments fell down, as if from a cornucopia, and one more unique than the other. Worst of all, falsifiers often destroyed texts that were really ancient but of little interest from their point of view, scraping them off parchments in order to use the old parchment to create a commercially promising remake.

And what can be said definitely from such a widely known episode as the baptism of Russia by Vladimir? Can it really be called into question?

If Vladimir's baptism had really taken place, then it would have been an event of enormous foreign policy significance for Romea (Byzantium) and it could not have gone unnoticed by imperial and church chroniclers. However, the Byzantine chronicles about the Kiev baptism are silent. The explanation is simple - the legend of Vladimir the Baptist arose after Romea left the historical stage. It is officially believed that the baptist prince was glorified in the 14th century (the question is, what were they waiting for 400 years for?), however, as they say, "it is customary to think so." If we rely on facts, and not on established opinion, then the veneration of St. Vladimir begins from the 17th century. 1635 is dated the uncovering of the relics of the holy prince by the Metropolitan of Kyiv Peter Mohyla. Well, soon Gisel will tell everyone how great Vladimir really was.

And what about the founders of Kyiv and the epic heroes - Ilya Muromets, for example, whose relics rest in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra? Do you also doubt their existence?

As for the founding of Kyiv, I am inclined to assume that the name of the city comes from the Kyiv perevoz (pontoon bridge held by cues), and not from the mythical Kiy. The legend of the three founding brothers is a common literary cliche, known in hundreds of works (let's remember the same PVL - Rurik and his two brothers). I see no reason to identify myth with historical reality. In modern versions of epics, collected just a couple of centuries ago, there is always a "capital city of Kyiv", "Kyiv princes", "Polovtsy, Pechenegs" and other popular print characters, although Ilya Muromets, he certainly goes to the Kyiv court to serve. The artificiality of this binding was well shown in his work by the folklore researcher Aleksey Dmitrievich Galakhov. He cited the following statistics: known at the end of the 19th century. epics of the "Kyiv" cycle were collected: in Moscow province-3, in Nizhny Novgorod - 6, in Saratov - 10, in Simbirsk - 22, in Siberia - 29, in Arkhangelsk - 34, in Olonets - up to 300 - all together about 400. In Ukraine, not a single epic about Kievan Rus and the heroes was found! None! Don't you think it's suspicious that all the ancient Russian button accordion storytellers fled to Siberia and Karelia?

I personally observed the relics of Elijah in the Lavra. But who does she belong to? The first written information about him is found in the 17th century in the book of the monk Athanasius of Kalnofoy "Teraturgim", describing the life of the saints of the Lavra saints, the author devotes a few lines to Ilya, specifying that the hero lived 450 years before writing the book, that is, at the end of the 12th century . At the same time, it is strange that the life of the Monk Elijah is absent in the Kiev-Pechersk Patericon. It struck me that the fingers on the mummy's hand were folded in the way it was customary to be baptized after Nikon's reform. In general, if there is a mummy, then it is not difficult to declare it as belonging to an ancient character - there are many characters, but few mummies.

Well, let's agree that it is not so easy to reliably establish the chronology of events that took place in those ancient times. Let's talk about events that are not so far removed from our days and about which reliable documents and evidence have been preserved. In your book you write that our national hero, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, never called the place where he lived Ukraine, himself and his people - Ukrainians, did not know Ukrainian language and wrote all the documents in Russian. "In 1648, approaching Lvov, Bogdan Khmelnitsky wrote in his station wagon: "I am coming to you as the liberator of the Russian people, I am coming to the capital city of the Chervonorussky land to save you from Lyash captivity" Who then wanted to reunite with Russia?

There was no talk of any REUNION. The Zaporizhzhya Cossack army asked to be taken "under the arm" of the fellow Russian tsar. Not a state, not a territory, not a people, but an army. The Cossacks, on the other hand, perceived the transition to Russian citizenship as a change from one overlord to another, and they did not see anything strange in giving reverse. However, such "flexibility" was not in fashion in Russia, so after a long series of hetman's betrayals, Cossack autonomy was abolished under Catherine II.

As for the "second-rate" population - peasants, urban dwellers - no one asked their opinion on the subject of "reunification". But speaking strictly on the merits, the territory of the present left-bank Ukraine became part of the Russian state not as a result of the will Cossack army, but on the fact of Russia's victory in the war with Poland, secured by the Andrusov peace. The Cossacks in this war rushed from one side to the other. That is, Ukraine in any form was not the subject of the historical process. Ukraine - the Ukrainian lands of the Kingdom of Poland was only an arena for the struggle of two states with each other (well, the Turks got stuck there, where would it be without them, and the Swedes were noted). Reunification is a purely ideological stamp, introduced into the mass historical consciousness already in Soviet times. Attempts by current historians to present the Cossacks (or even more so - the Cossack "republic") as an independent player in historical arena XVII century, cause nothing but sympathy for their fruitless efforts.

But still, the reason for this war was the unification of the Zaporizhzhya army and Russia, because almost immediately after the reunification, Russia entered the war with Poland. It turns out that, in addition to political ones, she also had military obligations to the Cossacks?

What does the obligation to the Cossacks? They were the same subjects of the king, like everyone else. Poland began hostilities against Russia, so Moscow responded with blow for blow. Besides main goal this war was not the retention of the Left Bank, but the return of Smolensk and other lost during the Time of Troubles and the previous unsuccessful war territories.

And what kind of "Moscow-Ukrainian war of 1658-1659" was it? , which, in connection with the Battle of Konotop, is mentioned in the school textbook on the history of Ukraine for the 8th grade?

There was no such war. In 1654-1667 there was a Russian-Polish war. Zaporozhye Cossacks fought on both sides. Hetman Vyhovsky defected to the Poles and signed the Hadiach Treaty with them, according to which he wished to see the Grand Duchy of Russia equal in rights with the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as part of the Commonwealth (as we see, the word "Ukraine" was also unknown to him). He himself, of course, aimed at the throne of the Grand Duke. However, the betrayal of the hetman met with a powerful rebuff from below, an uprising of Pushkar and Barabash broke out against Vyhovsky, as a result of which he was overthrown, fled to the Poles, who shot him for treason in connection with his real or imaginary involvement in the Sulimka uprising.

So, the Battle of Konotop is one of the battles of the Russian-Polish war, in which 30 thousand Crimeans and Nogays, 16 thousand Vyhovsky Cossacks and about 2 thousand mercenaries took part from Poland. On the opposite side, under the command of Prince Trubetskoy, about 28 thousand people fought in the Russian regiments and slightly less than 7 thousand Cossacks of Hetman Bespalov. The Russians were defeated, but they were not defeated, but retreated to Putivl. The Crimean Tatars and Nogai left Vygovsky because Ataman Serko attacked the Nogai uluses, and Vyhovsky was soon forced to flee. In what place the historians will see the Russian-Ukrainian war in this episode, especially the victory in it, I do not know. The most significant losses in the forces of Prince Trubetskoy fell precisely on the Cossacks of Bespalov, of whom every third died. I wonder if they fought for Ukraine or against it with the Crimean Tatars and German mercenaries?

- And in the royal documents, with regard to the Pereyaslovskaya Rada and reunification, does the word "Ukraine" occur?

No. The verdict of the Zemsky Sobor, assembled in Moscow specifically for the decision to accept the citizenship of the Zaporizhzhya Cossack army, is known - the words "Ukraine" and "Ukrainians" are not found in it. The Orthodox inhabitants of the Left Bank are called Cherkasy. The subject of the agreement is the army, and in the motivational part there is not even a hint of a certain common historical past of Russians and Cherkasy, the main reason for interference in the affairs of the Polish kingdom is the failure to fulfill the oath of King Jan Casimir to the Cherkasy "in the faith of the Christian beware and protect, and no measures for faith themselves crowd", that is, not violate the rights of Orthodox subjects. The seal sent to Khmelnytsky from Moscow (one of the attributes of the hetman's power) read: "The seal of the Tsarist Majesty of Little Russia of the Zaporizhian army."

Let's talk about Kyiv. Among Ukrainian, and indeed most Russian historians, it is traditionally accepted that the date of the founding of Kyiv is one and a half thousand years from our days, and for about a thousand years it has been a major metropolitan city. What, in your opinion, can be confidently asserted based solely on material evidence: testimonies of foreigners about Kyiv, archaeological excavations, architectural monuments?

It can only be established with certainty that Kyiv, as a small monastic settlement, already existed at the end of the 16th century. At the end XVIII century on the site of the modern city there were three scattered settlements - the Kiev-Pechersk fortress with its suburbs; Upper Kyiv was two versts from it; Podol lay three versts away.

All ancient mentions of Kyiv are sucked from the finger. For example, Roman (Byzantine) chroniclers could not fail to notice a huge state with a center in Kyiv at their side. About the Bulgarians, about the raids of robbers on cities in Asia Minor, about the insignificant tribes of barbarians, they write in detail, but about Kievan Rus, as a state, they are silent. Therefore, historians go out of their way to discover Kyiv where it does not exist and cannot exist. We found the mentioned fortress of Sambatos on Borisfen at Constantine Porphyrogenitus and immediately joyfully declared it the capital city of Kyiv, met the mention of the Kneb diocese - and immediately declared that Knebo was Kyiv. And having discovered a certain Kuyab among the Arabs, they ordered everyone to assume that we are talking about Kyiv, and only about Kyiv. But if, for example, Abu Hamid al-Garnati writes that Maghreb Muslims who speak the Turkic language live in Kuyab, then this does not fit at all into the fables of historians about Kievan Rus. Either the people of Kiev professed Islam, or Kuyab is not Kyiv, but, for example, the ancient Kulyab or Kuva (Cuba).

Kyiv archeology looks frankly pale, even if we take into account frank falsifications. For example, the Gnezdovsky mounds near Smolensk provide an order of magnitude more material, which archaeologists usually date to the 10th-11th centuries. The "pre-Mongolian" architecture of Kyiv is outright speculation. All "pre-Mongolian" monuments are built in the Ukrainian baroque style. There is no documentary evidence of their existence before the 17th century. So the standard fables are used that the temple, they say, is very, very, very ancient, only rebuilt 300 years ago. Even when archaeologists were "lucky" to unearth the ruins of the Assumption Cathedral blown up by the Germans, they uncovered only the cultural layers of the 17th century. The rest is the dexterity of the language in interpreting the results of excavations.

When did the term "Ukraine" first appear at the interstate level as the name of a geographical area from Kharkov to Uzhgorod? And when did the people living in this region begin to be called and, more importantly, consider themselves and call themselves "Ukrainians"? What did you manage to establish in this matter by studying the documents?

If you mean the territory from Kharkov to Uzhgorod, then it became Ukraine in 1945 with the inclusion of the Transcarpathian region into it. True, most of the inhabitants of Transcarpathia did not consider themselves Ukrainians, and even now they stubbornly call themselves Rusyns, but these are already trifles. With universal passportization, Ukrainians began to write all those living on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR, if there were no obvious obstacles to this.

The toponym "Ukraine" in Europe was put into circulation, as I already mentioned, by Boplan in 1660. But Boplan does not even suspect any Ukrainians, stubbornly calling the inhabitants of "the outskirts of the Kingdom of Poland, stretching from the borders of Muscovy, up to the borders of Transylvania" Russians. And the very name "Ukraine" got into his work already in the second edition, probably due to someone's mistake. Initially, Beauplan's book was called "Description des contrtes du Royaume de Pologne, contenues depuis les confins de la Moscowie, insques aux limites de la Transilvanie -" Description of the outskirts of the Kingdom of Poland, stretching from the borders of Muscovy, up to the borders of Transylvania, that is, the term "Ukraine "here in the sense of" outskirts ". And only the second edition of the book, published in Rouen in 1660, received the title Description d" Ukraine, qui sont plusieurs provinces du Royaume de Pologne. Contenues depuis les confins de la Moscovie, insques aux limites de la Transilvanie - "Description of Ukraine ...", and on the title page of the book the word "Ukraine" is written incorrectly - D "UKRANIE instead of D" UKRAINE. Bogdan Khmelnytsky does not know any Ukrainians and Ukraine either, in whose station wagons we do not find these words, although Ukraine is sometimes mentioned in the sense of "marginal, borderland".

Here is how he expressed himself in relation to the people subordinate to him, and the territory on which this people lived, in his speech at the Pereyaslovskaya Rada: “That for six years we have been living without a sovereign in our land in incessant warfare and bloodshed from the persecutors and enemies of our, who want uproot the Church of God, so that the Russian name is not remembered in our land ... That great sovereign, the Christian king, taking pity on the unbearable bitterness of the Orthodox Church in our Little Russia ... "

Ukrainians, as a nationality, were first introduced by the Pole Jan Pototsky in the book "Historical and geographical fragments about Scythia, Sarmatia and Slavs", published in Paris in French in 1795. Pototsky considered the Poles the heirs of the Sarmatians, and the Ukrainians - an offshoot of the Polish tribe. Another Pole, Tadeusz Chatsky, in 1801 wrote a pseudo-scientific work "On the name "Ukraine" and the birth of the Cossacks", in which he led the Ukrainians away from the horde of Ukrainians he invented, who allegedly moved in the 7th century. because of the Volga.

To understand on what grounds the first citizens appeared who began to call themselves Ukrainians, one needs to know the political situation in the southwestern regions of Russia at the beginning of the 19th century. Thanks to the favorable disposition of Alexander I towards Poland, this region was literally flooded with all kinds of Polish figures, many of whom, to put it mildly, did not have much sympathy for Russia. And there were especially many such figures in the education system of the Southwestern Territory: such as Adam Czartorysky, the trustee of the Vilna educational district (which included the Kyiv, Volyn and Podolsk provinces) who during Polish uprising 1830-1831, the government of the rebels, Tadeusz Chatsky mentioned above, the founder of the Kremenets Lyceum, the trustee of Kharkov University - Severin Pototsky and others, will head the government of the rebels. All these figures had obvious anti-Russian views, so it is not surprising that the marginal ideas of Ukrainianness Pototsky and Chatsky eventually took root among the South Russian intelligentsia. It is difficult to find a more fertile ground for innovative protest moods than students, which was taken advantage of by Polish nationalists who dreamed of restoring an independent Commonwealth, and for this purpose began a policy of "breaking away" part of its people from Russia in order to have allies in the fight against Russia . And it was precisely at the suggestion of Polish teachers that such well-known figures as Kharkiv University graduates Petr Gulak-Artemovsky, Dmitry Bogaley and Nikolay Kostomarov, Franciszek Dukhinsky, a graduate of the Uman Uniate School and others who became active propagandists of the Ukrainian national idea and laid the foundation for the process, which was later declared the "Ukrainian national liberation movement."

- Well, it turns out that the Ukrainians were invented by the Poles?

They, as they say, initiated a process that later got out of their control, and after the restoration of the statehood of Poland, the Poles had a lot of problems with Ukrainian nationalism. The apogee of the Polish-Ukrainian "friendship" can be considered the Volhynia massacre of 1943.

By the middle of the 19th century, a Russian (ethnically) intelligentsia appeared, preaching the doctrine of Ukrainianism, but it was precisely a political doctrine, under which they urgently began to undermine the cultural basis. It was then that the tradition of writing literary works in the peasant dialect was born. The idea of ​​Ukrainianism was in demand only in Austria, where it was used in Galicia to suppress the Russian cultural movement, since Vienna realized that it would soon develop into a national liberation struggle. Actually, then the Ukrainian language was created (one of its main creators, Mikhail Grushevsky, received a salary from the Austrian treasury for his work) and the Ukrainian alphabet. At first, attempts were made to create it on the basis of the Latin alphabet, but this idea turned out to be frankly crazy.

In 1906, the first attempt at Ukrainization in Russia was made (funded by Austria-Hungary) - the so-called linguistic crusade. The crusaders began to publish literature and periodicals in the newly created Ukrainian language, but the epic ended in a resounding failure - the population did not want to read newspapers in the incomprehensible "Ukrainian language" at all. Moreover, the most fierce resistance to the crusaders was put up by local Ukrainophiles, who believed that the Ukrainian language was a folk dialect literaryized by Shevchenko, and they considered the Galician Volapuk imposed by the Austrians to be artificial and completely unsuitable.

Finally, already in Soviet times, in the 20-30s, the first mass and total Ukrainization took place, which, despite the rejection of the population, was a relative success. At least, a single language standard was formed, which was introduced through school education. In the second half of the 1930s, Ukrainization began to decline, and after the war, the process generally died out. This was largely due to the fact that the most active Ukrainianizers willingly collaborated with the Germans during the years of occupation, and then either fled to the West or were repressed.

The longest and most active process of Ukrainization has been going on before our eyes for the last 20 years. However, the task of creating a "Ukrainian nation" has not yet been completed.

- Why do you think so?

Even in Kyiv, three-quarters of the population continues to speak Russian. Even those who call themselves Ukrainians in most cases admit that they think in Russian. In general, Ukraine today is a unique country where signs and official papers are written in one language and spoken in another. For the Ukrainian language to become a full-fledged language, it is not enough to mechanically replace Russian words with Polish ones and plant this lexicon from above; for this, giants are needed, such as Lomonosov, Pushkin, Tolstoy became for the Russian language. As soon as the Ukrainian language becomes native for the citizens of Ukraine, only then will it be possible to talk about the formation of the Ukrainian people. So far, three-quarters of Ukrainian citizens are Ukrainians by passport, and not by identity.

I believe it will be difficult for Ukrainian-speaking citizens to realize that they are not speaking the ancient language of their ancestors, but a language artificially invented 150 years ago.

Firstly, the Ukrainian language has not yet been invented, it is in active phase formation, it is still not sufficiently separated from the Russian. Secondly, in order to realize something, it is enough just to want. For example, try to find some ancient written source in Ukrainian. But there are none, Ukrainian written sources appear only in the 19th century. But Ukrainians do not want to know the truth at all, just as historians do not want to know the truth. Ukrainian schoolchildren are told that the Church Slavonic language is the Old Ukrainian language. Since the children do not know Church Slavonic now, they can only trust the teacher for the rest of their lives. It is on such a shaky phantom foundation that the Ukrainian national identity rests.

This, by the way, also explains the poverty of Ukrainian culture, because smart, educated, creative-minded people cannot consider themselves Ukrainians, just as Gogol vehemently denied any Ukrainophilism and attempts to separate the Little Russian layer from Russian culture. What is considered Ukrainian culture is a poor surrogate. For example, the "classic of Ukrainian music" - Hulak-Artemovsky's opera "Zaporozhets beyond the Danube" is not only a translation from Russian, but the music is also stupidly stolen from Mozart from his opera "The Abduction from the Seraglio", where several folk melodies are added. Ukrainian literature, starting with Kotlyarevsky, is either free translations or Ukrainization of other people's works, which is what all the "classics" sinned with - both Shevchenko and Vovchok stole plots. "Borrowing" the plot is, of course, not uncommon, Lermontov borrowed from Byron, Pushkin from Zhukovsky and folklore, Alexei Tolstoy torn the famous "Pinocchio" from Carlo Collodi. But if the share of "borrowings" in Russian literature, let's take it conditionally, is 10%, then in Ukrainian it is 90%.

Russian art, one way or another, is the property of world artistic culture, and Ukrainian literature, music has not gone beyond the framework of regional culture, into which it was driven by the Ukrainizers themselves. Imagine what will happen if the Kyiv Opera and Ballet Theater brings "Zaporozhets beyond the Danube" to Vienna. Yes, they will be thrown rotten there! And some Stankevich's "Lord of Borisfen" is a propaganda order for the needs of the day, which is even unsuitable for internal use.

Mikhail Bulgakov in The White Guard does not spare "black paint", when he writes about the Ukrainian rulers of 1917-19, through the lips of his heroes he calls them nothing but a gang of crooks and embezzlers of public funds. There is no reason not to believe the writer, whose reputation as an honest person is beyond doubt, no. Now, in our country, these statesmen are considered to be the founders of independence and national heroes. You spent a lot of time studying that period: who, in your opinion, were Grushevsky, Skoropadsky, Petliura and others really?

In addition to language, an important, even the most important, component of national self-consciousness is historical consciousness. Since Ukraine did not have an independent history, just as there was no independent history, for example, in Siberia, now this history is being written at an accelerated pace. For those who do not believe in the possibility of writing ancient history 300 years ago, I recommend looking at how school history textbooks have changed in 20 years. The past is unchanged, but ideas about it change dramatically. Therefore, when we talk about Skoropadsky, Petlyura, Grushevsky and others, we must separate the real faces and the myth about these people. In reality, these were extras who did not create anything, and who were used in their interests by real historical forces. The same Grushevsky managed to serve both the Emperor of Vienna and the German Kaiser (it was he, if someone forgot, who invited the Germans to occupy Ukraine in 1918), after realizing that nothing was going to happen to him in emigration, he publicly renounced his past views and comrades and went over to the Bolsheviks. Contemporaries perceived all these "leaders of the nation" as clowns, heroes of anecdotes and ditties (the first thing that comes to mind about Petliura is "At the carriage there is a Directory, under the carriage there is a territory"). So Bulgakov, as a witness of that era, expressed the dominant attitude in society.

But maybe these figures were naive inept politicians, but sincere people who wanted to build a nation state? Can we, based on the documents, find something positive in their biography?

Positive and negative are purely value judgments. Nationalists evaluate Hitler positively for the segregation of Jews, and it is not difficult to guess that the Jews themselves will give this figure a sharply negative assessment. I am far from evaluating Hrushevsky's activities in creating the Ukrainian language as positive or negative. Generally, artificial creation literary language is quite common. For example, the Portuguese colonialists began to create the Indonesian language based on Malay, which is used today by 200 million people. Here we should pay attention to something else: the Indonesian language served the cause of uniting thousands of multilingual tribes into a single nation, and the Ukrainian literary language was created to separate the single Russian people (Rusyns) in Galicia, and later was also demanded by the separatists in order to break away from Big Russia Little Russia, Volhynia, New Russia and Slobozhanshchina.

You say the nationalists wanted to build a nation state? Let's say, but why? The people did not need this very national state in 1918. Nobody came to defend him. It is quite obvious that the nationalists needed the state only in order to gain power over it. After all, Grushevsky called on the occupying troops to help him and kowtowed before Kaiser Wilhelm precisely in order to stay in power. The operetta power of Hetman Skoropadsky rested on German bayonets. Petliura for the sake of personal power Warsaw Pact sold half of Ukraine to the Poles. And vice versa, Grushevsky instantly abandoned nationalist "delusions" when, instead of public repentance, the opportunity arose to take a warm place under the Bolsheviks. In this fuss of petty intriguers, I do not see a great state idea and great fighters for it.

But a completely different matter is a historical myth. In the state historical mythology, Grushevsky, Petlyura, Skoropadsky, Vygovsky, Orlik, Bandera, Mazepa and others are knights without fear and reproach, powerful state minds. So far, of course, it is difficult to fashion heroes out of these figures, since their real portrait sticks out too clearly through the gloss of official propaganda, but propaganda is a powerful tool for shaping consciousness. 100 years ago, the publication in Russia of the 10-volume "History of Ukraine-Rus" by Grushevsky caused Homeric laughter. Today, his dogma has already been officially canonized, if in the Russian Federation they talk about Kievan Rus, then in Ukraine the New Language label "Kyiv Ukraine" is in use, as a designation of the ancient state in the Dnieper region that never existed. So if myth-making develops in the same spirit, in another hundred years we will get a beautiful, but completely virtual history of Ukraine, which millions of Ukrainians will consider to be an indisputable truth.

Falsification of "The Tale of Igor's Campaign": how it was.

More precisely, the post should have been titled "Falsification of Evidence of the Authenticity of the Tale of Igor's Campaign", but in principle it is one and the same thing. legalization of the remake, in respect of which doubts arose.In the case of the Lay, doubts arose among contemporaries immediately, and the question of the authenticity of the literary monument immediately passed into the political sphere.

To begin with, I will briefly dwell on the issue of political conjuncture. The end of the 18th-beginning of the 19th centuries was the time of the formation of nations. Not ethnic groups that had developed many centuries earlier, but modern political nations. The political nation is based on a common historical consciousness. Neither faith nor language played a leading role in this matter. The time was already quite enlightened, atheism became the norm in the ruling class, and the language, in principle, could not be a consolidating factor, because the top of Russian society was for the most part German- and French-speaking. Well, in any case, it was completely cut off from Russian society itself, being totally Westernized. But it was precisely this Europeanized nobility that became the bearer of historical consciousness, which actively (more precisely, explosively) began to take shape just at the time of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (and, by the way, with his direct participation). It can be said that the question of the formation of historical thinking was completely subordinated to the interests of ideology, and the demands of ideology were completely dictated by the current political situation.

The Norman theory of the genesis of the statehood of Russia, monstrously absurd according to the current understanding, was declared the only true and beyond doubt precisely because this was a political need. Ruling dynasty The Romanovs were completely non-Russian by blood, so the tale of the calling of the Varangians became a kind of phantom reflection of the "return" of the European aristocracy to the Russian throne. The Russian elite, for the most part, wanted to be their own in Europe, and the romantic doctrine of the Scythian originality nafik did not insert into anyone, with the exception of rare dissidents. The very thought of a general origin with stinking ink for many elites was deeply disgusting.

History is not a science even today, and in those distant times it could not have occurred to anyone that history had anything to do with science. The task of writing a beautiful story was perceived as a purely applied propaganda task - one must adequately participate in the competition of enlightened peoples in praising their great past. Therefore, Karamzin was appointed court historian, who had nothing to do with historiography, but was a talented writer. Everything is logical: in order to compose something, you need a well-spoken tongue and the ability to waver along with the general line of the party. And any “scientific” there, or rather its appearance, was required only half a century later to legalize the beautiful historical myths that had already firmly established themselves in the mass consciousness.

The great problem was that the Europeans began to compose their great past much earlier, and left no place in antiquity for the Russian "savages". Therefore, for ruling class Russia has the only loophole left - to cling to the already written in in general terms the history of Europe - they say, we have nothing to do with the bastard cattle, our ancestors sailed on boats to these wild lands and brought civilization to the natives. That is, the task was narrowed down: it was only necessary to write the history of the glorious European civilizers who arrived to cultivate the wild Slavic tribes. The civilizers, according to official mythology, were brilliant in military affairs and very wise: they nailed shields to the gates, accepted the faith of Christ voluntarily, and not as conquered peoples from the conquerors, christened the dense subjects of the pagans, well, etc.. The main backbone of Russian history the Germans Schlozer, Bayer and Miller, discharged from abroad, quickly scribbled back in the 18th century, and in the next century the popularization of this doctrine began. The aforementioned writer Karamzin made a decisive contribution to this matter, who, without taking his loins off his chair, scribbled 12 volumes of the History of the Russian State, which were published in huge circulations at that time and were sold like hot cakes.

The enlightened public in that era had an interest in historical fiction, and after that in ancient literary monuments. If there is demand, there will be supply. Ancient monuments rained down on the European reader as if from a cornucopia. Britain read the poems of Ossian, which McPherson falsified with Stakhanov's methods, and the Russians had nothing to wipe Europe's nose with. It was then that a sensational discovery appeared out of nowhere - the epic "Lay of Igor's Campaign", which was immediately put by enthusiastic reviewers on a par with Ossian's poems. Well, this is excusable, because even then the fact of the falsification of the Ossian cycle was not well known. On top of everything else, the content and ideological pathos of the Lay were sustained in an exceptionally correct political context. At that time, Russia was experiencing a boom in the development of the steppes of Novorossia, which, they say, Prince Igor wanted to conquer, and to shove the filthy Polovtsy (an analogue of the Turks hostile to Romanov's Russia) with a sword. True, he didn’t work out a little, but Mother Catherine, oh, glory to her, glory, fulfilled her age-old dream Slavic tribe and approved the Russian name in Tavri and Tmutarakan, which, by the way, is very intrusively mentioned in the "Word".

In the aesthetic sense, the work is really magnificent, and this alone is alarming: literature, like any other art, consistently goes from primitive forms to high and refined ones. And here we see something surprising: an allegedly very ancient author reveals an excellent command of a high literary calm, and after him for six centuries no one could come close to such epic heights either in style or in thoughtfulness of the plot composition. It is even more surprising that such a bright flash of literary talent did not leave any reflections in subsequent centuries, we do not know of a single list of such a brilliant work as the "Word", we do not find anywhere direct or hidden quotations from it, attempts to imitate.

True, historians and philologists are trying to convince us that the author of the Zadonshchina was familiar with the Lay, and even tried to imitate him. Oh, they better be quiet. This is tantamount to saying that Meladze was familiar with love lyrics Lermontov (well, I’m clearly familiar, I went to school) and even tried to develop gypsy plots in his poetic work. The level of pop Meladze's howls about the gypsy Sarah is somehow even inconvenient to compare with Lermontov's Zemfira, these are phenomena of a different order. One thing is indisputable - Meladze lived after Lermontov, and therefore he could borrow something from the classic, at least hypothetically, but the reverse possibility will have to be immediately cut off. But if the ancient origin of the "Word" is not proven, then we will not exclude the possibility that it was the "Zadonshchina" that provided the material for borrowing in Igor's poem, and not vice versa. With a strictly formal approach in linguistic analysis, this version will be even more substantiated. For otherwise, one will have to admit that the tongue-tied author of "Zadonshchina", licking from a genius, also creatively primitive borrowings.

In this regard, the opinion of the prominent historian Alexander Alexandrovich Zimin is curious, who substantiated the hypothesis according to which the parallels between the "Word" and "Zadnshchina" appear more clearly precisely in the later lists of the essay on the campaign on the Kulikovo field, although, in theory, the connection should be more noticeable in the early lists, that is, closer to the lost primary source. But if we assume that during the fabrication of the Lay, the author had at his disposal later editions of the Zadonshchina, everything immediately falls into place.

But in fact, all these philological games are of no particular importance, because elementary common sense suggests that it is absurd to look for evidence of the authenticity of a work inside it. But, due to the complete absence of historical material (lists of the "Word" are obviously older than the 18th century) and historical analogues, it is philologists who prove its authenticity, and they rely in their reasoning ... on the very same "Word".

Today, a certain citizen Zaliznyak is officially recognized as an authority on the issue of "The Tale of Igor's Campaign". Does this name mean anything to you? Then I will present it a little differently: Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the section of literature and language of the department of history and philology, Doctor of Philology, laureate of the State Prize of Russia, owner of the Lomonosov Big Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences Andrey Anatolievich Zaliznyak. What, the knees are already reverently bent? And then - an academician ...

So, let's read Zaliznyak's report "The Problem of the Authenticity of The Tale of Igor's Campaign", which summarizes the results of his work "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" - the view of a linguist." It follows from the text that the problem does exist, and for 200 years it has not been resolved. The author writes: "Two points of view oppose each other - that this is a genuine work created in the Old Russian era, and that this is a fake of the late 18th century, created shortly before the first publication of this work in 1800. The resolution of this dilemma is extremely difficult because the handwritten collection, as part of which was "The Tale of Igor's Campaign", according to the surviving information (however, not entirely clear), died during the invasion of Napoleon in the great Moscow fire of 1812.

Here Zaliznyak deliberately embarks on a crooked path of lies and distortions. There is no information, even "not entirely clear" information, about the death of the original source of the Lay in a fire. There is only a guess. But in the same way, there is an assumption that the manuscript was walled up in the basement of its owner's house, now owned by MGSU. By the way, in 2011 at a charity auction at the university it was sold for 140 thousand rubles. a curious lot - the right to an engineering and technical survey of the basement of the building of the university on Spartakovskaya street in order to search for the original "The Tale of Igor's Campaign".
Although the version of the loss of this literary monument is very doubtful, its origin is even more doubtful. According to the most common version, Count Musin-Pushkin allegedly received it in the library of the Yaroslavl Spaso-Perobrazhensky Monastery. A. M. Tyurin in the article "Dating" The Tale of Igor's Campaign "in the framework of the New Chronology" writes: " Here you can also cite the explanations of the guide of the Transfiguration Monastery of the Savior, which the author of these lines heard several years ago. "A. Musin-Pushkin found in the library of the monastery" The Tale of Igor's Campaign ". You ask why it was not listed in the library's possessions? The answer is simple. It was filed with another document, which A. Musin-Pushkin received for study. You may ask why this is not recorded in a special book for issuing library documents? The answer is simple. One of the abbots of the monastery ordered this entry to be erased."

Under these conditions, according to all the canons of historical science, "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" cannot be attributed to historical documents. However, philologists, as it were, justified that it is an ancient Russian literary monument. We cannot fully understand the essence of this strange metamorphosis. But it is precisely in this plane that philologists build their logical constructions, reducing the historical aspects of the phenomenon under consideration to meaningless and hypertrophied increasing the role of philology in its study.

So, there is no DOCUMENTARY evidence of the origin of the manuscript from the Transfiguration Monastery of the Savior. How did Musin-Pushkin get it? It is known that by decree of August 11, 1791, Empress Catherine II ordered the Synod to collect ancient manuscripts and early printed books from all the churches and monasteries of Russia. An order has been sent to all dioceses. And just a year before, Alexei Ivanovich had been appointed Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, and therefore he received access to the most extensive collection of Russian antiquities. But if the "Word" as part of some unknown handwritten collection was received by the Synod through an official channel, then, firstly, this fact must be registered, both the fact of sending in the monastery and the fact of receiving it in the office of the Synod, and secondly, priceless in this case, a literary monument could not end up in Moscow and burn down in a fire in the Pushkin mansion. Unless the count, before retiring in 1797, stupidly stole him and covered up all traces.

Musin-Pushkin himself allegedly explained the origin of the ancient source in this way from the words of the historian Konstantin Kalaidovich: "Before the conversion of the Spaso-Yaroslavl Monastery into the Bishop's House, it was managed by Archimandrite Joel, a man with enlightenment and a lover of literature; after the destruction of the state, he remained in that monastery on a promise until his death. In last years he was in short supply, and on that occasion my commission agent bought all Russian books from him, among which in one under No. 323, called Chronograph, at the end was found "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" ... "(Kalaidovich K.F. Biographical information about the life, scientific works and collection of Russian antiquities of Count AI Musin-Pushkin // Notes and Works of the Society for the History and Antiquities of Russia. Part 2. M., 1824.)

So, new details are emerging. According to Kalaidovich, the original source of the Lay had nothing to do with the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery, but was in the personal use of Joel Bykovsky, the former archimandrite of the abolished Spaso-Yaroslavl Monastery. As for the monastery, to be honest, I didn’t understand - either it was renamed Spaso-Preobrazhensky in 1787, or it was abolished, and its “assets” were transferred to Spaso-Perobrazhensky, but the fact is that Joel Bykovsky was removed from affairs, remaining to live in a boarding house in a monastery.

The legend about the origin of the "Word" thus becomes even more doubtful: as if the monk Joel suddenly needed money (even though he lived on everything prepared, and even the empress granted him a pension), and sold his vast collection of manuscripts to some anonymous agent Musin-Pushkin books, among which, under the number 323, an undoubted diamond was found. When the purchase was made is unknown. Surprisingly, the farther away from us that time, the more "you can see how it really was there." On the specialized resource "The Tale of Igor's Campaign", for example, it is stated that the manuscript was transferred to Musin-Pushkin in 1787 by the Yaroslavl Archbishop Arseny.

Nikolay Nikolaevich Bantysh-Kamensky, an accomplice of Alexei Ivanovich in translating the Lay, mentions a certain Belarusian trace in this case: “Musin-Pushkin enriched our literature with a published curious iroic song about the campaign against the Polovtsians of the specific prince of Novgorod-Seversky Igor Svyatoslavich. Nikolai Nikolaevich Bantysh-Kamensky and Alexei Fedorovich Malinovsky.(Dictionary of memorable people of the Russian land, compiled by Bantysh-Kamensky, part 2, St. Petersburg, 1847, p. 458.) In general, everyone in this choir sings out of order.

As for the famous collection of Musin-Pushkin's manuscripts, the beginning of which was laid by his father Ivan Yakovlevich, its disappearance, frankly, is very beneficial to modern historians. It was not cataloged (at least there is no information about it, but there is a mention by contemporaries of two rooms in the count's house, in which unsorted papers and even parchment scrolls lay in a shaft), and therefore you can fantasize as much as you like about its size and the value of the sources. At the same time, all questions to Karamzin about the sources of his epochal "History of the Russian State" - the cornerstone of Russian historical consciousness - are removed. Karamzin did not just actively use the Musin-Pushkin collection during his work on the 12-volume collection, it, as it were, formed the basis of his source base. And now all the bribes are smooth: if you want - believe Nikolai Mikhailovich, if you want - do not believe. It is impossible to check anything, all claims are against drunken French occupiers.

Somewhat alarming is the fact that the first volume of Karamzin's "History" went on sale only in 1818 (exactly after the death of Musin-Pushkin in 1817), and the last one was finalized and published in 1829 after the death of the author, in while the source of his inspiration allegedly burned down in 1812. Obviously, the ends do not meet. Therefore, according to the official version, Karamzin allegedly began working on his work in 1803, and for 15 years the author kept the results of his efforts secret from the public. Version, frankly, strained. Allegedly in 1807, Bantysh-Kamensky persuaded Musin-Pushkin to transfer his private collection to the archives of the College of Foreign Affairs. But for some reason, she was not transferred there, because ... the board allegedly did not want to accept this priceless gift. It is also not clear why, in the fall of 1812, Alexei Ivanovich, according to his contemporaries, who did not look after his soul in his library, did not take out of Moscow, even if only the most valuable manuscripts, although he allegedly sent a whole convoy of 32 carts from his estate to Moscow. to save property. For some reason, silverware and paintings from the walls were evacuated, and the most valuable, or rather priceless, was abandoned. Again, a completely fantastic oddity.

From the foregoing, it is quite possible to assume that the Musin-Pushkin collection is a kind of phantom, which is very convenient to refer to when legendizing both existing sources originating from it, and sources lost, but successfully used by historians during the boom in the formation of ideas about our past . Now these ideas have become bronzed, and no one is interested in their documentary substantiation. Like it's well known, and to doubt the well-known is bad manners.

But, perhaps, let us return to Joel Bykovsky. The fact is that it is he who is the main contender for the possession of the laurels of the writer of the Lay in the event that it is a remake of the end of the 18th century. This version was first put forward in 1938 by the French Slavist, Professor Andre Mazon. Alexander Zimin also adhered to this view. According to Wikipedia, he "He outlined his concept in the book" The Tale of Igor's Campaign ". Sources, time of writing, author", published by rotaprint with an edition of 101 copies. and distributed (with the condition of return) to the participants in the discussion held in the Department of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences on May 4-6, 1964. Most of the participants in the discussion did not agree with Zimin's point of view, and his work was never published, which was due to an administrative ban, moreover, what whole line Zimin's opponents believed that his research was of a serious reasoned nature and had the right to be published. Until the end of his life, he continued to adhere to his point of view, clarifying and supplementing the text of the manuscript. Partially, Zimin's point of view is set forth in his articles on "The Tale of Igor's Campaign". The final version of the book by A. A. Zimin about "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" (doubled in comparison with the rotaprint edition) was published only in 2006 with a circulation of 800 copies.

As you can see, it is clearly stated here that the reason for the publication ban was an ADMINISTRATIVE decision, despite the fact that even the opponents of the scientist recognized his work as sufficiently reasoned. But for us, the arguments in favor of a specific author of the Lay are not so important, it is more important to begin with deciding the fundamental question about the nature of this work - whether it is an ancient poem of the 12th century, or an essay stylized in antiquity of the late 18th century. Therefore, it's time to get acquainted with the arguments of Zaliznyak, whom no one is repairing administrative barriers. In his report, Andrei Anatolyevich reduces the evidentiary basis to a single conclusion: the alleged falsifier of the 18th century could not reproduce in his work so flawlessly a language that he did not speak, because in those years no one scientific linguistics did not exist, and therefore he could not scientifically reconstruct the ancient language.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that the retired official Musin-Pushkin, a man of the Enlightenment, in some amazing way comprehended written language XII century and was able to write a brilliant work on it. Pushkin (who is "our everything") vigorously defended his namesake, who had already died by that time, from accusations of falsification. In his opinion, only those who think in it can write such a poem in the "Old Russian language". But is the “Word written in the “Old Russian language” really?

But in fact, modern linguists do not know anything about the written language of the XII century, there is not a single work of secular literature of that time that has survived to this day. According to Zaliznyak, the “Word” was written in the language of the 16th century, and the text shows a clear northwestern influence of the scribe (North Belarusian, according to the researcher) on the South Slavic orthography. That is, the task of the forger is noticeably simplified: he does not need to forge the unknown language of the dark ages, but only copy the lexical and spelling features of the manuscripts of the 15th-16th centuries, of which the same Musin-Pushkin had at least hundreds. However, all the same, neither he nor his assistants in the publication of the Lay, Bantysh-Kamensky and Malinovsky, secular and European-educated people, are hardly capable of being native speakers of the archaic language of the Russian chronicles of the pre-Nikon era. But…

It's time to remember the "pensioner" Ioil Bykovsky. It is assumed that he came from Belarus, then called Lithuania, studied, and later taught at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, later served as archimandrite of the Trinity Eliinsky Monastery in Chernigov. Monk Joel was a passionate collector of ancient manuscripts and had a penchant for writing. It was in him that all three factors converged: literary ambitions, northwestern origin and South Slavic education. It remains to clarify the only question: could Joel, whose entire life was spent in monasteries in the midst of dilapidated bookish antiquity, be fluent in the bookish language of the 16th century? Give me at least one reason why Bykovsky could not imitate a letter from an era quite close to him.

Moreover, one can put forward an even bolder assumption: Elder Joel was a living speaker of the language in which the "Word" was written. There is no sensation here. The fact is that historical linguistics is not a science, but AS A science. Even Zalizniak himself admits that "a humanist does not have the opportunity to prove anything in the absolute sense of the word." That is, historical linguistics is a science based on more or less convincing assumptions, and the assumptions are especially unsteady, and sometimes completely helpless, precisely in the historical, and not in the linguistic component of this discipline. After all, in order to highlight language features written sources of a certain era, they must first be dated, which is a very difficult task, since dates, especially absolute ones, are rarely found on ancient papers and parchments, if we are not talking about annals. Therefore, extremely dubious methods are used, such as stratigraphy or paleography.

For example, the famous Novgorod birch bark can be dated almost exclusively stratigraphically, that is, according to the depth in the ground. First, such letters of Chokh are dated by archaeologists, and only after they are subjected to linguistic analysis, and for philologists, the dating of the artifact is already a constant. Philologists deduce some "classifying signs of the era", and then other manuscripts are dated according to these strictly codified signs. Accordingly, if archaeologists made a mistake in dating, then the whole harmonious concept of historical linguistics is pouring into edrenene-fen, like the entire official version of Russian history. In this sense, it is Novgorod archeology that is very vulnerable, it has already been literally crushed to smithereens. It comes to jokes when a corn cob found in the cultural layers of the 12th century is declared "a plant unknown to science." The most "liberated" scientists even deduce from this the hypothesis that the artifact was brought here by the Vikings, who torn off America long before Columbus. But after all, it is much more expedient to change the dating of the cultural layer to the 17th century, when the overseas cereal was already widely known in Russia! However, this cannot be done in any way, because the whole chronological construction will float!

So, today, some researchers fully admit that the rather contradictory, and in some places completely absurd concept of Russian historical linguistics, needs some clarification. Especially persistent in their demands for the revision of the mossy canon are the so-called linguists-new chronologists. For example, A. M. Tyurin in his work "Dating the Tale of Igor's Campaign in the Framework of the New Chronology" comes to rather non-trivial conclusions: "In accordance with our reconstruction of the stages of development of the Russian language and the conclusion of A. Zaliznyak ("in the "Lay" there are such deviations from phonetic, spelling and morphological norms, which in the manuscripts of the 15th - 16th centuries are found only among scribes of the Great Russian North-West and northern Belarus"), one can draw an unambiguous conclusion. "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" is written on literary language North-west of Russia, which survived until the beginning of the 19th century. It was fabricated by a highly qualified philologist, but not by a genius "equal in potential to the totality of tens and hundreds of his later colleagues" [Zaliznyak, 2008]. He did not need to know the discoveries of linguists of the 19th and 20th centuries about the rules for the development of languages. He worked with a still living written language that fully complied with these rules.

With all my desire, I can’t understand what kind of nonsense Zaliznyak was talking about the deviation from phonetic norms (that is, a deviation in pronunciation) in the text, but in general, according to the author of the article, we can assume that Zaliznyak is basically right when talking about the features of the text , only a mistake in dating leads him to an incorrect interpretation of the features he noted. It may be so, of course. The fact is that Northwestern Russia finally became part of the Russian Empire only at the end of the 18th century, and therefore the written language in Lithuania developed separately, and retained archaic features that "imperial" Russian had already got rid of during the Petrine language reform of 1708-1710. and subsequent rapid changes. Moreover, it is necessary to separate the concepts of the language of "official-clerical", "service-church" and "folk written". The third variety (according to Tyurin, the "Word" is written on it) will, of course, be much more archaic than the first, and therefore documents of the same time today can easily be attributed to different eras. For example, the vernacular written language of the 18th century, known to us from birch bark letters(they wrote on birch bark until the appearance of cheap paper in the 19th century) can be erroneously lowered a couple of centuries in depth, focusing on the similarity of spelling with the clerical language of that time. There is nothing surprising in that, it was in state institutions that scribes were trained in the latest fashion, and, for example, in Siberia, according to the "Slovenian Grammar" by Melety Smotrytsky, many peasants learned to read and write until the 19th century. However, even today, unsociable schismatics do not recognize schools and teach children at home according to grandfather's precepts. Give a modern philologist a note from some hundred-year-old old man who has survived to this day, an Old Believer Siberian from a remote taiga village, he will confidently say that this is a document of the 17th century, in which the influence of Western Russian orthography is clearly traced. Here you have a backlash in 400 years, here is the triumph of historical linguistics over reality and common sense!

However, all of the above is just a saying, and the real disruption of the cover and the break of the template will begin now. Try to ask yourself a question: what, in fact, do Zaliznyak, academicians like him, doctors of sciences and other experts on the Lay, including alternative neochronologists, study? By what sources do they draw conclusions that the "Old Russian" literary monument was made by a scribe of the 15th-16th centuries, by what text do they reveal the "influence of South Slavic orthography" and draw other thoughtful conclusions? After all, the object for study is ABSENT! Yes, the meaning of the word "absent" must be understood quite literally. There is nothing that historians-linguists and linguists-historians could investigate, because the real history of "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" begins only in 1800 with the publication of a printed book (the mythological background was briefly discussed above) in the Moscow Senate printing house. Yeah, the creators of the specialized site http://slovoopolku.ru write "Old Russian original of 1800" without any hesitation. This, of course, is a pearl from the category of enchanting, but, paradoxically, it is said with the utmost honesty.

Let's get acquainted with the article "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" from the authoritative "Encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron" 19011 edition. The text of the article written by P. Vladimirov is in italics, my comments are in bold.

The word about Igor's Campaign is a unique precious monument of ancient Russian poetry, both artistic and folk. It still remains not fully explained in terms of origin and text.

Commendable frankness, in the very first lines the dubious origin of the source is recognized.

S.'s manuscript burned down in the Moscow fire of 1812; only the first edition of S. remained under the title: "Iroic song about the campaign against the Polovtsy of the specific prince of Novogorod-Seversky Igor Svyatoslavich" (M., 1800)

So, for Vladimirov, it is obvious that descendants can judge literary work only according to the PRINTED book edition of 1800.

The first printed news about the discovery of S. was abroad, in the Hamburg magazine "Spectateur du Nord" in 1797 (October). “Two years ago,” wrote an unknown author of an article from Russia, “we opened in our archives a fragment of a poem called: “The Song of Igor's Warriors,” which can be compared with the best Ossian poems.”

Well, here's something interesting. If the publication in the Hamburg magazine really took place, then this gives at least some hint of the date the work was acquired - 1795. It is noteworthy that it is said here about an excerpt from the poem, although the "Word" is a whole work without any omissions .

In the "Historical Content of the Song", which is the preface to the 1800 edition, almost the same expressions are repeated.

The preface says: "Lovers of Russian literature will agree that in this work left to us from past centuries, the spirit of the Ossians is visible; consequently, our ancient heroes also had their own bards who sang their praises." Either Musin-Pushkin organized a "leak" abroad of information about the Lay, or he borrowed a laudatory passage from a Hamburg magazine, which somehow fell into his hands. The case, as they say, is dark.

The 1800 edition appeared without any indication of the persons who worked on reading the monument, on its translation, its interlinear explanations, mainly from the historical side, on the basis of Tatishchev's Russian History. Only on page VII of the preface, in a note, it is noted, by the way: "The original manuscript, in its handwriting is very ancient, belongs to the publisher of this (Count Alexei Ivanovich Musin-Pushkin), who, through efforts and requests to those who know enough Russian, after a few years he brought the attached translation to the desired clarity, and now, on the conviction of his friends, he decided to publish it into the world.

Humility adorns talent. True, the modesty of Musin-Pushkin is somewhat alarming. For example, for several years he avoided meeting with the young historian Kalaidovich, who was trying to find out about the origin of the priceless monument of "Old Russian literature." The first meeting of colleagues took place only in 1813, when the manuscript was lost. I dare to suggest that earlier the count avoided the stubborn curious young man only because he was afraid of harassment from the latter to contemplate the original manuscript itself.

Opening the precious monument, c. Musin-Pushkin reported it to experts in paleography - Malinovsky, Bantysh-Kamensky and others - and, having analyzed it, compiled his own list, in which he introduced the division of words, sentences, capital letters, etc.

Wait a minute! On what basis are Malinovsky and Bantysh-Kamensky declared paleographers? In the same encyclopedia, in the article "Palaeography", the first Russian scientist who left a mark in this discipline is named Professor Izmail Ivanovich Sreznevsky, who was born in 1812. It is believed that the ethnographer Ivan Ivanovich Nosovich was engaged in paliography, but by the time the "Word" was published, there were only 12 years. Would any knowledgeable reader dare to name what contribution Malinovsky and Bantysh-Kamensky made to paleography?
It is also not clear what kind of "and others" who were also supposedly notified by Musin-Pushkin about their find.

Copies were made from this list, which was constantly corrected until the publication of the 1800 edition. One of these copies Musin-Pushkin brought the imp. Catherine II, and it has come down to us.

Here is where something doesn't add up. According to the Hamburg journal, the work was found in 1795. Further, according to the book's publisher himself, it took several years to decipher the ancient text and bring the translation to the "desired clarity." The so-called "Catherine's list" is indeed available. But he could not belong to the Russian Empress, because she departed to another world in 1796, therefore, our trinity had not several years, but several months at most to decipher the text. However, the discrepancies between the "Ekaterininsky list" and the text "polished over the years of work", on which the publication was made, are rather insignificant. So I fully admit that "Catherine's List" is a duck put into circulation to give weight to the work. Like, the highest approved, you can not argue! After all, the "Catherine List" was found only in 1864, allegedly in a folder in which the Empress's handwritten notes lay. It is possible that the list was placed in a folder during the 70 years that have passed since her death. Neither

There are still translations of S. about Igor's Campaign into Russian with replacements about some readings of the original compared with the text prepared for publication in 1800 (the so-called papers of Malinovsky, partly described by E.V. Barsov in his work on S. about Igor's Campaign ; another translation, with notes on the manuscript of the Imperial Public Library, is described in the "Report of the Imperial Public Library, for 1889", St. Petersburg, 1893, pp. 143-144).
After the loss of the original S. about Igor's Regiment, there were reports of its features from the words of the owner and other eyewitnesses. These testimonies are contradictory, since no one bothered to copy a sample of the writing of the manuscript, to describe its features.

How is that?!!! As many as two "paleographers" studied a scientifically invaluable monument, and did not even take paleographic pictures? For almost 20 years, the luminaries of scientific thought had the primary source at their disposal, and no one bothered with the most elementary - to make an exact copy from a rather short text, to describe its characteristic features.

It can be assumed that S.'s manuscript about Igor's Campaign dates back to the 16th century, was written in cursive without separating words, with superscript letters and was not free from slips of the pen, errors, and maybe from omissions or from changes in the original expressions: such is fate all later lists of ancient Russian literary monuments.

Whatever the paragraph, the pearl! It is with what such joy cursive writing of the 16th century was performed without separating words? It is true that words were not always separated by spaces, but in this case the delimiters were capital letters.

Hence, from the very first studies of S. about Igor's Campaign, experiments in more or less successful corrections of S.'s text about Igor's Campaign have been dragging on in the scientific literature. The best of them were made by Dubensky in 1844, Tikhonravov in 1866-1888, Ogonovsky in 1876, Potebnya in 1878, Barsov in 1887-1890, Kozlovsky in 1890.

The word "correction" this case misleads the reader. Now, if the original of the work had been preserved, then one could speak of a more or less correct translation, but all subsequent translators corrected Musin-Pushkin's transcription, assuming that in this case it was meant in the original source.

There are many difficult places in S. due to damage to the text. Almost every such place has been interpreted more than once. The most solid way to interpret these dark places of S. are paleographic restorations, for example. by means of haplography (explanations by Kozlovsky in 1890).

Twenty-five again! The original source, if there were corrupted places in it, is lost! Paleographic restorations on what material were made? On a book edition? So printed materials have never been the subject of paleography. Haplography is generally mentioned out of place here.

Let's sum up. We have at our disposal the PRINTED text of the TRANSLATION (transliterated transcription), made by Musin-Pushkin, allegedly from some ancient text, about which there is no reliable information: neither about its origin, nor about its loss, nor about any features. There are also divergent manuscript lists of the work, however, they were made not from the lost original, but from the same translation of Musin-Pushkin, which formed the basis of the printed book. In the future, all the "researchers of paleography" and "improvers" of the text could only work with the translation known to us, that is, at best, they could reconstruct source code reverse transliteration method.
The impudence of Zaliznyak, who saw in the PRINTED edition of the end of the 18th century, "the preservation of Old Russian grammar" does not climb into any gates. In the upper picture (clickable) is the text of the first publication of the Lay, in the left column is the same "Old Russian text", which is still easy to read today. It is easy to read because it is made in Russian civil type, introduced into circulation by Peter the Great during the first administrative reform of the Russian language. True, the alphabet changed even after, until it finally settled down by the middle of the 18th century, and existed in this form until 1918. Explain to me, kind people, how the civil alphabet without titles, ligatures, superscripts, without archaic letters (initially Cyrillic had 45 signs, of which a third has now dropped out of the Russian alphabet, and two new letters have appeared) could convey the features of the "Old Russian" grammar?
I met stubborn defenders of the antiquity of the Lay, who stood to death on the fact that in the left column of the book published in 1800 there is precisely the text of the lost primary source, in which, they say, Musin-Pushkin, reverent for antiquity, the only thing he did was to break a continuous array letters into words and sentences, yes introduced punctuation. But, firstly, none of them could explain what their holy faith is based on, the source is missing, and it is impossible to verify. Secondly, if the translators allegedly set a goal to convey the features of the source text as accurately as possible, then why didn’t they use the Church Slavonic alphabet, fortunately, the font was available, and anyone could read it educated person that time?
Obviously, the transliterated text cannot carry information about the spelling features of the original. Here is an elementary example


Here is the text of one very famous work in transliteration in modern Cyrillic. Can you say at least something about the features of the original source, at least determine the century in which the recording was made, and identify the features of spelling - is it South Slavic, Old Belorussian, Moscow or Novgorod? Obviously not. Even those who were not too lazy to rummage around in Google and found out what kind of work they are talking about, still cannot say which of the many lists dated with a large run-up, having different origins, is transliterated here. And Zaliznyak, using the same exact transliteration of 1800, revealed the subtlest features, as if inherent in the LOST and ONLY, unparalleled work. That is, Zaliznyak conducted a scientific study without an object of study, which completely devalues ​​his work.
What conclusions can be drawn from all this? It is quite obvious that there is no reliable information indicating the ancient origin of the Tale of Igor's Campaign, any information about this monument before 1800 is mythical in nature and cannot be verified. The information at our disposal about the original source, if we approach its analysis critically, indicates a forgery, and the more this information appears in hindsight, the stronger the confidence in the hoax becomes. Zaliznyak's "research" is a set of purely speculative assumptions that can neither be proved nor refuted, they are logically incoherent and are characterized by tedious transfusion from empty to empty, tormenting completely third-rate details and verbose savoring the flaw of his opponents. But the author is clearly happy that all his conclusions are adjusted to the currently relevant canons of linguistics.
For example, he refers to a certain law of Wackernagel, sacred to him, who discovered the principle according to which in the ancient Indo-European languages the arrangement in the phrase of the enclitic - unstressed service words obeyed. According to his logic, the alleged falsifier of the eighteenth century could not have known this law, which was deduced only in the following century, and therefore could not concoct a fake intuitively without violating this law. But after all, the scribes of the 16th century did not know the Wackernagel law either, but they wrote, guided by the generally accepted norm. It follows from this that the author, familiar with the norm adopted in the 16th century, could well reproduce this norm precisely on a whim, and not reconstruct it with the help of cumbersome linguistic theories, which are not yet the fact that they are absolutely true.
In any case, no linguistic analysis can be considered independent proof of the work's authenticity, although Zaliznyak tries hard to convince us otherwise. After all, it is impossible to prove the authenticity of the protocols of the Elders of Zion only on the basis that there are no spelling errors in the text?
Linguistic analysis, in principle, cannot be used to prove the authenticity of a text. It's like with a handwriting examination: an expert can conclude that, for example, a signature on a document has been forged with a high degree of probability, if he finds characteristic features indicating that; but that it is genuine, he cannot assert under any circumstances. The graphologist can only state that he does not find signs of falsification. The reasons for this may be that the qualifications of the forger exceed the expectations of the expert, or the expert showed insufficient diligence in his work.
The moral of this fable is this: never take "professional" historians at their word, always check what they broadcast. As you can see, it is absolutely not difficult to do this in order to see the grossest manipulations in their "scientific" methodology and reveal blatant uncleanliness when working with factual material, the essence of which usually comes down to stubbornly ignoring the facts that contradict the dogma prevailing at the moment, and inflating those that somehow somehow fit into their concept.
As for the Lay, only one thing can be said: this work does not possess the criteria of a historical source in the slightest degree, and its literary qualities, no matter how excellent they are, in no way compensate for the dubiousness of its origin.

kungurov.livejournal.com

From the article's old address:

At the new address of the article:

We present to your attention a very curious book by a supporter of the "non-traditional" version of the story of Alexei Kungurov “There was no Kievan Rus or what historians hide”. As can be seen from the very title of this book, the author promises to overthrow the seemingly most undeniable myths of traditional history. Despite his youth - Alexei is 33 years old - he collected and summarized a huge amount of factual material on the history of modern Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania and traced how those who lived in these territories were deliberately distorted, and how from Russian people did Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lithuanians. And not always this happened voluntarily and without (c) blood. So more than 20 thousand Rusyns who lived in Galicia, who did not want to be Ukrainianized, went through concentration camp, of whom three thousand died. Several thousand Rusyns were kept in the Terezin concentration camp. Much more could have died if the Russian army had not occupied most of Galicia in 1914. When she left these lands in 1915, most of the Rusyns, who feared the persecution of the Austrians and Ukrainians, left with her.

The author angrily denounces both the past and the present, who served and serve the enemies of Russia, influencing the consciousness of people, distorting and erasing the historical memory of the Russian people, distorting the essence of historical phenomena, creating a kind of virtual history interspersed with some elements of real events, and also thoroughly reveals the methods and the methods of their actions, for example, the falsification of documents, both historical and statistical. In the matter of distorting the past, the publication of school textbooks on history, which have an undisguised anti-Russian orientation, stands apart.

“...20 years is a second by historical standards. Russia has one second left to live. What will happen in a couple of decades? NATO intervention? Too much honor! No one will come to conquer us. The degraded Russians will themselves destroy each other. We are waiting for the same end as, painfully dying in an endless series of ethnic conflicts and political crises. The Soviet people ceased to exist. It remains to crush the remaining piece - an amorphous formation called "Russians" - and the job is done. But just in case, the current masters of the world are also preparing a military option for " final decision Russian Question.

Who thinks that we have digressed from the topic? After all, it was about history. Yes, we are talking about it. Story– this weapon. Russian state can hypothetically be reborn even in the most adverse conditions, if the people remain - the bearer of political will. But national ideology and political will are based on historical consciousness. A people is, first of all, a historical community, and only secondarily a linguistic, cultural, social, etc. community. So now there is a war to destroy the Russian people as a single historical community…

For 20 years now, the methodical poisoning of the historical consciousness of Russians with the purulent poison of self-loathing has been going on. ... The task of our enemies is to force the Russians to abandon the national idea. Like, why do you, Russians, need your own state, especially an imperial state? Better integrate into the North Atlantic-tailored global community. You give us oil, gas, metals, prostitutes, children for adoption and organs for transplantation, and we give you cheap consumer goods and glamorous Hollywood-style spiritual food. And do not strain to protect your land. - this is a sacred concept for barbarians, and for civilized people it is just a commodity that can be sold at a profit. Accordingly, whether to give the islands to the Japanese is not a matter of principle, but a matter of price. And in general, one must live not for the sake of some stupid chimerical ideas like building the kingdom of God on earth, but for the sake of profit.

But the Russians are prevented from succumbing to these sweet speeches by their historical memory, the memory of the recent golden age. So main blow in the war to destroy Russia, the enemies inflict not on airfields and submarine bases, but on our memory. Strategically, stakes are placed on the sterilization of the historical consciousness of the people, the deformation of the cultural nation. Tactically, the main manipulations are based on the method of creating a virtual history based on real events and gradually ousting reliable ideas about the past from consciousness. This is the third method of manipulating historical consciousness...

…Can a lackey who is accustomed to groveling and fawning become a warrior? Here is the answer to the question of whether the Russians reeducated by historians will fight for the Kuriles. AT right moment The mass media will explain to the cattle that the sale of Alaska, which is very expensive to develop, was very beneficial for Russia, and therefore four useless rocky islands should be ceded to the Japanese, because it is very expensive to import fuel oil for boiler houses there. And the Russians will not fight for the Arctic. I remember how in school atlases during my childhood from Chukotka to North Pole two dotted lines stretched, marking the boundaries of the polar possessions of the USSR. When dividing the Soviet inheritance, they were supposed to go to the Russian Federation. But fuck you! As soon as talks about gigantic deposits of hydrocarbons on the ocean floor began, it immediately became clear that everything further than 200 nautical miles from the coast is nobody's. And to share these nobody's wealth will certainly not be in Moscow.

Therefore, I am not at all sure that I will have to use my helicopter carriers and landing craft to capture the South Kuriles. Perhaps they will receive them on a silver platter with a bow from the waist. After that, the Russians will have to part with Kaliningrad, which, of course, will return the historical name of Koenigsberg. The project of the Baltic Republic within the EU already exists. Putting it into practice is a matter of several years. The rest of the population will be popularly explained that letting them go to Europe is good for the Russian Federation, because in this way it will come closer to the civilized world.

Then a turning point will come, both literally and figuratively - the remnants of Russia will be broken along the line of the Ural Mountains into two parts - Muscovy and the Siberian Khanate. In 2003-2004, this idea was already exaggerated in the press, but public opinion reacted negatively to it, so the campaign was curtailed (it was precisely a planned campaign, and not a manifestation of freedom of speech). The main arguments in favor of the section were as follows. Beyond the Urals, where 80% of the natural wealth of the Russian Federation is concentrated, 30% of the country's population lives. It is worth Siberia to gain sovereignty, and the natives will live happily ever after, as in Kuwait. And European Russia, having lost its hydrocarbon freebie, will be able to develop high technologies and gradually integrate into. And the lost oil revenues will be compensated by levying Siberian Khanate fees for the transit of raw materials to Europe and intermediary trade.

Do you think this is unrealistic? It means that you do not understand the essence of historical processes at all. The plans for the division of the USSR, discussed in the West in the early 80s, also seemed like a fantasy. And it was all the more difficult to imagine that Transnistria or Nagorno-Karabakh would become sovereign bantustans. The project of Academician Sakharov about the collapse of the Union into 50 specific principalities under the name of the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and even at the end of the 80s seemed to be the nonsense of an old senile. But this is just a declaration of the goal pursued by our enemy. A goal that has already been half achieved.

And how easily achieved! All you need to do is to spoil Russian history and, in this edited form, drive it into the heads of the local population. As a result, the destruction of the USSR did not require carpet bombing, which is undesirable because, together with the extra Russians, they destroy useful material values. History is not only a cheap, but also a very humane weapon, because it can turn an invincible enemy into a weak-willed slave without the use of physical violence and damage to the environment...

Can lies be good? Maybe for the benefit of our enemies!

Let's compare some facts. The myth of Kievan Rus, inextricably linked with the legend of the Mongol invasion as the cause of its extinction, began to deliberately take root in the 17th century. In time, this coincides with Nikonova church reform and the wars of the Moscow kingdom and for the Ukrainian lands of the Commonwealth, populated mainly by Russian people, professing Greek Orthodox Christianity. Therefore, the tsars needed the legend of the alleged Kievan origin of Russia to support their claims to Little Russia, although formally the rights to these territories, which were settled in the direction from west to east, belonged to Poland. Thus, it is necessary to talk not about the reunification of Russia in 1654, but about the accession (of a historical region, but not of a state!) To Russia. This date is very conditional, and from it it is necessary to begin the process of collecting Western Russian lands under the rule of Moscow, then St. Petersburg and again Moscow, stretching for almost 300 years. Subcarpathian Rus was incorporated into the USSR in 1945.

Pre-revolutionary historians, by the way, preferred to call the Pereyaslav events precisely the accession, and not the reunification. And in the Pereyaslavl manifesto itself, there is no hint of any historical ties with Muscovy through Ancient Russia, although the religious community of the Cherkasy and the subjects of the Moscow Tsar is verbosely noted. The very act of entering into Russian citizenship is motivated by the failure of King Jan Casimir to fulfill his oath to end the oppression of the Orthodox faith.

Russian history is largely built on myths, of which the most harmful myths are pro-Western, humiliating our self-perception. The Norman theory, which claims that the Slavs could not even create a state, having invited overseas princes for this purpose, was generally brought to the point of absurdity. It is absurd, if only because there were several centers of statehood on the territory of Russia. What this pro-Western mythologization of historical consciousness leads to is clearly seen in the example of our intelligentsia, the most poisoned by pro-Western discourse - it suffers from a terrible inferiority complex precisely in relation to the “cultural West”, tries to cleanse itself of everything Russian and devoutly serve “universal values”. It's not just about the wretched Soviet intelligentsia, who hate "this country" and fetishize the crafts of foreign consumer goods. The Westernizing domestic intelligentsia has always been like that, let us recall at least the textbook Pekarsky, who joyfully exclaims “we have been beaten!” about the defeat of Russian troops in the Crimean War. Fortunately, it was impossible to turn the whole people into intellectuals, and therefore bakers were a foreign body in peasant Russia XIX century.

Yes, the ancient history of Russia is built on myths, but every myth carries at least some grains of truth that can be restored. The history of Ukraine is discourse in its purest form. My analysis shows that such a state did not exist and even hypothetically could not exist, and Kyiv acquires at least some visible significance only in the era of the grain boom and the rapid plowing of virgin lands by the end of the 16th century, as a regional economic and, mainly, religious Centre. At the same time, the agricultural development of lands to the south of , which now make up 80% of the territory of Ukraine, begins. Today, we can only speculate about the earlier period of Kyiv's existence.

There was no ancient Kievan Rus, and Rus itself, as a single state, did not exist in antiquity. In the Volga region, the core of the empire was formed, which, over the course of centuries, drew into its orbit all the territories inhabited by Russians, and along the way, many other peoples. This process ended only in the middle of the last century. Purely armchair doctrines about the separate existence of "two Russian nationalities" appeared only in the middle of the 19th century. among the liberal professors and were not scientific, but political in nature. But there was no unity in views on the issue of dividing the single Slavic people into two Russian branches, and there is no.

Historian Mikhail Pogodin, following, promoted the idea that Kievan Rus was created by the Great Russians, who without exception went to the Upper Volga after the Tatar pogrom, and the depopulated Dnieper region was settled two centuries later by people from Volyn and the Carpathian region, who became Little Russians (the question is, who were they before? ). His colleague and contemporary Konstantin Kavelin argued that Kievan Rus was created by the Little Russians, and the Great Russians appear on the historical stage no earlier than the 11th century, and they owe their origin to the Little Russians, who Russified the Finnish tribes dominating the Volga region. And then, thanks to the generous grants of the Habsburgs, he appears on the scene and, following in line with the Douchinsky doctrine, announces that the Ukrainians have nothing in common with the Russians, either anthropologically or historically.

The basic law of logic says that if the premises are correct and the course of reasoning is correct, then the conclusions must turn out to be correct. The fact that historians' conclusions are so contradictory only indicates that they suck their concepts out of their fingers without lifting their asses from their chairs. You are even more convinced of this when you discover an amazing fact: in the 19th century. historians talk about two Russian nationalities, and in Soviet times, out of nowhere, a third one appears, ancient and equal with the two previous ones - Belarusians, who for some reason had not been noticed point-blank before. Pedigrees of Great Russians, Little Russians and Belarusians are completely artificially derived "" from the total ancient Russian people who founded Kievan Rus. But if there was no Kievan Rus, then, it turns out, and common root the three fraternal peoples also did not have. Where did they come from then? The fact of the matter is that even the Little Russians and Belarusians themselves (meaning precisely the masses) at the beginning of the 20th century. considered themselves Russians and were unaware of their historical "separateness". But the Soviet Ukrainization thoroughly corrected the brains of the Little Russians, convincing them that they had been Ukrainians from time immemorial.

There was no state called Ukraine (options: Kyiv State, Cossack Republic) until the very end of the 20th century. Even the first Ukrainian president has no doubts about this, who clearly stated: “We didn’t have a state until 1991”! And even the history of the so-called Ukrainian people (and Ukrainian language) begins only in late XIX centuries in Austria-Hungary, where, in full agreement with the Jesuit thesis of Kalinka, it was possible to create Grits, not Polish, but not Russian either. The mutant was bred exactly as its creators expected - the main factor in the ethnic self-identification of the Ukrainian was hatred for the Russians, and such hatred, which was looking for the most active expression. In 1914, Ukrainians passed the Russophobia exam with an A.

That is why I cannot agree with the arguments of our kvass patriots who advocate the propaganda of the myth of Kievan Rus, as the alleged foundation of the ideology of the Russian-Ukrainian brotherhood. Any pro-Ukrainian discourse, including the myth of Kievan Rus, is a blow against all-Russian unity. There can be no Russian-Ukrainian brotherhood. Any Russian who “renounced the Russian people” and accepted the doctrine of Ukrainianism may not be a better brother to me than Cain.

Only clearing history of propaganda rubbish will give the peoples an awareness of our unity - national, cultural and civilizational. Only this will allow not only the Russians to survive as an ethnos and the all-Russian state, but will also make it possible for our culture to successfully resist the destructive dictates of the North Atlantic world system.

Russian writer (Little Russian by origin) Vsevolod Krestovsky said: “The direct word of truth can never undermine and destroy what is lawful and true. And if it causes harm and damage, then only to evil and. A direct word of historical truth can save Russia and Ukraine. Lies about the past will inevitably lead to war. It is not for nothing that the discourse about the three-hundred-year-old Muscovite yoke, about the Russian-Ukrainian wars, which began, they say, Andrei Bogolyubsky, “the first proper Muscovite prince,” is hammered into the heads of Ukrainians. It is not just that the image of the Russian enemy is formed. If you shoot at the past with a gun, it will respond with a shot from a cannon. Anyone who does not understand this simple truth is doomed to the role of cannon fodder.

Will we become witnesses, participants and victims of the Russian-Ukrainian massacre? I really hope that the bloody horrors and Bandera will not be repeated. That is why I am trying to dispel the poisonous fog over Russian history. Not because I am seduced by the laurels of the subverter of the idols of semi-official historical "science". No, brothers, I just want to live ... "

Alexey Anatolievich Kungurov

There was no Kievan Rus, or what historians hide

People do not believe in anything so strongly as in what they know least about.

Michel Montaigne

What is history

History is a threefold concept. We call history a chain of interconnected events in time and space; history is the science that studies the past of mankind; but much more important is history, as a complex of ideas about the past, present in the mass consciousness. As a result, the events that took place in reality receive, as it were, two phantom displays - scientific-documentary and mythological, rooted in the minds of people, and both versions often greatly distort reality and even exist out of touch with each other.

If we are talking about ancient history, then the matter is even more complicated, since the documents (written sources) either did not survive, or they reflect mythological ideas about the past, recorded several centuries later by authors who knew about them only by hearsay. Are the events described in The Tale of Bygone Years reliable or are we dealing with ancient Russian myths? The myths of Ancient Greece are known to everyone, so why not be literary myths of Ancient Russia? Can Homer's "Odyssey" serve as a documentary source on the history of the Trojan War (if there was such a war at all)? Why, then, do historians consider The Tale of Igor's Campaign to be a literary account of real events?

By the way, The Tale of Igor's Campaign is a highly dubious document. The list was found in 1795 by the famous collector of antiquities Count Musin-Pushkin in the Yaroslavl Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery. We know the text in three lists, very different from each other. The original find allegedly perished during the Moscow fire of 1812. It should be emphasized that the surviving versions of the text are literary translations, and not a literal reproduction of the document. Some researchers, relying on the verbal (!) descriptions of those who saw the original list, are inclined to think that the manuscript was made in the 16th century. Nothing is known about the author of the work. What are the grounds for considering this work a monument of Russian literature of the XII century?

Almost immediately after the first publication of The Lay in 1800, there was talk that the work was a hoax of the 18th century. Critics attributed authorship to the discoverer Musin-Pushkin, Archimandrite Ioil Bykovsky, historian Nikolai Bantysh-Kamensky and a number of other people. A few years ago, the American Slavist Edward Keenan put forward a hypothesis according to which the Lay was composed by the Czech philologist and educator Josef Dobrovsky.

The main proof of the authenticity of the Lay was the publication in 1852 by the literary critic Vukol Undolsky of Zadonshchina, a narration of the 15th century. about the Battle of Kulikovo. "Zadonshchina" is connected with "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" up to the borrowing of entire passages. Some of her expressions, images, whole phrases were repeated and altered by the corresponding turns of the Lay, applying them to the story of the victory of Prince Dmitry on the Kulikovo field. In my opinion, if this fact points to anything, it is precisely to the mystification of the Lay.

The fact is that ancient manuscripts do not reach us in the original, but in lists, sometimes very numerous and always having greater or lesser differences from the original text. Each list takes on a life of its own, serving as both a role model and compilation material. To date, six lists of the "Zadonshchina" are known, dated to the 15th-17th centuries. Forgery in this case is unlikely. And The Tale of Igor's Campaign existed in one single list, which we know today only by hearsay, because for some reason it never occurred to anyone to make a copy of it. Nowhere except in "Zadonshchina" the work is not cited. We do not find a single analogue in all ancient literature. According to the unanimous opinion of the researchers, the "Word" is a unique monument of literature in all respects, which has no analogues.

A strange picture is obtained, according to the official point of view. An unknown and undoubtedly brilliant author composed a vivid legend in the 12th century, which left no traces for the next three centuries. Then it caught the eye of the author of Zadnshchina, and he, revering it as a canonical model, borrowed whole pieces in his essay The Zadonshchina of the Grand Duke Mr. Dmitry Ivanovich and his brother, Prince Vladimir Andreevich. At the same time, we observe amazing thing: the style of the "Zadonshchina", despite the traditions of written speech that had developed by that time, is much more archaic, eclectic, less elegant than that of a work three centuries ago. After the "Word" again goes into oblivion, until happily found by Musin-Pushkin. He translated the legend into a language understandable to his contemporaries, after which the only (!) Monument of secular literature of the XII century. lost forever under unexplained circumstances. No lists of "Words" have been found so far.

Much more likely a different version. A good connoisseur of literature at the end of the 18th century finds one or more lists of the "Zadonshchina" (they are very different from each other) and, taking as a model, creates a stylization of a medieval poetic epic, colorfully describing the campaign of Prince Igor against the Polovtsians, who was known to the writer from the "Russian history" Tatishchev. XVIII–XIX centuries - this is the time when, due to the widespread spread of literacy and the increased interest in antiquity, a whole industry of creating fakes for antiquity arises. Basically, they forged what could be profitably sold, first of all, works of fine art, but, despite the difficulty of falsifying ancient written sources, they also fabricated them. But most often not for the purpose of profit, but for political or ideological reasons.

The assumption that the Lay is a fake explains exhaustively both the fact that it has not left any traces in Russian literature for 600 years, and the fact that the original manuscript mysteriously disappeared, and the fact that we do not know the original language (there are, let me remind you, only assumptions, that the manuscript found by Musin-Pushkin was compiled by a scribe of the 16th century). In this case, it is clear why this work is a unique written monument that has no analogues. Opponents of the version of falsification sometimes make a very ridiculous argument: they say that neither Musin-Pushkin, nor any of his contemporaries simply could master the literary Russian language of the 11th century. Of course he couldn't. This is the only reason why the “original” has not reached us, we know the “Word” only in a modern language.

What is the official version based on? Exclusively on the authority of "scientists". Since professors and academicians came to the conclusion that it was the “Word” that was taken as a model by the writer of “Zadonshchina”, and not vice versa, then all other opinions should be considered fundamentally wrong and anti-scientific. I, of course, with all my heart for believing the “scientific” historians, but I can’t, because I know how deceitful and intolerant of the slightest criticism the tribe is. What do “scientists”-historians love? Awards, titles, manifestations of respect for their person, many are very fond of money, some are very vain, do not feed others with bread - just let them teach others. Historians are very different, and sometimes they squabble among themselves, like a pack of dogs (if you publish all the denunciations to the authorities that these figures scribbled against each other in the 20-30s, it will turn out to be thicker than Marx's "Capital"). But I can say with absolute certainty that all historians, without exception, do not like it. More than anything, they dislike uncomfortable questions. They do not like and are VERY AFRAID.

Try to ask the doctor of historical sciences a question about why he believes that the Battle of Kulikovo took place near the confluence of the Kalka River with the Don. At best, he hesitates and refers to the work of his predecessor, where it is written exactly like this, and not otherwise. Then ask him a completely deadly question: what evidence is there for the truth of this version? In response, you will hear a lot of words in which there will be no meaning, but you will not be able to satisfy your curiosity. But you will understand what the figurative expression “to spin like a snake” means. But no matter how masterly the historians dodge, avoiding uncomfortable questions, this does not add credibility to their concepts.