Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor
Our brilliant Hetman Ivan Mazepa wisely explained the reason for many Ukrainian defeats: “We defeated ourselves!”.
But have we come to our senses yet, and are we always soberly responding to the challenges of our time?
For example, do we take a good look at our past and look forward, evaluating the contribution of all the outstanding people from our land, whom our descendants will be proud of in the eyes of the world?
Unfortunately, the processes of decommunization that unfolded in Ukraine after the Revolution of Dignity, mainly through the renaming of settlements, streets, institutions, and establishments, force us to recognize that in many cases they were hasty and ill-conceived, turning into an outright war with our historical memory. This is especially true for those prominent Ukrainians who had to live and work in tsarist or Soviet Russia.
Here is the decision of the Chernihiv City Council, which renamed 35 streets and alleys in the regional center on July 10 this year.
Among the first nstead, it is striking that the name of the first Nobel Prize winner from Ukraine, Ilya Mechnikov, will now disappear from the toponymy of this glorious city.
It is difficult to say what he did to Chernihiv residents: this outstanding zoologist and physiologist, who graduated from Kharkiv University in two years, instead of the four years required at the time, while still studying two scientific works.
After an internship in Italy and Germany, our fellow countryman brilliantly defends his master’s thesis in 1867 in St. Petersburg.
Then. moves to Odesa, where he worked as an associate professor at the university and began his world-famous research on intracellular digestion, which led to the creation of the theory of phagocytosis, which He is deservedly famous.
In the field of phylogenetics, he solved two important scientific problems: he put forward the theory of the origin of multicellular organisms and the so-called ctenophore theory of the origin of needle-footed and chordate animals.
This elevated our countryman Ilya Mechnikov to the most prominent embryologists in world science, and he is considered one of the founders of the comparative embryology.
His works on microbiology and immunity.
It was for these pioneering studies that he was awarded the title of honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1898) and the Paris Academy of Sciences (1904).
But this was not enough for the people of Chernihiv…
Ukrainian by birth, Kostiantyn Ushynskyi is directly connected to the land of Chernihiv: he graduated from the Novhorod-Siversk gymnasium, which he reached 5 kilometers away from his suburban family farm.
It was he who developed the doctrine of the purpose of education as preparation for work and life, the formation of national duty, and always advocated that children should be taught in their native language for the fullest development of their individuality, especially defending the rights of the Ukrainian language.
In his opinion, teaching children in their native language develops “an innate spiritual ability.
Teaching the mother tongue is also important in shaping students’ worldview, Konstantin Ushynsky emphasized: “The native word is precisely the spiritual garment in which all knowledge must be clothed in order to become the true property of human consciousness.”
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s “guilt” before Ukraine is obviously that his father, a native of Rivne, was sent to work in Kaluga, Russia, after graduating from the Forestry Institute in St. Petersburg, where the future prominent cosmonautics theorist was born.
So his name will also disappear from the map of Chernihiv.
As for the truly great Russian democrat Alexander Herzen, there is nothing to say.
Although it should be remembered not only in Chernihiv, but also by Ukrainians around the world, that this man was actually the first to defend the rights of our nation.
It was he who wrote the famous words: “Russian democracy ends where the Ukrainian question begins.”
That is, more than a hundred years ago, Alexander Herzen had the courage to publicly declare what American Senator John McCain proclaimed in defense of the rights of Ukrainians on the Kyiv Maidan in the winter of 2014.
A street in Kyiv is deservedly named after the latter, while in Chernihiv, someone whom we should always honor is being erased from our memory.
Thus, it seems that this situation with renaming is simply a matter of low awareness among members of the relevant commissions and local deputies. Or, as they always say behind the curb: “everything is going according to plan, according to schedule”?
But let’s go back to our compatriots who were forced to work in Russia.
For example, the prominent Ukrainian philosopher Pamphilus Yurkevych, who was born in Poltava.
Having already received a master’s degree from the Kyiv Theological Academy in 1852, he became the most qualified teacher of philosophy in the entire Russian Empire, as evidenced by a special diploma awarded by the Holy Synod.
It should be understood that with his first philosophical treatises “The Idea” and “The Heart and Its Importance in the Spiritual Development of Man According to the Word of God” the young Ukrainian philosopher won the favor of not only Kyiv students.
Developing his view of man, his new systematic anthropology, developed in the spirit of concrete Christian idealism, he brought a fresh stream to the scientific thought of the world of his time, taking his rightful place among its thinkers.
Pamphilus Yurkevych made a particularly loud statement when, in response to Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s materialistic work Anthropological Principles in Philosophy, he published his response entitled From the Science of the Human Spirit, in which he pointed out the Russian author’s flaws.
Then Pamfil Yurkevych had to endure a kind of “crusade” to which he responded with new works from the Kyiv hills: “On the Theological Articles in the Philosophical Lexicon,” “Proofs of the Existence of God,” and “Peace with Neighbors as a Prerequisite for Christian Coexistence.”
Obviously, this controversy decided the future of the already well-known Ukrainian philosopher: in 1861, Yurkevych was transferred to the position of professor of philosophy at Moscow University, where he published another philosophical work prepared in Kyiv: “The Language of Physiologists and Psychologists.
Soon after moving to Moscow, Yurkevych became dean of the Faculty of History and Philosophy, and thus began to pay more attention to pedagogy.
His first and last philosophical work outside of Ukraine was published only five years later under the title Reason According to Plato’s Science and Experience According to Kant’s Science.
His student Volodymyr Solovyov later wrote about his teacher: “Yurkevych’s individual character was undoubtedly formed against the general background of Ukrainian nature. It was characterized by his thoughtfulness, self-absorption, sensitivity more intense than extensive, as well as stubbornness and isolation, which reached the point of cunning… To these traits I must add another, also Ukrainian trait, a special kind of concentrated humor – he made me laugh only by smiling slightly.”
And do we have the right to abandon another prominent philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev, who was born in Kyiv?
In 1898, while studying at the University of St.
In 1898, while studying at St. Vladimir’s University, he was arrested for propagating socialist ideas and exiled. to the Vologda province. Our countryman developed the idea of freedom of individual creativity that formed the basis of anthropology, social philosophy and ethics. He was critical of capitalism and Christianity, even recognizing the “truth of communism,” which was the socialization of production.
Berdyaev proclaimed the existence of a subject whose creativity is based on “absolute freedom” as the only reality, and whose content is the mystery of “birth God in man and man in God.” He proclaimed the idea of a new Middle Ages as a return to harmony between God and man.
And these outstanding natives of our land, and many others who, due to various circumstances, worked for Russia, brought their benefit to Ukraine: they created the Russian science, technology, and culture that they Now they are proud.
But we have to tell the world: these are ours!
Take missile technology: Oleksandr Zasyadko, Mykola Kybalchych, Yuriy Kondratyuk, Serhiy Korolyov, Valentyn Glushko, Volodymyr Chelomei, Mykhailo Yangel – they are now “Russians” to the world.
However, our blood flowed in their veins, and it is important that the whole world knows this.
And this is our task.
Unfortunately, we are lagging behind in disseminating this knowledge, which our neighbors immediately take advantage of by claiming what cannot but be Ukrainian.
For example, in the book Olsany – the Necropolis of Russian Emigration, published by the Russian Tradition Publishing House in Prague, the burial of such prominent Ukrainians as the poet Oleksandr Oles, the UPR Ambassador to Czechoslovakia Maksym Slavinsky, the head of the Ukrainian Law Society in Czechoslovakia Serhiy Shelukhin, and a professor of financial law at the Ukrainian Free University Oleksiy Odarchenko, Director of the Ukrainian Gymnasium in Prague Yevhen Ivanenko is a “Russian necropolis.”
There are doubts as to whether this book refers to the “Russian emigration” as well as to a number of other well-known figures of Ukrainian origin who, in the conditions of our statelessness, formally worked for the Russian Empire.
But. General Mykola Khodorovych, a native of Kyiv, as commander of the Kyiv Military District in April 1917, received a parade of Ukrainianized garrison troops and then pronounced a salute for a free Ukraine.
Other natives of Ukraine had the same fate.
In particular, for Ivan Petrunkevych, a native of the village of Plisky, Chernihiv province, a member of the First State Duma, organizer of the Russian Constitutional Democrats party; Volodymyr Tukalevsky, a Poltava resident, founder and first director of the Slavic Library in Prague; Volodymyr Rafalskyi from Rivne, a well-known diplomat and orientalist…
Our task is to return these and other prominent figures of the Ukrainian land to the historical memory of our nation.
Otherwise, the proclaimed decommunization will turn into for us is the de-Ukrainization of historical memory, which will lead to the loss of national consciousness and identity.