(рецензія на книгу: Заруба В. Родзянки: стовпи імперії. Дніпро, Ліра, 2022. 190 с.)
En. translation
The book by the famous Ukrainian historian, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor Viktor Zaruba about the Rodziankos is a continuation of numerous historical and genealogical studies that focused on the ruling circles of Naddniprianshchyna Ukraine: the Cossack officers and the nobility, which largely evolved from those officers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The topic of the nobility of Katerynoslav has not been studied much over the past thirty years, with few exceptions. This is probably due to its "irrelevance" both during the rule of the party-menagerie and during the period of independence, when the focus was on state-building, national revival, and the Narodniks with their love for the peasant masses. The nobility clearly did not fit into this picture. Therefore, given the historian's impressive achievements, we can talk about the periods "before Zaruba" and "after Zaruba" in noble studies based on the materials of the Katerynoslav province: "Noblemen of the Ekaterinoslav Province" (Dnipro, 2016. 560 p.), "Pedigree of the Ekaterinoslav Nobility" (Dnipro, 2017. 546 p.), "Ekaterinoslav Nobles. Materials for biography, genealogy and personal history" (Dnipro, 2019. 1024 p.), "Materials for the history of the Ekaterinoslav nobility" (Dnipro, 2019. 476 p.), "Hnedin Dmitry. My memories. Preparation for publication, preface and commentary by Doctor of History, Professor V.M. Zaruba" (Dnipro, 2020. 112 p.), "Lost in Time. Essays on the History of the Katerynoslav Nobility" (Dnipro, 2020. 216 pp.), "The Alekseevs: How Earthly Glory Passes" (Dnipro, 2022. 187 pp.), "Genealogy of the Katerynoslav Nobility" (Dnipro, 2022. 300 pp.). ) It is worth mentioning in this list the research on the Poles, Negreskuls, Hofstetters, Abaz and other noble families connected by origin or property with the Dnipro region. First of all, the author does not intend to idealise his characters, nor does he attempt to hide their unattractive or even disgusting and immoral traits from the reader. The Rodziankos, Harkushevskys, Polys, Nechayevs, Savytskys, Alekseevs, and other landowners of southern Ukraine who gained their fortunes through loyal service to tsarism are shown as people of their time, far removed from the ideals of the "noble class".
They come to the arena of history literally out of nowhere, engage in robbery and extortion, drink, sue each other and their peasants endlessly, indulge in debauchery and start harems, and not only of women (such as the ancestor of the State Duma chairman, Pyotr Rodzianko, who lived with his coachman and tortured his wife), rob the tavern, drink away their savings, and torture not only serfs but also their own relatives. Historians often characterise the work of these figures in noble and zemstvo institutions as hypocritical demagoguery, chatter and empty talk, which is what it really was. Thus, as is often the case, we should not take the people's oratory published in the journals of zemstvo meetings at face value. The second half of the nineteenth century was the beginning of the era of open legal politics with its well-known populist attributes. The researcher aims to show, using examples from numerous biographies and family stories, how adventurers, adventurers and rogues ("children of different nations") who sought careers and material gain in the former lands of the Zaporozhian Army, how the "pillars of the throne" were formed, how they were nominated, how former Cossacks, fighters for the freedom of the Ukrainian people, turned into aids to imperial colonisation, seduced by the new tsarist table and estates with serfs. Their class egoism, narrow-mindedness, short-sightedness, and greed actually led to the revolution. In 1917, having seen which way the wind was blowing, the nobility of Yekaterinoslav easily renounced the monarchy, demonstratively moving "to the side of the people". The historian does not tire of giving a moral assessment of the former elite and its representatives, using very unfortunate characteristics. Zaruba considers Mikhail Vladimirovich Rodzianko, the chairman of the State Duma and a large landowner of the Novomoskovsk district, related to many noble and even aristocratic families of the empire, to be an exemplary political weather vane. Surprisingly, not a single book or even a thorough article has been written about him, either in Ukraine or abroad.
The work that we would like to briefly present here is dedicated to the Rodzianko family, which the author metaphorically called "the pillars of the empire". The book consists of thematically and chronologically interconnected essays, each of which has a catchy title: "From Mud to Princes," "Founders of the Rodzianko Dynasty," "Great Great Grandparents' Great Great Grandchildren," "Visiting Soshyn," "The Faleev Legacy," "The Mysterious Catholic Mary." "Angelic Friend", "Loans, Estates, Sodom and Gomorrah", "Majoratnavotchyna", "'Destroyer' of the Empire", "O Joy, Raisin Paradise", "Catastrophe", "Escape". The appendix contains a genealogical chart of the Rodzianko family. This is the first detailed genealogical analysis of this family, which has occupied a rather prominent place in the history of Ukraine since the late seventeenth century. The author traces the family lineage from the founder of the family, Ivan Rodzianko (or Rodzynka), a Cossack from the Khorolska Hundred (early seventeenth century), to the last representatives of the family who were still alive in the late twentieth century. The book is illustrated with portraits and photographs of old and new family members. Against a broad historical and cultural background, it shows how the Ukrainian Cossack family, which emerged from the depths of the dark Ruin, became more and more visible, branching out and covering not only the territory of sub-Russian Ukraine but also the wider expanse of the empire. The author, pointing out positive facts from the family's life or sympathetic traits of character or behaviour of individual Rodziankos, describing with sympathy the plight of the women of this family, is inclined in his synthesis to believe that they are vivid representatives of the denationalised elite, which could have been the core of Ukraine's state and political strength, but instead preferred to assimilate into the structures of the imperial ruling elite. In this regard, considerable attention is paid to the process of Rodzianko's acquisition of lands, ranks, connections, and estates, which the empire used to thank its servants for their loyal service. We can learn in detail what the servants of the throne owned and how they managed their estates, how they sued for property, how they bordered on neighbours, how they treated their serfs and freed peasants. The author writes that although the Rodziankos were not outright sadists, like the neighbouring Strukowy or Kharchenko landowners, who enjoyed torturing the innocent peasants. The Rodzianki were not the only ones who had a good attitude towards serfs, but their relations with peasants were not humanitarian. In particular, they reaped all possible speculative benefits from the reform, for example, by forcing peasants to pay double the amount for a tithe of land. The most famous representative of the Rodziankos (among both Poltava and Katerynoslav lines) is Mykhailo Volodymyrovych, the "destroyer of the empire". The historian does not spare bright colours to depict his historical image, which went through stages of radical transformation: from a loyal supporter of the throne who collaborated with the Black Hundreds and demanded the death penalty for participants in the 1905-1907 revolution to a "revolutionary" who was lucky enough to be at the top of power at the moment of the collapse of the empire. However, his Duma activities in the capital are not disclosed. The author left this page for other researchers, and perhaps for himself at a later date, limiting himself to the activities of the "destroyer" in the Katerynoslav region and his family ties.
Mikhail Rodzianko is shown as a politically untalented man who, by chance, ended up at the top of the political ladder but turned out to be incapable of doing anything. In the early days of the revolution, when information was received in the province in fragments and distorted form, the imagination of the outraged street crowd turned Mykhailo into a folk hero, whom some enthusiasts wanted to erect a monument to during his lifetime in the very centre of Yekaterinoslav (later to be replaced by the now-celebrated Lenin). In reality, as the book shows, Rodzianko was only able to present himself as a respectable and wise figure, concerned with spirituality and gifts for poor children, in times of peace and stability. The revolution needed other leaders - more decisive and, we would add, much more immoral, cynical, bloodthirsty and unscrupulous in their means than Mikhail Vladimirovich. The figure who reacted to the rampant disorder and anarchy of 1918 by lying numb on the bed in his Novomoskovsk estate was not fit to lead either a revolution or a counter-revolution. It seems that the whirlwind of events brought him to the top of power quite by accident, and he was unable to ride this short-lived wave, to compete with young political mavericks for the affections of the fickle crowd. The cabinet intriguer failed to become a staid politician and stir up crowds with hysterical speeches about his love for the people. He probably did not fully understand what was happening and dreamed of his cosy white house covered with reeds in his ancestral home of Vidradi, Novomoskovsk district. Did he think then about his historical responsibility for what was happening? Rodzianko, after all, became a victim of the course of events in which he was directly involved. The "oppressor and Russifier of the Ukrainian people", as the author calls him, managed to escape to Serbia, died there in poverty, was buried on foreign soil at the expense of a foreign government, and was forgotten by everyone at the time. The key advantages of V.M. Zaruba's book are the combination of a sharp journalistic style with a deep analysis of primary sources (documents from a number of Ukrainian and foreign archives, genealogical books, memoirs, correspondence, diaries, etc. ), as well as the ability to understand the genealogical intricacies and clearly chart the incredibly tangled family threads. The monographic study of the Rodziankos fills a significant gap in the history of the Katerynoslav region of the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries and the Dnipro region in general.