The Village Ukraine has launched a new season of the Ukrainian History Street podcast that will focus on maps and territories, and the role certain cities and regions have played in Ukraine’s unity and sovereignty.

In May 2023, the Russian president and the chairman of the Russian Constitutional Court pored over a 17th century map drawn up by Guillaume Sanson. They claimed that Ukraine was absent from Sanson’s map to buttress the Russian myth of Ukraine’s non-existence throughout history.

Maybe this could be skewed to make sense, but a banner reading “Ukraine, or the land of Cossacks” stretched across the territory that is now central Ukraine. The map depicts Ukraine – alongside lands that are now part of Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus – as part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

УКРАЇНСЬКУ ТЕКСТОВУ ВЕРСІЮ МОЖНА ПРОЧИТАТИ ЗА ПОСИЛАННЯМ.

 

 

 

“We need the Soviet Union’s borders, we don’t need these maps of Ukraine’s borders”

In November 1980, a group of researchers gathered in Moscow for the Second All-Union Conference on the Historical Geography of Russia – among them Mariia Vavrychyn, an archeographer, historical geographer, and bibliographer from Lviv. She gave a talk on “Guillaume de Beauplan’s little-known maps of Ukraine” – a series of maps that were found in the Gdansk City Library by a Polish researcher. Mariia talked about the French cartographer’s 11 maps and outlined the borders of Ukraine that de Beauplan set out in his maps.

Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan might have been the first person to use the name Ukraine to designate a separate geographic and political unit stretching from Muscovia to Transylvania. Vavrychyn talked about these borders in Moscow, and noted that de Beauplan’s maps had been reissued abroad, suggesting Western Europe’s interest in Ukraine in the 17th century. Moscow’s historians didn’t respond well: the borders of Ukraine represented on those maps didn’t quite coincide with the borders they advocated. One of the Russian researchers went as far as saying: “We need the Soviet Union’s borders, we don’t need these maps of Ukraine’s borders.”

Vavrychyn’s presentation at the conference was fateful. She was offered a choice between accepting Moscow’s version of Ukraine’s history or abandoning her dissertation on cartographic sources and Ukraine’s history in the 15th-17th centuries. She chose the latter. Her research halted for over 10 years. The papers she was working on didn’t see the light of day until the declaration of Ukraine’s independence. But Vavrychyn’s integrity helped her to safeguard the truth about Ukraine’s borders outlined in Guillaume de Beauplan’s 1639 Geographical Map of Ukraine. Now it is Vavrychyn who maintains the age-old custom of depicting Ukraine as stretching between the rivers Danube in the west and Don in the east, and between the Black Sea in the south and the upper reaches of the Prypiat River to the north of Chornobyl.

 

 

“Ukraine, the land of Cossacks”

Guillaume Sanson depicted the territory of Ukraine on his maps on other occasions as well. His map titled “Lands of the Crown of Poland, Duchies and Provinces of Prussia, Cuiavia, Mazovia, Black Rus &c. of Ukraine &c.” was unveiled in Paris in 1655.  On the map, “Ukraine” overlaps with “Volhynia” and stretches across the left and the right banks of the River Dnipro from Kyiv in the north to the mouth of Dnipro in the south. Sanson outlined the regions of Podillia, Volhynia and Pokuttia, mistakenly labeling western Ukraine as Black Rus.

By 1665, the name Ukraine appeared on five out of seven Sanson’s published maps. As part of the “Great Map of Ukraine”, he marked the Carpathian mountains, the site of the 1651 Battle of Berestechko [a battle of the Cossack-Polish War near the town of Berestechko in Volhynia that took place on 28-30 June 1651 - ed.], the rivers Dniester and Western Bug (and its tributaries).

Western Ukraine maintained the Black Rus label on foreign maps until 1706, when Sanson’s son Adrien realized and corrected the mistake. The reason why the mistake occurred in the first place is that Guillaume Sanson’s sources included travelers and diplomats, who might have had a better grasp of the Muscovian language than the Rusyn, or Ukrainian, language. What is known today as “Red Rus”, Chervona Rus in Ukrainian, used to be Chormna Rus in Old Ukrainian, meaning dark-red or brown-red: the words chornyi (black) and chormnyi (dark-red) would have sounded nearly indistinguishable, especially to a foreigner.

The name “Ukraine, the land of Cossacks” – the name Sanson gave to central Ukraine – kept coming up in French sources until late 18th century. After that, the region was labeled as just “Cossacks” or “Zaporizhzhian Cossacks”.

How did Sanson mark Russia on his maps? The 1665 map titled “European or Lesser Tartary” designated the territory of today’s Russian Federation as the land of the “Prince or Tsar of Moscow”. It appears that if today’s Russian government officials want to abide by Sanson’s maps, they will have to change the name of their country to Lesser Tartary or the Kingdom of Moscow as one thing is certain: there is no “Russian Federation” on those maps.

 

Why Rus is Ukraine

In January 2023, the BBC released a series on “The Invention of Russia” and Russia’s expansion over centuries. The series starts in the 1340s, with the principality of Moscow as a vassal of the Golden Horde. Prior to the release of the series, the Western world seemed to believe that Russia was the heir of Rus – a lie peddled by Russian propaganda both inside Russia and outside of it.

Viktor Yelenskyi, Head of Ukraine’s State Service for Ethnic Policy and Freedom of Conscience, told creators of the documentary The Final War (2022) that Russia still finds it very important to claim Kyivan Rus as its lineage: “It is very important [for Russia] to show that the Kyivan Rus was the antecedent of the Kingdom of Moscow, that the Kingdom of Moscow was the antecedent of the Russian Empire, that the Russian Empire was the antecedent of the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation is the successor to the Soviet Union.”

Old maps refute all these claims. The oldest map featuring the name Rus was made in Iceland around the middle of the 13th century. It looked nothing like the maps of today: it was written and did not contain any symbols, drawings, or graphic elements – instead, represented are factors such as the 12 winds, ages (childhood, adolescence, old age, and senility), qualities (heat, moisture, cold), and bodily elements (blood, water, spirit, flesh). Crucially, however, it marked only three European cities: Rome, Constantinople, and Kyiv. And the country of Rus. It made no mention of Russia or Moscow.

The fact that Rus’ was located exclusively on Ukrainian lands is also confirmed by ancient chronicles. The Tale of Bygone Years and the Novgorod Chronicle contain more than 700 references to Rus between the 9th and the 13th centuries. They bear out the fact that Rus did not exist outside the Kyiv, Pereyaslav, and Chernihiv principalities. You can check for yourself: search for “Rus” in the “Tale of Bygone Years” and look through all the references. You will not find any confirmation that Rus contained the Russian cities of Pskov, Novgorod, Ryazan, or Suzdal.

 

Vkraina

In 1613, cartographer Willem Janszoon Blaeu’s Amsterdam-based publishing house printed a map of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that came to be known as the map of the Radziwiłł map – one of the first maps to refer to Ukraine’s lands as “Vkraina”. The map marks the area between Rzhyshchiv and Kaniv as “Eastern Volhynia, also known as Ukraine and Nyz”.

The name “Nyz” (“bottom”, “underside” or “down below” in Ukrainian) was determined by the geographic imagination at the time: Ukrainian lands were located to the south of Vilnius, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – “down below”. It could also refer to the name used by Ukrainian Cossacks to refer to the land “below” Kyiv, past the Dnipro’s rapids. The Cossacks referred to unregistered cossacks who lived beyond the Dnipro’s rapids as “Lowland (“Nyzovi”) Cossacks”.

The 1613 map also contains an insert with information about Ukrainian Cossacks and the Dnipro rapids, and marks the location of the Zaporizhzhian Sich, a proto-Cossack state, which was then located in Tomakivka. On the insert, the Dnipro is shown from Cherkasy to where it lets out into the Black Sea. This insert is the best ancient depiction of the River Dnipro available to us.

Today, the only original copy of the cloth map is kept in the main building of the Carolina Rediviva Museum at the Uppsala University Library in Sweden. Similar maps exist in Lviv, at the National Historical Museum in Belarus, in Lithuania, and in Poland. Copies of the map can also be found online on the website of the multimedia information and education project Vkraina.

Vkraina features 37 historical maps from the Netherlands, France, Germany, and England. They are accompanied by late Renaissance music and show the Europeans’ awareness of the Ukrainian lands in the 16th-18th centuries. They once again prove that Ukraine existed long before Lenin, as they say in Russia.

 

Intelligence and analysts, or what does The London Gazette say?

Vyacheslav Ilchenko, an analyst, was curious about Ukraine and its place on Guillaume Sanson’s maps. When he wrote about it, social media users responded that it was difficult to determine Ukraine’s eastern border on Sanson’s maps. In fact, those maps feature hardly any borders as such. Ilchenko decided to look for the elusive borders in other sources. His search took him to The London Gazette – the oldest London newspaper: one sheet of paper summarizing the most important developments across the world, accessible to every Londoner.

Ilchenko reviewed scans of The London Gazette issues from nearly 200 years. His meticulous work was complicated by the fact that the news was written in what he called an ancient “Shakespearean English”. Still, he managed to find a real treasure: information about the 1735 Russo-Turkish war waged by Empress Anna of Russia.

When Russia suffered losses in 1736 and agreed to negotiate with the Ottoman Empire, the talks were mediated by representatives from Great Britain and the Netherlands; The London Gazette reported on the mediation process. The news was gathered under the umbrella of “The Last Letters from the Frontiers of the Ukraine”. The definite article at the time always preceded proper nouns, so one can conclude that “the Ukraine” would have referred to a state, not just a geographical area.

While reviewing the “Letters from the Ukraine”, Ilchenko came across the mention of the country’s easternmost settlement: Bakhmut, which was mentioned in the October 8-11 edition of the newspaper. It was in Bakhmut that Peter Lacy, who served under Empress Anna, and his troops set up camp for winter. Ilchenko wrote: “Donetsk Oblast marks the easternmost border of Ukraine. So screw you, Moscow comrades.”

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

History Street, Ukraine is a podcast supported by the Ukraine Confidence Building Initiative launched by the United States Agency for International Development.