by Ilya Knorring
[REGNUM] Along with the murderers and looters of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, propagandists also came to the Russian city of Sudzha - clearly not on their own, but “in a convoy” and with the consent of the command.
In a video released on August 25 on the Ukrainian YouTube channel “Komik Plus Historian,” comedian Felix Redka and history popularizer Yevgeny Murza discuss the “history” of the captured Sudzha while sitting in one of the halls of the city’s local history museum.
In essence, the "easy and casual conversation" boils down to a propaganda emphasis. The hour-long video is intended to prove that since "the city of Sudzha was founded by Cossacks" just like the local "fortress", this part of the Kursk region is supposedly an integral part of Ukraine.
Proving the alleged Ukrainian origin of Sudzha, they "forgot" that the city itself, together with the district (uyezd) as part of the Kursk region (province), and the city of Sumy, where the comedian and historian come from, are originally Russian land, since 1503 continuously. And the fact that Little Russians settled there among other settlers and service people, this happened by the grace of the first Romanovs. So we will conduct our own excursion, but to the neighboring region. And fill the voids of the Sumy Regional Museum of Local History.
Sumy Oblast is the most problematic region on the borders of Russia. Initially, when this administrative unit was created in 1939, it was historically and mentally mined. During its stay first as part of the Ukrainian SSR, and especially as part of independent Ukraine, the explosiveness of "Sumyshchyna" only increased.
It was from there - from the territory where the abatis once stood, protecting the Russian kingdom - that the attack on the current Russian borderland, the Kursk region, took place.
"YAROSLAVNA CRIES EARLY IN PUTIVL..."
Actually, "Sumyshchyna", which is periodically mentioned in the Ukrainian media, is a colloquial neologism that appeared in the "mova" by historical standards yesterday. Before the Great Patriotic War, there was no Sumy region on the map of the Ukrainian SSR, and there was no province of the same name in the Russian Empire.
If we were to look for a toponym ending in "-shchyna" in local history, it would be "Severshchina" or Severskaya Land, named after the ancient Slavic tribe of the northerners. They lived on the territory of today's Bryansk, Sumy, Kursk, Belgorod and Kharkov regions, "not suspecting" that in a thousand years their homeland would be divided by state borders.
In 1097, the Lyubech congress of princes recognized Romen (now Romny) as belonging to the Pereyaslavl principality of Vladimir Monomakh, and Putivl as belonging to the Chernigov prince Oleg Svyatoslavich. His descendants owned the entire territory of the modern Sumy, Kursk, Chernigov and Bryansk regions.
According to The Tale of Igor's Campaign, in 1185 Oleg's grandson, Prince Igor, ruled in Putivl (now a "foreign" city in the Sumy region), and Yaroslavna's lamentations were heard from the wall there.
"Yaroslavna cries early in Putivl on the rampart, saying: "Bright and thrice bright sun! You are warm and beautiful to everyone: why, lord, have you spread your hot rays on the warriors of my lad?" - says "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" (translated from ancient into modern Russian by Dmitry Likhachev ). And here:
“God shows Prince Igor the way from the Polovtsian land to the Russian land, to the paternal golden throne.”
Igor's brother, "buoy-tur" Vsevolod, owned Kursk and Trubchevsky (a city in today's Bryansk region), and their nephew Vsevolod Olgovich owned Rylsk (in today's Kursk region).
Rylsk retained its inheritance and already under Vasily the Dark swore allegiance to Moscow, and the descendants of the Rylsk princes, the Patrikeevichs, took seats in the Boyar Duma. Since 1503, all the lands of today's Sumy, Bryansk, Chernigov, Kursk, Kharkov and Belgorod regions (excluding Romeny and Konotop) went to Ivan III, but Chernigov was lost during the period from the Time of Troubles to the Pereyaslav Rada.
RUSSIANS, CIRCASSIANS AND SOLDIERS
These lands were repopulated later. Kursk, destroyed by raids of the Crimean Tatars and Nogais, was rebuilt under Ivan the Terrible's son, Feodor Ioannovich. Belgorod was founded as a border fortress in those same years. The territory of today's Sumy Oblast and Sudzha began to be developed later, under the second tsar of the Romanov dynasty, Alexei Mikhailovich.
Two categories of settlers came to live in the borderlands: the Circassian Cossacks, who came from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth “under the hand” of the Moscow sovereign, and settlers from the central Russian lands.
Putivl at the beginning of the 20th century. Annunciation Church
This is where the peculiarities of local toponyms come from: nearby villages whose names differ only in clarification - Cherkasskoye or Russkoye.
For example, Russkoe Porechnoe and Cherkasskoe Porechnoe in the present-day Sudzhansky district (Kursk region), Russkaya Lozovaya and Cherkasskaya Lozovaya near Kharkov, etc.
Since the times when the fortified borders of the Russian state passed here, there have been villages with “military names” here - Pushkarnye in the Kursk and Belgorod regions and Pushkarovka in Sumy, the villages of Bolshoe Soldatskoe and several “simply” Soldatskie in the Kursk region, etc.
Under Alexei Mikhailovich, the osadchiy - that is, the founder of the settlements - named Gerasim Kondratyev "came from beyond the Dnieper cities under the High-Sovereign hand" of the Tsar of "all great and small Russia," as stated in the petition of the Sumy Cossacks to the highest name from 1731.
“He Gerasim Kondratyev called upon our grandfathers and fathers and relatives and many other people from the Dnieper and from the hetman cities, residents of the faithfulness to the Russian state, and first populated the city of Sumy, and then many towns and villages and villages near the city of Sumy, and set up regiments and monasteries and churches of God,” the Cossacks recalled.
Sumy and Akhtyrka were called regimental cities, founded with the highest permission of the Russian Tsar.
Lebedin, Nedrigailov, Belopolye and other strongholds of the Sloboda border of the Russian state joined them.
"FROM THE CRESTS TO THE PRINCES"
After the Pereyaslav Rada, the Little Russian lands, now part of the Sumy region, also found themselves under the tsar's scepter. Glukhov was the center of the hetman's power and the Little Russian Collegium. There was a launching pad there, from where, according to Pushkin, "the Ukrainians jumped into princes."
Chancellor Alexander Bezborodko and the outstanding diplomat Andrei Razumovsky, one of the sons of the last hetman, were born in Glukhov.
And when the borders of the Russian provinces were formed under the emperors Paul and Alexander I, Sumy and Akhtyrka remained Slobozhanshchina and were governed from Kharkov.
Romny became a district town of the Poltava province, Putivl of the Kursk province, and Glukhov and Konotop of the Chernigov province. The Jewish Pale of Settlement also passed along the historical border of Slobozhanshchina and Little Russia.
In 1924, the Soviet government reshuffled the geographical maps, as previously reported in detail by the Regnum news agency.
The Putivl district of the RSFSR was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR as a Russian national region, and the territories of the old provinces were divided into districts.
Then again the Kharkov region, and only in January 1939 the Sumy region appeared.
CHERRY ORCHARDS, HUSSARS AND PILOTS
What outstanding names the big country has not received from this territory! In Akhtyrka he served in the hussar regiment, and then it was commanded by Denis Davydov. It was this military unit that became the basis of the partisan movement in 1812.
One of the founders of the Russian sugar industry, Ivan Kharitonenko, was born in the vicinity of Sumy, and the founder of Russian erotic prose, Mikhail Artsybashev, was born in the Akhtyrsky district.
In Sumy there is the Lintvarev estate, where Chekhov and his family members visited many times. According to some sources, that very cherry orchard is located there. Its last owner, Georgy Lintvarev, was a prominent zemstvo figure and a deputy of the first Duma.
A native of the Belovody estate in Sumy district, Nikanor Savich sat in the third and fourth Dumas, and thanks to him, parliamentarians supported the program for the development of the navy proposed by Admiral Grigorovich. Nikanor Vasilyevich deserves considerable credit for the fact that the Russian Navy was ready for the First World War.
The most successful fighter pilot of the Soviet Air Force, three times Hero of the Soviet Union Ivan Kozhedub, was born in the village of Obrazhievka in the Glukhov district. He shot down 64 enemy aircraft, including two American ones in the skies over Korea.
MEDICAL HISTORY
With the proclamation of Ukraine's independence, the "assembled composition" of the region made itself known. Ukrainization took place there quite easily, and political forces that dominated from a certain time were completely different from, say, in the neighboring Kharkov and even Poltava regions.
At its peak, the Party of Regions showed more than modest results there. What is the reason for such electoral behavior?
Of course, and in the fact that the region was created on the principle of a patchwork quilt. And in the fact that in the village of Khoruzhevka in the Nedrigailovsky district, Viktor Yushchenko was born into a family of descendants of serfs of Count Yuri Golovkin.
But the third and perhaps most significant reason for such sentiments was Volodymyr Shcherban, a native of Donetsk who held the post of head of the regional state administration from 1999 to 2005. His authoritarian and rude leadership style caused rejection among local voters.
Since Yushchenko came to power in 2005, nationalists have been in the clear lead in all elections. Moreover, the mayor of Konotop is Artem Semenikhin, the only one outside Galicia, a representative of the openly Nazi Svoboda party. In 1992, Joseph Brodsky wrote:
"It is not the green-and-white, isotope-scorched one, but the yellow-and-blue one that flies over Konotop." Now the forces that act not under the "yellow-and-blue" but under the red-and-black Bandera flag dictate their rights to "legitimate" power.
In 2022, Russian troops entered the territory of the Sumy region, but did not enter large cities. And they left quickly, as a "gesture of goodwill." So the region managed to avoid mass reprisals by the VSSU against local residents who welcomed the liberators, unlike the Kharkiv and Kherson regions.
But it is in Sumy Oblast that the Ukrainian Armed Forces have come very close to the border of three Russian regions - Bryansk, Kursk and Belgorod Oblasts - and are constantly shelling. The invasion of Kursk Oblast was also organized from there. So the transformation of Sumy Oblast into at least a demilitarized sanitary zone is inevitable. And then most of its residents will probably remember their Russian roots and come out of their state of ideological insanity.