UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe, the second most populous among the Soviet successor states and Europe's second largest country after Russia. Its population in 2001 was 48,457,100, with ethnic Ukrainians comprising 77.8 percent of the total. Russians constitute by far the largest ethnic minority in the country (17.3%). Ukrainians are an Eastern Slavic people who speak the Ukrainian language, which is closely related to Russian and uses the Ukrainian version of the Cyrillic alphabet. The capital of Ukraine is Kiev (Kyiv). Geographically, Ukraine consists largely of fertile level plains that are ideal for agriculture. The country's main river is the Dnieper (Dnipro).

EARLY HISTORY

Ukraine did not exist in its current territorial form until the twentieth century. In ancient times, different parts of Ukraine were inhabited by the Scythians and Sarmatians, but Slavic tribes moved into the area during the fifth and sixth centuries. During the ninth century, the Varangians, who had controlled trade on the Dnieper, united the East Slavic tribal confederations into the state known as Kievan Rus. During the late tenth century, the Rus princes accepted Christianity and began developing a high culture in Church Slavonic. Scholars, however, believe that modern Ukrainian is a lineal descendent of the colloquial language that was spoken in Kievan Rus. The power of Kievan Rus began declining during the twelfth century, and during the thirteenth it was conquered by the Mongols. After the fall of Kiev, linguistic divergences between the languages spoken by Eastern Slavs in the Ukrainian and Russian lands began to harden.

Indigenous state tradition in the Ukrainian territories was extinguished during the early fourteenth century with the decline of the Galician-Volhynian Principality in the west. During the second half of this century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a rising Eastern European empire at the time, annexed virtually all the Ukrainian lands except Galicia, which was claimed by Poland. But the East Slavic lands preserved considerable autonomy, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania even adopted the local Ruthenian language as its state language. This changed in 1569, when the dynastic union between Lithuania and Poland evolved into a constitutional union. The indigenous nobility gradually became Polonized, cities came to be dominated by Poles and Jews, and the local peasantry was enserfed and exploited. In 1596 a crisis in the Orthodox Church and pressure from Polish Catholics prompted the majority of Ukrainian Orthodox bishops in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to sign an act of union with Rome, resulting in the creation of the Uniate Church and a religious rift between the Orthodox and Uniate churches. From that time, social grievances of the Ukrainian lower classes coalesced with religious and national anxieties.

These growing tensions found their expression in the Cossack rebellions. The Cossacks were a class of free warriors that emerged during the sixteenth century on Ukraine's southern steppe frontier. Although originally employed by Polish governors to defend steppe settlements against the Crimean Tatars, the Cossacks, many of whom had been peasants fleeing serfdom, identified with the religious and social concerns of lower-class Ukrainians. In 1648 a large Cossack revolt turned into a peasant war. Led by a disgruntled Cossack officer named Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the rebels, who had secured Tatar support and had seen their ranks swelled with peasant recruits, inflicted several crushing defeats on the Poles. Khmelnytsky, who had been elected the Cossack leader, or hetman, and calling himself a defender of Orthodoxy and the Ruthenian people, soon began building a de facto independent Cossack state. Looking for allies against Poland, in 1654 Khmelnytsky concluded the Pereiaslav Treaty with Muscovy; the significance of this treaty remains a subject of controversy.

Whether it was intended as a temporary diplomatic maneuver or a unification of two states, according to the treaty, the Cossack polity accepted the tsar's suzerainty while preserving its wide-ranging autonomy. In the long run, however, the Russian authorities gradually curtailed the Cossacks' self-rule and, by the late eighteenth century, had established their direct control of Ukraine. The last serious attempt to break with Russia took place under Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who joined Charles XII of Sweden in his war against Tsar Peter I, but

the Russian army and the loyalist Cossacks defeated the united Swedish-Ukrainian forces in the Battle of Poltava (1709). The last hetman, a largely symbolic figure, was forced to resign in 1764, and in 1775 the Russian army destroyed the Zaporozhian Host, the principal bastion of the Ukrainian Cossacks.

IMPERIAL RULE

Poland remained the master of Galicia, Volhynia, and other Ukrainian lands west of the Dnieper until its partitions in the years from 1772 to 1795. Following the disappearance of the Polish state, Galicia became part of the Austrian Empire, while other Ukrainian territories were incorporated into the Russian Empire, ruled by the Romanov Dynasty. The Ukrainian people's experience within the two empires was markedly different.

The Romanovs abolished the administrative distinctiveness of Ukrainian territories and promoted the assimilation of Ukrainians. The apogee of this policy was the 1863 official ban on Ukrainian-language publications, which was reinforced in 1876. Yet, the Russian conquest of the Crimea in 1783 opened up the southern steppes for colonization, thus greatly expanding Ukrainian ethnic territory. Following the abolition of serfdom in 1861, industrial development began in earnest in southeastern Ukraine, resulting in the creation of large coal and metallurgical centers in the Donbas and Kryvyi Rih regions. The Russian cultural physiognomy of cities and industrial settlements produced an assimilated working class, which would identify politically with all-Russian parties.

Like elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the Ukrainian national revival began with the discovery of a new notion of nationality as a cultural and linguistic community. Literature soon emerged as the primary vehicle of cultural nationalism, and the great poet Taras Shevchenko came to be seen as its high priest. Together with other members of the Cyril and Methodius Society (1845–1847), Shevchenko also laid the foundations of Ukrainian political thought, which revolved around the idea of transforming the Russian Empire into a democratic federation. Such was the reasoning of the hromady (communities), secret clubs of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, which spearheaded the Ukrainian national movement during the second half of the century. Ukrainian political parties began emerging at the turn of the twentieth century, yet could not built a mass support base during the short period of legal existence between the Revolution of 1905 and the beginning of World War I.

The Habsburg Empire, in contrast, was based simultaneously on accommodating its major nationalities and pitting them against each other. In addition to Transcarpathia, which for centuries had been part of the Hungarian crown, during the late eighteenth century the Habsburgs acquired two other ethnic Ukrainian regions: Eastern Galicia and Northern Bukovyna. In Galicia the landlord class was overwhelmingly Polish, whereas in Bukovyna Ukrainians competed with Romanians for influence. Although they were never Vienna's favorites, the Ruthenians of the Habsburg Empire did not experience the repressions against their national development that were suffered by the Little Russians (Ukrainians) in the Russian Empire. Ukrainians benefited from educational reforms that established instruction in their native language, and by the official recognition of the Uniate Church, which would become their national institution.

Ukrainians emerged as a political nationality during the Revolution of 1848, when they established the Supreme Ruthenian Council in Lviv and put forward a demand to divide Galicia into Ukrainian and Polish parts. The abolition of serfdom in 1848, however, did not lead to the industrial transformation of Ukrainian territories, which remained an agrarian backwater. Land hunger and rural overpopulation resulted in mass emigration of Ukrainians to North America, beginning in the 1880s. Modern political parties began emerging during the 1890s, and the introduction in 1907 of a universal suffrage provided Ukrainians with increasing political representation. However, the Ukrainian-Polish ethnic conflict in Galicia deepened during the early twentieth century. Developments in Bukovyna largely paralleled those in Galicia, while Transcarpathia remained politically and culturally dormant.

WORLD WAR I AND THE REVOLUTION

Galicia and Bukovyna were a military theater during much of World War I. The annexation of these lands and the suppression of Ukrainian nationalism there was one of Russia's war aims, but Russian control of Lviv proved short-lived. In the Russian Empire, the February Revolution of 1917 triggered an impressive revival of Ukrainian political and cultural life. In March of that year representatives of Ukrainian parties and civic organizations formed the Central Rada (Council) in Kiev, which elected the distinguished historian Mykhail Sergeyevich Hrushevsky as its president. Instead of a dual power, the situation in the Ukrainian provinces resembled a triple power, with the Russian Provisional Government, the Soviets, and the Rada all claiming authority.

With the Rada's influence steadily increasing, the Provisional Government was forced to recognize it and, in July 1917, grant Ukraine autonomy. Following the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd on November 7, the Rada refused to recognize the new Soviet government and proclaimed the creation of the Ukrainian People's Republic, in federation with a future, democratic Russia. Meanwhile, at the first All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets (Kharkiv, December 1917), the Bolsheviks proclaimed Ukraine a Soviet republic. In January 1918 Bolshevik troops from Russia began advancing on Kiev, prompting the proclamation by the Central Rada of full independence on January 22.

Following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Bolsheviks were forced to evacuate their troops from Ukraine. The Rada government returned with the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, but it was too left-leaning for the Central Powers. In April 1918 a German-supported coup installed General Pavlo Skoropadsky as Hetman of Ukraine. This conservative monarchy lasted in Ukraine until December, when the defeated Central Powers withdrew their troops, and was replaced by the Directory of the Ukrainian People's Republic. The new government was at first a dictatorship of several Ukrainian socialists and nationalists, who had previously been associated with the Rada, but later all power became concentrated in the hands of Symon Petliura.

As the Austro-Hungarian Empire began disintegrating in October 1918, the Ukrainian political leaders there declared the creation of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic. On January 22, 1919, the two Ukrainian republics proclaimed their unification, which, however, was never carried through. The Western Republic found itself fighting a civil war against the Poles, who claimed all of Galicia for their new state and eventually defeated the Ukrainian forces in July 1919. In the meantime, the Eastern Republic was being torn apart in an even more confusing and brutal civil war fought among the Directory, the Reds, the Whites, and various anarchist armies. The collapse of civic order in 1919 resulted in Jewish pogroms, which were committed by all the participating armies, but especially by unruly peasant rebels. By early 1920 Soviet forces controlled all Ukrainian territories of the former Russian Empire except Volhynia and Western Podolia, which were occupied by Poland. A Polish-Soviet war in the spring and summer of 1920 briefly restored the Petliura government in Kiev, but ultimately resulted in the affirmation of Ukraine's division between the USSR and Poland. Northern Bukovyna became part of the Kingdom of Romania, while Transcarpathia found itself within a newly created Czechoslovak republic.

INTERWAR UKRAINE

The Ukrainian territories under Bolshevik control had been constituted as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which in 1922 became a founding member of the Soviet Union. Although it possessed all the structures and symbols of an independent state, Soviet Ukraine was effectively governed from Moscow. During the early years of Bolshevik rule, the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, or CP(b)U, was predominantly Russian and Jewish in its ethnic composition. The proportion of Ukrainians increased to some 20 percent only in 1920, after the absorption of the Borotbisty, a non-Bolshevik communist party in Ukraine. Still, the CP(b)U always remained an integral part of the All-Union Communist Party.

During the 1920s, in order to reach out to the overwhelmingly peasant population and disarm the appeal of Ukrainian nationalism, the Bolsheviks pursued the policy of Ukrainization. This affirmative action program fostered education, publishing, and official communication in the Ukrainian language, and sponsored the recruitment of Ukrainians to party and government structures. By the late 1920s the proportion of ethnic Ukrainians in the CP(b)U exceeded 50 percent. The Ukrainization drive eventually caused resistance among Russian bureaucrats in Ukraine and uneasiness in Moscow. Yet, some Ukrainian Bolsheviks, led by the vocal Mykola Skrypnyk, defended the policy of Ukrainization. Peasant resistance to the forcible collectivization of agriculture during the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932) led to Moscow's denunciation of Ukrainization and its defenders. Skrypnyk killed himself in 1933, the same year that millions of Ukrainian peasants died in a catastrophic famine, which was caused by state policies. Ukrainian cultural figures suffered disproportionately during the Great Terror. Stalinist-era industrialization, however, turned the Ukrainian republic into a developed industrial region.

In interwar Poland and Romania, Ukrainians experienced discrimination and assimilationist pressure. By the mid-1930s, popular discontent with the inability of mainstream Ukrainian political parties, such as the National Democrats, to counter Polish oppression, propelled Ukrainian radical nationalists to prominence. The conspiratorial Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN, founded in 1929) became increasingly influential among Ukrainian youth. The situation was different in Czechoslovakia, where the government promoted multiculturalism and modernized the economy in Transcarpathia. When Hitler began dismembering Czechoslovakia in 1938, this region was granted autonomy and briefly enjoyed independence as Carpatho-Ukraine before being occupied by Hungary.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (August 1939) transferred Poland's Ukrainian territories and Romania's Northern Bukovyna to the Soviet sphere of influence. The USSR occupied these regions in September 1939 and June 1940, respectively, under the guise of reuniting the Ukrainian nation within a single state structure. The OUN had just split into a more moderate wing led by Andrii Melnyk and a more radical one under the leadership of Stepan Bandera. The infighting between the OUN(M) and OUN(B) effectively prevented radical nationalists from putting up any resistance.

WORLD WAR II AND THE LATE SOVIET PERIOD

The surprise Nazi attack on the USSR in June 1941 turned the Ukrainian republic into a battlefield. The Germans scored one of the war's biggest victories when they took Kiev in September at a cost of 600,000 Soviet fatalities and an equal number of soldiers who were taken prisoner. By the end of 1941 the German armies controlled practically all of Ukrainian territory. In Lviv on June 30, 1941, the OUN(B) attempted the proclamation of a Ukrainian state, but the Gestapo soon began arresting the leading Banderites. The German administration divided Ukraine into several administrative entities and discouraged Ukrainian national aspirations. The economy was exploited and the population brutalized. The Nazis exterminated between 600,000 and 900,000 Ukrainian Jews, including 34,000 who were machine-gunned during a two-day massacre in the ravine of Babi Yar in Kiev (September 1941). The Red Army began the liberation of Ukraine in mid-1943, and completed it by October 1944. In Western Ukraine, Soviet troops encountered fierce resistance from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which continued its guerilla war in the region until the early 1950s. In 1945 Czechoslovakia ceded Transcarpathia to the Soviet Union, thus completing the unification of all Ukrainian ethnic lands within the Ukrainian SSR.

The first postwar decade was characterized by economic reconstruction and the Sovietization of Western Ukraine. In 1946 the authorities forcibly dissolved the Uniate Church, the national institution of Galician Ukrainians. In Ukraine, the Zhdanovshchina (Zhdanov's time) campaign from 1946 to 1948 was aimed primarily at real and imaginary manifestations of Ukrainian nationalism, and to reinstall in Soviet culture Bolshevik values. In 1949 the long-serving first secretary of the CP(b)U, Nikita Khrushchev, left for a higher position in Moscow, but continued to consider the republic as his power base. Therefore, his ascendancy to power in the Kremlin after Stalin's death signaled the Ukrainians' promotion to the status of the Russians' junior partner in running the USSR. This change was sealed by the celebrations in 1954 of the tercentenary of Ukraine's "reunification" with Russia and the transfer of the Crimea from Russia to Ukraine. By 1959 ethnic Ukrainians constituted more than 60 percent of the membership of the Communist Party of Ukraine (renamed the CPU in 1952) and dominated its Central Committee and Politburo. Following a long line of non-Ukrainian party leaders, after 1953 all first secretaries were Ukrainian. In particular, Petro Shelest, who headed the CPU from 1963 to 1972, distinguished himself as a defender of the republic's economic interests and culture until his removal on charges of being soft on nationalism.

His replacement and Leonid Brezhnev's faithful client, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky (1972–1989) began his rule with a purge of patriotic intellectuals. From the late 1950s Ukraine was a hotbed of the dissident movement. In addition to human rights issues, Ukrainian dissidents focused on the defense of the Ukrainian language and culture. In 1975 the movement acquired more political coloration, when the writer Mykola Rudenko founded a Helsinki Watch Group. However, by the late 1970s the KGB succeeded in breaking up organized dissent in the republic. The Shcherbytsky regime promoted Russification and consumerism, but could do nothing to halt the deterioration of the economy. The crisis was brought home by the world's worst nuclear accident, at Chernobyl power plant near Kiev in April of 1986.

Glasnost was slow to develop in Ukraine due to Shcherbytsky's perseverance in his post, but the first mass demonstrations in Lviv and Kiev took place in 1988. The next year saw the emergence of a mass popular front, Rukh (Movement), and the defeats of many prominent party leaders in free elections. The elections to the Ukrainian Parliament in 1990 broke the Communist Party's hold on political power, while Rukh openly proclaimed independence as its ultimate aim.

INDEPENDENT UKRAINE

In the wake of a failed coup in Moscow, on August 24, 1991, the Ukrainian Parliament proclaimed the republic's full independence, an act endorsed by more than 90 percent of voters in a referendum in December 1991. Under President Leonid Kravchuk (1991–1994), Ukraine experienced hyperinflation and a sharp drop in the gross national product. The state promoted Ukrainization of education and culture and in foreign affairs sought to develop closer ties with the West. In the elections of 1994 Kravchuk lost to Leonid Kuchma, who advocated economic reform and the restoration of Ukraine's special relationship with Russia. By dividing the Black Sea Fleet between Russia and Ukraine (1995), Kuchma resolved the tension between the two countries. In 1997 he signed a comprehensive friendship treaty with Russia. Kuchma was re-elected in 1999 and, after a long period of decline, the economy began to recover during Victor Yushchenko's tenure as prime minister from 1999 to 2001. For most of the 1990s Ukraine was among the largest recipients of U.S. financial aid. Relations between the West and Kuchma's administration cooled in 2001 and 2002 due to rampant corruption in Ukraine, as well as the president's alleged involvement in a journalist's murder and the sale of a sophisticated radar system to Iraq.

See also: borotbisty; cossacks; crimea; crimean tatars; cyril and methodius society; enserfment; kravchuk, leonid makarovich; muscovy; romanov dynasty; nationalities policies, soviet; nationalities policies, tsarist; skrypnyk, mykola oleksiiovych; uniate church; world war i; world war ii

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