New Muscovy

Mar 23

A map of the old Kyivan Rus in the 11th Century. Ukraine and Russia claim to be this country’s successor states, and Ukraine wants to obliterate Russia’s claim by changing its Ukrainian name to “Muscovy.”

Categories:

A Recipe for War, Analysis of History, Current Events, Military History, Military History, 21st Century Conflicts, Russo-Ukrainian War

Tags:

Connections to the Past, Understanding the Past, Repercussions of Events, Current Views, Motives Behind Conflict, Weaponizing History, #Ukraine, #War, #A Recipe for War

March 23, 2023

On March 13, 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy endorsed a radical proposal. This proposal was started by a petition launched in November of 2022 that called for changing the official Ukrainian name for Russia to “Muscovy.” The petition’s author, Valeriya Oleksandrivna Shakhvorostova, wrote: “For foreigners, the names “Rus”… and “Russia,” “Russie,” “Russland” (as Russia was marked) look almost identical…This leads to confusion at the international level. Fiction books are being written, films are being shot where Russia is presented as Rus’, which is unacceptable”. This refers to a dispute between Ukraine and Russia that has existed possibly longer than the two countries themselves. Both claim to be the true successors of the Kyivan Rus’, a medieval Slavic state that ruled much of European Russia and Ukraine from the late ninth to the mid-thirteenth centuries. The name of Russia comes from the word Rus’, but Ukrainian scholars have claimed that their country, the region of which was known for centuries as Malorossiya (which means “Little Russia”), is the true successor state to the Kyivan Rus’. After all, the capital of the Kyivan Rus’ was Kyiv, the modern-day capital of Ukraine. Ukrainian scholars claim that Russia’s history only begins with the state of Muscovy, which appeared years after the fall of the Kyivan Rus’ to the Mongols in the 1200s. So, to make the situation easier to comprehend for those who may not be familiar with it, a group of Ukrainians petitioned the government to change the Ukrainian name of Russia to “Muscovy” (in Ukraine, Russians are already informally called “Muscovites”). The story highlights a general trend of Ukrainian attempts to purge their country of connections to Russia (as Ukraine does have historical ties to the name “Russia,” but it has no historical ties to the name “Muscovy”). As at least one Ukrainian said in one interview: “In a few years, there will be nothing Russian here.” In this article, I will dive deeper into this trend and examine its repercussions.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has endorsed the name change. His backing increases the likelihood of its going through, though it must first be approved by Ukraine’s Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada.

In April 2015, a little more than a year after the Euromaidan protests overthrew the pro-Russian government of Victor Yanukovych and Russia invaded Crimea and the Donbas Region in response, Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, enacted four controversial new laws. These laws mandated the removal of communist-era monuments and the renaming of places named after communist themes. More than 51,493 streets, squares, military units, and “other facilities” have since been renamed or are in the process of being renamed. At the same time, communist symbols were removed all over Ukraine. The most notable example is the tearing down of numerous Lenin statues that once stood in towns throughout the country. Even the Ukrainian Communist Party was banned from Ukrainian politics because of the “communist nature” of its name (though this was only one of many reasons, which included corruption allegations and collusion with Russia). All this was done to remove the last vestiges of the era of Soviet rule over Ukraine, and it was done despite fervent protests by Russia, which claimed that Ukraine was erasing its heritage. To this day, many places that were renamed in Ukraine are still called by their communist-era names in Russia (such as Bakhmut, formerly known in Ukraine as Artemivsk and still called Artyemovsk by Russian media). Now, Ukraine has gone a step further to reclaim its history. As I discussed in an earlier blog post, many aspects of the history of Ukraine are heavily intertwined (though by no means inseparable) with the history of Russia. In an attempt to fully reclaim its history from Russia’s own, Ukraine is now working to give many more things a “true Ukrainian name.” Russia (or perhaps, Muscovy) is likely only the first thing that will be renamed in Ukraine’s attempt to once and for all purify itself of Russian influences. Many cities in Ukraine have a Russian name as well as a Ukrainian name (such as Kharkiv, or Kharkov in Russian). Ukraine can remove all official recognition of these Russian names. It can even change its own name in the process. The word “Ukraine” comes from an old Slavic root that roughly translates to “the edge” or “the borderland.” The region of Ukraine was named as such because it was situated on the borderland frontier region between numerous Eastern European empires throughout the centuries. Ukraine’s government may decide to finally acknowledge the country’s transformation into a fully sovereign nation from a borderland by changing its name to signify the completion of this process. This may sound far-fetched, but then, changing Russia’s name to Muscovy sounded far-fetched not too long ago. If Ukraine does indeed change its name, the new name will most likely be just Rus’. However, it’s unlikely that most countries will agree to change Russia’s name to Muscovy (though some countries, namely the Baltic states, might agree to do just that). If this name change does indeed go through, we’d end up in a comical situation that, ironically, was precisely what Ms. Shakhvorostova and the authors of the Muscovy petition hoped to avoid. Anyone looking at a map of Eastern Europe would immediately spot three countries (Russia, Belarus, and Rus’) with similar names. This might need to be clarified for those who need an understanding of the history of the region’s names. Even so, these radical changes will likely go through in the coming months and years, and in doing so, radically change the map of both Ukraine and Eastern Europe (whether or not this change affects international maps or just domestic Ukrainian maps).