In the official vernacular of the empire, Ukraine became “Malorossia”—“Little Russia” (Belorussia, now Belarus, was “White Russia,” and the imperial Russian core “Velikorossia,” or “Greater Russia”). The basic administrative imperial unit was the province (guberniya); no entity called Ukraine appeared on any map. The idea of Ukrainian nationhood would not appear until the mid–nineteenth century.[9]
This idea was conceived in Ukraine’s western regions, collectively known as Galicia and belonging to Austria-Hungary. While hardly a paragon of free thinking, the Habsburg Empire was nevertheless more liberal than the Romanov dynasty in Russia. In the words of the historian Orest Subtelny, Galicia became the “bastion of Ukrainianism.”[10] Many believe it still is.
The task of defining, or, to use Benedict Anderson’s term, “imagining,” Ukraine was similar to that facing a number of Eastern European peoples, all of whom were influenced by the new German concept of nationhood—common language and shared heroic mythology. A founding father of nationalism in Ukraine, Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866–1934), dismissed the political and cultural fragmentation of the previous six centuries as inconsequential, claiming that since the breakup of the Kievan state Ukrainians had still continued as a single ethnos, or nation. Looking for a historical myth that would separate Ukrainians from Russians, nationalists zoomed in on Cossacks, denizens of an autonomous rogue republic, Bohdan Khmelnytsky one of them. This mythology, however, held little appeal for the Russian and Jewish artisans and bourgeoisie who made up the majorities in Ukrainian cities, and who saw little benefit in participating in a new imagined community, particularly since the myth of “Cossackdom” was intensely xenophobic. The national poet of Ukraine, Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861), who wrote Cossacks into the literary canon, defined them by their struggles against “Polaks” (lyahi), “Ivans” (moskaly), “kikes” (zhidy), and Tatar “infidels” (pohantsy).[11]
Ukraine had no clear boundaries, either in reality or in collective memory. Mental maps of the country differed widely depending on who was thinking them up, and when, and where. Crimea was not part of any “mental map.” Nationalist lore remembered it as an infidel horde that raided Ukraine in search of slaves and loot; liberal intelligentsia such as the outstanding poet Larysa Kosach-Kvitka (1871–1913), known by her nom de plume Lesya Ukrainka, empathized with Tatars as victims of Russian imperialism, on par with Ukrainians themselves.[12]
For Ukraine, only a catalyst of extraordinary proportions could have made a national movement possible. It arrived in the form of the two Russian revolutions of 1917. The revolution of February swept away the Romanov monarchy, and the revolution of October took care of pretty much everything else, leaving no value in the country standing and hardly any structures. The civil war, apocalyptic in brutality, continued for three years. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania used the chaos to secede: each was a compact territory where the educated class upheld a national myth. Ukraine, still fragmented, tried and failed.
Having no structure, power base, or resources, the succession of three nationalist regimes in Kiev between November 1917 and December 1919 (the Central Rada, the Hetmanate, and the Directory) exercised suzerainty only over Kiev. Throughout 1918, Ukraine was occupied by Germany, a condition incompatible with any but titular independence. After signing the armistice in the west in November 1918, the Germans evacuated, and the only force holding Ukraine together departed with them. Total collapse and lawlessness followed. No government could claim continuous authority. In two years, Kiev changed hands eighteen times.[13]
The very notion of the “territory of Ukraine” remained unresolved. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 refused to recognize it as a state. Woodrow Wilson was a strong proponent of a revived Poland but entertained no such ideas about Ukraine. The revived Poland, meanwhile, occupied Galicia in the spring of 1919 and received the allied powers’ blessing.[14]
It is ironic that bringing down statues of Lenin became a mark of the civil conflict in Ukraine in 2013–2016, because Lenin is the person who put Ukraine on the political map. Under Soviet rule, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was endowed with all the attributes of a state.
When the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was in the works in the fall of 1922, Lenin was a dying man. A succession of strokes, striking at an early age (he turned fifty-two that year), bestowed bitter lucidity upon him. The state he was leaving behind was terribly unfair, and the person likely to succeed him, Joseph Stalin, was certain to make it even more repressive. The principles of the Union became Lenin’s last battle. Stalin wanted minorities in the USSR to have cultural autonomy—meaning just titular recognition of ethnic diversity. Lenin wanted the larger ethnicities to have quasi-states with all the attributes of sovereignty, including maintaining their own borders with the outside world—the latter was a provision Lenin insisted on, in case a republic chose to secede.[15]
Within a few years, Ukraine had established itself as second among equals in the USSR, after Russia proper. In 1945, at Stalin’s insistence, the United States accepted the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as a founding member of the United Nations—a bizarre arrangement legitimizing Ukraine’s ersatz sovereignty (the only other faux state among the U.N. founding members was another Slavic Soviet republic, Belorussia).
Having Polonized with the Poles and Russified with the Russians, in the Soviet Union the Ukrainian elites Sovietized. Together with Russians, Ukrainians made up the bulk of the Communist Party, KGB, police, and officer corps. The leader of the USSR between 1964 and 1982, Leonid Brezhnev, came from Ukraine, as did several other Politburo members.[16]
No other republic of the union increased its territory as much as Ukraine did. In 1939, after dividing up Poland with Hitler, Stalin assigned Galicia to the Ukrainian SSR. Ukraine now encompassed both former Russian and former Polish territories. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev awarded it Crimea. As Orest Subtelny noted, because Crimea was the “historic homeland of the Crimean Tatars,” the Russians did not have “the moral right to give it away nor did the Ukrainians have the right to accept it.”[17]
Lenin’s 1922 provisions paved the way for the bloodless disintegration of the USSR in 1991: the republics had a right to secede, and the fact that each had a border with the outside world facilitated this. Ukraine seceded from the union with most structures of statehood already in place—ministries, law enforcement, schools, research centers, power grid, transportation system, even a modest foreign service. The military had to be reorganized, but not forged anew: Ukraine had inherited the Soviet Union’s well-trained officer corps, infrastructure, and arsenals.
But tensions among different regions, frozen by the federal Soviet state for decades, now surfaced. As in Russia, the post-Soviet transition to a free market economy led to the emergence of an exploitative class of the shady new rich, presided over by the oligarchs—fifty people owning about 85 percent of national wealth. Their business empires tended to be region-based, contributing to general fragmentation. Times were especially hard in eastern and southern Ukraine: that’s where the Soviet-era megalomaniac industry enterprises, now unfit for the new economy, were. Already in the early 1990s, thoughtful observers, of which Ambassador Jack F. Matlock was one, “began to wonder if Ukraine could retain its unity if the process of regional estrangement continued.”[18]
11
Benedict Anderson,
12
13
Subtelny,
15
Robert Service,
17
Bilenky,
18
Jack F. Matlock,