a very brief history of Ukraine

I'm appalled at the abysmal ignorance I read and hear about Ukraine and its history. So, this is a very brief outline of how Ukraine got to be the way it is today, which is critical to understand what is going on there. I have two long histories of Ukraine. I'm using Paul Robert Magocsi's book as a source; I've heard him on the radio recently, and he definitely gets it.

First, you need to look at the geography of Ukraine. Aside from the Carpathian mountains in the western edge of the country and the mountains in Crimea, Ukraine is mostly very flat. As a result, it has been invaded and occupied over and over again for thousands of years, and its borders have shifted a lot. Ukraine means borderland. Ukraine is 232,200 square miles and larger than any European country aside from Russia. Ukraine's major north/south rivers include the Dniester, the Dnieper, and the Donets'. The Dnieper, in particular, runs from Chernobyl in the north, through Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk, and down to the Black Sea just west of Crimea and east of Odessa. Ukraine is very rich agriculturally, and it is also rich in natural resources, particularly in eastern Ukraine where there are coal, iron, and manganese. In 1989, ethnic Ukrainians constituted nearly 73 percent of the population and ethnic Russians 22 percent with many minorities of less than 1 percent, the largest being Jews at 0.9 percent. Ukrainians, like Russians and Belorussians, are eastern Slavs. Note that because in modern times, Ukraine was under Polish and Russian control, histories were often written to justify that control. In general, Polish and Russian histories played down or denied a uniquely Ukrainian nation. In general, the history of Crimea has been quite distinct from that of the rest of Ukraine.

The very early history of Ukraine is one of nomadic civilizations: Cimmerians from 1150 to 750 BCE, Scythians from 750 to 250 BCE, Sarmatians from 250 BCE to 250 CE, Goths from 250 to 375 CE, Huns from 375 to 550 CE, Avars fro 550 to 565 CE, Bulgars from 575 to 650 CE, and Khazars from 650 to 900 CE. Note that the Khazars were a Turkic people who migrated westward from the western edge of China and who converted to Judaism en masse while they controlled Ukraine. The ancient Greeks had settlements in Crimea as did the eastern Roman or Byzantine empire. This was the source of the spread of orthodox Christianity to eastern Slavs.

The early history of the Slavs is still not known; however, Slavs can be documented in eastern Europe in the first millennium BCE. The consensus is that the original homeland of the Slavs was in eastern Poland,, southern Belarus, and northwestern Ukraine. From there, they gradually spread outward for about a thousand years beginning around 500 BCE.

In the mid ninth century, the Verangians (Swedish Vikings) arrived. With the Slavs, they founded the Kievan Rus, which lasted for five centuries. One of the remnants of the Swedish presence is familiar names such as Vladimir (Volodomir in Swedish), Olga (Helga in Swedish), and Oleg (Helge). The precise origin of the Kievan Rus is one of the most controversial issues in Ukrainian history. In the late 980s, the ruler of the Rus, Volodymyr the Great, was baptized which marks the predominance of Christianity in Ukraine. Another very controversial issue is the linguistic origins of modern Ukrainian, Russian, and Belorussian. It seems, however, that these languages differentiated in the 13th and 14th centuries CE.

In the year 1240 CE, the Mongols arrived, razed Kiev, and destroyed the Kievan Rus. Life actually did not change much under Mongol rule; however, there was a split into three divisions: Galicia-Volhynia, Vladimir-Suzdal, and Novgorod. Vladimir-Suzdal became centered around Moscow and incorporated Novgorod as well. It became known as Muscovy.

In the 14th century, first Lithuania and then Poland arrived to conquer Ukraine. Muscovy also tried to take Ukraine but was not strong enough then. Note that Ukraine's western neighbors and new conquerors were Roman Catholics. The Lithuanian-Polish conquest also introduced feudalism to Ukraine in which most Ukrainians were serfs and the nobles were Lithuanians and Poles.

In this period, southern and eastern Ukraine were much less populated because of the threats from nomadic invaders. The last of these were the Crimean Tatars. This led to the rise of the Cossacks, who were peasants who armed themselves to take and hold the threatened territory. These Cossacks should be seen as distinct from another group, also called Cossacks, who served as mercenaries. The Ukrainian Cossacks fought for their Polish rulers, but they were also militantly Orthodox. Their first political entity was in Zaporozhia, which is in southeastern Ukraine on the Dnieper.

In 1648, under the leadership of hetman Bohdan Khmelnytski, the Cossacks revolted, took half of Ukraine's territory, and aligned with Muscovy. Their control of Ukraine lasted until 1711. Khmelnytski was also virulently anti-Jewish and killed thousands of Jews. His successor aligned more with Poland. The Cossacks and their territory became divided between Poland and Muscovy.

In 1721, Tsar Peter renamed Muscovy to be the Russian Empire and, over time, Ukraine was integrated into the empire. Russia imposed its control over the Orthodox church, and the Ukrainian language was also subordinated. These were to become important aspects of Ukrainian nationalism as it arose in the 19th century. In 1897, Dnieper Ukraine was 71.5 percent Ukrainian, 12.4 percent Russian, 8.5 percent Jewish, and had smaller numbers of other minorities. However, most of the non-Ukrainians lived in cities. The great Ukrainian writer, Nikolai Gogol, wrote in Russian because Ukrainian was not yet considered a literary language. It's ironic that the first Ukrainian cultural revival was in Kharkiv, which is in eastern Ukraine. The first great writer of Ukrainian literature was Taras Shevchenko, who published a book of poetry, Kobzar, in 1840. Shevchenko, who was born a serf, was also a fervent Ukrainian nationalist.

In 1863, Poles revolted against tsarist rule. After that, the Russian empire clamped down hard against Ukrainian nationalists and banned books in Ukrainian on the pretext that it did not exist separate from the Russian language. This was a period of scholarly resistance. However, in 1900, some Ukrainians began to organize a revolutionary national party instead of joining all-Russian parties. Others, influenced by Lenin, joined the Russian party. After a brief period of political freedom, however, the tsar clamped down once again. There was also a lot of activity in western Ukraine under Austrian control.

World War I in 1914 is a major watershed in Ukrainian history. Ukraine was a key arena of fighting. There were short periods when Ukrainian political entities existed, but by the end of the fighting, Ukraine had been incorporated into the new Soviet Union by 1920.

In 1933 came the great famine during which millions of Ukrainians starved to death. Grain was confiscated from peasants by force, and they were not given any to eat. This event powerfully shaped Ukrainians attitudes toward Russia and socialism. There is some evidence that Lenin had been planning a more benign policy toward Ukraine, but after his death, a ruthless policy was followed. The policy of Ukrainianization ended, and the great purges of the 1930s were also carried out in Ukraine.

In Crimea, at first, a Tatar Bolshevik leader promoted Tatars into the government. However, after he was purged by Stalin, that policy ended.

World War II, of course, was fought very heavily in Ukraine. Germany and Romania both invaded. Significant numbers of Ukrainians collaborated with the Germans and participated in the slaughter of Jews. However, there was also significant resistance beginning in 1941. In 1943, the Red Army defeated the Nazis at Stalingrad and proceeded to march westward. By 1944, they had taken back all of Ukraine. However, on the disputed grounds that they had collaborated with the Germans (some did, but some resisted and most were neutral), Stalin deported all Tatars from Crimea to other Soviet Republics further east.

In 1953, Joseph Stalin died, and Nikita Khrushchev, who had been assigned to Ukraine earlier, became the leader of the Soviet Union. In 1954, he gave Crimea to Ukraine.

Soviet Ukraine was both an agricultural, industrial, and resource producer, but the Soviet system had a national division of labor which means that no one country could produce many finished products on its own. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and introduced perestroika, one of his opponents was still in power in Ukraine for a few years, and that delayed changes coming to Ukraine. As late as 1990, 95 percent of industrial and agricultural production in Ukraine was still controlled from Moscow. The entire Soviet economy was in a shambles, and Ukraine had also been the host to the terrible Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. In 1990, Ukraine's parliament declared it a sovereign state. On December 1, 1991 a referendum was held on Ukrainian independence and Leonid Kravchuk, a former communist party member was elected president with 62 percent of the vote. The vote for independence was 92 percent and in each of the eastern oblasts (provinces), the vote was more than 80 percent. Even Crimea voted 54 percent for Ukrainian independence.

That is where my source ends, but, as we know, Ukraine descended into a totally corrupt state with a small number of very wealthy oligarchs and a dysfunctional economy. In 2004, there was a popular uprising against a disputed election won by Viktor Yanukovich. Viktor Yushchenko won the rerun election. He was later replaced by Yulia Timoshenko, but she did nothing to end corruption or develop the economy. Yanukovich was re-elected in 2010, and he jailed Timoshenko for her own corruption, but Yanukovich was equally corrupt and stole billions of dollars for himself, his family, and friends.

What do we mean by corruption? At the lowest level, it is a police force that routinely takes bribes for many kinds of activities. At the highest level, it is the theft of national resources. It's difficult to find a decent job, and even those with jobs have a lot of trouble making ends meet. Some enterprises, including banks, just stopped paying their employees. It's understandable that popular anger was mounting, especially as Ukrainians saw some of their neighbors doing better. In this context, the proposed agreement for closer ties with Europe was symbolic of an end to corruption and a functioning economy. However, the European Union told Ukraine that they could not make agreements with both the EU and Russia. This situation was complicated by the fact that Ukraine relies on Russia for its natural gas and that Ukrainian pipelines are a principal conduit of natural gas to Western Europe, particularly Germany. The Ukrainian government had subsidized gas prices to consumers so whenever Russia threatens to raise the price (Putin has done that more than once), the Ukrainian economy and consumers are immediately threatened. Ukraine wants more ties to Europe, but it doesn't want to break with Russia.

Ukraine, like most other European countries, has fascist rightwing parties who polled about 10 percent of the vote in the last elections. They tend to glorify and name themselves after the fascists who collaborated with the Nazis. They were very militantly active and visible in the protests in Independence Square (Maidan) in Kiev, but those protests had overwhelming popular support which was not rightwing. The organized Jewish community has issued statements asserting that these fascists are too weak to threaten them.

So, how to sort out fact from fiction in the news reports and government statements we see and hear every day. The US government and the EU would certainly like to control Ukraine, and their offers of assistance are predicated on an austerity which Ukrainians cannot afford. Their lives are already very austere. The Russian government has a few interests in preventing that. First, the Russian military is very dependent on airplanes, missiles, and ships produced in Ukraine. Second, Russia leases its large naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea. Third, Russia and Belarus are both very corrupt and undemocratic in their own right, and the example of a genuinely democratic Ukraine would appeal to their citizens. Belarus, in particular, also has a very dysfunctional economy, and it is ruled by an extremely violent dictator who has little popular support. He claimed 85 percent of the vote in the last presidential elections, but the opposition said that exit polls showed that he actually got about 35 percent.

Russian propaganda has been particularly clumsy. Putin denied that Russian troops took part in the takeover in Crimea, but he has since admitted that they were there in unmarked uniforms. The Ukrainians call these green men, and green men are seen now in eastern Ukraine, where Putin continues to deny they are present. Putin claims to be concerned about threats to ethnic Russians and Russian speakers; yet there is no evidence that there are such threats. In fact, most Ukrainians are bilingual in Russian and Ukrainian, and many for whom Russian is the first language participated in the protests for which there was obvious support in eastern cities such as Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkiv, and Donetsk. There is no sharp east/west divide in Ukraine, though there may be a generational divide in which Ukrainians who grew up in Soviet Ukraine look more to Russia than younger Ukrainians do.

Western propaganda is more subtle. We know that they want the corrupt former opposition to come to power again, and thus they do not want real progressive change in Ukraine. The difficulty for Ukrainians is that there is no party or politician who represents their real aspirations. They hate Yanukovich, and they hate Timoshenko. They don't trust the former boxer, Klitchko. They certainly don't want the fascists to come to power.

Ukraine and the Ukrainian people are thus in a very difficult situation. Nobody knows if there's a real way forward now, but to understand what is happening, any analysis must be rooted in facts and reality and not in competing big-power propaganda.