‘The stone rejected by the builders’
As the members of the Brotherhood were awaiting their verdicts in prisons in Kyiv and St. Petersburg, in the west of Europe Adam Mickiewicz was taking part in another battle for the freedom of nations, getting involved in struggles to liberate Italy and creating a Polish legion there. During this time he wrote one of his most radical works, ‘A Set of Principles’, in which he formulated principles for a future democratic society – with freedom of speech and faith, equality of genders and nations. Before that, in the Parisian Lectures – as Michał Kuziak notes – Mickiewicz outlined a vision of Europe as a community of sovereign nations based in Christianity. Mickiewicz saw model for and symbol of this future European community in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
In Mickiewicz’s radical concepts for a solidary and democratic Europe, we should see an analogy with Kostomarov’s programme for a Slavic federation. In the Book of Genesis, as well as in other writings by the Brotherhood, we read of a Slavic federation that includes ‘the Southern Rus’, Northern Rus’, Belarusians, Poles, Czechs, Slovenes, Lusatians, Serbo-Illyrians, Croatians, Bulgarians’, wherein each tribe was to have independence and a national government, and mind the principles of civic equality. It projected a Slavic parliament, made up of representatives of all the Slav nations. As Stefan Kozak puts it, these documents ‘speak of democracy overruling any monarchic and authoritarian forms of wielding power [...] The Slavic federation was to be organised in the mould of the ancient Greek republics or the United States of America, with identical autonomous principles, in law, education, trade, customs and religion’.
Kostomarov himself wrote years later in his Autobiography:
‘We could not precisely draw up the map that the federation of states we were planning would cover; we left this to history. In all parts of the federation we proposed uniform main laws and regulations, the standardisation of weights, measurements and coins, the elimination of duty-tax and free trade, universal abolition of serfdom and slavery, in whatever form it might take, a single central power that would conduct the union’s foreign affairs, army and navy, while retaining full autonomy [by single states] when it comes to internal government, administration, courts and national education’.
This exceptional and truly pioneering political vision of a union of equal, solidary and sovereign nations in Central-Eastern Europe, connected through common values and principles and bound to no empire’s hegemony certainly deserves recognition as a prototype for the political community that united the democratic nations of Western Europe after World War Two and came to include the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in the twenty-first century.
Kostomarov concluded his Books with a vision of a free Ukraine as an ‘independent republic in the Slavic federation’. After that, adapting the gospel parable, he concluded with a sentence that acquires new meaning in the context of Europe in 2024, its identity and capability of continuing to exist:
Then all the nations, pointing to the place on the map where Ukraine is drawn, will say: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’.
The author intended for these prophetic words to point to Ukraine’s future role in forming a free political community of Slavic nations. In 1847 this vision was brutally shattered by Russia, the gendarme of despotism in Europe at the time. In 2024, this view and the task it suggests – to create a joined, free Europe of solidary, equal and democratic states – has again been tested by Russia in its neo-imperial form. It all depends on us, if we will be able to effectively fend off the aggressor and Ukraine will indeed become the foundation for a more powerful and solidary community of the free nations of Europe.
Author: Mikołaj Gliński, November 2023. Translated by Soren Gauger
Source: Stefan Kozak, Ukraińscy spiskowcy i mesjaniści. Bractwo Cyryla i Metodego, 1990.
