Time to read: 16 minutes(s)

Author: Andrey Filimonov.

The idea of ​​settling the Far East with Slavs was born in St. Petersburg shortly after the Governor-General of Eastern Siberia, Muravyov, concluded a treaty with the Qing Empire, according to which China ceded more than half a million square kilometers of its territory to Russia.

Alexander II ratified the treaty on July 8, 1858, with a handwritten note: "We cannot wish for anything better." By decree, the emperor elevated Muravyov to the rank of count and added "Amursky" to his surname.

Once the sovereign's joy at annexing the "new territories" had subsided, it became clear that Russia had bought itself a problem. First, the Amur and Primorsky regions needed to be protected and developed, and most importantly, someone had to live there. And preferably not representatives of the "yellow race," but people of Slavic appearance.

But where can I get them?

Alexander II's Far Eastern hectare

In the early 1860s, the American Civil War broke out, opportunely enough (from St. Petersburg's perspective). A special Russian official traveled to America and met with Czech émigrés who had moved there from Austria-Hungary, trying to persuade them to move to the Far East. The US, he argued, was in turmoil—there was shooting, and who knew how things would turn out... But in Primorye, they could take as much land as they wanted for free and live under peaceful skies alongside their fellow Slavs—the Ukrainians and Poles.

The idea of ​​receiving a "Far Eastern hectare" from Alexander II seemed tempting to some American Czechs. Representatives of the Czech community traveled to Primorye to explore and "get a feel" of the local soil. The Resettlement Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs prepared a program to attract Slavic emigrants from "foreign" America to "kindred" Russia. A deal was almost reached with the Czechs, but then the Polish Uprising of 1863 broke out, and Tsar Alexander suddenly cooled to the ideas of Pan-Slavism, realizing that not all closely related peoples wanted to live under his rule.

However, Russia could have easily managed to settle the Far East without Czechs or even Poles. In the second half of the 19th century, Ukrainian peasants suffered greatly from land shortages, willing to travel to the ends of the earth if they could establish a truly large farm there. Ukrainians from Austria-Hungary looked west, toward Canada. For Russian Ukrainians, officially called "Little Russians," the government opened the way to the east, to very remote places. In the minds of Ukrainian peasants, this land lay even further than China. This is where the popular name for the Far East originated: "Zakitayshchyna," or, alternatively, "Zeleny wedge." Green because they would have to live amidst a green sea of ​​taiga. A wedge originally referred to a plot of land in Ukraine. Later, this designation was adopted for all territories inhabited by the Ukrainian diaspora. The Russian Empire had "wedges" of various colors: crimson in the Kuban region, gray in the steppe of Kazakhstan, and yellow in the Volga region. But the Green Wedge has the most interesting history.

During the reign of Alexander II, when the government gave Ukrainians the go-ahead to resettle in the Far East, only the most daring adventurers managed to reach the region via the Siberian Highway. Firstly, it was expensive, and secondly, dangerous: wolves, freezing temperatures, and ruthless people... But in 1883, regular steamship service to Vladivostok opened, significantly reducing the risks. That year, 250 families from the Chernigov, Kyiv, and Poltava provinces moved along the Odessa-Vladivostok sea route. Of course, crossing the Indian and Pacific Oceans, they suffered from seasickness three times longer than the Ukrainians who sailed to Canada across the Atlantic. But the suffering was worth it. The Resettlement Administration covered the costs of settling the migrants. Peasants were given a free leasehold plot of 100 dessiatinas (109 hectares) per family. For comparison, in the Chernigov province there were on average about 8 dessiatines per farm.

Unsurprisingly, over the next quarter century, the Ukrainian population of the Far Eastern Primorye grew to 200, accounting for 60% of all immigrants from the European part of the empire. Ukrainians founded Khabarovsk, one of the main centers of "Little Russian migration" in the Far East. Villages such as Chernigovka, Novokiyevsk, Khorol, and others appeared in Primorye. The city of Ussuriysk, according to this report written in 1905, was not yet a city, but a village, and a Ukrainian one at that:

"Among the Russian population, not counting the Cossacks, Little Russians predominate so much that the so-called intelligentsia of the city call rural residents nothing less than 'khokhly.' And indeed, among the Poltava, Chernigov, Kyiv, Volyn, and other Ukrainians, the settlers from the Great Russian provinces are completely lost, appearing as if a sprinkling of the main Little Russian element. A market on a market day, for example, in Nikolsk-Ussuriysky, is very reminiscent of some village in Ukraine; the same mass of sharp-horned oxen, lazily chewing the cud beside carts filled with sacks of flour, grain, lard, pork carcasses, and the like; the same Ukrainian clothing on the people. Everywhere you can hear the cheerful, lively, and lively Little Russian dialect, and on a hot summer day you might think that you are somewhere in Mirgorod, Reshetilovka or Sorochintsy in the time of Gogol." Illich-Svitych V. S. Far Eastern Ukraine. Kyiv, 1905.

Meanwhile, the Russian government, which encouraged Ukrainian agricultural and commercial activity, refused to hear of any Ukrainian cultural societies, Ukrainian-language newspapers, or Ukrainian schools. All of these were strictly prohibited. Interior Minister Alexander Makarov asserted in 1912 that emphasizing national differences was a "source of unrest and disorder." Interestingly, in the Canadian prairies, where Ukrainians from Austria retained their language and culture, no ethnic-based problems arose. Of course, "international conflicts" did occur in saloons, but that was all.

In Russia, where the authorities have always sought to control every sneeze, any social problem sooner or later escalates into a revolutionary situation.

In 1917, of the 1.5 million people in Primorye, one million were Ukrainians who welcomed the February Revolution. At the First All-Ukrainian Congress of the Far East, it was decided to urgently organize Ukrainian libraries and schools, as well as print Ukrainian-language newspapers, in order to "raise the national consciousness of Ukrainians and dispel the hypnosis of the past, when the Russian government actively pursued Russification and fought against the Ukrainian national movement" (from the Congress resolution).

It became clear almost immediately that the "hypnosis of the past" had not dissipated with the fall of the monarchy. It turned out that both the army leadership and the Bolshevik Party in the Far East were equally hostile to the idea of ​​Ukrainian national education. The Vladivostok Soviet even attempted to disperse the Congress. But their comrades lacked the strength—the Ukrainians fought back. Naturally, faced with such an attitude, they began to seek support in their historical homeland.

The Second All-Ukrainian Congress, held in January 1918 in Khabarovsk, sent a group of delegates to Kyiv for talks with the leadership of the newly proclaimed Ukrainian People's Republic. The congress participants hoped that the UPR would help the Green Wedge gain autonomy. And the two Ukraines could eventually unite. Kyiv listened to the envoys from the Far East, but was not inspired by the idea of ​​a Ukrainian state on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. The Far Easterners were given books in Ukrainian and wished good luck. Soon, the UPR itself disappeared, liquidated in April 1918 by Hetman Skoropadsky. Mikhail Bulgakov described this coup in "The White Guard":

"In April of 1918, on Easter Sunday, the circus's matte electric balls hummed merrily, and it was pitch black with people. Talberg stood in the arena, a cheerful, militant column, counting hands—"The sharovars are finished, there will be Ukraine, but a 'hetman's' Ukraine—they were electing the 'Hetman of all Ukraine.'"

At the same time, on the other side of the empire, in Khabarovsk, the Third All-Ukrainian Congress was held, electing the Far Eastern Rada, which resolved to establish an independent Ukrainian state in Primorsky Krai. At that time, in the heat of the Civil War, many were attempting to create their own states. It was something of a fashionable political fad. In the summer of 1918, the formation of a Ukrainian division began in Primorsky Krai, because statehood without an army is impossible.

Meanwhile, interesting events were unfolding at the front and in headquarters. The Ukrainian Consul General, appointed by Symon Petliura, arrived in Vladivostok from Kyiv. Admiral Kolchak became the supreme ruler of Russia. He launched an offensive on Moscow, initially so successful that Lenin became alarmed and telegraphed President Woodrow Wilson his willingness to divide Russia with the admiral.

But then Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the Red Army's most ruthless commander, arrived on the Eastern Front of the RSFSR. He counted no losses and turned the tide of the war. The Ukrainian Division also fought against the "Reds" as part of the Siberian Army. Naturally, after Kolchak's defeat, the Far Eastern Ukrainians could not count on the Bolsheviks' mercy.

In 1922, Lenin ordered the dissolution of the sham Far Eastern Republic, of which Zeleny Klin was a part. The Red Army entered Vladivostok, and the GPU immediately began making arrests. Interestingly, the leaders of the Far Eastern Rada were the first to fall victim to this. In January 1924, the Bolsheviks staged a show trial for them in Chita. The organizers intended to condemn the very idea of ​​"Ukrainianism." But they miscalculated. Thanks to the moral support of the Ukrainians, who constituted the majority in the courtroom, the judges refrained from imposing a "harsh revolutionary" sentence: 24 defendants were released in the courtroom, and 14 were sentenced to short prison terms.

The Soviet regime was still uncertain in the Far East. Until approximately 1931, almost nothing changed in terms of national policy; Ukrainian newspapers continued to be published, and Ukrainian schools and universities operated. Within the Far Eastern Oblast, there were Ukrainian districts where the Ukrainian language was used in institutions. However, at the same time, the Main Administration of the Camps (GULAG) had already been established, which soon began actively working to "reconstruct" ordinary people into Soviet citizens. Ukrainian autonomy did not fit into this project and was destroyed.

Tiger catchers

In 1963, a campaign was underway in the United States to nominate Ukrainian writer Ivan Bagryany (real name Lozovyaga) for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Twenty years before Solzhenitsyn, Bagryany published two major novels about the Gulag—"Tiger Catchers" and "The Garden of Gethsemane"—based on his own experiences in the camps.

Lozovyaga's fate is itself a plot for a novel. In the early 20s, he was a devout Komsomol member. After finishing school, he managed to change jobs many times: he worked as an art teacher in an orphanage, as a newspaper artist, as a policeman, and as a political worker at a sugar factory. He traveled all over Ukraine. In the mid-20s, he published his first poems and decided to become a writer. He enrolled in the Kyiv Art Institute. Based on his initial publications, the GPU came to him a few years later.

Ivan Lozovyaga was first arrested in 1932 for his historical novel in verse, "Skelka," which dealt with the struggle of Ukrainian peasants against "Muscovite priests" and was deemed "counterrevolutionary agitation" by a GPU investigator. The sentence: three years in a special settlement in the Far East. Then came an escape, wanderings through the taiga, a new arrest, and a new sentence, this time three years in BAMLAG, working on the construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline. After his release, he was arrested a third time. In 1938, the writer spent two years under investigation in the Kharkov NKVD prison, where they tried to beat a confession out of him about leading a terrorist counterrevolutionary organization. Already an experienced prisoner at that time, Bagryany does not sign anything, and he is released with the explanation that “all evidence of counterrevolutionary activity relates to the years 1928–1932, for which he had already been convicted, and the investigation did not obtain any other information about the anti-Soviet activities of Bagryany-Lozovyaga.”

In short, the author of "Tiger Catchers" knew the ins and outs of the Gulag system well. And he hated it with all his heart. The novel begins with a fairytale opening—Stalin's dragon rushing deep into Siberia:

“…With fiery eyes bulging, breathing flame and smoke, shaking the desert and thicket with its roar, sweeping its trail with a fiery tail, the dragon flew… over the endless Urals… Through the wilds of Siberia… Through the harsh, gloomy Lake Baikal… Through the wild ridges of Transbaikalia… flew and flew in the boundless night… St. George the Victorious himself could not have overcome it. On steel paws, with a fiery belly, with an iron mouth, it roared as if it had just flown out of hell. Sixty boxcars—sixty joints of the dragon. In front—a fiery-eyed cyclops—the super-powerful steam locomotive “IS” (Joseph Stalin). Behind—an equally powerful monster: the steam locomotive “FD” (Felix Dzerzhinsky). On the tender—a searchlight, a long fiery tail. Each carriage—bayonets. The dragon bristled with them like a porcupine... No, like a dragon! And it rushed with a grinding sound. The dragon's sixty joints were sixty red coffins, each brimming with swallowed victims, the living dead. Through the barred windows, clusters of flickering eyes gazed mournfully—gazing through the darkness into a lost world, where the country remained, illuminated by the sun, where the Motherland remained, echoing with children's laughter, and youth cut short early, where the mother... family... wife remained... The clusters of eyes flickered and disappeared into the darkness, into the abyss. The dragon's belly was filled to the brim with them. And the cyclopean "IS" pulled them, and the demon "FD" pushed them on. This was the "death echelon" of the OGPU-NKVD.

Grigory Mnogogreshny, the novel's protagonist, accomplishes the near-impossible—escaping from the belly of a dragon. During a long journey, he uses a homemade knife to saw through the boards in the back of a prison car and leaps out into the void, into the endless taiga. There, a female bear attacks him, but Grigory kills her with his own knife. Exhausted, he can no longer escape from under the bear's carcass. He is found by hunters, the Syrko family of Ukrainian immigrants, who hunt the taiga's most dangerous predators—Amur tigers. Along with the men, Natalka, a "quick-eyed girl" who falls in love with the heroic Grigory, participates in the hunt. The fugitive is accepted into the family. The wild, impenetrable taiga becomes his home. Hunting tigers becomes a familiar pastime.

He almost forgets that he himself is prey to a very dangerous predator, an NKVD investigator named Medvin, who continues to search for the escaped convict. However, in the taiga, pursuer and prey can easily switch places. Medvin and his subordinate pursue Grigory on a sleigh and are already catching up when the horses, sensing the Ukrainian's tiger scent, take fright and overturn the cart carrying the NKVD men. Grigory now has the opportunity to execute a swift, taiga-style trial on his enemy. And so he does:

"— Well, that's it, Comrade Investigator! That's it." He began breathing heavily: "I'm finishing the investigation..." He raised his voice, slowly, menacingly: "Here... I'll... and roar, here I'll give you a tribunal!" He raised his rifle and fired. A small fountain of red sprayed out of the investigator's head..."

At the end of the novel, Grigory and Natalka flee from the dragon's kingdom to neighboring Manchuria.

The novel ends with a reading of Soviet newspapers. Natalka's father, an old hunter, already aware that the "children" have safely crossed the border, leafs through the local Pravda, which routinely lies about how "Comrade Medvin died heroically while fighting a gang of spies and saboteurs." And all the workers of the Far Eastern region swear they will take revenge on the enemies of "our Soviet homeland."

The author of the novel himself had never been to Manchuria. Unexpectedly released after his third arrest, he lived in his native Akhtyrka, where he was caught in the German offensive of 1941. Under the Germans, Bagryany, a Komsomol member of the 1920s, edited the newspaper "Voice of Akhtyrshchina," which published editorials like these:

"The press during the Bolshevik era was rotten, corrupt, and mendacious. And now… many citizens, in their sincere fervor, write about the difficult past, expressing gratitude and pleasure at their liberation from the 'Soviet paradise'… The Ukrainians of Akhtyrshchyna, under the leadership of the German High Command, are already marching forward. And this is where the magazine 'Voice of Akhtyrshchyna' plays a significant role, helping to convey to the public the truth about the great liberation movement of the German people, about the national and social justice that German soldiers carry on their flags…"

It must be said that, stylistically, "The Voice of Akhtyrshchyna" isn't much different from any Soviet newspaper from the 1930s or 1940s. "A difficult past," "a rotten, corrupt press," "a feeling of gratitude"... The same old words, only instead of Stalin, it's Hitler. It's hard to say how staunch anticommunist Bagryany had become by then. He certainly had his reasons for disliking the Soviet regime, which had sent him from prison to exile and exterminated millions of Ukrainians in the Holodomor. He had to choose between Stalin and Hitler.

The unenviable fate of Eastern European intellectuals, caught between the "Bolsheviks" and the "Nazis," trying to choose between two evils. A hopeless choice.

After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Bagryany found himself in the British Occupation Zone, where he lived in hiding from various Allied commissions repatriating Soviet citizens. He managed to avoid extradition to the USSR, remained in West Germany, and lived in Neu-Ulm, where he died of a heart attack in 1963. It was at this time that the campaign to nominate the writer for the Nobel Prize began. But his sudden death prevented the official nomination.

In the postwar years, Ivan Bagryany was a prominent figure in the cultural and political life of the Ukrainian émigré community. In 1945, he founded and led the Mystetsky Ukrainsky Rukh (MUR), an association of artists and writers. In 1950, he published his autobiographical novel, The Garden of Gethsemane, which detailed the torture-ridden interrogation conveyor belt and the Soviet prison camp system. Having survived the camps, the novel's characters see Stalinism without embellishment, as "the latest serfdom," sustained solely by terror.

Unlike Solzhenitsyn, whose books began to be published during Perestroika, Bagryany and his works remained banned in the USSR until the very end of Soviet rule. Publication in his homeland became possible only after Ukraine gained independence in 1991.

In 1946, he wrote an article entitled "Why I Don't Want to Return to the USSR." Bagryany was trying to explain to Western readers things that were obvious to him (and to us)—about the camps, the Holodomor, and Stalin's propaganda. He wrote: "Take the 1940 edition of the Small Soviet Encyclopedia and read the article on the 'Ukrainian SSR.' You'll find that according to the 1927 census, the Ukrainian population was 32 million, and in 1939, only 28 million. Where did the 4 million Ukrainians go?" asks Bagryany.

“Therefore, the least powerful will of any of the “equal” nations in the USSR (near Russia) is suffocated by terrible moral and physical terror. With terror, Russian red fascism (Bolshovism) is trying to transform 100 nationalities into so-called. “one Radian people”, which is actually the Russian people. The slightest manifestation of will on the part of any of the “equal” nations of the USSR (with the exception of the Russians) is invariably suppressed by cruel moral and physical violence. With the help of this terror, the Bolshevik government seeks to erase the national identity of more than a hundred peoples, turning them into the so-called “Soviet people,” essentially a Russified population.”

This is precisely what happened in the Far East, where a "Russified population" lives today. Twenty years ago, researchers from the Far Eastern University were still allowed to defend dissertations on the history of Green Wedge.

It's hard to imagine this today.