Every detail of this story is bitterly contested; to leave anything out invites fierce criticism. But here’s a foolhardy attempt at a summary. For centuries, most of Ukraine’s largely peasant people were governed by the Poles, and had much in common with their Russian neighbours. But they were not Poles, and they were not Russians. At the time people called them “Ruthenians” — a word derived from that original Viking state of Kyivan Rus. But the word Україна, Ukraine, is old, dating from at least the 12th century. It probably means “the edge, the borderland”. And that pretty much sums Ukraine up. It was the land in between.
It’s perfectly true that over time, Ukraine turned to look eastwards. By the early 19th century Poland had been destroyed, while most of modern Ukraine, including the lands of the Cossacks and the capital Kyiv, had been absorbed by the empire of the Tsars. Not the far west, though: it was taken by Austria-Hungary, which is why L’viv looks so much like Krakow or Prague. Meanwhile, in the east, in the coal basin of the river Don, Russian workers poured into the newly built mines and steelworks, which is why so many eastern Ukrainians still speak Russian.
But that’s not an unusual story. At exactly the same time, a very similar thing happened here in Britain, where English workers moved into the mines and steelworks of South Wales. Today their descendants still speak English; you don’t often hear Welsh on the streets of Cardiff. But an anglophone Welshman is still Welsh. Like his childhood friends in the steel-making city of Kryvyi Rih, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was brought up speaking Russian. But he’s not Russian. He’s Ukrainian.
So was Ukraine invented by the Bolsheviks, as Putin says? No. Just look at its cities and universities in the late 19th century, when the Ukrainian idea flourished as never before. Intellectuals, poets, historians and folklorists became fascinated by their unique past and distinctive culture, just like their counterparts elsewhere. All over Europe, from Ireland, Germany and Italy to the lands of the Czechs, the Bulgarians, the Serbs and the Poles, people were part-uncovering, part-inventing their own national stories. So too in Ukraine, where the national poet Taras Shevchenko, the son of a serf, wrote verses celebrating the peasants, rebels and outlaws of days gone by.
But of course that didn’t fit with the Russian story. Under Tsars Nicholas I and Alexander II, the Ukrainian ideal seemed a threat to the unity of the Russian Empire. Shevchenko was arrested and exiled, his poems suppressed. In 1876 the Ukrainian language was effectively banned. You couldn’t write Ukrainian books, put on Ukrainian plays or give Ukrainian recitals; you couldn’t even teach your children in Ukrainian.
Yet Ukraine endured. By the outbreak of the First World War, the national idea was probably stronger than ever. At first the Russians invaded the Austrian-held west, in Galicia, and tried to stamp out all traces of a distinct Ukrainian identity. Then they were driven back. The Russian Revolution and civil war brought chaos, and Kyiv changed hands 16 times in two years. But every rival contender — the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Hetmanate, the Directorate, even the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic — believed there was such a thing as Ukraine. That was why, when Lenin and Stalin created the Soviet Union in 1922, Ukraine joined as a separate republic. Everybody knew it wasn’t Russia.
In the century that followed, Ukraine’s history was so awful, so horribly stained with sorrow, that it feels almost indecent to write it down. A famine in the early Twenties, then another horrific famine — the Holodomor, caused by Stalin’s collectivisation policies — in the early Thirties. Occupation by the Nazis in the Second World War, then the charnel house of the Holocaust, in which some Ukrainian nationalists actively took part. Reconquest by the Red Army; years of suppression and stagnation; the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. Then the collapse of the Soviet Union, the implosion of Ukraine’s economy in the decade that followed, the Orange Revolution, the Maidan and the annexation of Crimea.
Yet amid all this, Ukraine endured. In his speech on Monday night, Putin failed to mention that in the late Eighties thousands of people took to the streets of L’viv and Kyiv to demand language rights, greater autonomy and, in the end, independence. Nor did he mention that when the Ukrainians were given the chance to go their own way, in a free and fair referendum in December 1991, a staggering 92% voted for independence. Every single oblast, even Donetsk, even Luhansk, even Crimea, said yes. Even Russian-speakers voted for it. And no wonder. They were, after all, Ukrainian.
A complicated story, then. But in a European context, it’s not so unusual. Yes, Ukraine’s borders have been fluid; but whose haven’t? Just look at a map of Germany over time; or Italy, or Poland. Yes, many Ukrainians speak Russian. But that’s not unusual either. Some Finns speak Swedish. Some Germans speak Danish. Some Italians speak German. Do the Swiss all speak the same language?
And yes, Ukraine’s history is deeply, inevitably intertwined with that of its overbearing neighbour. It always has been, and always will be. But you could say exactly the same of Spain and Portugal, Germany and Austria, Britain and Ireland. Most people in Ireland speak English. Many read English newspapers. Many even support English football teams. But Ireland isn’t England. Ukraine isn’t Russia.
For Ukraine, doomed to what appears to be unending suffering, the future seems grim. When I began this essay, opening with those lines on the fall of Kyiv in 1240, the BBC headlines talked of overnight air attacks on the city. Now, while I have been writing, Russian tanks are rolling into the suburbs. Historians love to quote Mark Twain’s quip that history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes. They rarely admit that sometimes it rhymes in dreadful, unbearable, heart-rending ways.
But the story of Ukrainian history isn’t just a story of endless defeat. It’s a story of endless resilience. It’s the story of a people trapped between mighty neighbours, who have always been themselves, with their own land, their own identity, their own history. You can bomb them and kill them, smash their cities and tear down their buildings, burn their books and suppress their language. But you can’t make them something they aren’t, and you can’t destroy their belief in themselves. That’s the story of the siege in 1240, and it’s the same story now. Kyiv fell. But Kyiv endured, and Kyiv will rise again.
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Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland discuss the history of Ukraine in the latest episode of The Rest is History.
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