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The absence of natural borders helps explain why Ukrainians failed, until the late twentieth century, to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state.
The desire to hold on to such valuable property often lay behind the colonialist arguments: neither the Poles nor the Russians wanted to concede that their agricultural breadbasket had an independent identity.
Like the Russians and the Belarusians, they traced their history back to the kings and queens of Kyivan Rus’, and many felt themselves to be part of a great East Slavic civilization.
During the centuries of colonial rule different regions of Ukraine did acquire different characters.
For much of Ukraine’s history, Ukrainian was spoken mostly in the countryside.
As Ukraine was a colony of Poland, and then Russia and Austria-Hungary, Ukraine’s major cities—as Trotsky once observed—became centres of colonial control, islands of Russian, Polish or Jewish culture in a sea of Ukrainian peasantry.
The peasants identified the cities with wealth, capitalism and “foreign”—mostly Russian—influence. Urban Ukraine, by contrast, thought of the countryside as backward and primitive.
These divisions also meant the promotion of “Ukrainianness” created conflict with Ukraine’s colonial rulers, as well as with the inhabitants of the Jewish shtetls who had made their home in the territory of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since the Middle Ages.
The link between the language and the countryside also meant that the Ukrainian national movement always had a strong “peasant” flavour.
Although not taught in state schools, Ukrainian became the language of choice for a certain kind of rebellious, anti-establishment Ukrainian writer or artist.
The importance of the peasantry also meant that from the very beginning the Ukrainian national awakening was synonymous with populist and what would later be called “left wing” opposition to the Russian and Polish-speaking merchants, landowners and aristocracy.
Freedom for the peasants was, in effect, freedom for Ukrainians, and a blow to their Russian and Polish masters.
the Ukrainian national movement, alongside other national movements, was perceived by Moscow as a potential threat to the unity of imperial Russia.
The Ukrainian language was a primary target. During the Russian empire’s first great educational reform in 1804, Tsar Alexander I permitted some non-Russian languages to be used in the new state schools but not Ukrainian, ostensibly on the grounds that it was not a “language” but rather a dialect.
The restrictions on the use of Ukrainian limited the impact of the national movement. They also resulted in widespread illiteracy.
Discrimination also led to Russification: for everybody who lived in Ukraine—Jews, Germans and other national minorities as well as Ukrainians—the path to higher social status was a Russian-speaking one.
this meant that Ukrainians who were politically, economically or intellectually ambitious needed to communicate in Russian.
Industrialization deepened the pressure for Russification as well,
The Austrian state gave Ukrainians in the empire far more autonomy and freedom than did Russia or later the USSR,
But even inside the Russian empire, the years just before the revolution of 1917 were in many ways positive for Ukraine.
A wave of peasant revolts ricocheted across both Ukraine and Russia
The ensuing riots set off a chain reaction of unrest, unsettled Tsar Nicholas II, and led to the introduction of some civil and political rights in Ukraine, including the right to use the Ukrainian language in public.
When the politicians gathered at Versailles in 1919 drew the borders of new states—among
Ukraine would not be among them.
Ukraine’s declaration of independence on 26 January 1918 “marked not the dénouement of the process of nation-forming in the Ukraine, but rather its serious beginning.”22 The tumultuous few months of independence and the vigorous...
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national feelings could only be channelled through literature and art.
It explains why imperial Russia had banned Ukrainian books, schools and culture, and why their repression would later be of central concern to both Lenin and Stalin.
But it was insufficient: the spread of national consciousness, foreign recognition and even the Brest-Litovsk treaty were not enough to build the Ukrainian state.
By the end of 1917 all the military powers of the region, including the brand-new Red Army, the White Armies of the old regime, and troops from Germany and Austria, were making plans to occupy Ukraine.
Lenin authorized the first Soviet assault on Ukraine in January 1918,
This first Soviet attempt to conquer Ukraine ended within a few weeks when the German and Austrian armies arrived and declared they intended to “enforce” the treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
Instead of saving the liberal legislators of the Central Rada, however, they threw their support behind Pavlo Skoropadsky, a Ukrainian general who dressed in dramatic un...
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Skoropadsky brought back tsarist laws and tsarist officials, and advocated reintegration with a future Russian state.
Skoropadsky also reinforced the old ownership laws and withdrew promises of land reform.
By the middle of 1918 the national movement had regrouped under the leadership of Symon Petliura, a social democrat with a talent for paramilitary organization.
As German troops withdrew from the country, he patched together some of the “ex-colonels, self-styled generals, Cossack otamany and batky ” into a pro-Ukrainian force known as the Directory, and laid siege to the capital.
Skoropadsky’s forces crumbled with amazing speed, almost without fighting.22 On 14 December 1918, Petliura’s troops marched into a surprised Kyiv, Odessa and Mykolaiv, and power changed hands yet again.
The Directory’s rule would be short and violent, not least because Petliura never managed to obtain complete legitimacy and could not enforce the rule of law.
Petliura’s peasant army was the true source of his authority and, in the words of one of his opponents, it made for “neither a good government nor a good army.”
By the end of 1919 the national movement, launched with so much energy and hope, was in disarray.
Ukrainians themselves were profoundly divided along many lines,
But the greatest political divide—and the one that would shape the course of the subsequent decades—was between those who shared the ideals of the Ukrainian national movement and those who supported the Bolsheviks, a revolutionary group with a very different ideology altogether.
Bolsheviks believed themselves to be the “vanguard of the proletariat”; they would call their regime the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” They sought absolute power, and eventually abolished all other political parties and opponents through terror, violence and vicious propaganda campaigns.
disdain for the very idea of a Ukrainian state had been an integral part of Bolshevik thinking even before the revolution.
In large part this was simply because all of the leading Bolsheviks, among them Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Piatakov, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, were men raised and educated in the Russian empire, and the Russian empire did not recognize such a thing as “Ukraine” in the province that they knew as “Southwest Russia.”
In addition to their national prejudice, the Bolsheviks had particular political reasons for disliking the idea of Ukrainian independence. Ukraine was still overwhelmingly a peasant nation, and according to the Marxist theory that the Bolshevik leadership constantly read and discussed, peasants were at best an ambivalent asset.
Marx famously explained that they were not a “class” and thus had no class consciousness:
They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.”
Lenin, who was more pragmatic, modified these views to a degree. He thought that the peasants were indeed potentially revolutionary—he approved of their desire for radical land reform—but believed that they needed to be guided by the more progressive working class.
Ominously, Lenin also suspected that many farmers of small-holdings, because they owned property, actually thought like capitalist smallholders.
