I picked up the Soviet fielm "Bogdan Khmelnitsky" on DVD today (along with "V for Vendetta," which sucked eggs -- I can't believe those bastards butchered the comic so hideously). I am curious to see how they handle Bogdan's pogromshchik side -- probably they won't. I'm guessing he'll be presented exlusively as the guy who threw the Poles out of Ukraine and facilitated bringing the latter into the Russian Empire (which ironically ultimately resulted in the destruction of the Zaporozhian Cossacks as such when Catherine the Great burned down the Sech).
(Interestingly apparently there is today a group of Slavic-speaking peoples in Romania called the Rusaks, who are the descendents of Khmelnitsky's Zaporozhians who fled to the Ottoman Empire after Catherine's burning of the Sech, although the majority wound up in what is now the Kuban. Which is why the Russian spoken in that region has a heavy Ukrainian influence.)
(I love having a niche of obscure historical knowledge I can call my own. :) I still speculate occasionally about how I would like to write a book about the Cossacks, and how much work that would entail...)
--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> In the Russian and Ukrainian nationalist narratives
> of
> history (e.g. Gogol) when the Poles ruled Ukraine in
> the 1700s they used Jewish intermediaries to extort
> money from the population. Actually AFAIK there is
> some historical basis for this belief in that the
> Polish lords used Jews in some unpleasant capacities
> because they knew that public ire would be displaced
> from targeting them into targeting the Jews. From
> their POV it was better to have an anti-Jewish
> pogrom
> than an anti-Polish rebellion. It would have been a
> very small proportion of the Jewish population
> engaged
> in such activities, but you know how such things
> fester in the popular imagination over time. The
> peasant has to hand his harvest over to the
> non-Christian and all that, he passes that down to
> his
> children and etc.
>
> The most obvious example of this belief is in Taras
> Bulba (Gogol again), in which the Jews are the
> lackeys
> of the evil Polish overlords. It's in Dostoevsky
> too,
> I think.
>
> For a convinced 18th- or 19th-century Orthodox
> Christian believer, at any rate, exceptions like the
> Judeophile Potemkin notwithstanding, Judaism and
> Catholicism were both Satanic and in league with
> each
> other.
>
> --- andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > It would be ironic if Russians hated Jews in part
> > because they were "Poles," something which the
> Poles
> > would have passionately rejected. The old country,
> > feh. On the other hand my Hungarian grandmother
> had
> > a
> > real attachment to her old country, but the
> Magyars
> > weren't Slavs and had far less prejudice. (The
> Nazis
> > had to actually overthrow the fascist Arrow Cross
> > regime to enforce the deportation of the Hungarian
> > Jews.) My understanding is that her own
> grandfather
> > was the mayor of their little town, and it wasn't
> a
> > shtetl, just a town with a majority Catholic
> > population.
> >
>
>
>
>
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