TWO
Protagonists
Every person who has ever crossed from Russia into Ukraine on land—and until recently that was how most travelers did it—must have noticed a gradual change in the scenery occurring in the borderland. No natural boundary separates Ukraine from Russia, no mountain range or river, and the terrain the traveler negotiates stays the same—a treeless plain, occasionally made unattractive by overdevelopment—yet something changes, and at some point, still in Russia or already in Ukraine, the traveler is aware of having entered a different culture. The front yards have flowers, if not exactly flower gardens. Logs and brick give way to whitewashed walls. Streets are cleaner, the people louder and more cheery.
From a junction in central Ukraine—say Kharkiv, or Zaporizhia—you have a choice of continuing south or west. If you go west, aiming at Galicia with Lviv its capital city, you will encounter yet another cultural metamorphosis, perhaps best represented by the presence of Catholic churches, which the locals still call by their Polish name, kostyol. Continue west, and you arrive at one of the border crossings—into Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, or Romania. This would be Europe’s edge.
But if you have chosen the southern route, toward the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, instead of the Occident you would be traveling toward the Orient, its approach announced by the Turkic names of hamlets, creeks, and junctions. When translated, these names speak of abandonment, war, and drought. You are on what used to be called the Wild Fields. The Crimean Peninsula dangles from their underbelly.
Ukraine-Russia
When Moscow and the European powers clashed in Ukraine in the twenty-first century, the catastrophe continued a historical pattern. Theoretically, Ukraine’s sheer size should have prevented such a staggering loss of agency, but paradoxically, one could argue that for Ukraine, its size was its worst enemy: too much diversity, and too little time to bind it all together. Western Lviv thought of itself as Europe, eastern Donbass identified with Russia, and the rest of the country struggled between these extremes. Centuries of imperial rule by Austria, Poland, Russia, and Turkey left it in fragments.
The underlying reason for the Ukraine-Russia conflict is that both are offshoots of the same long-dead state: siblings with very different fortunes. One became an empire, another a borderland. It is hard to find another example of this kind of connection: Russia and Ukraine are joined more tightly than England and Scotland or the United States and Canada.
The first state of the eastern Slavs developed on the upper Dnieper River in the 880s. It is remembered as Kievan Rus’. A millennium later, Kiev is the capital of Ukraine; in Russian tradition, it remains the “Mother of All Russian Cities.” Ivan the Terrible of Russia claimed to be a direct descendant of the Kievan dynasty.[1]
Seeking unity for the loosely connected assembly of tribes and princelings, the princes of Kiev implemented a cultural revolution by borrowing Eastern Orthodox Christianity from Byzantium and then enforcing it as a state religion. The Cyrillic alphabet came from Byzantium as well. The idea was brilliant: the enforcement of borrowed memes put all subjects of the Kievan prince in an equal position. In the ecclesiastical writings and folklore of Rus’, this Kievan revolution is a focal point—not a mere episode in the nation’s history but its beginning. With their common language, alphabet, faith, early statehood, and the pantheon of saints and heroes, Russians and Ukrainians share a national creation myth.[2]
Not unlike other early states, Rus’ quickly disintegrated. The hundred years from 1146 to 1246 saw forty-seven changes of head of state, involving twenty-four different princes. The Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century hit Rus’ at the height of disunity, making the Mongols’ victory instantaneous and its consequences lasting. As a Russian chronicle stated in 1224, “for our sins, there came unknown tribes. No one knew who they were or what was their origin, faith, or tongue,” but they had already “conquered many lands.”[3]
The southern principalities of Rus’ sitting at the edge of the steppe (a natural avenue for Mongol cavalry)—Kiev, Galich, Chernigov—were devastated, but the northern Russians hung on in the dense boreal forests of Vladimir and Novgorod. By 1300, the surviving Kievan elites, including the leaders of the Orthodox Church, had moved north. The south entered seven centuries of statelessness; the north eventually grew into what is nowadays known as Russia.[4]
The name “Ukraine,” meaning “borderland,” initially meant the periphery of Kiev but gradually became the name for all the southern territories of the former Rus’. That was what the area had become geopolitically—contested land for Ottomans, Russians, and Poles.[5]
In the sixteenth century, most of Ukraine fell under Polish rule. Its upper class adopted the language and culture of the conqueror (the process known as Polonization), causing a critical alienation between the elites and the lower classes. When Bohdan Khmelnytsky led Ukrainian peasants in a revolt against the Poles in 1648, he was also fighting his own country’s aristocracy. Though a hero to Ukrainians, Khmelnytsky became infamous among Jews for the exceptional brutality of the Cossack pogroms under his rule.
Seeing the impossibility of domestic consensus, Khmelnytsky realized that he needed a powerful foreign patron and that his options were limited to just Russia and the Crimean Khanate, an offshoot of the Mongol empire, and by this time a protectorate of the Ottomans.
Russia was Poland’s nemesis. Russians were Eastern Orthodox, like the majority of Ukrainians. There was little doubt, though, that eventually the Kremlin would want total control over Ukraine. But no lasting alliance with the only alternative patron, the Crimean Khanate, was possible, as Khmelnytsky had a chance to see for himself after visiting its capital, Bakhchisaray: there was nothing in it for the khan. Choosing what looked a lesser evil, in 1654 Khmelnytsky pledged allegiance to the Russian tsar.[6]
For nearly four hundred years since then, Russians have celebrated the 1654 pledge as a “reunification” of the “two Slavic peoples.” That was not how Khmelnytsky intended it, but with his death his nation-building project fell apart. The succession crisis led to a fratricidal war commanded by regional warlords, who were, in turn, manipulated by foreigners: Russians, Poles, Ottomans, Tatars, and Swedes. In Ukraine, the period is still remembered till this day as the Ruin (Ruina).
By the time of Khmelnytsky’s death, with opportunism as their modus operandi, the upper classes of eastern and central Ukraine sided with Russia. Polonization was replaced by Russification, which lasted as long as the aristocracy did. The greatest Ukrainian man of letters, the nineteenth-century satirist Nikolai Gogol, wrote in Russian.[7]
In the eighteenth century, Russia’s war against the Ottoman Empire and its client state, the Crimean Khanate, did not seem to directly concern Ukraine. The Turkic-speaking khanate, which at that time encompassed not just the Crimean peninsula but the Wild Fields and the entire region surrounding the Sea of Azov, was next door but not part of the Ukrainian narrative. This changed when Russia took over the khanate, christened the region “Novorossiya,” or New Russia, and began to rule it straight from the imperial capital as frontier provinces. Trade hubs and industrial centers along the coasts, from Odessa to Taganrog, were multinational. So was the new farming class.[8]
1
Ronald Suny,
2
“The Tale of Bygone Years” quoted in
3
Orest Subtelny,
6
Samoil Velichko,
7
Y. V. Mann,
8
Paul Bushkovitch,