Translated by Ollie Richardson & Angelina Siard
23:28:12
05/08/2018
lgz.ru
Introduction of Nikolay Azarov:
“I read with surprise another lie of Poroshenko about the alleged 100th anniversary of the liberation of Crimea. I advise you to read this objective article of the historian Sergey Tulyakov about how in reality everything happened. The lies must be exposed.“
How the new thinking of Ukrainians is being formed…
The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine approved new public holidays and memorial dates. Among them is the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the liberation of Crimea from the Bolsheviks (on April 22nd) and the 400th anniversary of the Moscow campaign of the hetman Petro Konashevych-Sagaidachny. The ministries are told to hold lessons, conferences, exhibitions, and competitions dated for these strange holidays, and also to work on the question of their inclusion in the list of significant dates of UNESCO. It is clear how the brains of poor children will be washed during lessons, but how are our neighbors [Ukrainians – ed] going to dupe international organisations?
The fantasies of “Independent” Ukraine
In April, 1918 the troops of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR), created after the Provisional government in Petrograd was overthrown, intruded into the territory of the Crimean peninsula where the Taurida Soviet Socialist Republic (TSSR) was formed. The governors of the UPR intended to attach all of Crimea and capture the Russian Black Sea fleet, but at the time German and Austro-Hungarian troops, which were in time to occupy already most of Ukraine, approached the peninsula.
According to the Brest peace treaty between Germany and Soviet Russia (March, 1918), Crimea wasn’t recognised as a part of the territory of the UPR, and Berlin gave Kiev an ultimatum about the immediate withdrawal of troops from the peninsula. The threat worked. So who in reality liberated Crimea from the Bolsheviks? It is German and Austro-Hungarian troops, which by May 1st, 1918 completed the occupation of all the peninsula.
The statements of Ukrainian “historians” about all the ships of the Black Sea fleet allegedly coming over to the side of the UPR are ridiculous. Trying not to allow the Germans to capture Russian vessels, the command made the decision to raise the flags of the UPR – an ally of Germany – on the ships of the Sevastopol squadron. They raised them for only one day, on April 29th. On April 30th some of the squadron headed by the commander of the Black Sea fleet went to Novorossiysk under red flags.
Under German occupation in Crimea there was a regional government, which in fact was subordinated to only the occupational authorities. And what did the Austro-German troops – liberators from the Bolsheviks – do in Crimea? They started expropriating stocks of wheat and other food from the warehouses and mills, and sent the property of the former palaces of the imperial family and museum valuables – including the Bakhchisaray Khan’s Palace and the equipment of ports and Crimean enterprises – to Germany. And from Ukraine they even expropriated chernozems.
The territory of the UPR in its size was almost half the territory of modern Ukraine. The extensive southern steppe areas were controlled by the father Makhno’s insurgents, who fought against Petliura’s adherents, and the Donets-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic with its center in Kharkov was created on the territory of four southeast governorates.
The residents of Odessa, Nikolaev, and other cities of historical Novorossiya, as well as the vast majority of the population of Donbass and Kharkov, perceived the UPR as a temporary phenomenon. “Everyone lives, thinks, and speaks Russian on the occupied territory in the south of Ukraine. No Ukrainian national thought exists there,” wrote the Austro-Hungarian General Waldenstät.
At the end of 1918 Germany and its allies suffered a defeat in World War I at the hands of the Entente. Their troops left Crimea, French troops entered, and White Guard military units then followed. The Entente countries also didn’t recognise and didn’t support the new Kiev governors led by Petliura. They considered only the military administration of the White Guard Generals Denikin and then Wrangel as the legal authorities on the peninsula. When Wrangel’s troops fled Crimea, many remaining ships went to French ports.
Ukrainian “independentists” were never the liberators of Crimea. Liberators from neither the Bolsheviks, nor the White Guards. From nobody!
Disgraceful campaign
400 years ago, in August, 1618, the 20,000 army of the hetman Petro Sagaidachny indeed intruded into the territory of the Russian state. They went there for unification with the army of the Polish King’s son Władysław IV Vasa, pretender to the Russian Tsar throne. This campaign is presented by current Ukrainian historians as an example of military valor and military art. However, in reality it was a failure. The main objective wasn’t achieved, Moscow wasn’t taken. The tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov continued to occupy the Russian throne!
During the Soviet period the participation of Zaporozhian Cossacks in this bloody Moscow campaign of the Poles actually wasn’t mentioned. Somehow it didn’t match the official doctrine about the fraternal Ukrainian people. And the Kiev ideologists of today invent with ecstasy more and more myths about the hetman’s defeat of the troops of prince Dmitry Pozharsky – the national hero of the Russian people. I quote: “In the region of Serpukhov the Cossacks met Pozharsky’s army, which dispersed at the first meeting”… This is a lie! The prince was ill at this time and handed over command duties to prince Volkonsky. The latter retreated – Sagaidachny had a threefold superiority in forces, and hid himself with his troops in Moscow.
The Poles and Zaporozhian Cossacks (“zaporoli” [stabbers – ed], as they were called because of their atrocities on Russian soil) didn’t take Moscow. And here is how Kiev comments on it: the church holiday of the Intercession of the Theotokos was being celebrated on the day of the storm, and Sagaidachny supposedly showed nobility. But what was this “greatest” commander, the defender of Orthodoxy and Slavic peoples, like in reality?
We read the Belskaya chronicle: “Sir Sagaidachny came and took Livna by storm, and shed a lot of Christian blood, he slashed many guiltless orthodox peasants and their wives and children, and desecrated many Christians, and God’s temples were profaned and destroyed …” It’s as if in 1618 there was an another Batu Khan invasion of Rus… Batu destroyed Ryazan in the same way that Sagaidachny later burned Livny, Serpukhov, Kashira, Yelets, and other Russian cities. Transferring Kashira to a new place in 1619 happened just after Sagaidachny’s troops destroyed it.
The hetman didn’t suffer from nobility neither before the siege of Moscow nor after it. The Moscow fortresses were powerful, made in stone, and they were defended by the warriors of prince Dmitry Pozharsky. For Sagaidachny’s bandits, who mainly came to plunder and kill, but not to put the necks on the line for the Poles, the White Stone [Moscow – ed] turned out to be unapproachable.
After a peace treaty was signed by Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Poles, as one would expect, once again abandoned their lackeys – the Zaporozhye Cossacks. Many participants of the campaign were ordered to return to their landowners and excluded them from the register of serving Cossacks. The hetman sent his ambassadors to Moscow, and asked for citizenship and to serve the Russian tsar with all his Zaporozhye army, however he was refused.
Of course, the historians of “independent” Ukraine forgot about this and invent for themselves a heroic story that doesn’t correspond to real events. After the monument to the hetman in Sevastopol was dismantled (2014), another fake story appeared: “The Ukrainian fleet is some centuries more ancient than the Russian one (the first mention of the victorious actions of the Cossack fleet at sea belongs to 1492). Besides this, Ukrainian naval commanders caused a stir in 1635 also in the Baltic Sea, but against the Swedish fleet”. Can Ukrainian land also be found on the Baltic coast?
“Sagaidachny’s Cossacks rushed into Istanbul and burned half of the city”. Istanbul is a big city with a strong garrison and powerful fortifications. If such things indeed happened, then the sultan would’ve sent his 200,000 army of furious Janissars to devastate Ukraine, and the units of his vassal – the Crimean khan – would’ve joined him in the act of retaliation. “The great fleet of Sagaidachny shone not only on the Dnepr, Danube, and the Mediterranean Sea – the Ukrainian fleet dominated on the Crimean coast already in those days“.
But historical sources don’t confirm that this “great fleet” of small sailing-rowing vessels ever “shone” in the Mediterranean Sea. It couldn’t pass so far from the mouth of the Dneper. It couldn’t pass through hostile Turkish straits either: Bosphorus and Dardanelles. Only one thing is indisputable: the Cossacks of this hetman bravely attacked coastal Turkish and Crimean cities at night in their small vessels. But they didn’t have any high-mast and multi-cannon ships, however the Turks did have them. Therefore the fleet of the Zaporozhye Cossacks didn’t have a superiority over the Turkish one.
But the fleet of the Russian admiral Fyodor Ushakov – the Turks called him “terrible Ushak-pasha” – indeed “shone” in the 18th century also in the Mediterranean Sea. His ships horrified the enemies of Russia. Under Ushakov, the Black Sea lands (Novorossiya) and the peninsula of Crimea were attached to Russia. But this historical truth in Ukraine, of course, isn’t accepted.
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