It is of interest that the only two Slavonic languages which were in a more or less healthy condition were Russian and Polish. In both cases, the upper classes had not been denationalized. They were still willing to use the popular language, even if in a refined or revised form. They were still able to produce literature such as it was and to secure access to printing presses to make their works known. They still maintained a historical culture, even though Peter had completely overturned Russian life and had started his new creation off on a Polish-Ukrainian-Western European tack. It gave the two peoples a tremendous advantage which they were not slow to recognize and it added tremendously to the burden of the other Slavonic peoples, who had not lost all hope and ambition of recovery. Even the dismemberment of Poland had not had time to damage the dreams of the Poles and to take away the advantages that centuries of political life had given them. The special burden of the Ukrainians was rather to be found in the nature of the Kozak Host. As we have seen, the Host did not in the beginning think of taking over civilian administration. It had been a brotherhood of fighting men. Its remains, the tales of its exploits, looked very little to territorial control and much to heroic deeds. Where a Czech, whether he were writing in Czech, Latin or German, could not fail to know of the achievements of the Kingdom of Bohemia, the Ukrainian could not look back easily to the Ukrainian state of two or three centuries before. He had to go back to Kiev and those traditions were torn and confused by the tragedies of seven hundred years. The Kozaks gave him much but not what was most important in a national revival. The people had confused ideas of the Kozaks but not of their valor. They could admire the songs of the fearless raiders; they could draw from them very little of political education. There was needed a long series of scholars and of thinkers to delve into the annals of the past and to draw the proper conclusions, before an intelligent and clear theory could be put before the average peasant serf. There was needed a work of study and of synthesis and it seemed clear under the conditions of the eighteenth century that that could not take place. As Catherine the Great looked out on the reorganized Ukraine, now turned into typical Russian provinces in Little Russia, she could be sure that there was no danger, that the last sparks of the Ukrainian idea had been quenched and that her work had been a success. She was startlingly incorrect, for all that the eighteenth century could not imagine suddenly happened. The intellectual changes of the world in one or two decades laid the basis for a Ukrainian revival in a form that would have seemed incredible to the leaders even a half-century earlier. CHAPTER TWELVE _THE AWAKENING IN EASTERN UKRAINE_