13 - The Real Ukraine
Putin keeps claiming that Ukraine doesn’t exist – that Ukraine’s sovereignty is somehow a Western slight-of-hand, and that Ukrainians are really Russians in pseudo-democratic disguise, ready to be rescued by Mother Russia. But all of those posturings are false, as any examination of Ukraine’s deep history shows. Only in Soviet times, especially after the 1932-1933 massacres of 4 million, were the Ukrainian spirit and identity fully denied. Now Putin wants – as a deathly vanity project --to obliterate a genuine people who survived one after another rendezvous with destiny. We must stand firmly with Ukraine in its hour of need, nuclear threats or no.
Starting with a Swedish Viking who became Volodymyr the Great in 980 C. E., what is now Ukraine adopted Byzantine Christianity and expanded what was known as the Kievan Rus (or Viking principality) to encompass the largest land domain in Europe. It stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, to the Volga River in the east, and to the Carpathian mountains in the west. To cement his rule, Volodymyr married Anna, sister of Basil II, the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople (Istanbul). He minted coins stamped with the trident symbol, still Ukraine’s national emblem. Modern Ukrainians can trace themselves back to his influence and this epoch.
Yaroslav the Wise (1019 to 1054), another Viking descendant, established schools and libraries, promoted Christianity, established a major monastery, codified customary laws, arranged dynastic alliances with many of the ruling families of Europe, and started to create a Slavic bureaucracy to administer the dominions of the medieval state.
Squabbles among contenders for the leadership of the Kievan Rus led to the disintegration of the state during the remainder of the twelfth and well into the thirteenth century. Several of what are now Russian regions broke away from Kyiv and joined other alliances along the Baltic Sea. Western sections of the Kievan state were conquered by Hungary and Moldova. The Mongols arrived in 1223 and 1237, and sacked Kyiv in 1240. These were dire times, comparable to the present.
Lithuania and Poland picked off parts of what was left of the Kievan Rus in the latter fourteenth century. An alliance with Teutonic Knights, and wars involving the Tatars, also embroiled this region well into the fifteenth century. Ukraine (or Kyiv) ceased to exist as a state or principality during these centuries, although the nature of Ukraine and the existence of Ukraine was still there, buried beneath the contests and conquests of neighboring powers and contenders. Moscovy, as one of the rival forces with ambitions over Ukraine, entered the picture only in the sixteenth century, when Poland dominated.
From the sixteenth century and well into the seventeenth century the Cossacks, a collectivity of talented warriors, established themselves along the Dnieper River in what is now central Ukraine. They fought against the Turks, Poles, and Tatars, sometimes as mercenaries. A disciplined army of Cossacks attacked Moscow in the early seventeenth century and was critical in defending Orthodox Christianity and repulsing a Turkish invasion of Poland and the Polish borderlands later in that century.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, however, Ukraine was engulfed in a succession of new wars, with native Ukrainians (including Cossacks) seeking their freedom from Polish rule and then repulsing invading Russians. From about 1663, Poland ruled Ukraine west of the Dnieper River and Russia east of the river, but all hegemonic pretensions were disputed and fighting continued throughout the last decades of the century. Russia even invaded Crimea, but its hold on the peninsula was strongly contested.
Ukraine was once again united under Cossack rule briefly in the early eighteenth century, and at one point was allied to Sweden’s King Charles XII in his wars against the Russians and the Poles. But Russia under Czar Peter the Great became too powerful in the remainder of the century, and absorbed much of Ukraine into his empire. Under Czarina Catherine II (1762 to 1796), this process continued, with the remaining vestiges of Ukrainian autonomy erased along with her centralization of other outlying parts of the empire. (“Ukraine” means “periphery”). Ukraine was effectively colonized, and the imprint of imperial Russia stamped firmly on and within the Ukrainian province.
In the nineteenth century, western Ukraine was included in the Hapsburg Empire, ruled from Vienna, and the rest of Ukraine was a part of Russia, its independence having been effectively extirpated, but not its cultural and religious traditions. Meanwhile, to the west, in Galicia, belonging to the Hapsburgs, there were upsurges of Ukrainian nationalism, with demands for autonomy and the establishment of a Ukrainian newspaper. Lviv University established a professorial chair in Ukrainian philology.
Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War led to the emancipation of serfdom throughout Russia, a particularly beneficial development for the Ukrainian province, where 42 percent of the nominal populace were private serfs. Even so, in Russian Ukraine poverty grew throughout the rest of the century because of heavy taxation and a shortage of available land on which emancipated serfs could settle and sow crops. Many emigrated to Siberia and other parts of Russia. Industrialization began, too, within the Russified sections of Ukraine, and Odessa, Kharkiv, and Kyiv mushroomed in population and importance. In-migration of Russians increased substantially, as did the arrival of Jews.
After the Russian revolution of 1905, Ukrainians everywhere within the empire, and in the Hapsburg section, began to express themselves with nationalistic and patriotic fervor. There was little doubt in this period that Ukraine existed and that Ukrainians, subject as they had been for centuries to rule by outsiders, still expressed a Ukrainian consciousness.
Ukrainians fought on both sides of World War I, some with Russian battalions, some with the Hapsburgs. Galicia and western Ukraine saw some of the most intense battles and unparalleled destruction. By the end of the war’s third year, however, it was evident that the empires that had long held Ukraine in thrall were disintegrating. After Russian Czar Nicholas II abdicated in early 2017, the leaders of what became the government of the new Ukraine met in Kyiv amid a popular assembly of more than 100,000 citizens. An All-Ukrainian National Congress recognized the country’s new autonomy in April and approved the creation of a Central Rada to run the new state. The Ukrainian language, banned in Russian times, was restored. So was a people’s assembly.
None of these developments was accepted by the Bolshevik rulers of Russia. The new Ukrainian National Republic and Bolshevik Russia were soon at war, hostilities that persisted from 1917 to 1921 and initially forfeited control of Kiev to the Russian invaders. The Ukrainians invited assistance from Germany and Austria, regaining Kyiv and the remainder of the country by mid-1918. But that led to effective German control of the Republic for the balance of the year, perhaps giving false justification to Putin’s current claims of Nazification. By 1919, Ukraine was back in local socialist hands, but the restored Republic still had to battle Russian Bolsheviks in the east, Polish commandos in Galicia, and Romanians in Bessarabia (Moldova). A Franco-Greek force occupied Crimea.
The end of the Ukrainian National Republic came in late 1920 and 1921 when Bolshevik armies occupied Kyiv once more and effectively subjugated most of today’s Ukraine. In the west however, the retreating Ukrainian army merged with the Polish army; Poland and Russia signed the Treaty of Riga, which split Ukraine into the Polish and Soviet territories that persisted until the end of World War II.
In the 1920s and 1930s, much of Ukraine was collectivized and starved by Stalin. Ukraine was effectively absorbed, even though several prominent Soviet leaders came from Ukraine just as Stalin was a Georgian. There was little thought of a free Ukraine and the revival of Ukrainian identity until the Soviet Union collapsed and a restored Ukraine emerged in 1991.
Now the task of the free world is to sustain the existential oneness that President Volodymyr Zelensky champions against the Soviet revanchism of Putin and his apparatchiks. Putin is the new Stalin, already attempting to repeat the enormous cruelty that Ukrainians endured under the Soviets. President Biden and the leaders of Europe should prevent such a catastrophic outcome.