Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine

by Anna Reid

Alexander II assassinated by anarchists.

They were Nihilists.

UKRAINA is literally translated as ‘on the edge’ or ‘borderland’, and that is exactly what it is. Flat, fertile and fatally tempting to invaders, Ukraine was split between Russia and Poland from the mid seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth, between Russia and Austria through the nineteenth, and between Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania between the two world wars. Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it had never been an independent state.

I liked the cobbled streets with their elaborately stuccoed turn-of-the-century houses, so dilapidated that the city authorities strung netting under the balconies to prevent chunks of plaster falling onto pedestrians’ heads.

Kyiv of 1993 reminds me of Bratislava 2023

By choosing Christianity rather than Islam, Volodymyr cast Rus’s ambitions for ever in Europe rather than Asia, and by taking Christianity from Byzantium rather than Rome he bound the future Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians together in Orthodoxy, fatally dividing them from their Catholic neighbours the Poles.

Good manners, as laid down by one of Yaroslav’s successors, required them to get up early, praise God, ‘eat and drink without unseemly noise’ and refrain from beating their wives.

Though the term ‘Ukrainian’ did not come into general use until the end of the nineteenth century, the word Ukraina, denoting the lands around Kiev, first appears in a chronicle of 1187. Muscovites started calling themselves the Russky, and their state by the Greek word for Rus, Rossiya, in the fourteenth century, while the future Ukrainians and Belarussians carried on referring to themselves as Russes or Rusyny, rendered in English as ‘Ruthenians’.

‘The Russians learned from the Mongols,’ writes the historian Richard Pipes, ‘a conception of politics which limited the functions of the state to the collection of tribute (or taxes), maintenance of order, and preservation of security, but was entirely devoid of any sense of responsibility for public well-being.’

From the late fourteenth century until Russia took its first big bite out of the Commonwealth in the mid seventeenth, therefore, nearly the whole territory of present-day Ukraine, including Kiev, was ruled from the Polish royal capital of Cracow.

Six years after independence, hammer-and-sickle emblems still top the parliament and foreign ministry buildings, and at the end of the central highstreet, the Khreshchatyk, Lenin stretches out an ox-blood marble hand to a billboard advertising a newly privatised bank.

Catholic monks from Cracow had put a new copper roof on the cathedral and installed two or three pews – all they needed, since most of the city’s Poles were deported by Stalin after the war.

From the late sixteenth century onward the szlachta also appointed the king himself, at a rowdy gathering in a field outside Warsaw. Poland thus became that constitutional oddity, an elective monarchy, and a Republic of Nobles.

‘One is born noble, not Catholic’

Quarrels between ‘kinglets’ were frequent, and settled in full-scale battles involving thousands of armed retainers. Judicial rulings from Cracow were routinely flouted: one magnate paraded at court in a suit fashioned from all the writs he had received and ignored.

With the rise of the great landowners, Polish society, once so tolerant and inclusive, began to atrophy and fossilise. In the early sixteenth century, just as the rest of Europe was abandoning serfdom, Poland introduced it, the better to exploit an export boom in grain.

The weirdest manifestation of the new exclusivity was the cult of ‘Sarmatism’, based on the lunatic notion that the Polish nobility were descended from a mythic eastern warrior-tribe called the Sarmatians, justifying an imaginary racial divide with the rest of the population.

Poles ended up looking so oriental, in fact, that at the battle of Vienna in 1683 Jan Sobieski had to order his troops to wear straw cockades so as to distinguish them from the enemy Turks.

The high point of the Catholic push came when Piotr Skarga, an influential Jesuit divine, persuaded a group of Orthodox bishops, hopeful of being admitted to the upper house of the Sejm, to acknowledge papal supremacy while retaining their own Slavonic liturgy and their priests’ right to marry. In 1596 an Act of Union was signed at Brest creating the ‘Greek-Catholic’ or Uniate Church, which dominates western Ukraine to this day.

Though as individual families the Ruthenian nobility flourished, providing many of the greatest names in Polish history, as a distinct group it disappeared.

Shorn of their native élite – the class that founded and filled schools and universities, patronised the arts, built churches and palaces, invested in trade and manufacturing – they turned into a leaderless people, a ‘non-historic nation’.

proof that states always require a class system as a foundation.

Ruthenian became the language of serfs and servants, barn and byre. Right up to the First World War the words ‘Ruthenian’ and ‘peasant’ were virtually synonymous, used interchangeably in Polish letters and memoirs.

Polish rule robbed Ukraine of its nobility. But it also saw the emergence of a new power in the region – the Cossacks. Outlaws and frontiersmen, fighters and pioneers, the Cossacks are to the Ukrainian national consciousness what cowboys are to the American.

suddenly John Wayne doesn't seem such a bad choice for Ghenghis Khan afterall.

Khokhol – the name of the long pony-tail, worn with a shaven head, which was the Cossack hallmark – is still derogatory Russian slang for a Ukrainian.

Still is today if Russian war telegram is an indication.

Epitome of Cossackdom was the Zaporozhian Sich, a stockaded wooden barracks-town on a remote island south of the Dnieper rapids. Symbol of freedom for generations of Ukrainians, it was where the wildest outlaws gathered, the most daring raids were plotted, and the most horilka drunk. No women were allowed to enter the Sich, and important decisions were taken by the Rada, a rough-and-ready open-air assembly where, in theory at least, everybody had an equal voice. ‘This Republic could be compared to the Spartan,’ wrote a seventeenth-century Venetian envoy, Alberto Vimina, ‘if the Kozaks respected sobriety as highly as did the Spartans.’11

Despite Ukrainian wishful thinking, Cossackdom never formed anything approaching a state in the modern sense of the word. It had no borders, no written laws, no division between army and administration, and no permanent capital (the Sich moved several times in its career).

The author shows her bias towards political and social liberalism.

Nor, since not all Ukrainians were Cossacks and not all Cossacks Ukrainians, did Cossack-dom form an embryo Ukrainian nation.

Ethnic homogenity has rarely been attained despite its assumed necessary character for nations.

What they also certainly were was a military power. Most of the time they worked on the land as ordinary farmers and craftsmen. ‘Among these people,’ wrote de Beauplan, ‘are found individuals expert in all the trades necessary for human life: house and ship carpenters, cartwrights, blacksmiths, armourers, tanners, harnessmakers, shoemakers, coopers, tailors, and so forth.’

Europe rang with the Cossacks’ praises: from scrubby renegades they had turned into latter-day Crusaders, new paladins in a holy war against the godless Mohammedan. ‘The horrible Turk opened his mouth,’ wrote a Polish polemicist approvingly, ‘but the brave Rus thrust his arm within. When Turkey rushed upon Poland with a mighty army, it was stopped by the Ruthenian force.’14

But what the Polish stipends signally failed to do was to stop the Cossacks attacking Poland herself. A series of uprisings – in 1591, 1595, 1625, 1635 and 1637 – was met with equally vicious pacification campaigns, culminating in 1648 with the biggest and bloodiest Cossack rebellion of them all, under Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky.

Of all the endlessly mythologised figures of Ukrainian history, Khmelnytsky is both the most influential and the most mysterious. For Ukrainians he is the leader of the first Ukrainian war of independence; for Poles he is the misguided peasant rebel who split the Commonwealth, pushing Poland into her long pre-Partition decline. For Jews he is the prototype pogromshchik, author of the infamous Khmelnytsky massacres; for Russians he is the founde...

It is hard to make out what kind of man Khmelnytsky was in real life. Polish tradition paints a lurid picture of a half-mad drunkard surrounded by necromancers, terrified by his own runaway success. But contemporary accounts from outsiders describe a quite different figure: plain, judicious and oddly at variance with the chaotic rebellion to which he gave his name.

In 1646, while Khmelnytsky, now a widower, was away on business, a Polish neighbour with whom he had quarrelled raided his estate, beating to death his young son and kidnapping the woman he had been planning to marry. Having failed to win redress from the local courts or the Senate in Warsaw, in January 1648 the infuriated Khmelnytsky fled to the Sich, where he succeeded in persuading the Zaporozhians to rise once more under his leadership.

Much like Owyn Glyndr and his rebellion in Wales.

‘Wherever they found the szlachta, royal officials or Jews,’ says the nearly contemporary Eye-Witness Chronicle, ‘they killed them all, sparing neither women nor children. They pillaged the estates of the Jews and nobles, burned churches and killed their priests, leaving nothing whole. It was a rare individual in those days who had not soaked his hands in blood .

This passage implies that Jewish estate owners were targetted alongside Polish ones rather than targetting Jews in general.

For a country short on heroes, he is simply too prominent to pass up. Instead, he and his Cossacks have once again been recast to suit the mood of the times – Khmelnytsky as the leader of Ukraine’s first failed stab at independence; the Sich with its Rada as a prototype democracy.

Did we know, she asked, that Marx had called the Sich the ‘first democratic Christian republic’?

Did we know that the Cossacks had helped France defend Dunkirk during the Thirty Years’ War? Did we know that Orly airport, in Paris, was named after Pylyp Orlyk, author of the first Ukrainian constitution?

Some might pretend, she said, that the Cossacks were nothing but bandits, but all cultured, scientific people knew ...

I suggested to Roma that as national figureheads the Cossacks weren’t up to much. Weren’t they violent? Weren’t they drunk? Above all, weren’t they failures? Didn’t even Gogol make fun of his Cossack hero Taras Bulba?

in addition to political bias there is an undercurrent of snobbery. She praises the rusticness of 90s Ukraine many times, but often in ways that reflect on herself positively for putting up with and even liking it.

Like Kievan Rus, Poland had fallen off the map. Like the Ukrainians, the Poles were now a nation without a state.

I think the problem her was more that they were a people between many states.

The borderlands, in fact, were even more Polish than Poland proper, because the provincial nobility, unlike the sophisticates of Warsaw, had stuck to old-fashioned szlachta ways. The fact that the actual population of those borderlands was mostly of a different nationality was immaterial. Hence Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s national poet and a man who never visited Warsaw in his life, was able to open his patriotic epic Pan Tadeusz with the words ‘Oh Lithuania’.

‘Poland is not yet lost’ was the title of a Napoleonic Polish marching song; ‘Ukraine is not dead yet’ is the less-than-inspiring opening line of the present-day Ukrainian national anthem.

National leaders and national uprisings – no matter that they failed – are given more space and weight than the foreign governments who actually dictated events. Poles revere their ‘Constitution of May 3rd’, Ukrainians, their so-called ‘Bender Constitution’. Never mind that neither even came close to being put into practice, for intentions are more important than results.

Magna Carta is a key cornerstone of English and others constituional heritage. The same King who signed embarked on a decade long campaign of murderous vengeance against the Barons to ensure it remained a dead letter. This is not unique nor even that strange for Poles and Ukrainians. French revolution admirers likewise are obsessed with the constituion of 1793, the most radical of the legal documents of that period. It too was never implemented.

The British historian E.H. Carr, a delegate at the Paris peace talks of 1919, called reborn Poland ‘a farce’.

For Keynes it was ‘an economic impossibility whose only industry is Jew-baiting’;

for Lloyd George, ‘a historic failure’ – he would no more hand over Upper Silesia to Poland, he swore, than he...

George Bush, had he been around at the time, would undoubtedly have joined this chorus in favour of the status quo, his only contribution to Ukrainian independence being the infamous ‘Chicken Kiev’ speech of August 1991, in ...

For both Poland and Ukraine, the best way to get the West’s attention has been to stress their impact on Russia. Nineteenth-century liberals argued that unless Russia freed Poland, it would never be able to undertake its own constitutional reform.

Sick burn on Marx and Engels

The effort of holding down its most intransigent colony trapped Russia in the role of tyrannical autocracy, hurting ordinary Russians as much as the Poles themselves – hence the slogan of the 1831 Polish rebellion: ‘For our freedom and yours.’

The (Polish-born) American Sovietologist Zbigniew Brzezinski writes that ‘without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.’ The bottom line is that ‘Russia can either be an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both.’

If Ukraine does not stay independent, in other words, Russia will not remain a democracy, so Ukrainian independence is as much for Russia’s good as Ukraine’s.

Russians, of course, have some difficulty taking this concept on board. Just as the Polish risings turned even diehard anti-establishmentarians like Pushkin into raging Slavophiles, today’s independent Ukraine brin...