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First, a disclaimer: we are not going to annex parts of it and this text is not a try to justify this annexation.
Okay, what do we know about the history of Ukraine? First of all, modern Ukraine is a new country. But what happened on its territory since the time of Kievan Rus?
Well, there was Kievan Rus. KR was not Ukraine and it wasn't Russia. It was a state of Eastern Slavs who have not split yet into self-conscious nationalities. Kiev was a southern capital: most of the territory of Kievan Rus lay to the north of Kiev. Southern and eastern steppes were inhabited by verious Turkic tribes.
Soon a natural thing happened: the state fractured into many feudal principalities, just like any other European country. And then the Mongols arrived.
They sacked and burned most of the southern principalities of the former KR, including Kiev. Important principalities left included Vladimir-Suzdal and Galicia-Volynia. V-S would become Russia, and Galicia-Volynia is what we will talk about. Centered around Lvow, the principalities of G-V were weakened by the Mongols and had to join the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to survive. This resulted in Eastern Slavic peasantry dominated by Polish and Pollonized nobility. PLC later expanded eastwards, conquering the lands around Dnieper, including Kiev, and for a brief time reaching Black Sea.
Another inhabitants of modern Ukraine were Cossacks: more or less Slavic people who fled feudal oppression of Polish, Tatar and Muscovite states and lived in anarcho-syndicalist communes. Not everyone who lived around Dnieper was a Cossack, they were more of a warrior caste, and East Slavic peasants who lived there weren't something Cossacks cared about. Cossacks didn't have any specific loyalty, and they didn't mind serving the PLC. However, the Poles didn't really take them into account, and that was their mistake that started their downfall.
In the 17th century the populace of Dnieper was getting tired of Polish hegemony. So when a strong Cossack leader appeared, Bohdan Khmelnitsky, the uprising was imminent. At first, it was wildly successful, liberating most of the central Ukraine from the Poles. I have to add that Bohdan didn't think of the country he was liberating as Ukraine, he called himself a cossack and the ruler of Rus.
But when the PLC started pushing back, he needed an ally. There were only two neighbours he could turn to: Tatars of the Black sea coast, and Muscovy. Allying with Muslims against Catholics (forced conversion to Catholicism was one of the things that the Poles were hated for) could work, but allying with another Orthdox country was better. So Bohdan became a vassal of Tsar Alexey.
What happened to G-V? Well, it stayed in Poland.
I have mentioned the Crimean Tatars. They controlled not only the peninsula itself, but most of the northern coastline of the Black sea. After the Cossack Hetmanate joined Russia, they too became vassals of a ruler that shared their religion, Turkish pasha, who almost completely encircled the sea with his lands. This means the territory of modern Ukraine was shared by three countries:
- Russia, through the Hetmanate.
- Poland
- Turkey and its Tatar vassals.
This situation didn't change much in the following hundred years, except the Hetmanate gradually lost its independence. All changed when a German princess got the throne of Russia. Catherine the Great has done two things that shaped the future of Ukraine: she took part in the partition of Poland, and she kicked Turkey's ass. Repeatedly.
When the PLC was split between Russia, Prussia and Austria, it ended up in the last one. Lvov became Lemberg, but stayed heavily Pollonized. The rural population remained Eastern Slavic. Russia took Belarus, Lithuania and Eastern Poland, along with the majority of European Jews.
In a series of Russo-Turkish wars Catherine the Great conquered vast swathes of southern steppes, forming so-called Novorossiya, or New Russia, bringing them for the first time under the Russian crown. After expelling its Turkish and Turkic residents, she invited people from nearby provinces to settle there. This explains the national setup of Novorossiya: Jews, Ukrainians and Russians all settled there. New Russia stretched from Transnistria almost to Abkhazia, and was considered different from Malorossiya, or Lesser Russia, or Ukraine proper, which was historically Slavic.
By the time Russian national identity was already forming, at least in the nobility, there was no such Ukrainian identity: its nobility was either Pollonized (in Austria) or Russified (in Russia), and peasantry living in the steppes around Dnieper was forming a continious entity with peasantry from the northern plains and forests. Neither were yet considering themselves Russians or Ukrainians. They were both Christians, they were both ruled by Russian Tsar, there was no noticeable difference but the language.
The language of Eastern Slavs was not uniform, but gradually changed from the north to the south. Around Moscow it sounded more or less similar to Modern Russian, but in, say, Tambov, Kiev and Lvov different versions of the language were spoken. But there were still no rapid changes between languages of two neighbouring villages in different provinces.
When normative Russian language finally emerged after the war with France, along with large-scale national identity, it was based on the language norms of Central Russia. Gogol, for example, wrote in Russian, as there was no literary Ukrainian to speak of yet. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did the Ukrainian elite recognize themselves as Ukrainians and start fostering the national identity in their population. Ukrainian language, created from the local dialects of the East Slavic language, just like Russian, which was created from the Muscovite dialects, began to spread, being easier to learn and understand for the local peasantry and cityfolk.
When the Russian and Austrian empires disintegrated, Ukrainian government broke off Russia and took central Ukraine (around Kiev) and most of New Russia, which the Provisional government couldn't access. Crimea remained more or less autonomous and later became a White republic. Poland couldn't get most of its Prussian lands back, but got back Vilnius and Warsaw from Russia and Lvov from Austria.
When a Soviet government came to power in Ukraine and joined Soviet Russia, it kept New Russia, as it was closer to Kiev than Moscow. Crimea stayed in the RSFSR, and G-V in Poland. In 1939-1945 the USSR conquered Kresy, or Poland's eastern provinces with a Polish minority and distributed the lands between Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Finally Ukrainians were all living in the same country.
Let's stop for a while and take a look back.
Modern Ukraine consists of three main parts:
-central Ukraine, historically inhabited by Ukrainians and ruled by Poland/Russia
-western Ukraine, historically inhabited by Ukrainians and ruled by Poland/Austria
-southern and eastern Ukraine, historically inhabited by nomadic Turkic tribes, but conquered by Russia in the 18th century and inhabited since then by a mix of ethnicities with a strong Russian minority, even a majority in some regions.
This can be observed on a map of political affiliations.
Western Ukraine, which has never been ruled by Russia, consider themselves a European country and support the party of Viktor Yushchenko, "Our Ukraine".
Central Ukraine, including Kiev, supports Yulia Timoshekon and her party. She proposes a more moderate approach, trying to play Europe and Russia against each other.
Southern and Eastern Ukraine supports the Party of Regions, led by Viktor Yanukovich and known for its pro-Russian attitude.
There's also a region on the westernmost extremity of Ukraine, inhabited by a small branch of Eastern Slavs, Rusyns. They hate Ukrainians so much that they are more pro-Russian than our Serb.
So, back to the story. About ten years after the war Khrushchev made a symbolic gift from the RSFSR to the UkSSR. Crimea. This didn't mean much from the practical viewpoint: both republics were parts of the USSR. This meant a lot after the union fell apart. This is also why the peninsula has a Russian majority, and by that I do not mean people with Russian passports. I mean people with Russian hearts.
As you can see, there's no single Ukraine that you can describe in a single sentence. It's one of the countries that had a misfortune to exist between several great powers, like Benelux or Serbia. This is why you shouldn't pull it into alliances. If you pull too hard, it will come apart at the seams.
Okay, what do we know about the history of Ukraine? First of all, modern Ukraine is a new country. But what happened on its territory since the time of Kievan Rus?
Well, there was Kievan Rus. KR was not Ukraine and it wasn't Russia. It was a state of Eastern Slavs who have not split yet into self-conscious nationalities. Kiev was a southern capital: most of the territory of Kievan Rus lay to the north of Kiev. Southern and eastern steppes were inhabited by verious Turkic tribes.
Soon a natural thing happened: the state fractured into many feudal principalities, just like any other European country. And then the Mongols arrived.
They sacked and burned most of the southern principalities of the former KR, including Kiev. Important principalities left included Vladimir-Suzdal and Galicia-Volynia. V-S would become Russia, and Galicia-Volynia is what we will talk about. Centered around Lvow, the principalities of G-V were weakened by the Mongols and had to join the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to survive. This resulted in Eastern Slavic peasantry dominated by Polish and Pollonized nobility. PLC later expanded eastwards, conquering the lands around Dnieper, including Kiev, and for a brief time reaching Black Sea.
Another inhabitants of modern Ukraine were Cossacks: more or less Slavic people who fled feudal oppression of Polish, Tatar and Muscovite states and lived in anarcho-syndicalist communes. Not everyone who lived around Dnieper was a Cossack, they were more of a warrior caste, and East Slavic peasants who lived there weren't something Cossacks cared about. Cossacks didn't have any specific loyalty, and they didn't mind serving the PLC. However, the Poles didn't really take them into account, and that was their mistake that started their downfall.
In the 17th century the populace of Dnieper was getting tired of Polish hegemony. So when a strong Cossack leader appeared, Bohdan Khmelnitsky, the uprising was imminent. At first, it was wildly successful, liberating most of the central Ukraine from the Poles. I have to add that Bohdan didn't think of the country he was liberating as Ukraine, he called himself a cossack and the ruler of Rus.
But when the PLC started pushing back, he needed an ally. There were only two neighbours he could turn to: Tatars of the Black sea coast, and Muscovy. Allying with Muslims against Catholics (forced conversion to Catholicism was one of the things that the Poles were hated for) could work, but allying with another Orthdox country was better. So Bohdan became a vassal of Tsar Alexey.
What happened to G-V? Well, it stayed in Poland.
I have mentioned the Crimean Tatars. They controlled not only the peninsula itself, but most of the northern coastline of the Black sea. After the Cossack Hetmanate joined Russia, they too became vassals of a ruler that shared their religion, Turkish pasha, who almost completely encircled the sea with his lands. This means the territory of modern Ukraine was shared by three countries:
- Russia, through the Hetmanate.
- Poland
- Turkey and its Tatar vassals.
This situation didn't change much in the following hundred years, except the Hetmanate gradually lost its independence. All changed when a German princess got the throne of Russia. Catherine the Great has done two things that shaped the future of Ukraine: she took part in the partition of Poland, and she kicked Turkey's ass. Repeatedly.
When the PLC was split between Russia, Prussia and Austria, it ended up in the last one. Lvov became Lemberg, but stayed heavily Pollonized. The rural population remained Eastern Slavic. Russia took Belarus, Lithuania and Eastern Poland, along with the majority of European Jews.
In a series of Russo-Turkish wars Catherine the Great conquered vast swathes of southern steppes, forming so-called Novorossiya, or New Russia, bringing them for the first time under the Russian crown. After expelling its Turkish and Turkic residents, she invited people from nearby provinces to settle there. This explains the national setup of Novorossiya: Jews, Ukrainians and Russians all settled there. New Russia stretched from Transnistria almost to Abkhazia, and was considered different from Malorossiya, or Lesser Russia, or Ukraine proper, which was historically Slavic.
By the time Russian national identity was already forming, at least in the nobility, there was no such Ukrainian identity: its nobility was either Pollonized (in Austria) or Russified (in Russia), and peasantry living in the steppes around Dnieper was forming a continious entity with peasantry from the northern plains and forests. Neither were yet considering themselves Russians or Ukrainians. They were both Christians, they were both ruled by Russian Tsar, there was no noticeable difference but the language.
The language of Eastern Slavs was not uniform, but gradually changed from the north to the south. Around Moscow it sounded more or less similar to Modern Russian, but in, say, Tambov, Kiev and Lvov different versions of the language were spoken. But there were still no rapid changes between languages of two neighbouring villages in different provinces.
When normative Russian language finally emerged after the war with France, along with large-scale national identity, it was based on the language norms of Central Russia. Gogol, for example, wrote in Russian, as there was no literary Ukrainian to speak of yet. Only in the second half of the nineteenth century did the Ukrainian elite recognize themselves as Ukrainians and start fostering the national identity in their population. Ukrainian language, created from the local dialects of the East Slavic language, just like Russian, which was created from the Muscovite dialects, began to spread, being easier to learn and understand for the local peasantry and cityfolk.
When the Russian and Austrian empires disintegrated, Ukrainian government broke off Russia and took central Ukraine (around Kiev) and most of New Russia, which the Provisional government couldn't access. Crimea remained more or less autonomous and later became a White republic. Poland couldn't get most of its Prussian lands back, but got back Vilnius and Warsaw from Russia and Lvov from Austria.
When a Soviet government came to power in Ukraine and joined Soviet Russia, it kept New Russia, as it was closer to Kiev than Moscow. Crimea stayed in the RSFSR, and G-V in Poland. In 1939-1945 the USSR conquered Kresy, or Poland's eastern provinces with a Polish minority and distributed the lands between Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Finally Ukrainians were all living in the same country.
Let's stop for a while and take a look back.
Modern Ukraine consists of three main parts:
-central Ukraine, historically inhabited by Ukrainians and ruled by Poland/Russia
-western Ukraine, historically inhabited by Ukrainians and ruled by Poland/Austria
-southern and eastern Ukraine, historically inhabited by nomadic Turkic tribes, but conquered by Russia in the 18th century and inhabited since then by a mix of ethnicities with a strong Russian minority, even a majority in some regions.
This can be observed on a map of political affiliations.
Western Ukraine, which has never been ruled by Russia, consider themselves a European country and support the party of Viktor Yushchenko, "Our Ukraine".
Central Ukraine, including Kiev, supports Yulia Timoshekon and her party. She proposes a more moderate approach, trying to play Europe and Russia against each other.
Southern and Eastern Ukraine supports the Party of Regions, led by Viktor Yanukovich and known for its pro-Russian attitude.
There's also a region on the westernmost extremity of Ukraine, inhabited by a small branch of Eastern Slavs, Rusyns. They hate Ukrainians so much that they are more pro-Russian than our Serb.
So, back to the story. About ten years after the war Khrushchev made a symbolic gift from the RSFSR to the UkSSR. Crimea. This didn't mean much from the practical viewpoint: both republics were parts of the USSR. This meant a lot after the union fell apart. This is also why the peninsula has a Russian majority, and by that I do not mean people with Russian passports. I mean people with Russian hearts.
As you can see, there's no single Ukraine that you can describe in a single sentence. It's one of the countries that had a misfortune to exist between several great powers, like Benelux or Serbia. This is why you shouldn't pull it into alliances. If you pull too hard, it will come apart at the seams.
... and in the past I thought about "how come Russians let Crimea go away into Ukraine" but now I got my answer it seems... USSR in the end was not totally pro-Russian...
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