Modern history of Ukraine
emerged as the concept of a nation, and Ukrainians as a nationality, with the Ukrainian National Revival which began in the late 18th and early 19th century. The first wave of national revival is traditionally connected with the publication of the first part of "Eneyida" by Ivan Kotlyarevsky. In 1846, in Moscow the "Istoriya Rusov ili Maloi Rossii" was published. During the Spring of Nations, in 1848 in Lemberg the Supreme Ruthenian Council was created which declared that Galician Ruthenians were part of the bigger Ukrainian nation. The council adopted the yellow and blue flag, the current Ukrainian flag.
Ukraine first declared its independence with the invasion of Bolsheviks in late 1917. Following the conclusion of World War I and with the Peace of Riga, Ukraine was partitioned once again between Poland and the Bolshevik Russia. The Bolshevik-occupied portion of the territory became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, with some boundary adjustments.
In 1922, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, together with the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, became the founding members of the Soviet Union. The Soviet famine of 1932–33 or Holodomor killed an estimated 6 to 8 million people in the Soviet Union, the majority of them in Ukraine.
In 1941, the Soviet Union was invaded by Germany and its other allies. Many Ukrainians initially regarded the Wehrmacht soldiers as liberators from Soviet rule, while others formed an anti-German partisan movement. Some elements of the Ukrainian nationalist underground formed a Ukrainian Insurgent Army that fought both Soviet and Nazi forces. In 1945, Ukraine was made one of the founding members of the United Nations even though it was part of the Soviet Union. In 1954 the Crimean Oblast was transferred from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian SSR.
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine became an independent state, formalized with a referendum. With the enlargement of the European Union in 2004, Ukraine became an area of overlapping spheres of influence between the European Union and the Russian Federation in the post-Soviet era. This manifested in a political division between the "pro-European" Western Ukraine and the "pro-Russian" Eastern Ukraine, which led to an ongoing series of political turmoil, including the Orange Revolution, the Euromaidan protests, the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014, and the ongoing Russian invasion.
The 19th century
Following the 17th century failed attempt to regain statehood in the form of the Cossack Hetmanate, the future Ukrainian territory again ended up divided between three empires: the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.In the second half of the 18th century, Catherine the Great instigated hysteria in the local Eastern Orthodox population by promising protection from Catholicism and support leading to an armed conflict Koliivshchyna in the neighboring right-bank Ukraine which was part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and resulting in the Polish Bar Confederation, Russian military invasion of Poland and its internal affairs, and successful partitions of the last. By the end of the 18th century, most of Ukraine was completely annexed by Russia. At the same time the Russian Empire gradually gained control over the area of the Black Sea coast which was part of the Ottoman realm at the conclusion of the Russo-Turkish Wars of 1735–39, 1768–74, 1787–92.
The lands were generously given to the nobility, and the unfree peasantry were transferred to cultivate the Pontic steppe. Forcing the local Nogai population out and resettling the Crimean Greeks, Catherine the Great renamed all populated places and invited other European settlers to these newly conquered lands: Poles, Germans, Swiss, and others. Some Estonian Swedes were deported to southern Ukraine. Since then there exists the old Swedish village of Gammalsvenskby–Zmiivka.
Ukrainian writers and intellectuals were inspired by the nationalistic spirit stirring other European peoples existing under other imperial governments. Russia, fearing separatism, imposed strict limits on attempts to elevate the Ukrainian language and culture, even banning its use and study. The Russophile policies of Russification and Panslavism led to an exodus of a number some Ukrainian intellectuals into Western Ukraine, while others embraced a Pan-Slavic or Russian identity, with many Russian authors or composers of the 19th century being of Ukrainian origin.
In the Austrian Empire most of the elite that ruled Galicia were of Austrian or Polish descent, with the Ruthenians mostly representing the peasantry. During the 19th century, Russophilia was a common occurrence among the Slavic population, but the mass exodus of Ukrainian intellectuals escaping from Russian repression in Eastern Ukraine, as well as the intervention of Austrian authorities, caused the movement to be replaced by Ukrainophilia, which would then cross-over into the Russian Empire.
First World War, the revolutions, and aftermath
When World War I and a series of revolutions across Europe, including the October Revolution in Russia, shattered many existing empires such as the Austrian and Russian ones, people of Ukraine were caught in the middle. Between 1917 and 1919, several separate Ukrainian republics manifested independence, the Makhnovshchina, the Ukrainian People's Republic, the Ukrainian State, the West Ukrainian People's Republic, and numerous Bolshevik revkoms.As the area of Ukraine fell into warfare and anarchy, it was also fought over by German and Austrian forces, the Red Army of Bolshevik Russia, the White Forces of General Denikin, the Polish Army, anarchists led by Nestor Makhno. Kyiv itself was occupied by many different armies. The city was captured by the Bolsheviks on 9 February 1918, by the Germans on 2 March 1918, by the Bolsheviks a second time on 5 February 1919, by the White Army on 31 August 1919, by Bolsheviks for a third time on 15 December 1919, by the Polish Army on 6
May 1920, and finally by the Bolsheviks for the fourth time on 12 June 1920.
The defeat in the Polish-Ukrainian War and then the failure of the Piłsudski's and Petliura's Warsaw agreement of 1920 to oust the Bolsheviks during the 1920 Kiev offensive led almost to the occupation of Poland itself. This led to the Polish–Soviet War, which culminated in the signing of the Peace of Riga in March 1921. The Peace of Riga divided the disputed territories between Poland and Soviet Russia. Specifically, the part of Ukraine west of the Zbruch river was incorporated into Poland, while the eastern portion became part of the Soviet Union as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The first capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was Kharkiv; in 1934, the capital was relocated to Kyiv.
Interbellum
Soviet Ukraine
The Ukrainian national idea lived on during the inter-war years and was even spread to a large territory with the traditionally mixed population in the east and south that became part of the Ukrainian Soviet republic. The Ukrainian culture even enjoyed a revival due to Bolshevik concessions in the early Soviet years known as the policy of Korenization. In these years, an impressive Ukrainization program was implemented throughout the republic. Alongside this a number of national territorial units were set aside for non-Ukrainian ethnic groups. As well as an autonomous republic in the west for Ukraine's Moldovan people several national raions including 8 Russian, 7 German, 4 Greek, 4 Bulgarian, 3 Jewish, and 1 Polish national raion existed in this period.The rapidly developed Ukrainian language-based education system dramatically raised the literacy of the Ukrainophone rural population. Simultaneously, the newly literate ethnic Ukrainians migrated to the cities, which became rapidly largely Ukrainianised—in both population and in education. Similarly expansive was an increase in Ukrainian language publishing and overall eruption of Ukrainian cultural life.
At the same time, the usage of Ukrainian was continuously encouraged in the workplace and in government affairs as the recruitment of indigenous cadre was implemented as part of the korenisation policies. While initially, the party and government apparatus was mostly Russian-speaking, by the end of the 1920s the ethnic Ukrainians composed over one half of the membership in the Ukrainian communist party, the number strengthened by the accession of Borotbists, a formerly indigenously Ukrainian "independentist" and non-Bolshevik communist party.
Despite the ongoing Soviet Union-wide antireligious campaign, the Ukrainian national Orthodox church was created called the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. The Bolshevik government initially saw the national church as a tool in their goal to suppress the Russian Orthodox Church always viewed with the great suspicion by the regime for its being the cornerstone of pre-revolutionary Russian Empire and the initially strong opposition it took towards the regime change. Therefore, the government tolerated the new Ukrainian national church for some time and the UAOC gained a wide following among the Ukrainian peasantry.
The change in the Soviet economic policies towards the fast-pace industrialization was marked by the 1928 introduction of Joseph Stalin's first piatiletka. Industrialization brought about a dramatic economic and social transformation in traditionally agricultural Ukraine. In the first piatiletkas the industrial output of Ukraine quadrupled as the republic underwent a record industrial development. The massive influx of the rural population to the industrial centers increased the urban population from 19% to 34%.
Soviet collectivisation
However, industrialization had a heavy cost for the peasantry, demographically a backbone of the Ukrainian nation. To satisfy the state's need for increased food supplies and finance industrialization, Stalin instituted a program of collectivization of agriculture, which profoundly affected Ukraine, often referred to as the "breadbasket of the USSR". In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the state combined the peasants' lands and animals into collective farms. Starting in 1929, a policy of enforcement was applied, using regular troops and secret police to confiscate lands and materials where necessary.Many resisted, and a desperate struggle by the peasantry against the authorities ensued. Some slaughtered their livestock rather than turn it over to the collectives. Wealthier peasants were labeled "kulaks", enemies of the state. Tens of thousands were executed and about 100,000 families were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan.
Forced collectivization had a devastating effect on agricultural productivity. Despite this, in 1932 the Soviet government increased Ukraine's production quotas by 44%, ensuring that they could not be met. Soviet law required that the members of a collective farm would receive no grain until government quotas were satisfied. The authorities in many instances exacted such high levels of procurement from collective farms that starvation became widespread.
The Soviet famine of 1932–33, called Holodomor in Ukrainian, claimed up to 10 million Ukrainian lives as peasants' food stocks were forcibly removed by Stalin's regime by the NKVD secret police. As elsewhere, the precise number of deaths by starvation in Ukraine may never be precisely known. That said, the most recent demographic studies suggest that over 4 million Ukrainians perished in the first six months of 1933 alone, a figure that increases if population losses from 1931, 1932, and 1934 are also included, along with those from adjacent territories inhabited primarily by Ukrainians, such as the Kuban.
The Soviet Union suppressed information about this genocide, and as late as the 1980s admitted only that there was some hardship because of kulak sabotage and bad weather. Non-Soviets maintain that the famine was an avoidable, deliberate act of genocide.
The times of industrialization and collectivization also brought about a wide campaign against "nationalist deviation" which in Ukraine translated into an assault on the national political and cultural elite. The first wave of purges between 1929 and 1934 targeted the revolutionary generation of the party that in Ukraine included many supporters of Ukrainization. The next 1936–1938 wave of political purges eliminated much of the new political generation that replaced those that perished in the first wave and halved the membership of the Ukrainian communist party.
The purged Ukrainian political leadership was largely replaced by the cadre sent from Russia that was also largely "rotated" by Stalin's purges. As the policies of Ukrainisation were halted and replaced by massive Russification approximately four-fifths of the Ukrainian cultural elite, intellectuals, writers, artists, and clergy, had been "eliminated", executed or imprisoned, in the following decade. Mass arrests of the hierarchy and clergy of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church culminated in the liquidation of the church in 1930.