So, on October 22, 1721, Peter I proclaimed the “All-Russian Empire” and, accordingly, changed the name of the “Moscow czardom” to the “Russian Empire.”
“Moscovite essentially usurped the name Rus’, which, with its specific meaning – ethnic, geographical, and organizational – fully corresponds to the modern term Ukraine… This gave Moscovite, albeit a fake one, the shine of a cultural, civilized state with an ancient historical tradition, with Byzantine-Kyiv church metrics.”
Yaroslav Dashkevych, historian
Such a large-scale substitution required radical falsifications in historical science.
And they were carried out during the reign of Ekaterina II.
Academician Pivtorak noted that when studying historical documents, the empress was shocked by the history of Moscovy, which was “poor and very short,” and by the fact that it had no relation to the centuries-old glory of Rus`, “whose princes the kings of France, Hungary, and Sweden considered as an honor to be related to…”
The “Commission for the Compilation of Notes on Ancient History, predominantly Russian,” established by the Empress in 1783, spent 9 years under her personal control compiling a new “history of Russia” – the “Chronicle of the Russian State” in 5 volumes. It was in it that the fictional “one people” appeared.
During this process, the Commission members made numerous corrections in historical documents, effectively rewriting such monuments as the “Tale of Bygone Years” and others. And those chronicles and documents that could not be “corrected” were simply destroyed.
Ekaterina II personally wrote the genealogy of the Moscow princes.
A vivid example of the tradition of Russian historical falsifications is the information about the founding of Odessa by Ekaterina II at the end of the 17th century.
However, the first written mention by historian Jan Dlugosz of the port of Katsiubiyiv, or Hadzhybey, is dated November 19, 1415.
The future Odesa also appears under this name on the map of Ukraine of 1648 by Guillaume Beauplan.
