As we approach the 30th anniversary of Ukraine’s Declaration of Independence on Aug. 24, it’s worth recalling the history of this nation and how independence was finally achieved. The Ukrainians, trace their historical ancestry to the state of Kyivan Rus’, which developed into a large and powerful realm after its foundation in the ninth century.
Its center was Kyiv and the area around it, that is, the heartland of present-day Ukraine. Kyivan Rus’adopted Christianity from Byzantium in 988, and its “gold-domed” capital flourished for several centuries as a jewel of East Slavonic culture.
Kyivan Rus was eventually destroyed in 1240 by the onslaught of the Mongols. Only in the western part of present-day Ukraine, the principalities of Galicia and Volhynia managed to hold out for another century until they were finally absorbed by Poland and Lithuania. After the union of the latter two powers in 1569, virtually all ethnically Ukrainian lands came under Polish rule.
In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ukrainian nobility was pressured to adapt to Polish ways and adopt Catholicism, while the peasantry was driven into serfdom.
In the 16th century, the Ukrainian Cossacks began to emerge as a significant military force. Initially composed of runaway peasants and frontiersmen, they established an autonomous stronghold on the lower Dnipro, and gradually emerged as the champions of Ukrainian Orthodoxy and culture.
The Cossacks sought to defend Ukrainian lands (then known as Ruthenian, from the Latin for Rus’) against the Poles in the west and the constant slave raids in the south by Tatars and Turks.
In 1648, under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Cossacks launched a war of liberation which culminated in the establishment of an independent Ukrainian Cossack state.
Khmelnytsky’s search for a reliable ally led him to conclude a treaty in 1654 in Pereyaslav with the state of Muscovy, which until now had not been linked with Europe but were also Orthodox Christians. The Muscovites, however, soon came to terms with the Poles and in 1667 partitioned Ukraine with them. Ukrainian self-rule was gradually reduced by both.
Half a century later, a desperate attempt by Ukrainian Cossack leader, or Hetman, Ivan Mazepa to throw off Muscovite domination by siding with Sweden’s Charles XII ended in disaster at the battle of Poltava in 1709.
Russian tsar Peter the Great’s victory at Poltava sealed the fate of Ukraine and marked the emergence of Muscovy, or the Russian Empire, as he now renamed it, as a major European power.
At the end of the 18th century, with the decline of Poland and the partitioning of its territories, most Ukrainian lands ended up under Russian rule, except for Ukrainian parts of Galicia (Halychyna in Ukrainian) and Bukovyna, which were annexed by Austria.
As Russia expanded southward to the shores of the Black Sea, the tsarist policies of colonization and Russification were stepped up.
Nevertheless, in the 19th century, a Ukrainian cultural revival somehow got under way spearheaded by the fiery poet Taras Shevchenko.
Conditions for Ukrainian subjects of Austria were more favorable, and in the 19th-century, national consciousness and political activity gradually developed among them. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic or Uniate Church was important in this regard. It had been created in 1596 when Ruthenian-Ukrainian Orthodox church leaders had agreed to accept the jurisdiction of the Pope in return for being allowed to preserve their Byzantine rite.
However, the Ukrainian national movement in Galicia was confronted by Poles intent on restoring their state with its former imperial boundaries. In As early as 1848 Galicia’s Ukrainians demanded the administrative division of Galicia into a Polish western part and an eastern Ukrainian one.
In November 1918, after the collapse of Austria-Hungary, in Lviv the Galician Ukrainians proclaimed the independent Western Ukrainian People’s Republic (ZUNR). This resulted in a war with the restored Polish state. Poland eventually triumphed and imposed its rule over Eastem Galicia.
In Russian-ruled Ukraine, after the overthrow of the tsars, the Ukrainian national movement rapidly took hold and launched a campaign for independence. In 1917 and early 1918 the Ukrainian Central Rada (Council) in Kyiv proclaimed first the autonomous, and then on January 22, 1918, the independent Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR), which was recognized by the Central Powers and by Bolshevik Russia.
The armed fight for Ukrainian independence lasted until 1920. Despite the proclamation of Ukraine’s reunification made by the UNR and ZUNR on 22 January 1919, the Bolsheviks finally emerged victoriously and established a Soviet Ukrainian state.
The Poles took Eastern Galicia and Volhynia, where over five million Ukrainians lived, the Romanians occupied ethnically Ukrainian areas in Bukovyna and Bessarabia, where there were some 750,000 Ukrainians. About 450,000 Carpatho-Ukrainians ended up under Czechoslovak rule.
Although the Ukrainian “national revolution’ of 1917-20 ended in failure, the struggle for national self-determination strengthened the sense of modem Ukrainian nationhood, something that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were forced to recognize.
During the relatively liberal 1920s, when Soviet nationalities policy was aimed at winning over the non-Russians, the Ukrainians had a brief opportunity to advance the processes of nation-state building. A crucial aspect of this was the de-Russification of Ukraine’s cities and the Ukrainization of education, public, cultural, and religious life.
In the late 1920s, however, Stalin reversed this policy. Seeking to eliminate the Ukrainians as a political factor, he carried out repeated purges and in 1932-3, following his collectivization drive, millions of Ukrainians were starved to death in a man-made famine – the Holodomor.
Meanwhile, during the interwar period, the Ukrainians in Poland endured varying degrees of official intolerance and repression, albeit less severe than in Soviet Ukraine, and resisted.
After the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, the Ukrainian-populated territories in Poland and Romania were occupied by the Red Amy.
When Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941, Ukraine became a major battlefield. The fighting and the repressive policies of the Nazi occupiers cost millions of lives and brought terrible devastation. The Jewish population was barbarically exterminated by the Nazis. Over two million young Ukrainians were deported by them to Germany for forced labor.
Though terribly bloodied and traumatized Ukraine emerged from the war as a united entity. For reasons of political expediency, in 1945 Stalin demanded and obtained a seat for Soviet Ukraine in the United Nations.
In western Ukraine, armed resistance to Soviet rule continued right up to Stalin’s death in 1953, as did severe Soviet repression.
In the 1960s there was a new upsurge of national feeling. Ukrainian writers and poets – the generation of the 60s – pioneered new forms of open and legalistic national dissent, in which concerns for human and national rights were interwoven.
This new insubordination irritated the Soviet leadership and, first in 1965 and then in January 1972, Moscow cracked down. The purge in the early 70s was followed by intensified Russification.
In April 1986, the Chornobyl nuclear disaster near Kyiv became a turning point. For the non-Russian, it sharpened sensitivities about the extent of Moscow’s control over them and the power of the central ministries.
As the new younger Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev eased political controls, unofficial ecological groups emerged, then cultural and religious ones, and eventually more politically oriented patriotic ones. Like in other non-Russian republics, most notably the Baltic ones, the struggle for democratization was inseparable from the quest for national self-determination.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 and the push by Russian leader Boris Yeltsin to weaken the power of the Communist Party and affirm the Russian Federation’s sovereignty within the USSR encouraged the various diverse national movements.
In Ukraine, an alliance of national democratic forces uniting newly released political prisoners with other leading intellectuals called Rukh (initially, the Popular Movement for Restructuring) emerged in 1989 and promoted the path to independence. Some of the Ukrainian Communist party leadership, such as parliamentary speaker Leonid Kravchuk, were won over and refused Moscow’s attempts to preserve the unity of the Soviet Union.
Eventually, in July 1990, the Soviet Ukrainian parliament declared the state sovereignty of the republic, and a year later, on Aug. 24, following a failed coup attempt in Moscow by Soviet hardliners, it proclaimed Ukraine’s independence. This became a reality after a referendum was held in Ukraine on Dec. 1, 1991. An overwhelming majority, 92.3% of the voters, approved the declaration of independence.
Within days the Soviet Union dissolved, and Ukraine was finally free. Fortunately, because of a variety of favorable circumstances, the restoration of the independence proclaimed in 1918 was achieved in a peaceful manner. But it was preceded by centuries of struggle with many pages of heroism, sacrifice, and martyrdom that should not be forgotten. And even today, Ukrainians are having to pay a price for their hard-won freedom.
