Aggressors may deliberately and systematically disseminate a narrative that an Indigenous people is not a distinct nation but merely a regional or wayward branch of the metropole's people. Constructing a false myth of a single common root allows the aggressor to declare the political independence of the colonized society a historical misunderstanding and to justify any violent actions as a natural process of "reunification."
The deliberate dissolution of a distinct Ukrainian identity in the construct of a "single Orthodox people": the "Synopsis" subordinated Kyiv's history to the idea of a common "Slaveno-Rossian people"[1], and its political program presupposed a struggle for the "liberation… of the remaining part of the 'single Orthodox people'"[2]. Hrushevsky points out what exactly was erased: the "Synopsis" is "a brief history of Rus composed at the Pechersk Lavra, done very lifelessly and incompletely (the history of the Cossacks, the struggle against Poland, and all of Ukraine's recent history are almost entirely omitted from it)"[3].
The introduction of strict political censorship. Under threat of punishment, the population was forbidden even to say aloud that their lands constituted a separate state entity: "and let no one utter such voices, that the Little Russian land is of the hetman's regiment"[4].
The official refusal to recognize the language and identity – the formula of Valuev's circular (1863): "there was not, is not, and cannot be any distinct Little Russian language, and their dialect, used by the common folk, is the same Russian language, only spoiled by Poland's influence upon it"[5].
The ideological justification of the censorship refusal – the language was declared nonexistent by definition: the censor's resolution about "the grammar of a language that must not exist"[6].
The denial to Ukrainians of the status of a separate people at the level of official doctrine. The linguist Sergei Bulich, in the article "Little Russian dialect" of the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (1896), formulated: "The relation of the L[ittle] Russian dialect to the Russian language may be likened to the relation between the Slovak dialect and the Czech language… but not to the relation between the Polish, Czech, Serbian and similar languages, on the one hand, and Russian, on the other"[7] - by this classification Ukrainian was a dialect within the Russian language. This doctrine was applied to the entire empire by the Central Statistical Committee, which conducted the census of 1897: in the tables of the consolidated volume, "Little Russian" ran as a subdivision of a single "Russian language", and its speakers were counted into the overall total of "Russians"[8]. This wrote 22,380,551 people into the "Russians" - speakers of the empire's second language after Great Russian (55,667,469)[8]. Nearly one in four of them - 5,374,863 people - lived outside the nine Ukrainian governorates: in Voronezh governorate 915,883 people named Ukrainian as their native language, in the Don Host region (now mostly Rostov oblast of Russia) - 719,655, in Kursk governorate - 527,778, in Bessarabia (now Moldova and the south of Odesa oblast) - 379,698, in Grodno governorate (now western Belarus) - 362,526, in Stavropol governorate - 319,817, in Lublin and Siedlce governorates (the Kholm region and Podlachia, now eastern Poland) - 304,261, in Siberia - 223,274, of them 54,422 in the Amur and Primorye regions, in Akmolinsk region (now northern Kazakhstan) - 51,103[8]. In the Kuban region (now mostly Krasnodar krai of Russia) Ukrainian was the most widespread native language: 908,818 people declared "Little Russian" (Ukrainian) as their native language against 816,734 with "Great Russian" (Russian), out of a regional population of 1,918,881[8]. The census methodology also undercounted Ukrainians, notes the collective monograph of the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences: "The census of 1897 recorded not nationality but the respondents' native tongue, and since many Ukrainians named Russian as such, there were in fact more ethnic Ukrainians than indicated in the census"[9].
The imposition of a concept of unbreakable unity instead of recognizing a distinct nation: per the Theses, "by the act of reunification the Ukrainian people consolidated its close and unbreakable historical bond with the Russian people, in whom it found a great ally, a faithful friend and defender"[10]. The celebrations and the transfer of Crimea "taking into account the commonality of the economy, territorial proximity, and close economic and cultural ties"[11] served the same frame.
The ideological course toward erasing nations: the Third Program of the CPSU, adopted by the 22nd Congress in October 1961, announced "a new stage in the development of national relations in the USSR, characterized by the further drawing together of nations and the achievement of their complete unity," and called "the effacement of national distinctions, especially of language distinctions," merely "a considerably longer process than the effacement of class boundaries"[12].