The whole world is watching with bated breath the developments in Ukraine after Russia's invasion and awaiting the next moves of Vladimir Putin and the international community, which appears rather embarrassed and weak...
Of course, the crisis in Russia-Ukraine relations did not erupt suddenly, nor does it have a "history" of a few years.
As we will see Russia and Ukraine have had many frictions and conflicts in the past. Especially since the mid-19th century when Ukrainian nationalism was "awakened", conflicts between the two were a frequent occurrence.
But let's take a closer look at the history of Ukraine and its relations with Russia over time.
The history of Ukraine[/P]In the 9th and 8th centuries BC, the areas near the mouths of the Dnieper and Dniester rivers were inhabited by Milesian settlers and the cities they founded flourished. In pre-Christian times, the northernmost areas were inhabited by the Scythians. In the Middle Ages, the Ukrainian Empire of Kiev was created in the country by the Slavic populations that had settled in these territories. The "Kiev Dominion" (Kievan Rus, 9th-12th centuries) is considered the nucleus of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.), these regions became the principalities of Kiev, Galicia and Volynia on the right bank of the Dnieper and the principalities of Pereyslav, Chernigov and Novgorod-Seversky on the left bank of the river.
The continuous attacks of the Cumans (or Polovsky) from the middle of the 11th century, forced the inhabitants of the Kiev and Pereyslav regions to leave the places where they lived and move northeast (Rostov-Suzdal regions) or seek refuge in the forests of Polesia and Volhynia, the Bug basin, Galicia and the slopes of the Carpathians[BR].[AFTER THE FALL OF THE RUS PRINCIPALITIES IN THE 13TH AND 14TH CENTURIES, THE UKRAINIANS DEVELOPED SEPARATELY FROM THE OTHER EASTERN SLAVS UNDER THE RULE OF LITHUANIANS AND POLES, AND WERE THEN RULED BY INDEPENDENT RULERS, THE ATAMANS.
The Cossacks - The partition of Ukraine into Russia and Austria
From the 16th century and in Ukraine, especially in the Dnieper region, the Cossacks played an important role.
They supported the resistance of the peasants who, to escape Polish pressure, fled to the southern and eastern steppes and some settled in Muscovy. Around 1655-1656 the Cossack state of Kharkiv was founded. The surrounding area was called Ukraine Slobinchka, and the Cossacks converted to Orthodoxy.
After wars between Cossacks and Poles (1625-1637 and 1648-1654), the Cossack ataman (leader) Bogdan Khmelnitsky was put under the protection of the Moscow Tsar by the Treaty of Pereyslav (1654), following the population's tendency to move away from Poland.
The non-Cossack population of eastern Ukraine was under Russian administration, while the Ukrainian clergy was dependent on the Moscow Patriarchate.
The Treaty of Andrusovo (1667) ratified the division of Ukraine between Poland and Russia, which retained the Kiev region and the left bank of the Dnieper. The region of Ukraine on the right bank of the Dnieper was attacked by the Ottomans who occupied parts of it until 1774.
The population fled to eastern Ukraine, which was ruled by an ataman and assimilated by Russia. Peter the Great created the College of Little Russia in 1722 to control the activities of the atamans and the starchina (Cossack authorities).
There had been a previous attempt to create a reunified and independent Ukraine, supported by Poland and Sweden, which ended with the victory of Peter the Great of Russia over Charles IV of Sweden (Battle of Poltava, 1709).
The institution of atamans was finally abolished in 1764.
In 1780, Catherine the Great completed the administrative assimilation of Ukraine. In 1783 she extended the institution of slavery in most of its territory and in 1785 she granted to the Starchina the privileges of the Russian nobility . After the distribution of territories in 1793 and 1795, Ukraine was divided between the Russian Empire, which annexed the right bank of the Dnieper, Podolia and Volynia, and the Austrian Empire, which included Galicia, the northern part of Bukovina and southern Carpathian Ukraine.
Ukraine's economic boom and the development of Ukrainian national consciousness (19th-early 20th century)
After the signing of the Treaty of Kyuchuk-Kaynarji (1774) and the annexation of Crimea in 1783, the Russians saw an opportunity to exploit southern Ukraine, which was called "New Russia".
Ukraine experienced from the beginning of the 19th century a great development in wheat and sugar beet cultivation and from 1835-1840 in food industries, especially sugar. Mining of minerals (coal in Donetsk and iron in Krivoy Rog) and metallurgy after 1870, thanks to the investments of foreign (French, Belgian and German) capitalists, turned Ukraine into the most important industrial region of the Russian Empire. The cities gathered a mixed population, with Russian as the dominant language, while the countryside was dominated by the Ukrainian element.
The Jews who had settled in Ukraine at the end of the 16th century (despite the massacres of 1648-1649) made up 30% of the population of cities and towns according to the 1897 census.
It should be noted that the Jews were victims of several pogroms (especially in the years 1881 - 1884, 1903 - 1906 and 1917 - 1921).
In the first half of the 19th century, national consciousness began to develop in eastern Ukraine, as the Ukrainian intelligentsia began to study the history, popular culture and language of the country and participated in the resistance movements against the tsarist power. In 1875 the first Ukrainian workers' organisation, the 'Union of Workers of the South of Russia', was founded in Odessa. Since 1863 the Russian government had adopted a strongly repressive attitude towards Ukraine.
It had even banned the name Ukraine, putting into use the name Little Russia, and had prohibited the printing of works in Ukrainian, which was in force until 1905. The Ukrainians of Galicia, which as mentioned was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, did have some rights ignored by their counterparts in the Russian Empire, such as the use of the Ukrainian language in primary schools, but eastern Galicia was still dominated by the wealthy Polish aristocracy and a class of Polish or Jewish bourgeoisie.
Ukraine participated in the revolutionary movement that developed in Russia in the early 20th century: peasant riots of 1902, workers' strikes (1900-1903) and the 1905 revolution. The freedoms granted in 1905 strengthened the Ukrainian nationalist movement. However, there were tensions between Russia and the Central Empires (Germany and Austria-Hungary) which resulted in the Russian government hardening its stance and occupying Galicia in the autumn of 1904, even imposing violent extermination in the region.
The years of revolution (1917 - 1920)
During the First World War, Russia allied itself with Great Britain and France, which promised independence to the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe in order to defeat their rivals, as Austria-Hungary "included" many nationalities (Slavs, Czechs, Hungarians, Hungarians, Poles, Germans, etc.).Germany also controlled territories inhabited by Polish populations. After the failures of the Russian army in the war, the situation inside the Empire was shaken, the Tsar resigned and the first republican government was formed under Alexander Fydorovich Kerensky. Immediately afterwards the Ukrainians formed an informal Parliament in Kiev, called the "Small Rada" (Council), led by Mykhaylo Hrushevsky.
The Rada in November 1917 proclaimed in Kiev the "People's Republic of Ukraine". The Bolsheviks, who had consolidated their presence only in industrial cities in the east and south, proclaimed in Kharkiv the "Soviet Republic of Ukraine" (11 December 1917). In response, Rada declared the independence of Ukraine (9 January 1918), but as the Bolsheviks occupied all the major cities of the country in January-February 1918, Rada fled to Zhitomir.
However, it sent a delegation to Brest-Litovsk, which on 26 January/8 February 1918 signed a separate peace treaty with Germany. Under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in April 1918, Germany occupied Ukraine and restored the title of ataman, which was given to Pavlo Skoropadsky. However, Germany's defeat in World War I caused the fall of the atamanate (November-December 1918) and the creation in Kiev of an independent Ukrainian government headed by Symon Petliura. During the same period, the Republic of Western Ukraine was established in Lvov, which was occupied in 1919 by Polish troops. The northern part of Bukovina had been ceded to Romania in November 1918.
After the end of World War I, Crimea was the headquarters of counter-revolutionary forces of General Anton Ivanovich Denikin. Soon thousands of "Whites" arrived there, who were supporters of the Tsarist regime as opposed to the "Reds", as the civil war in Russia spread. Of course, the "Whites" were a patchwork of anti-communist groups that often had no contact with each other. Denikin was succeeded by General Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel , who was put in charge of most of them. In June 1920 Wrangel's men launched a major offensive in Ukraine that did not come to fruition. The failed Ukrainian campaign in 1919 had of course also intervened (see our related article on 28/9/2019). In early November 1920 the Bolsheviks attacked the "Whites" and forced them to retreat. The remnants of the "Whites" fled to Constantinople.
As early as June 1919, the Soviet Republic of Ukraine, which had been declared in December 1918 in Kharkiv, was linked by military and political agreement with Russia. It was recognized by Poland in the Treaty of Riga (March 1921) and joined the Soviet Union as a Federal Republic in December 1922.
Ukraine in the years of the Soviet Union
On 18 October 1921 the "Autonomous Crimean Soviet Socialist Republic" was established, which became part of the USSR and on 5 December 1936 was renamed the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Crimea. As is well known, the Soviet regime, using Greece's participation in the Ukrainian Campaign as an argument, unleashed persecution against the Black Sea Greeks and thousands of Pontians who had settled there to escape the persecution of the Turks. In 1921-22 and 1932-1933 two great famines broke out which claimed the lives of more than 10,000,000 Ukrainians.
But Western and Ukrainian scholars mention 11,000,000 - 16,000,000 dead. The famine of 1932- 33 seems to have been the result of a systematic and organized policy of the Soviet state, which magnified the hatred of the Ukrainians for the Russians. The exact number of victims cannot be calculated as the Soviet authorities buried the dead in mass graves. In the following decades Ukrainians were forbidden to talk about this issue, which was done after the fall of the Soviet regime. In 2006, the Ukrainian parliament recognised this event as genocide, as did other countries. The Ukrainians also claim 66 tonnes of gold, 1 439 tonnes of silver, diamonds and antiques, in addition to grain, which the Soviet regime expropriated through the Torgsin (state-run hard currency shops that operated in the USSR from 1931 to 1936) in exchange for buying scarce food from starving Ukrainians.
The forced collectivization of agriculture and the five-year programs imposed by the Soviet government had the effect of achieving the social and economic changes it sought and the unification of the country. The tight control of political and economic life simultaneously curbed Russian 'sovereign nation chauvinism' and Ukrainian nationalism.
Ukraine during World War II
Under the terms of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact (24 August 1939), the Soviet Union annexed Polish territories inhabited by Ukrainians, as well as Bukovina and Bessarabia. However, the German attack on the USSR in June 1941 changed the situation. The Germans occupied a large geographical area, which included Ukraine and Crimea. Many Ukrainians welcomed the Axis forces as liberators from the oppression of the Soviet government. Some even fought alongside them. There were, of course, guerrilla groups that fought against the Germans, the Poles and the Soviets, while partisans loyal to Stalin worked in the rear of the invaders.
The Germans occupied Kiev on 19 September 1941. Four days later the city was sabotaged, probably by members of the Soviet regime's secret police, the notorious NKVD. The explosion of several bombs resulted in the death and injury of many Germans and the outbreak of a fire in the city. During the firefighting efforts, a Jew was captured who cut one of the water hoses and was executed shortly afterwards.
The occupation authorities held the Jews collectively responsible and ordered them to gather at a crossroads on the morning of 29 September 1941. From there they were taken to the Babi Yar ravine where some 35,000 Jews and also Soviet soldiers and Gypsies were executed.
Many Soviet civilians were collaborators of the invaders throughout the war, with the Vlasov Army being a prime example. Stalin, believing that all ethnicities living in Crimea, except the Russians, supported the Germans, punished the Crimean Tatars by deporting them en masse to Central Asia. 46% of the Tatars could not withstand the starvation and disease and died. Five weeks later the same fate befell those Greeks and Armenians who had stayed in the wider area. Some of them did not return to their homes until 1967. In June 1945, the "Autonomous Crimean Soviet Socialist Republic" was abolished and the peninsula became part of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic.
After World War II
The war caused enormous destruction, both in the cities and in the Crimean countryside. In fact, Sevastopol was completely destroyed and was one of the cities rebuilt by Stalin's personal order, but he intervened in Ukraine's religious affairs and abolished its Roman Catholic Church in 1946. This led to prolonged guerrilla warfare by nationalist groups, which ended with Stalin's death (1953).
Immediately afterwards, the central government of the USSR relaxed restrictive measures and sought to improve Russian-Ukrainian relations. This allowed the creation and development of a movement of Ukrainian intellectuals who tacitly opposed the Soviet regime.
On 19 February 1954 Moscow issued a decree transferring Crimea from the Russian Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Socialist Republic, on the grounds that there were close geographical, economic and cultural ties between the region's inhabitants and Kiev.
The Russians accuse the then General Secretary of the CPSU Nikita Khrushchev of doing this because he had a soft spot for his mother, who was of Ukrainian origin. Khrushchev's daughter Nina, however, wrote that this was done because there were water supply problems due to a lack of desalination systems in the region and the network had to be connected to some hydroelectric projects. The Ukrainians report that only 13 of the 27 members of the Presidium of the CPSU were present when this decision was taken, signed not by Khrushchev but by Marshal Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilo, who formally held the highest office in the country, that of Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.
Of course, all that is in the past. But whoever does not know the history and the past of a region, finds it difficult or even impossible to understand its present and future...
Sources. JOSEPH I. I. PAPAFLORATOS, "CONCISE HISTORY OF RELATIONS BETWEEN RUSSIA AND UKRAINE", LIIMON 2022
EN/DEIA PAPYROS - LARUS - BRITTANY, Volume 40, Edition 2007
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