Thoughts after reading– “The Gates of Europe” https://archive.org/details/the-gates-of-europe-a-history-of-ukraine-2015-serhii-plokhy/The%20Gates%20Of%20Europe%3B%20A%20History%20Of%20Ukraine%20%282015%29-Serhii%20Plokhy%20/ on Ukraine and Russia
There are four distinct parts of Ukraine: the Black Sea Coast, the steppes, the forested area and the mountains. They share a common language and culture; they have been sometimes united and sometimes divided by their more powerful neighbors.
Portions of Ukraine in the East are Russian speaking; portions in the West have had a strong affinity with and/or equivalent antipathy for the Poles and Austro-Hungarians. The Crimean Peninsula was historically populated by Crimean Tatars. For over 1000 years Ukrainians have struggled for their independence and autonomy against stronger invading neighbors from the South, North, East, and West who have sought to subjugate them. Their internal divisions have often been self-defeating in these struggles for nationhood.
The Black Sea coastline was and is the conduit for trade and commerce from Ukraine into the Middle East and into the Mediterranean Sea. The fertile steppes are much like our Great Plains. Historically, this was the sparsely populated area for nomadic, independent, and war like tribes, and it served as the four-lane highway for horse born invasions from Central Asian tribes seeking plunder and conquest. The forested area was fertile, settled farmland. It was also the area in which the early Ukrainian cities like Kiev, Kharkiv and Lviv developed; at many times it had large landowning estates and local or foreign imposed aristocracies. The Carpathian Mountains are in the West close to the old Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Ukraine has major rivers running north and south: the Dnieper, the Don, and the Dniester. The Dnieper bisects the nation while the Don and Dniester are on the east and western borders respectively. At certain times, the landowning Poles, Lithuanians-and Austro-Hungarian aristocrats controlled the Ukrainian lands west of the Dnieper; while the Russian landowning aristocrats controlled the Ukrainian lands to the east of the Dnieper. Ukrainians were the peasants and serfs working the land for these landowners of a different nationality. Eastern Ukraine was initially Greek Orthodox; Western Ukraine was orthodox as well, and then it became Roman Catholic under the sway of the Poles. The Uniate Church sought to bridge the theological rifts between the two Christian religions. The Crimean Tatars lived in the buffer zone between Ukraine and the Muslim world; they conducted slaving expeditions and operated slave markets of Ukrainian men and women captured to serve the Arab, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires.
The ancient Greeks traded and established colonies along the Black Sea Coast of Ukraine well before the rise of the Roman Empire. After Rome was sacked and fell, leadership of the remaining Empire passed to Constantinople astride the Bosporus (controlling access between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean) which became Byzantium; it lasted another 1000 years as the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantines traded along the Dnieper and spread Christianity, writing, and learning up the river into Kiev in the year 1,000 AD.
The Arab Empires based in the Middle East rose to become the extraordinary centers of learning and civilization beginning in the seventh Century. They were the rich and powerful centers attracting trade and commerce from the hinterlands of the Black Sea. The Arab Empires declined and were then replaced by the Ottoman Turks who conquered Anatolia and Byzantium and much of the Arab world.
The Ottoman Turks took over the role of the Byzantine Empire in the 1400s as the pre-eminent power along the coasts of the Black Sea. The Ottoman Empire retained its roles along the Black Sea until partially displaced by the growing Russian Empire in Crimea, the Balkans, and the Caucasus.
The Vikings were raiders, traders, and settlers from Scandinavia, who spread from their homes on the Baltic coasts down the rivers of today’s Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus and into the Black Sea where they besieged Constantinople/Byzantium/today’s Istanbul beginning in the Seventh Century. We often think of Vikings primarily as raiders and pillagers, but they were also settlers and farmers who built settlements as far west as Newfoundland, and as far south as Sicily; they governed Normandy in France and then England.
The Byzantine monks came up the river from Byzantium and converted the pagan Vikings who had settled in the Kiev area to Christianity about 1000 AD. The now Christianized Vikings in Kiev created a flourishing beautiful medieval city modeled on Byzantium; it ruled much of what is now Ukraine as well as parts of European Russia. They experienced dynastic succession issues and consequently split up into many smaller and ever weaker principalities. Both Ukraine and Russia claim lineage from the principality of the Kievan Rus; ethnically most are Slavs native to the region, not Scandinavians.
About two and a half centuries later in the mid 13th Century, Genghis Khan and his Mongolian calvary swept in from Central Asia and destroyed Kiev and the civilization it had built. His successors ruled much of Russia, good parts of China, Korea, and Central Asia, sometimes for many centuries. The Mongols invaded much of eastern Europe and even pushed into Central Europe.
After the defeat of the Mongols by the Austrians at the gates of Vienna in the mid 13th Century, the Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians, and Bulgarians began to push back the Mongols; they used a combination of heavy calvary, heavily armored knights and stone fortifications which were effective against the highly mobile light calvary of the Mongols. As the Mongols were defeated and retreated, they expanded their own empires and kingdoms into the lands they had vacated.
Ukraine was next ruled in part by the Polish/Lithuanian Empires (in the West), the growing Russian Empire under Peter the Great and his successors (in the East), and the powerful Ottoman Empire (in the South). Cossack revolts coming out of the steppes and the areas below the Dnieper rapids established an independent Ukraine, known as the Hetmanate, in the 16th and 17th Centuries. They elected their own leaders, and they were free from the serfdom prevailing in the regions controlled by Polish and Russian landowners and the slavery prevalent in the Ottoman controlled lands. They included runaway serfs, slaves and free land-owning peasants. They fought and beat the Poles with the assistance of the calvary from the Crimean Tatars and drove many of the foreign landowners out of the lands of the Hetmanate.
However, when the Crimean Tatars and Ottoman Turks proved repeatedly to be untrustworthy allies in battle, the Hetmanate sought to ally with the Russians against the Poles. The Hetmanate looked at this as a military alliance or contract; the Russians viewed it as joining the Russian Empire and acted accordingly. They introduced serfdom under Russian nobles and Russian rule from St. Petersburg, then later under Catherine the Great they began steadily suppressing the Ukrainian language and culture. The Hetmanate then shifted their allegiances to an alliance with Charles Xll, the mad military genius king of Sweden, who was invading the Russian Empire. Their combined forces lost to the Russians at the decisive battle of Poltava in the early 18th Century. After a series of wars, the Poles and Russians agreed to split their respective portions of the Ukraine with the dividing line along the Dnieper River.
During the 18th Century, four empires, the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Poles/Lithuanians and the Ottomans, split Ukraine among them. The Poles were beaten in a series of wars during the 19th Century, and Poland was then partitioned among the growing German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires.
The Russians and the Ottoman Turks fought about twelve wars between 1568 and 1918 over control of Ukraine, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. Typically, the Russians beat the Turks and took more of their territory in each of these wars. Ideological and theological issues such as Pan-Slavism and Christianity vs. Islam pervaded these conflicts, which were primarily conflicts for dominance between growing and declining empires. Occasionally Great Britain and France intervened on behalf of either the Russians or the Turks to preserve navigation through the Bosporus. The Russians took Crimea from the Turks and Tatars during the 18th and 19th Centuries, and the Russians set up quasi-independent Russian client states (e.g. Serbia and Bulgaria) throughout the Balkans, and they appropriated the Caucasus region into their empire as they expanded at the expense of the empires of the Turks and the Persians. https://daily.jstor.org/empire-the-russian-way/#:~:text=Russia%27s%20imperial%20growth%20was%20largely,and%20Ottoman%20and%20Persian%20empires.
By the end of the 19th Century, Ukraine and Poland had each been partitioned out of existence. In the Russian controlled area of Ukraine, industrialization was encouraged, and this led to rise of coal, iron, and steel industries in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. Railroads were built connecting Ukrainian agricultural and industrial output to the Black Sea, the Mediterranean and the fast-growing Western European industrial economies. In the Austro-Hungarian portion, there was much greater latitude for local autonomy, for the use of the Ukrainian language and culture.
Nationalism was rising throughout Europe during the 19th Century challenging the dominions of aging empires unable to respond to the aspirations of their diverse populations, and this helped lead to the First World War. In Ukraine, this rising nationalism took the form of the rise in Ukrainian culture and language and efforts to secure their own political autonomy within the ambit of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires.
During and in aftermath of World War l, the Russian, Turkish, German and Austro-Hungarian Empires collapsed and disappeared, and were replaced by democracies and by the world’s first communist state. During the 19th Century Russia had served as a bulwark for the autocratic forces opposing revolutionary democracies, growing nationalism, and the rise of worker’s rights. In an extraordinary about face, 20th Century Russia become the chief proponent and exporter of revolutions for worker’s rights and freedom of oppressed nations and peoples from their colonial rulers and landowners. New nation states such as Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and a restored Poland (but not Ukraine) were created and crafted at the Versailles Peace Table. Instead, a Civil War was fought in Ukraine between the Moscow Bolsheviks (Red Army), the Ukrainian Mensheviks, the Ukrainian nationalists, and the White Army (which sought to restore Tsarist rule). Ukraine had a short three-year existence as an independent socialist state before the Red Army crushed all opposition and incorporated it into the USSR.
After the First World War, Russia lost Finland, the Baltics, Poland, and Bessarabia (today’s Moldova). The independence of the Balkan states was assured (until the next war); Poland was resurrected as an independent state (until the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact dismantled it); however, Ukraine was not.
Russia was no longer an empire, ruled by a hereditary Tsar; it became the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the first new Communist state, a new form of government and economy. Each of the constituent Republics of the USSR, represented a separate nationality and, according to the USSR’s Constitution, each had a right to secede as an independent Republic. For example, there was an Armenian Republic, a Ukrainian Republic, a Georgian Republic, a Russian Republic, a Republic for the Kazakh’s and another for the Turkmen, the Uzbeks, the Kirghiz and other nationalities. The concept underlying this regional autonomy is that it would solve Russia’s extensive nationalities problems (1/3rd of the population was not Russian) and they were concentrated in the different regions.
Under Lenin, there was a fair degree of regional autonomy for each Soviet Republic, and the NEP (New Economic Plan) promised some degree of economic freedom to stimulate growth. The governing principles, however, were the dictatorship of the proletariat, embodied in the leadership of the Communist Party, the elimination of private ownership of property, and its replacement by public ownership.
Lenin was succeeded by Stalin who centralized all controls in Moscow, eliminated regional autonomy, and suppressed nationalities. Stalin’s five-year plans set ambitious goals for the growth of industry to be financed by even more ambitious goals for agricultural production, which would earn the foreign currency needed to pay for industrial growth. This was accompanied by the large-scale collectivization of farms, in other words the end to an individual small farmer’s land ownership. Ukraine, as the breadbasket of Russia, was especially hard-hit by the unrealistic targets for agricultural production, the ineffectiveness of Soviet collectivization, and the police state efforts seeking to compel farmers in rural Ukraine to achieve these unrealistic targets. Its farmers and rural communities starved to death during the Holdomor (about 4 million died), as Stalin’s police state commandeered their agricultural products. Ukraine’s industrial workers thrived, and this was particularly true in the big cities, the Donbas, and the Black Sea coast which expereinced rapid industrial growth. Stalin increasingly resorted to show trials, executions, exiles to Siberia and a pervasive police state to enforce his dictates.
Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact in 1939. https://www.britannica.com/event/German-Soviet-Nonaggression-Pact A series of Secret Protocols divided up eastern and Central Europe between them; the Protocols were not discovered until after the war. Under the Protocols, they shared Poland and divided Romania. The USSR would get Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Shortly after they attacked Poland from opposite sides, and Stalin invaded and annexed the Baltics as newly acquired Republics into the USSR.
Less than two years later, Germany attacked the USSR, took the Baltics, Ukraine, the rest of Poland and a good portion of Russia before they were devastatingly defeated at Stalingrad in 1943. Ukraine was at the epicenter of the killings and widespread destruction in the Eastern Front, losing as much as 1/4th of its population during the war. While most Ukrainians fought in the Red Army against the Nazis; a portion collaborated with the Nazis, and some of them participated in the massive killings of Ukrainian Jews (a million were killed by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators). Some nationalists (from the OUN) fought for Ukrainian independence against both the Nazis and the Red Army and continued their armed guerilla warfare centered in Western Ukraine for nearly 10 years after the end of World War ll.
As the Red Army progressed, Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the Balkans, and Hungary were liberated from the Nazi’s. Stalin, however, took them over as war booty (Soviet controlled satellite states) for the USSR or in the case of the Balkans incorporated them into the USSR.
Rebuilding of Russia. The new satellite states were used to help finance the reconstruction of Russia which had lost about 28 million dead in the war. Ukraine suffered the highest percentages of destruction and of civilians killed from the war. The lessons and terrible losses of WW 2 resonate deeply in Russia and Ukraine.
Russian economic growth from the mid 20s to the mid 60’s exceeded even the US growth during that period; a backwards agricultural society was rapidly transformed into an industrial one. Scientific and technical advances, such as those necessary to the launching of Sputnik, became common place. Ukraine, particularly in the East and South prospered during this transformation of the USSR into an advanced industrial society and a nuclear superpower.
Then from the 70’s forward, Russia’s growth rate was anemic, and the Donbas region of Ukraine (coal, iron and steel) suffered economic decline comparable to the American Rust Belt. Russia had made huge commitments to military spending which it could neither sustain nor readily shift towards more productive civilian economic uses. Essentially productivity collapsed, and bad economic decision-making in a centrally planned system without market incentives left the USSR further and further behind the rapid economic and societal advances being achieved in Western Europe. https://content.csbs.utah.edu/~mli/Economics%207004/Allen-103.pdf
Khrushchev had been the party leader in Ukraine during and after the war, and he brought along many of his Ukrainian loyalists when he replaced Stalin, so Ukraine’s importance as a region and the role of Ukrainians in the USSR prospered during his tenure from the early 50’s to the early 60’s. He exposed many of the Stalin era abuses and reduced the extent and brutality of the police state Stalin had put in place.
He also made Crimea a part of the Ukraine region. Crimea had been the home of the Crimean Tatars. They had been deported to Siberia under Stalin and replaced by Russians loyal to Stalin. Crimea included the warm weather naval port of Sebastopol. That port was key to the Russian navy as, absent the Ukrainian ports, Russia has only a very few ice-free ocean ports such as St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, and Murmansk.
Under Brezhnev and his successors, Ukraine’s prominence was diminished; the party leadership gave less regional autonomy and emphasized the preeminence of central planning from Moscow. Efforts to reform increasingly sclerotic and corrupt systems were crushed in the Eastern European satellites; Soviet dissidents were imprisoned or exiled. Life expectancies dropped, and alcoholism was increasingly pervasive. The coal, iron and steel industries in Ukraine declined in their competitiveness. The central planning apparatus in Moscow made a steady series of bad investment and economic decisions. Black markets appeared everywhere for those who could afford them.
Gorbachev tried to reform the USSR’s political and economic systems from within, but it was too little, too cautious, and too late. The Baltics, Poland and Hungary led the way in asserting their independence from the USSR. Then the Russian Federation and Ukraine declared their independence, and the USSR formally dissolved. https://millercenter.org/gorbachev-and-ussr
Putin rose to power in the Russian Federation, succeeding Boris Yeltsin who had instituted democratic and economic reforms while the Russian economy collapsed. He re-introduced authoritarian rule and reverted towards a police state where his opponents were killed or jailed. In another 180 degrees turnabout from the prior century, he became a prime supporter of reactionary rightwing parties and extremists in Europe and the US. He has sought to restore the Russian Empire (remember it lost half its population when the USSR dissolved), using force in Georgia, Crimea, Moldova, and now Ukraine to achieve his goals. Access to and control of the Black Sea ports, control over Ukraine’s rich agriculture, and protection from NATO expansion seem to be his three key goals in the nine years war in Ukraine.
Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine meanwhile has shifted ever more towards the EU and NATO for two reasons: the economic growth and investment opportunities inside the EU, and protection from Putin’s expansionist Russia through NATO. NATO and the US have been cautious as they do not want to provoke a war with Putin; however, his unprovoked aggression has validated the warnings of the Baltics and Poland about Putin’s intentions unless he is checked now. His credibility has been destroyed, and the foundations of Western democratic solidarity have been strengthened in the US and Europe. Likewise, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the US and other nations have become increasingly concerned about Chinese military intentions towards Taiwan and in the South China Sea. As a world we are increasingly at peril of a terrible and unspeakable conflict between a militarily expansionist China/Russian axis and the US and its European and Asian allies seeking their containment. Ukraine could become the flash point.