Did Bismarck say: “There is nothing more vile and disgusting than the so-called Ukrainians”?

In a number of quotes signed by the German chancellor, distributed in the Russian-speaking part of the Internet, one can also find unflattering descriptions of the Ukrainian people. We checked whether these words really belong to Otto von Bismarck.

The full statement looks like this (spelling and punctuation preserved): “There is nothing more vile and disgusting than the so-called “Ukrainians”! This rabble, raised by the Poles from the most vile scum of the Russian people (murderers, careerists, intelligentsia groveling before power), is ready to kill their own father and mother for power and a profitable position! These degenerates are ready to tear apart their fellow tribesmen, and not even for the sake of profit, but for the sake of satisfying their base instincts, nothing is sacred for them, betrayal is the norm of life for them, they are wretched in mind, malicious, envious, cunning with a special cunning. These non-humans have absorbed all the worst and basest things from the Russians, Poles and Austrians; there is no room left for good qualities in their souls. Most of all they hate their benefactors, those who did good to them and are ready to grovel in every possible way before the powers that be. They are not adapted to anything and can only perform primitive work, they would never be able to create their own state, many countries chased them like a ball throughout Europe, slave instincts were so ingrained in them that they covered their entire essence with disgusting ulcers.”

This maxim has appeared over the years on both information and entertainment websites (“Mangazeya", "Peekaboo") and on social networks ("Livejournal", Facebook, Telegram, Twitter). She was quoted by a Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky on the air of the talk show “Sunday Evening with Vladimir Solovyov.” In some places the statement is even quoted in original language.

Otto von Bismarck, along with Winston Churchill, is one of the most frequently quoted foreign politicians on the RuNet. At the same time, quotes like first, so second often turn out to be fictitious, and this can be verified by the fact that the legacy of figures of such magnitude has been recorded as completely as possible.

First of all, we tried to find in German-language sources something at least a little similar to the specified text about Ukrainians, but we did not find anything like it. We are talking not only about authoritative sources directly related to Bismarck (a selection of quotes from fund page named after him, which deals with the legacy of the chancellor, and memoirs), but also in principle about any available scanned printed publications from the project “Google Books", as well as about sites from the .de domain. The version mentioned above in Otto von Bismarck's native language appears to be a translation from Russian, since meets almost exclusively on Russian resources. Moreover, when in 2014 employees of the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle tried check another quote from the chancellor (“The power of Russia can only be undermined by the separation of Ukraine from it”), they received an answer from German historians from the Otto von Bismarck Foundation that he did not know the word “Ukraine” at all. We also did not find this and words derived from it in books Bismarck - at least in the author's part of the text. One way or another, the origin of the quote is not connected with Bismarck.

As for Russian-language text sources, the oldest indexed mention on the Internet is dated March 24 of the same 2014, when a LiveJournal user from Russia under the nickname klim_vo posted this quote supposedly from Bismarck in comments under another user's post. If someone published these words before klim_vo, then we were unable to find the corresponding records using available technical means.

Cover photo: social networks

Incorrect quote attribution

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