The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine

We know precious little about the Slavs who settled Ukrainian territory prior to the tenth and eleventh centuries. … The Slavs were agriculturalists who followed in the wake of nomad invasions, as the nomads who “made history” usually did not know what to do with land that was not steppe in which their animals could graze. The waves of Slavic colonization were slow and mostly peaceful, and the results were to prove long-lasting.

Kyivan Rus', a polity with no generally recognized date of birth, has a definite date of death. It occurred on December 7, 1240, when yet another wave of invaders from the Eurasian steppes, the Mongols, conquered the city of Kyiv.

The Cossacks had come a long way—from small bands of fishermen and trappers foraging in the steppes south of Kyiv to settlers of new lands along the steppe frontier; from private militiamen in the employ of princes to fighters in an independent force that foreigners treated with respect; and, finally, from refugees and adventurers to members of a cohesive military brotherhood that regarded itself as a distinct social order and demanded from the government not only money but also recognition of its warrior status. The Polish state could benefit from the military might and economic potential of the Cossacks only if it managed to accommodate their social demands. As subsequent developments would show repeatedly, that was no easy task.

The Turning Point in the internationalization of the Khmelnytsky Revolt took place on January 8, 1654, in the town of Pereiaslav. On that day, Bohdan Khmelnytsky and a hastily gathered group of Cossack officers swore allegiance to the new sovereign of Ukraine, Tsar Aleksei Romanov of Muscovy. The long and complex history of Russo-Ukrainian relations had begun.

The eighteenth century was not only an age of enlightenment and reason. More than anything else, it was an age of empire.

Altogether, close to 4 million people perished in Ukraine as a result of the famine, more than decimating the country—every eighth person succumbed to hunger between 1932 and 1934.

Although the map made it seem like one of the main beneficiaries of the war—Ukraine’s territory increased by more than 15 percent—the republic was in fact one of the war’s main victims. It lost up to 7 million of its citizens, who had constituted more than 15 percent of its population. Out of 36 million remaining Ukrainians, some 10 million didn’t have a roof over their heads, as approximately 700 cities and towns and 28,000 villages lay in ruins. Ukraine lost 40 percent of its wealth and more than 80 percent of its industrial and agricultural equipment. In 1945, the republic produced only one-quarter of its prewar output of industrial goods and 40 percent of its previous agricultural produce.

Russian aggression sought to divide Ukrainians along linguistic, regional, and ethnic lines. While that tactic succeeded in some places, most of Ukrainian society united around the idea of a multilingual and multicultural nation joined in administrative and political terms. That idea, born of lessons drawn from Ukraine’s difficult and often tragic history of internal divisions, rests on a tradition of coexistence of different languages, cultures, and religions over the centuries. The Ukrainians managed to read their troubled history in a way that secured their future as a political nation.

But Russian mercenaries and volunteers brought to the region an overarching idea of a different kind. Like the best known of the Russian commanders, Igor Girkin, they came to the Donbas to defend the values of the “Russian World” against the West. In that context, they saw Ukraine as a battleground between corrupt Western values, including democracy, individual freedoms, human rights, and, especially, the rights of sexual minorities on the one hand and traditional Russian values on the other. By that logic, Western propaganda had simply addled the Ukrainians’ minds. It was up to the Russians to show them the light.