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The Basic Knowledge on Ukraine: A Short Historical Perspective
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic
The Germans, the Bolsheviks, and Ukraine
Historically, the German occupation forces were those who were the first Great Power to create and recognize any kind of at least a short-lived state’s independence of “Ukraine”. That was in January 1918 during the time of their own inspired and supported anti-Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917−1921. We have to keep in mind that up to the 1917 February/March Revolution in Imperial Russia, the Central Powers succeeded in occupying in the East the territories of Curlandia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania. However, in 1918, the line of maximum occupied territories at the Eastern Front was moved far eastward, including Bessarabia, Ukraine, Crimea, White Russia, Livonia, and Estonia (including Rostov on Don, Novorossijsk, Novočerkassk, Harkov, Minsk, Pskov, Reval, and Helsingfors) [Direttore generale, Marco Ausenda, Nuovissimo Atlante Storico Mondiale, Milano: Touring Club Italiano, 2001, 128‒129]. In short, a German-created and patronaged statehood of Ukraine was, for the first time in history, that some political entity with more or less fixed borders became established under the name of Ukraine. Therefore, up to that time, a pure geographical term “Ukraine” (“Borderland” between Poland and Russia) became transformed into a political entity and even a nationhood.
However, as reoccupied by the Bolshevik Red Army, the eastern and southern parts of the present-day territory of (a Greater) Ukraine joined in 1922 the USSR as a separate Soviet Socialist Republic (without the Crimean Peninsula). The western portion of the post-1945 Ukraine was included in Poland during the time between the two world wars. Concerning the Crimean Peninsula, as a “disputed” territory between Ukraine and Russia, it is important to note that according to the 1926 Soviet census of Crimea (which was the first census organized in the USSR), the majority of its population was ethnic Russians (382.645). The second largest ethnic group was the Tartars (179.094).
In truth, (ethnic non-Russian) V. I. Lenin has to be considered the real historical father of Ukrainian statehood, but also of contemporary Ukrainian nationhood. Ukraine was the most fertile agricultural Soviet republic, but was particularly catastrophically affected by (ethnic Georgian, not Russian!) J. V. Stalin’s economic policy in the 1930s (NEP), which neglected agricultural production in favor of the speed of industrialization of the country, according to the political-economic ideology of Marxism-Leninism. The result was a great famine (Holodomor) with around seven million people dead, but the majority of them were of ethnic Russian origin but not Ukrainians, whose majority lived at that time in Western Poland, like Galicia (with Lviv/Lavov/Lemberg/Leopoli/), etc., i.e., not included in the USSR. In addition, in interwar Poland, the ethnic Ukrainian nationality was not recognized.
The interwar territory of the Soviet Ukraine included the cities of Kiev/Kyiv, Vinnica/Vinnytsia, Aleksandrovsk/Zaporož'e, Juzovka/Stalin/Stalino, Vorošilovgrad, Harkov/Kharkiv, Nikolaev, Odessa, etc. The three biggest urban settlements were Kiev, Odessa, and Harkov [Direttore generale, Marco Ausenda, Nuovissimo Atlante Storico Mondiale, Milano: Touring Club Italiano, 2001, 130].
A territory of present-day Ukraine was devastated during WWII by the Nazi German occupation forces from 1941 to 1944 which have been supported by puppet and criminal groups around S. Bandera (1900−1959) under which genocide on Poles, Jews, and Russians was committed [on Stepan Bandera, see: Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist. Fascism, Genocide, and Cult, Stuttgart, ibidem, 2014]. For instance, the Ukrainian militia (12.000) directly participated in the 1942 holocaust of some 200.000 Volhynian Jews together with 140.000 German policemen. The ethnic Ukrainian mass killers learned their job from the Germans and applied their knowledge as well as on the ethnic Poles [Timothy Snyder, Tautų rekonstrukcija: Lieuva, Lenkija, Ukraina, Baltarusija 1569−1999, Vilnius: Mintis, 2009, 183]. The Polish historiography today claims that at least 200.000 ethnic Poles were exterminated by the Ukrainian militia in WWII.
J. V. Stalin and Ukraine
After the war, J. V. Stalin, supported by the Ukrainian party cadre N. Khrushchev, deported about 300.000 Ukrainians from their homeland as they had been accused of collaborating with the Nazi regime during the war and participating in the genocide committed by S. Bandera’s armed nationalists and war criminals. It was done so that those Ukrainians would not experience retaliation for their crimes. However, after the war, the Ukrainians have been and directly rewarded by Moscow for their collaboration with the Germans and participation in S. Bandera’s organized genocide as the lands of Transcarpathia, littoral Moldova (Bessarabia), Polish Galicia, and part of Romania’s Bukovina in 1945 followed by Crimea in 1954 became annexed by the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine regardless to the fact that in many of these regions ethnic Ukrainians either did not exist or were in minority followed by the fact that these regions never belonged to the geographic Ukraine. These territories, which never have been part of any kind of Ukraine and substantially not populated by ethnolinguistic Ukrainians, were included in Soviet Ukraine primarily due to the political activity by the strongest Ukrainian party cadre in the USSR – N. Khrushchev, a person who inherited J. V. Stalin’s throne in Moscow in 1953.
On this place, a parallel with Croatia is absolute: for the Croat committed genocide on the Serbs, Jews, and Roma by A. Pavelić’s regime (a Croat version of S. Bandera) during WWII on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia a post-war (the Socialist Republic of) Croatia was awarded by a Croat-Slovenian dictator of Yugoslavia, J. B. Tito, with the lands of Istria, Adriatic islands, and Dubrovnik – all of them never have been in any kind of the state of Croatia before WWII.
Dissolution of the USSR and the post-Soviet Ukraine
The policy of General Secreary of the Soviet Communist Party M. Gorbachev of deliberate and gradual dissolution of the USSR after the Reykjavik Summit (Iceland) or bilateral meeting with the U.S. President Ronald Reagan on October 11‒12ᵗʰ, 1986 caused a revival of the ethnic nationalism of the ethnic Ukrainians who proclaimed independence on August 24ᵗʰ, 1991 (confirmed on a referendum on December 1ˢᵗ, 1991 only by those who did not boycott it) in the wake of anti-Gorbachev’s military putsch in Moscow (mis)using the political situation of the paralyzed central Government in the country. However, Ukraine’s state independence was proclaimed and later internationally recognized within the borders of a Greater Stalin-Khrushchev’s Ukraine, with at least 20% of the ethnic Russian population living in a compact area in the eastern part of the country and as well as making a qualified (2/3) majority of Crimea’s population. In truth, it has to be clearly stated that a Soviet and post-Soviet Greater Ukraine annexed certain ethnohistorical territories from all its neighbours and, therefore, potentially can be or in reality already is in political conflict.
The coming years saw the rifts with neighboring Russia, with the main political task of Kiev (Kyiv) to commit as much possible as to the Ukrainization (assimilation) of ethnic Russians (similar to the policy of the Croatization of ethnic Serbs in Croatia orchestrated by the neo-Nazi government in Zagreb led by Dr. Franjo Tuđman in the 1990s). At the same time, the Russian majority in Crimea constantly required the peninsula’s reunification with Mother Russia but got only an autonomous status within Ukraine, a country that they never considered to be their natural-historical homeland (as a matter of comparison, Kosovo Albanians enjoyed within Socialist Serbia and Yugoslav federation a higher level of national autonomy compared to Crimea within Ukraine). The ethnic Russians of Ukraine were becoming more and more unsatisfied with the conditions in which they have been living from the time when in 1998−2001 the Ukrainian taxation system collapsed, which meant that the central Government in Kiev was not able to pay the salaries and pensions to its citizens. A very weak Ukrainian state organization became, in fact, unable to function normally (“failed state”) and as a consequence, it did not have the power to prevent a series of politically motivated assassinations followed by popular protests which had been also very much inspired by the economic decline of the country [on the history of Ukraine and the Ukrainians, see more and compare with: Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, New Heaven: Yale University Press, 2009; Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, New York: Basic Books, 2015; Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine, New York: Basic Books, 2015].
Nationalistic Ukrainian historiography
As a matter of fact, it has to be stressed that the Ukrainian historiography of their history of the land and the people is extremely nationalistic and in very cases not objective like many other national historiographies. It is, basically, politically colored with the main task to present the Ukrainians as a natural ethnolinguistic nation who have been historically fighting to create a united independent national state and unjustifiably claiming certain territories to be ethnohistorically the “Ukrainian”.
One of the typical examples of such a tendency to rewrite the history of Eastern Europe according to a nationalistic and politically correct framework is, for instance, the book by Serhy Jekelčyk on the birth of a modern Ukrainian nation in which, among other quasi-historical facts based on self-interpreted events, it is written that the USSR in 1939−1940 annexed from Poland and Romania the “West Ukrainian land” [Serhy Jekelčyk, Ukraina: Modernios nacijos gimimas, Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2009, 17]. However, this “West Ukrainian land” never was part of any kind of Ukraine before WWII as Ukraine as a state or administrative province never existed before V. I. Lenin created a Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine (in 1922) within the USSR but at that time without the “West Ukrainian land” as it was not a part of the USSR (it became part of Poland). Moreover, the Ukrainians were either not living or were just a minority on this land, which means that Ukraine did not even have ethnic rights over the biggest part of the “West Ukrainian land”.
Even today, around half of Ukraine’s territory is not populated by the Ukrainians, as the majority of the population. Moreover, in some regions, there are no Ukrainians at all. Therefore, the cardinal question became: On which principles are the Ukrainian borders formed? In principle, concerning at least the Old Continent (of Europe), there were two cardinal principles or models regarding the creation of the “national” state: historical and ethnic. However, in several cases, these two models have been combined to a certain extent. Nevertheless, regarding Ukraine, no one of these two principal models has been applied in any significant form. Consequently, Ukraine became one of the typical examples of “artificial” creation, existing as such due to geopolitical projects by certain Great Powers of the time.
Another example of the Ukrainian historiographic nationalistic misleading we can find in an academic brochure on Bukovina’s Metropolitan’s residence, published in 2007 by the National University of Chernivtsi. In the brochure is written that this university is “...one of the oldest classical universities of Ukraine” [The Architecturial Complex of Bukovynian Metropolitan’s Residence, Chernivtsi: Yuriy Fedkovych National University of Chernivtsi, 2007, 31], which is true only from the present-day rough political perspective but not from a moral-historical point of view. Namely, the university is located in North Bukovina, which in 1775 the Habsburg Monarchy annexed. The land was since 1786 administered within the Chernivtsi district of Galicia, and one hundred years after the affiliation of Bukovina to the monarchy, the Franz-Josephs-Universität was inaugurated on October 4ᵗʰ, 1875 (the name day of the emperor). In other words, the university’s origin as a whole Bukovina has nothing to do with any kind of both historical Ukraine or/and ethnic Ukrainians as before 1940 it was outside of the administrative territory of Ukraine when the whole of North Bukovina on August 13ᵗʰ, became annexed by the USSR according to the Hitler-Stalin Pact (or the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact) signed on August 23ʳᵈ, 1939 [Ibid.].
Therefore, two notorious bandits (one Nazi and another Bolshevik) decided to transfer North Bukovina to the USSR, and the land became, after WWII, part of a Greater (Stalin’s) Ukrainian SSR. Nevertheless, while the Ukrainian nationalists claim that “Russia” (in fact, anti-Russian USSR) occupied Ukraine, the annexation of the North Bukovina and other territories from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania in 1940 is for them a legitimate act of historical justice done by the same “Russia” (i.e., the USSR). Here, we have to notice that according to the same pact, the territories of the independent states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were as well as annexed by the USSR that is considered by their historians and politicians as “occupation”, which means the (illegal) act of aggression that is breaking international law and legitimate order in the international relations. Nevertheless, they never accused Ukraine of doing the same concerning the occupied lands from its three western neighbors in 1940/1944 [see, for instance: Priit Raudkivi, Estonian History in Pictures, Tallinn: Eesti Instituut, 2004 (without numeration of the pages); Arūnas Gumuliauskas, Lietuvos istorija (1795−2009), Šiauliai: Lucilijus, 2010, 279−295]. Lithuania, moreover, within J. V. Stalin's USSR became “justifiably” territorially enlarged with the German Memelland and the Polish Vilnius region (“Middle Lithuania”/”Litwa Śródkowa”). The whole eastern portion of the present-day Lithuania, including Vilnius, was on October 10ᵗʰ , 1939, by a special decree gifted to Lithuania by Moscow, and on October 26ᵗʰ, the Lithuanian army (with German helmets) marched into Vilnius [Tomas Venclova, Vilnius. City Gide, Vilnius: R Paknio leidykla, 2012, 57, 61]. Something similar happened with Ukraine as well as in 1944/1945.
The year 1654
Political assimilation of certain separate Slavic ethnolinguistic groups in Ukraine was and is one of the standardized instruments for the creation and maintenance of the Ukrainian national identity in the 20ᵗʰ century. The most brutal case is of the Ruthenians (Rusyns), who are simply proclaimed as historical Ukrainians known under such a name till WWII. Their land, which was in the interwar period part of Czechoslovakia, was annexed by the USSR at the end of WWII and included in a Greater Soviet Ukraine. It became simply renamed from Ruthenia into the Sub-Carpathian Ukraine. However, the Ruthenians and the Ukrainians are two separate Slavonic ethnolinguistic groups, as such officially recognized, for example, in Serbia’s Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, where the Ruthenian (Rusyn) language is even standardized and studied together with Ruthenian philology and literature at a separate department at the University of Novi Sad. Unfortunately, the Ruthenian position in Ukraine is even worse in comparison with the Kurdish position in Turkey, as the process of Ruthenian assimilation is much faster and successful than that of the Kurdish case.
From the current perspective of the Ukrainian crisis and in general from the point of solving the “Ukrainian Question” it has to be noticed a very historical fact that a part of present-day East Ukraine became legally incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1654 as a consequence of the decision by the local hetman of Zaporozhian territory, Bohdan Khmelnytsky (c. 1595−1657), based on a popular revolt against the Polish-Lithuanian (the Roman Catholic) occupation of Ukraine which broke out in 1648 [Alfredas Bumblauskas, Senosios Lietuvos istorija, 1009−1795, Vilnius: R. Paknio leidykla, 2007, 306; Jevgenij Anisimov, Rusijos istorija nuo Riuriko iki Putino: Žmonės. Įvykiai. Datos, Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos centras, 2014, 185−186]. It means that the core of present-day Ukraine (Ukraine proper) voluntarily joined Russia, therefore escaping from the Roman Catholic Polish-Lithuanian oppression. Subsequently, B. Khmelnytsky’s ruled territory has to be considered from a historical point of view as the motherland of all present-day Ukraine – the motherland which already in 1654 chose Russia.
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| Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic Ex-University Professor Research Fellow at Centre for Geostrategic Studies Belgrade, Serbia www.geostrategy.rs sotirovic1967@gmail.com ©Vladislav B. Sotirovic 2025 |
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