Editor’s Note: This story is from the special 30th Independence Day edition of Kyiv Post. Find it online or pick up a copy in Kyiv.
Ukraine was fortunate enough to gain independence peacefully in 1991, but its history is one of armed struggle against foreign occupation and colonization.
There are countless examples of resistance against tyranny throughout Ukrainian history. Here are four major attempts to create a sovereign Ukraine, all of which ended in failure but laid the groundwork for a future state.
1648: Khmelnytsky Uprising
The 1648 Cossack Uprising was the seventh Cossack rising since 1590, but it was the first to erupt into a serious nationwide rebellion against Polish rule.
It began after Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a petty noble, became embroiled in a land dispute with the son of a powerful Polish aristocrat.
The incident was symptomatic of the mistreatment suffered at that time by Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants at the hands of their Polish masters.
Khmelnytsky’s land was taken, his young son was beaten, and eventually he was thrown in prison. He escaped, and despite having previously been a loyal servant to the Polish crown, he decided that he’d had enough.
Khmelnytsky found support in the Zaporizhian Sich and cannily made an alliance with the Crimean Tatars, whose skilled cavalrymen played a crucial part in decisive battlefield victories.
The uprising led to mass killings of Jews, sparked by socio-economic and inter-faith tensions. Contemporary scholars estimate the number of deaths at around 20,000.
In August 1649, the Polish king was forced to grant Khmelnytsky’s newly established Cossack Hetmanate de facto independence.
Much of the new Hetmanate was on lands which were labelled “Ukraine” on French and Polish maps, and the name stuck.
Khmelnytsky lost most of his territories after being abandoned by the Tatars in the heat of the 1651 Battle of Berestechko, the largest battle in 17th century Europe. His Crimean and Ottoman allies were more interested in balancing regional powers than helping to create an independent Ukrainian state.
This led him to look for new friends and sign the infamous 1654 Treaty of Pereyaslav, which made the Hetmanate a Muscovite protectorate and placed Ukraine in Russia’s orbit until 1991.
However, contemporary Russian claims of “brotherly nations” reuniting at Pereyaslav should be dismissed, as the two sides had to use interpreters to negotiate.
1708: Mazepa Revolt
The Treaty of Pereyaslav was followed by a half-century of chaos and division of Ukrainian land between Polish and Russian control, being split largely down the Dnipro River.
The last Cossack attempt to unify both sides of Ukraine into an independent polity came in 1708, when Hetman Ivan Mazepa bowed to the continued pressure of his colonels to turn against Tsar Peter the Great of Russia and join the Swedish side in the Great Northern War.
Peter, who had mercilessly exploited thousands of Cossacks to build his new capital, St. Petersburg, was furious when he found out and demanded that Mazepa be awarded the “order of St. Judas.”
The Hetman suffered a disastrous start to the rebellion, as his undefended capital of Baturyn was taken by Russian forces, who massacred 10,000 men, women and children.
The uprising fell apart on the fateful day of July 8, 1709, when the Swedish army, backed by several thousand Cossacks under Mazepa, faced a much larger Russian force.
Mazepa and his advisors had to flee to Ottoman Moldavia (present-day Moldova), where he died in exile months after the battle. It was there that Mazepa’s elected successor, Pylyp Orlyk, signed the first Ukrainian constitution in 1710.
1917: Ukrainian People’s Republic
In the 19th century, Ukrainian nationalism simmered without boiling over. Tensions were present, but these did not cause any large outbreaks of violence aimed at gaining independence.
Things changed in the early 20th century, thanks in large part to the efforts of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, a professor of Ukrainian history at Lviv University, as well as the turmoil of the World War I.
The February Revolution in 1917 caused the implosion of the Russian Empire, thus giving Hrushevsky and his supporters the opportunity to establish a parliament: The Central Rada of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR) was born on March 17, 1917.
Despite having the support of the vast majority of the 300,000 Ukrainians serving in the Russian army, the Central Rada failed to consolidate its power or form a proper army.
The UPR initially existed as a part of the Russian Republic and only declared independence on Jan. 25, 1918, several months after the Bolshevik Revolution.
The independence declaration led to an immediate Bolshevik invasion of Ukraine, and the rag-tag Ukrainian forces were unable to stop the Russian advance into Kyiv despite valiant resistance at Kruty.
The Bolsheviks left Kyiv a month later, after their surrender to the Central Powers. This allowed German troops to enter Ukraine and install Pavlo Skoropadsky as a puppet dictator of a nominally independent Ukrainian state.
Skoropadsky was able to govern somewhat effectively, but his reactionary tsarist politics remained unpopular with the more left-leaning leaders of the overthrown UPR.
After Germany surrendered on Nov. 11, the old Ukrainian People’s Republic’s leadership led a successful revolt against Skoropadsky.
The reinstated UPR quickly united with the nascentest Ukrainian People’s Republic, comprised of Ukrainians in Galicia taking advantage of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
However, despite being under attack from The Red (Bolshevik) and White (tsarist) Russian armies as well as the Poles, the various factions of the new Ukrainian state failed to unite.
Symon Petliura, who became leader of the UPR in February 1919, was enraged by Galician troops letting the White army into Kyiv, and the Galicians in turn broke off relations with Petliura for making a deal with Poland.
This rupture, as well as a severe typhus outbreak, caused the Ukrainian armies to be wiped out by the end of 1919.
Petliura raised more armies and fought alongside the Poles until 1921, but the UPR was already effectively dead.
1942: Ukrainian Insurgent Army
The inter-war period ravaged Ukraine, and while the Soviet-controlled part suffered far worse, Ukrainians in Polish-controlled parts of the land also experienced oppression.
This drove the founding of Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in 1929: a network of far-right Ukrainians in Polish-controlled Galicia who believed that the Ukrainian People’s Republic had failed because it was too liberal.
When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, radical members of the OUN formed two Nazi battalions in the hope that this would build relations with Adolf Hitler and precipitate the creation of a Nazi-aligned but nominally independent Ukrainian state.
They were immediately disappointed when the Nazi authorities repudiated OUN’s proclamation of a Ukrainian state and began executing OUN members, putting the nationalists in conflict with both the Nazis and the Soviets.
In October 1942, as it became clear that both powers would have to be fought to establish an independent Ukrainian state, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA) was formed by OUN leaders.
The UIA is by far the most divisive organisation ever to be formed in Ukraine: On the one hand, it fought for Ukrainian independence with a fearsome 13-year guerrilla campaign against the two biggest armies in Europe. On the other, it massacred tens of thousands of Polish civilians and many of its commanders were former Nazi collaborators.
In 2015, the UIA were designated as “fighters for the independence of Ukraine” by the Ukrainian government. A 2017 poll showed that 41% of Ukrainians supported this, while 27% opposed it.
The UIA killed several thousand Nazi soldiers in 1943-1944, although as the Soviet counteroffensive approached, the Nazis stopped hunting UIA men and supplied them with weapons instead.
As the Soviet Union took hold of western Ukraine, the UIA engaged in a vicious, drawn-out guerrilla conflict, operating out of underground lairs called “kryivky.”
The Soviet army was unable to destroy the UIA until 1956. Reliable statistics are hard to come by, but the Soviet numbers say that 15,000 of their troops and officials, 15,000 civilians and over 100,000 guerrillas were killed in 11 years.
The year 1956 closed the book on the last significant attempt to create an independent Ukrainian state before the Granite Revolution in 1991.
