Page:Russian Realities and Problems - ed. James Duff (1917).djvu/156

 are differences of historical tradition. There never was an actual distinct Little Russian State in the complete sense of the word. In the Middle Ages, when the tide of Tartar invasion began to recede, the Southern Steppes were overrun by Cossacks, some of whom were Great Russians, and some of whom were Little Russians, that is, they spoke the Southern Russian dialect. They formed a military organisation whose allegiance swayed between Muscovy and Poland. They lived a very free and interesting life. They were altogether a most interesting people, but there never was a Little Russian State in the full sense of the word. There were differences in the development of civilisation. There were differences in the church organisation, which in Southern Russia was much more democratic. There were and are very great differences in land tenure, and there were certainly very great differences in spirit, and all these factors have created a marked distinction between the Great Russian and the Little Russian.

But again after the Southern Steppes had been conquered by Russia, and after the region had been gradually drawn into the general life of the Russian Empire, a certain unifying, a certain assimilating process went on, and the southern regions began to fed themselves more and more a part of a larger whole. Then in the early part of the last century arose a movement to promote the literary development of the Little Russian language, and the movement received a powerful stimulus in the work of a very talented poet, called Taras Sherchenko, whose poems have almost become folk-songs among the Little Russians of to-day. This movement did not constitute any danger to the Russian