3 June, 08:29
The most enduring trauma of Moscow’s statehood is not NATO. It’s not Ukraine. Not even the internet.
It’s something far more personal — a civilizational inferiority complex rooted in primordial illegitimacy.
Moscow is not a bastard child, nor a rightful heir to Kyivan Rus.
It is something else entirely: a historical counterfeit, a cultural emulator, a liturgical mime performed under the guidance of German bureaucrats and Byzantine ghostwriters.
It is not the cradle of law, faith, literacy, or language.
It is a crooked Xerox machine with a passion for titles.
For five centuries, Moscow has been desperately trying to rewrite history, casting itself as the sacred heir — the "Firstborn of Rus’."
But the more it insists, the more visible become the seams, the glue, the patched ideology — and the fear.
🗣️ Enter Margarita Simonyan, Kremlin’s high priestess of alternative philology, who has once again taken to the stage with a monologue worthy of an annotated anthology of linguistic schizophrenia.
According to her, the Ukrainian language was invented by Austrian and Polish offices to tear Ukrainians away from "their Russian brothers."
What she omits — accidentally or willfully — is the inconvenient fact that everything Moscow uses to claim cultural primacy was borrowed, stolen, or forcibly adapted from Kyiv.
📚 Fact 1: The “Aeneid” That Young Pushkin Read Was Ukrainian
While Muscovy was still wrestling with Cyrillic alphabets, Ivan Kotliarevsky — a Ukrainian author from Poltava — had already transformed Virgil’s Aeneid into a living, breathing, vernacular Ukrainian parody.
It was this earthy, satirical, folk-infused Eneïda that a young Alexander Pushkin read, absorbing the rhythm and power of a language far more organic than any imperial variant emerging in Petersburg.
So who borrowed whose voice?
🖋 Fact 2: Linguistic Standards Came from Kyiv, Not Moscow
Seminal grammarians like Lavrentii Zyzanii and Meletius Smotrytsky were not from Moscow — they were Ukrainian scholars writing under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Their grammars and textbooks — printed in Kyiv, Ostroh, and Vilnius — set the standard for Orthodox Slavic education long before Moscow had even codified its bureaucratic tongue.
In fact, the Muscovite elite first copied their work — and later tried to ban it for being “too Latin,” “too Kievan,” or simply “too independent.”
📖 Fact 3: Ivan Franko — a Russian Dialect? Seriously?
Simonyan’s attempt to label Ivan Franko’s work as a “dialect of Russian” is as absurd as claiming that Dante wrote in Spanish because it’s “also Romance.”
Franko was a polyglot, a philosopher, and a literary titan.
And he wrote exclusively in Ukrainian — a literary Ukrainian grounded in the living speech of Galicia, Volhynia, and Podillia.
Not in the sterile clerical jargon of the Russian Synod.
🪶 Fact 4: Turkic Words — and Who’s Afraid of Them
Here’s a linguistic reality that no Kremlin ideologue wants to discuss:
The Russian language contains far more Turkic borrowings than Ukrainian ever has.
Not by accident — but by design.
Moscow grew under the yoke and protection of the Golden Horde.
Its terminology — from kazna (treasury), saray (palace), karavan (caravan), bashlyk, kaftan, bazaar, to dushman — reflects a deep linguistic symbiosis with Turkic culture.
And that’s fine.
❓ What's wrong with Turkic words? Or Turkic languages?
Absolutely nothing.
Turkic civilizations are ancient, literate, and often far more organically structured than the haphazard centralism of Muscovy.
What’s embarrassing is not the influence — but the denial.
Denying these roots, while simultaneously accusing Ukrainian of being “artificial,” is not nationalism. It’s projection.
In truth, the Russian language is a creole.
A hybrid of:
Ukrainian vocabulary and literary imagery,
Bulgarian grammar and ecclesiastical syntax,
and a Turkic lexicon that shaped military and everyday life.
So why not be honest?
Let’s call things what they are: Russian is a Ukrainian-Bulgarian-Turkic creole.
Not inferior.
But absolutely not primordial.
🧠 But Moscow’s Real Pain Isn’t Language. It’s Kyiv.
Everything Moscow now claims as its “sacred inheritance” — Orthodoxy, literacy, imperial vision — was taken, not given, from Kyiv.
The original metropolitanate?
Kyivan.
The first grammars?
Kyivan.
Church rites, liturgical calendars, political theologies?
Kyivan.
Moscow is not the mother.
It is the foundling with ambitions.
This is why Simonyan lies with such theatrical passion.
She needs the myth — desperately — where Kyiv is the lost younger sibling, and Ukraine the misguided province.
Because to admit the opposite is to fall into the gaping void where the myth of “Russian firstness” used to live.
And without the myth, there is no Third Rome.
No empire.
No Putin.
Just a city — pretending to be a civilization.
🔍 History does not tolerate counterfeits. But the Kremlin isn’t history.
It’s a wax museum of restored lies.