By Vestnik Kavkaza
The 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War correlates to modern problems. “Almost all countries didn’t want the war, but it happened,” Alexander Chubaryan, the director of the General History Institute of the RAS, says. “And it is relevant today; it concerns the mechanism of a major conflict’s appearance.”
“By the beginning of WWI the territory of contemporary Ukraine was a part of the Russian Empire and a part of Austria-Hungary; the Ukrainians were fighting for both coalitions,” the speaker of the State Duma, Sergei Naryshkin, says. “The threat of development of aggressive nationalism in Ukraine was obvious in the early 20th century.”
Naryshkin thinks that Ukraine as an independent state is a consequence of the First World War: “It was a short, but very intensive stage of its so-called independence, and it revealed the threat of aggressive nationalism at the time… Forgetting the lessons of such global conflicts as world wars could play a low-down trick, and the Ukrainian crisis, the civil war, the humanitarian disaster are bright examples of this.”
Gennady Matishov, a member of the RAS Presidium, the chairman of the Southern Scientific Center of the RAS, is sure that today we are witnessing European and world history in the making: “In the Soviet period a lot of details paled into insignificance, details which worsened the lives of the tsar and Stalin and our contemporary leaders. Bohdan Khmelnytsky never called himself “a Ukrainian.” The word was inappropriate and at the time it wasn’t used. Taras Shevchenko was the founder of the Ukrainian nation. In the Soviet period his books were seriously edited. Ukraine has always strived for independence. Moreover, it was independence for the sake of independence. When the Germans came, Bandera decided to cooperate with them. But suddenly he changed his mind, and he wanted Ukraine to be independent under fascists. And he was sent to a concentration camp. He spent the whole war there. So they have striving for independence in their blood. Probably it is not bad, every nation has its peculiarities. But we have to realize this.”
