1913 to 1936: Ukrainian historian, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, publishes his ten volume History of Ukraine-Rus. He addresses the contentious question of Ukrainian-Russian identity. The following extract – an edited citation of his “Introductory Remarks” – puts the subsequent timeline of the Russian invasion of Ukraine into historical perspective.
Historically, Ukraine had several names. “Little Rus”, “South Rus” and, simply, “Rus”, was how the nation was once called. The ethnopolitical groups that today constitute the Ukrainian people used to be known as “Ruthenian” (rusyns’kyi) people.
During the long period of Ukraine’s political and cultural decline, its ancient historical names – “Rus” [referring both to the people and to the nation], “Rusyn” [person], and “rus’kyi” [adjective] – were appropriated by the Russian people. Russia’s cultural and political life evolved out of the traditions of the Old Rus state, which originated at, and centred on, Kyiv. Russian political entities – the Grand Principality of Vladimir and, later, that of Moscow – considered themselves the heirs and successors of this Old Rus (Kyivan) state. Their dynastic links stemmed from the ruling dynasty of Kyiv.
The existence of such terminological confusion itself reflects the unpropitious historical lot of the Ukrainian people.
The fourth century of the Current Era marks the threshold of the historical life of the Ukrainian people. Our knowledge of these people, as a separate entity within the Slavic group, dates to this period. From this time on, the Ukrainian-Rus tribes colonised the territories that comprise modern Ukraine. The centuries immediately following this colonisation set the stage for the organisation of the Rus state. The ruling dynasty of Kyiv and its retinue united all the branches of the Ukrainian people into a single political body – albeit not for long – and this political unity is reflected in the common characteristics that mark this people’s culture and social life.
In the tenth century, Ukraine officially became a Christian state.
In the middle of the fourteenth century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland annexed Ukrainian lands.
The ensuing Ukrainian resistance, championed by the Cossack sword, sought to build a new social and political order on the ruins of the class system that the Polish nobility had established. But the struggle was ultimately lost by the Ukrainians, bringing full decline in the wake of Lithuanian-Polish supremacy.
As early as the fourteenth century, political predominance had passed to the Russians. Ukrainian life was centred in western Ukraine, in the Galician-Volhynian state. The name “Little Rus” was attached to the latter state. The name later fell into disuse and reappeared only in the seventeenth century, after the Ukrainians had been incorporated into the Muscovite state and the need arose to distinguish them from the Muscovites.
It was then that the terms “Little Russian” and “Little Russia” were adopted as official designations, remaining in Russia to the present day.
Among Ukrainians, however, the name did not take hold. Instead, “Ukraine” (Ukraïna) and “Ukrainian” (ukraïns’kyi) gradually came into widespread use. In the sixteenth century this ancient term, which during the Old Rus period had meant “borderland” was applied to the middle Dnipro [Dnieper] region, which by the end of the fifteenth century had become a very dangerous borderland indeed, subject to repeated attacks by the Tatars.
The name “Ukraine” assumed particular significance in the seventeenth century, when the region of eastern Ukraine became the centre and symbol of the Ukrainian revival, and, in contrast to the sociopolitical and national orders of the Polish and Russian states, concentrated in itself the aspirations, dreams and hopes of modern Ukraine.
As awareness of the continuity of ethnonational Ukrainian life grew, the Ukrainian name came to encompass the entire history of the Ukrainian people, their traditions and language.
When Peter the Great renamed Muscovy “Russia”, everything Ukrainian was suppressed.
1863: Peter 1st bans the printing of books in Ukrainian and forbids their use in Ukrainian churches and schools. The tsar proclaims: “There was never a separate Little Russian language and there can never be one.”
1876: Alexander 2nd outlaws the importation of all Ukrainian-language literature, as well as shuts down Ukrainian theatres.
1881: Ukrainian language is prohibited in schools and churches.
1888: Alexander 3rd criminalises the use of Ukrainian in official institutions; makes illegal the baptism of children with Ukrainian names.
1922: Russian annexation of Ukraine into the Soviet Union.
1932-33: Some six million children, women and men starve to death in an orchestrated famine as wheat harvests are confiscated to Russia.
1930’s: Show trials summarily murder/exile Ukrainian citizens to Baltic and Siberian labour camps.
1984: Teachers who use Russian in Ukrainian schools are paid 15 percent more than teachers who use Ukrainian.
1991: More than 90 percent of the electorate of Ukraine, the second most powerful nominal republic in the former Soviet Union, votes for independence. The first president of a free Ukraine elected.
1991: The leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus formally dissolve the Soviet Union.
1994: Ukraine, holding the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, agrees to destroy the weapons and joins the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
1994: The leaders of Ukraine, Russia and the United States sign a memorandum “to respect the independence, and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.”
And “The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine . . . if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.” [Budapest Memorandum].
1994: France and China formally assure Ukraine of Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty.
2014: Russian unmarked military forces invade Ukrainian Crimea and Donbas. Russian soldiers without insignia take control of strategic positions and infrastructure in Crimea. Russian forces without insignia, Russian-armed separatists, and Russian mercenaries intensify war on Donbas.
2014: Russian foreign minister states his country has the right to defend annexed Crimea and regions of Donbas by using nuclear forces.
2015: Minsk ll agreements signed by Russia and Ukraine but not implemented amid intense warfare. Putin says he is prepared to put nuclear forces on alert.
2019: 7% of Ukraine classified by Ukrainian government as temporarily occupied territories.
2021-22: Putin questions Ukraine’s right to exist. Russia scales-up its continuing war on Ukraine and its population.
Article by Robin Knightley.
Robin Knightly is the nom de plume of a writer whose mother was born in eastern Ukraine, and father in western Ukraine. Both parents survived the Ukrainian genocide orchestrated by the regime in Moscow. The 1932-1933 famine was executed by confiscating the wheat harvests, a seizure that took the lives of six million Ukrainian children, women and men. The writer’s grandfather was humiliated in one of the 1930’s show trials, dragged off and murdered. Both parents escaped to Australia as refugees. The writer was born here.