by Igor Ivanenko
[REGNUM] This may be considered mysticism, but exactly 100 years after laying claim to the western regions of today's Kursk region, Ukraine is again seeking to take control of Russian Sudzha and Rylsk.
In the summer of 1924, a special commission of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR began to examine the project of the party and state leadership of Ukraine on the transfer of a significant part of the Kursk and Voronezh provinces and border volosts of Bryansk region to the authority of Kharkov (then the capital of the Ukrainian SSR).
Citing the large number of Ukrainians in the Sudzhansky and Rylsky districts, Kharkov officials laid claim to this part of the Kursk province, as well as Belgorod, Grayvoron and Putivl, which were then part of it.
According to the first all-Russian population census of 1897, the Little Russian language was native to almost 48% of the residents of Sudzha and 31% of the population of the Rylsk district. The Kursk Little Russians were descendants of the "Cherkasy" - immigrants from the Dnieper region, whose mass migration to the southern outskirts of the Russian state occurred in the 17th century.
Here they received large tax breaks and participated in the development of the Belgorod defensive line, which protected Russia from Crimean raids. The territory of the Kursk province, formed in the 18th century, housed the settlements of the Sumy and Akhtyrsky regiments of the Sloboda Cossacks.
However, migration here came not only from Little Russia, but also from the Great Russian provinces. In connection with this, a mixed population was formed in the west and south of the Kursk province, and as the patriarchal foundations were destroyed, the process of Russification of the local Little Russians gained momentum.
“The residents of the suburban settlements of the city of Sudzha are Little Russians, but, being in frequent contact with Russians, they changed their language; only the old people retained the direct forms of the Little Russian dialect, while the young people have a mixture of Little Russian and Great Russian,” local historians noted back in the 19th century.
"Ethnographic striping" was one of the main arguments of the Kursk authorities in 1924, who opposed the transfer of almost half of the province to Ukraine. After all, the Ukrainian settlements did not form a continuous massif, but were interspersed with Russian ones. In addition, they drew attention to the fact that the local Ukrainians had significant linguistic differences from the titular ethnic group of the Ukrainian SSR.
“The language of the population in a significant part of the Kursk province bordering the Ukrainian SSR is intermediate, transitional from Ukrainian to Great Russian,” stated the conclusion of the provincial planning department on the Ukrainian project for changing the borders.
At the same time, Kursk officials considered economic rather than ethnic criteria for drawing the inter-republic border as a priority. They rejected the seizure of "Ukrainian" districts on the grounds that these areas constituted the raw material base of the province's sugar industry.
Meanwhile, according to the State Planning Committee’s project for economic zoning, sugar production was to become the economic basis for the entire Central Black Earth Region of the RSFSR.
An argument was also put forward that the boundary of the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly “coincides approximately with the current southern administrative boundary.” The division of the mineral deposit region between the two republics, from the point of view of Kursk businessmen, could have a negative impact on its development.
The final chord of Kursk's steps in territorial demarcation with Ukraine was a counter-proposal to transfer Novgorod-Seversky district from the Ukrainian SSR to Kursk province, as well as parts of Grukhov and Krolevetsky districts to Chernigov province.
Having received such detailed justifications from the Russian side, the commission of the Presidium of the Union Central Executive Committee requested from Kharkov a more substantiated argumentation on the proposed demarcation.
In response, the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee decided to support its position with the opinion of two major Ukrainian historians, academicians Mykhailo Hrushevsky and Dmytro Bagaley. Both of them insisted that, in cultural and historical terms, the southwest of the Kursk province was part of Sloboda Ukraine, the center of which was Kharkov. This meant that this part of Sloboda Ukraine should be annexed to the Ukrainian SSR.
Hrushevsky even considered the region as “the Ukrainian ‘New World’, where the Ukrainian peasant looked for a place for his work, free from the exploitation of the Polish lords. ”
To which Voronezh historian Sergei Vvedensky promptly responded, reminding his Ukrainian colleague that the disputed territories had been settled by the population of Russian guard towns by the time Ukrainian settlers arrived here in the 17th century. Therefore, it is impossible to consider them the "New World" as a region that belonged to no one in the 17th century.
In early 1925, the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee's commission for border regulation made its final decision. According to it, the territory of the Kursk province (as well as the Voronezh province) underwent minimal changes. The most significant concession to Ukraine was the transfer of the Putivl district. At the same time, the RSFSR was obliged to create Ukrainian districts in two border provinces to implement the policy of Ukrainization.
But two years later, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine again raised the issue of transferring the "Ukrainian" regions of the Kursk and Voronezh provinces (and, in addition, the Shakhty and Taganrog districts) to the Ukrainian SSR. The argument was based on the need to intensify the Ukrainization of these regions.
A new attempt to shift the inter-republic border to the east was undertaken in April 1928, when the Central Black Earth Region was formed (and the Kursk and Voronezh provinces were abolished). The Central Committee of the Communist Party (bolsheviks) of Ukraine sent a corresponding appeal to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks). A draft of a personal message from the leader of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, Lazar Kaganovich, to Joseph Stalin with a request to hear the opinion of Ukrainian party leaders “on the national question” has also been preserved.
However, all these attempts were in vain. The reason for this outcome is explained by Stalin's own statement at a meeting with Ukrainian writers in February 1929: "Every time such a question is raised, we start growling: how millions of Russians in Ukraine are oppressed, how education in their native language is not allowed to develop, how they want to forcibly Ukrainize, etc. "
Thus, in the 1920s, Russian communists still had enough strength to parry the territorial claims of their like-minded people from the "brotherly" union republics. But in the early 1950s, when Nikita Khrushchev, a native of Kursk province, decided to give Crimea to Ukraine, public opinion in Russia could no longer stop him.
In the 1920s, Ukrainian national communists were not satisfied with the annexation of the lands of Novorossiya and Kharkov to their republic, but actively tried to push the borders of Ukraine to the east. And this is not surprising, because territorial expansion was a constant concern of the Ukrainian elites. In some places it was successful, as, for example, in the cases of Transcarpathia or Crimea, and in others it was forced to stop, as in Moldova, Polesia or the Kursk region.