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May 3, 2026, 10:28 p.m.
Writer Sanchenko tells how Ukrainians built the Russian empire
This article also available in English0
From sailors, scientists, doctors, and ministers, Ukrainians shaped the institutions of the Russian Empire, but remained anecdotal characters in it.
In an interview with Intent, writer Anton Sanchenko explained why the history of the Russian Empire is much less Russian than it seems.
According to the writer, research shows that two-thirds of the doctors of the Russian Empire in the eighteenth century were Ukrainians, and 80% of the teachers of the naval cadet corps were graduates of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.
"When you start looking at it from this perspective, it turns out that Ukrainians made a very big contribution, and often an outstanding one. For example, in the book Cruz and the Fox, Platon Gamaley, a teacher and company commander of the Naval Cadet Corps, is mentioned. He wrote all the Russian textbooks on maritime affairs, including navigation, nautical affairs, ship structure theory, meteorology, and astronomy. All these textbooks were written by one person. And it was Plato Gamaliel. Russians called him the naval Lomonosov," the writer noted.
"Cruz and the Fox is a book by Anton Savchenko about the first Russian round-the-world expedition led by Yuri Lysyansky and Ivan Kruzershtern.
Yuriy Lysiansky was a traveler, a world sailor in the British and Russian naval service, geographer, oceanographer, ethnographer, founder of scientific oceanography of the Russian Empire, and a captain of the 1st rank. A descendant of the Cossack Lysiansky family, he was born on April 1 (12), 1773, in the regimental town of Nizhyn (Hetmanate), in the family of a priest of the Nizhyn church and his wife Fotina Yosypivna (from the noble Yakubovsky family).
According to the writer, historians in Russia have persistently ignored the Ukrainian origin of prominent figures. Although, for example, Lysiansky's fellow countryman was the Chancellor of the Russian Empire, Alexander Bezborodko, who is often accused in various memoirs of having a "Little Russian accent."
"They couldn't stand it, that is, what they appropriated in history, in life they were always trying to ridicule and humiliate these people. There are jokes about Bezborodchykha, his mother. She was also the wife of the last general clerk of the Hetmanate. This is Bezborodko. Yes. And she is the daughter of the last general judge, so this is the elite of the Hetmanate, the Ukrainian state. And they just found a way to, well, I'll say this unexpected word, to lead the Russian state. That is, what his father did in the Hetmanate, he did on the scale of the Russian state. That was his career," the writer noted.
The Russian Empire was a German project
"At the same time, Ukraine, the Left Bank, Estonia, Latvia, and the Baltic states, which were German, were annexed to Russia. And they simultaneously played this "king of the mountain" game with varying success. That is, the German and Ukrainian parties were always in competition, sometimes interacting. And in the end, the Germans won because they put their own kings in power. And Russia is a German project. That's why they still have such a nostalgic attitude towards them, I don't know, nostalgically. And Gazprom is a German company there, and so on. And this expedition of Krusenstern and Lysiansky, when one ship is commanded by a German and the other by a Ukrainian, is very revealing in this regard," the writer noted.
