The Russian attack on Ukraine

The Russian attack on Ukraine

A historical background

The war in Ukraine is not just a response to the expansion of NATO or an attempt to reverse the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Some of the reasons lie in the more distant past. This article explores the historical roots

Christoph Mick

 

The Russian President Vladimir Putin is partly right when he states that Ukraine and Russia have the same cultural roots. Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians can all trace their origins back to the Kyivan Rus (or Kievan Rus, to use the Russian spelling).

The Kyivan Rus

The Kyivan Rus was a large and influential medieval principality, mostly inhabited by East Slavic tribes. It was founded in the ninth century by Viking warrior-traders on the banks of the Dnieper River and was part of the trade route from Scandinavia to Constantinople. In 988, Grand Prince Volodymyr of Kyiv and his East Slavic subjects were baptised. They took their form of Christianity from Byzantium rather than Rome and became part of the Orthodox Christian world.

With the arrival of troops of the Mongol Empire in the mid-thirteenth century, the land of the Kyivan Rus was broken up. The western and southwestern parts, which constitute most of the territory of today’s Ukraine and Belarus, were divided between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland. Meanwhile, the northern and northeastern parts – the heartland of the later Russian state – remained under Mongol rule.

For the next 400 years, the Ukrainian lands partook of all the cultural and political developments of Europe while the Principality of Muscovy – later to become a grand principality and then Tsardom – was cut off for 200 years and then only reluctantly opened up. During this period the East Slavs developed into three distinct groups, with different political cultures, traditions and customs. In the mid-seventeenth century, Russian diplomats needed translators to understand the language spoken by Ukrainian Cossacks.

Reconquering

After the fall of the Mongol Empire in the fifteenth century, the rulers of Muscovy set themselves the task of reconquering the lands of the old Kyivan Rus. They justified interventions in the domestic affairs of neighbouring countries with the pretext that they were protecting Orthodox believers.

The grand dukes of Lithuania who were also kings of Poland were the main rivals of the tsars in Moscow for the heritage of the Kyivan Rus, but they were at a disadvantage compared to the tsars. They were Catholic, while the people living in the territories which make up today’s Ukraine and Belarus were Orthodox – like the rulers of Muscovy.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Russian tsars and their allies managed to destroy the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and annex about 90% of the territory of today’s Ukraine. The Tsardom of Muscovy became the Russian Empire and in 1914 most of Ukraine was part of this. The remaining 10% of the territory around Lviv and Chernivtsy were part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.

Ukraine: an ‘invented nation’?

There is a long tradition among the Russian political elite of opposing the very idea of the existence of a Ukrainian nation. Putin’s imperial predecessors believed that Great Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians were three branches of the Russian people – in other words, that they are all essentially Russians. In the nineteenth century, Russian imperial authorities referred to Ukrainians as Little Russians and their language – called the Little Russian dialect – was considered a corrupted form of Russian. The imperial authorities fought the Ukrainian national movement and suppressed Ukrainian publications.

For Putin, the idea that Ukraine constitutes a nation is a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century invention dreamed up by Russia’s enemies at the time: the Poles, Austria-Hungary and the German Empire. In Putin’s view, these enemies encouraged the Ukrainian national movement in order to weaken Russia, a strategy which Putin considers is now being continued by ‘the West’ (the USA, NATO and the European Union).

The Ukrainian national movement

Many of these claims are incorrect. The Ukrainian national movement began in the Russian Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century, when secret societies sprang up all over Ukraine. At the end of the nineteenth century, the most famous Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky wrote a history of Ukraine-Rus which challenged the Russian master narrative of the Tsardom of Moscow and subsequently the Russian Empire as the legitimate and only heir of the Kyivan/Kievan Rus.

Hrushevsky and generations of Ukrainian historians after him saw the Ukrainian people as the true heirs of the Kyivan Rus, emphasising the continuity of the people living on its territory. Ukrainians and Belarusians consider themselves to be the descendants of those people and also lay claim to a share of the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Before its union with the Kingdom of Poland, the administrative language of Lithuania was Chancery Slavonic, a predecessor of today’s Belarusian language. Ukrainians view the Cossack hetmanate of Bohdan Khmelnytsky in the middle of the seventeenth century as the first attempt to create a genuinely Ukrainian state.

The Ukrainian Revolution

In another of his speeches, Putin implied that modern Ukraine was a creation of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. In essence, he is wrong but there are certain reasons why he made this statement. Between 1917 and 1920 Ukrainian politicians made several attempts to proclaim and defend an independent Ukrainian state. But the different Ukrainian governments found themselves between all fronts, caught up in the middle of the Russian civil war between counter-revolutionary White armies and the Red Army – both of which tried to prevent Ukraine from being independent. The nascent Ukrainian governments also had to fight against the territorial claims of the new state of Poland. All Ukrainian attempts at state building ended in failure and defeat, with Ukraine partitioned between Poland and Bolshevik Russia.

The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic

The attitude of the Bolsheviks towards Ukraine was ambivalent but at least – in contrast to the Russian Empire – the Bolsheviks recognised Ukrainians as a separate nation. In 1919, Ukrainians were granted their own republic: the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which in 1922 became one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union. In the 1920s, the Soviet government promoted Ukrainian language and culture. This is where Putin’s statement about Ukraine as a creation of Lenin comes from.

The positive policy towards Ukrainian culture changed in the 1930s. For Stalin, the Ukrainian Bolsheviks running the republic had become too nationalistic and they were purged. Collectivisation and dekulakisation hit Ukraine hard, resulting in a famine in which 4–5 million people – most of them ethnic Ukrainians – perished. Today, many Ukrainian historians and politicians view the famine as an attempt to destroy the Ukrainian nation and regard it as genocide.

The Second World War

Another notion Putin also often uses to justify the recent Russian attack is the idea that Ukraine is ruled by fascists and that Ukrainian nationalism is intimately linked to national socialism. Again, this is wrong. The main attempts to build a state in 1918/19 were democratic, but there are reasons why the identification of Ukrainian nationalism with fascism has its proponents.

As a result of the German–Soviet treaty of August 1939, those areas of Ukraine which had formerly been part of Poland came under Soviet control. The Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland on 17 September 1939 led to mass arrests, deportations and executions. The radical wing of Ukrainian nationalism, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), became the strongest political grouping in this part of Ukraine. The OUN consisted of integral nationalists who had embraced fascism in the 1930s and early 1940s. In the summer of 1941, they participated in anti-Semitic pogroms and later fought against the Polish presence in western Ukraine, murdering tens of thousands of Polish villagers. These Ukrainian nationalists continued their fight against Sovietisation even after Germany had been driven out of Ukraine. Between 1944 and 1947 the Soviet authorities killed about 100,000 Ukrainians who were resisting Sovietisation, and many more were deported.

Especially in western Ukrainian society, members of the OUN are remembered, first and foremost, as anti-Soviet resistance fighters, while in Russia they are denounced as Nazis and German collaborators, but it is a blatant untruth to accuse Ukraine of being dominated by fascists. In parliamentary elections since 2014, no right-wing party in Ukraine has managed to get more than 5% of the vote.

The Soviet victory in the Second World War brought one big gain for modern Ukraine: it brought almost all ethnographically Ukrainian lands into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. However, this united Ukraine was not an independent state but part of the repressive Soviet Union. After the war, more Russians moved to Ukraine as workers and administrators, and Russian culture and language permeated the country. This process of Russification has a long tradition but accelerated in the 1960s and 70s. It went so far that in the 1980s, Ukrainian culture and the Ukrainian language in central and eastern Ukraine were under severe threat.

Developments since 1991

For the Ukrainian nation, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a blessing, but nevertheless it struggled after becoming an independent country. Corruption was widespread and a few oligarchs got richer, while the country continued to be dependent on Moscow.

Along with many members of the Russian political elite, Putin shares the view that it is not in the Russian interest to allow Ukraine to leave its sphere of influence. He would agree with the former adviser to the American president, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who once famously remarked that

‘without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.’

Putin and with him many Russians suffer from imperial phantom pain. They would like to either annex or re-establish Russian dominance over territories and people previously belonging to the Soviet Union. The alienation between Russians and Ukrainians is a result of Putin’s policies since 2014. He thought that the loss of Crimea and the war against pro-Russian rebels would destabilise Ukraine, that Ukrainians would be divided and eventually they would accept being ruled indirectly by Moscow. Contrary to such expectations, however, his aggression has led to much greater national unity in Ukraine.

Conclusion

Ukraine holds a special place in Putin’s thinking. There is a long tradition among the Russian political elite of opposing the very idea of the existence of a Ukrainian nation. Part of the Russian population never really came to terms with Ukraine becoming an independent country in 1991 and with Ukrainians considering themselves to be a separate nation. The Russian war against Ukraine is therefore not a war to increase Russia’s security. It is an imperialist war, a land grab, directed against the very existence of an independent Ukrainian state and nation.

Christoph Mick is a professor in the history department at the University of Warwick.