Freemasonry in Ukraine from the Origin and until 1919 Characteristic Features; [МАСОНСТВО НА УКРАИНЕ С МОМЕНТА ЗАРОЖДЕНИЯ ДО 1919 ГОДА: ХАРАКТЕР И ОСОБЕННОСТИ]

The article discusses the main stages of the development of Freemasonry in the Ukraine as a part of the Russian Empire and up to 1919. It is shown that Freemasonry appears on the Malorossiya lands simultaneously as on the resting territory of of Russia. Its roots are about the same. The originators were foreigners from abroad. And, remarkably, it was even about one figure, the general-anshef James Keith, who was both the founder of Freemasonry in the Ukraine and a provincial grandmaster for Russia. Regarding the fact that part of the territory of the today’s Ukraine was in those years part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the processes of creating Masonic lodges went parallel with Russian one. Freemasonry, accordingly, spread in the Ukraine in three ways: through Poland, through Russia and directly from Western European countries, with Galicia and the Right-Bank Ukraine belonging to the Polish "sphere of influence", and the Left Bank and Slobozhanshchina – to the Russian side. Due to the close ties of the Ukrainian Freemasons with the Decembrists, Masonic lodges in the Ukraine were banned in 1819 and re-emerged in the early XX century. The formation of the Ukrainian intelligentsia and its participation in the revolutionary and national movement opened at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries a new stage in the Ukrainian Freemasonry, but better organized and more politicized, due to ties with the Great East of France, which was the flagship of liberal Freemasonry in the world. © 2023 Aquilo. All rights reserved.