Archimandrite Vitaly (Maksimenko) about Slavic unity and the Ukrainian question

Modern historiography has attempted to link Archimandrite Vitaly (Maksimenko), the head of the largest department of the Union of the Russian People, Pochaevsky, to the Ukrainian national movement. The article challenges this point of view and reconstructs Archimandrite Vitaly's views on the Slavic unity and the Ukrainian question, based on a range of historical sources (materials of periodicals edited by Fr. Vitaly, and some of his leaflets). The author puts forward the thesis that Archimandrite Vitaly's position was based on the idea of single Russian people split into three branches - the Great Russians, the Little Russians and the Belorussians. Recognizing the ethnographic differences between Great Russians and Little Russians, Fr. Vitaly was a consistent opponent of political Ukrainian nationalism, which manifested in the imposition of a "special" Ukrainian language on the peasant population of Volhynia and unique interpretations of its history and literature. According to Fr. Vitaly, the language problem was that the language imposed by Ukrainian nationalists, claimed to be Ukrainian, yet it was artificially created solely for the purpose of separating the Little Russians from the all-Russian root, while the true local language for Volhynian peasantry was the Little Russian dialect. Fr. Vitaly considered the Uprising of Bohdan Khmelnitsky and the Pereyaslav Rada to be events of all-Russian history. Therefore, he often wrote about these events in his works to strengthen the people's unity. He also paid attention to the question of Galician Rusins, who lived in Austria-Hungary and were subjected to severe oppression during WWI. Fr. Vitaly regarded them as "one-blood and like-faith brothers" and urged for rendering every possible support to them to strengthen the all-Russian unity.