2/9 It is almost impossible to find a popular history in English which gives an accurate account of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. I am, therefore, trying to cram a thousand years of history into a twitter thread.
3/9 Ukraine is the successor of Rus, a medieval Slavonic kingdom whose capital was Kyiv and which encompassed what is now North Ukraine and parts of Belarus and western Russia. The country was Christianised by Bulgarian missionaries in the tenth century who brought their language
4/9 with them – it became the written tongue of Rus, known as Old East Slavonic. However, the spoken language, which is preserved in graffiti on the walls of St. Sophia in Kyiv, was Ukrainian and the variant of Old East Slavonic used in Ukraine had many elements of the spoken
5/9 language: it is the ancestor of written Ukrainian.
6/9 Rus fell under the onslaughts of the Mongols in the thirteenth century. Muscovy was created as a vassal state of the Mongols in the same period and its people were largely Finno-Ugric tribes who were Slavicised, using the written language of Rus. Eventually, it became the
7/9 state we now call Russia and annexed Ukraine, whose capital Kyiv was regarded as its cradle, in the seventeenth century. However, the Russians could not understand why Ukrainian, the original spoken language of Rus, was different from the tongue they spoke. Russia came to
8/9 regard Ukrainian and Ukraine as artificial constructs separating one Russian people. The language was prohibited from many areas of public life under the Tsars and Russia still struggles to accept that Ukraine has a distinctive language and culture. However, the fact that
9/9 writing in Ukrainian was for long periods a radical political act, and the language's history which stretches back to the origins of Slavonic culture that give this literature a distinctive character.
@threadreaderapp please unroll
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
