THE UKRAINIAN QUESTION IN THE PAGES OF BULGARIAN NEWSPAPERS IN THE YEARS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Abstract

This article examines the state of the Ukrainian question in the pages of the Bulgarian periodical press during the First World War.Before the outbreak of the Great War, the problems of nationalities in the Russian Empire, and specifically the Ukrainian question, were unfamiliar to Bulgarian society. It was in the autumn of 1914, with the arrival of representatives of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, that Bulgarians were first acquainted with the striving of part of the Ukrainians to separate the Ukrainian lands from the Russian Empire and create an independent Ukrainian state. After the beginning of the war, all the power of the periodical press was directed at the agitation for or against the entry and participation of the respective countries in the ongoing conflict.The Ukrainian idea is used as one of the arguments for the choice of the Central Powers as a natural ally of Bulgaria in the European conflict.The most important mouthpieces for the ruling coalition newspapers ‘Narodni prava’, ‘Nov vek’, ‘Volya’ and the most popular dailies ‘Dnevnik’ and ‘Utro’publishedmaterials on the Ukrainian question.At the end of 1917-beginning of 1918 the aim of the Bulgarian newspapers was to acquaint their readers with the new state - the Ukrainian People's Republic. The articles were dedicated to the Brest-Lithuania Peace Treaty, the arrival and composition of the Ukrainian diplomatic mission headed by O. Shulgin, the foreign policy orientation of the Ukrainian state.