Divided State

The total wars and revolutions of the twentieth century also reinforced Ukraine’s national divisions. By mobilizing millions of heretofore politi­cally uninvolved Ukrainian speakers in the First World War, Russia and Austria inadvertently converted their peasant conscripts into political ac­tors and introduced their soldiers and civilian populations to a new total war mentality.

The total wars (in their traditional state vs state and internal war incar­nations) not only generated enormous human losses and border changes, but also mobilized national identities. If most residents of the Ukrainian provinces entered the twentieth century with multiple identities, most at century’s end embraced a single exclusive one. The First World War and revolutions ignited this process. States introduced procedures to assess their citizens, categorizing them and dividing them into friends and foes.³⁷ Their political establishments and security organs did not tolerate nation­al, cultural, or religious connections to outside powers, and during the world’s conflagrations, they demonized their internal and external ene­mies, dehumanized them, abused them, and exterminated them.

The First World War, the revolution, the civil and national wars, and foreign occupations devastated the population in the Ukrainian-speaking territories of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. In the late 1920s and 1930s, the mass violence unleashed by collectivization, mass deporta­tions, the Holodomor, and the purges decimated the Ukrainian population of Ukraine and the USSR, and to a lesser extent the German and Polish populations.

In the course of the Second World War the Germans killed by bullets, bombs, gas, or starvation 6.5 to 7.4 million men, women, and children (most of whom identified themselves as Ukrainians), including nearly 1.7 million Jews.³⁸ The Soviets removed hundreds of thousands from the Crimea and from the newly annexed territories of Eastern Poland and Romania.

The war’s political and demographic shifts set the stage for a new post­war environment. Ukraine remained nationally diverse, but regionally ho­mogeneous, divided into five different sets of territories. Each group established different clusters of “tipping points,” that critical mass needed to maintain the Ukrainian language and culture, abandon it, or modify it. The differences between Western Ukraine/Central Ukraine and Eastern Ukraine/Southern Ukraine grew stronger even before the USSR Supreme Soviet’s transfer of the Crimea (with its predominantly Russian popula­tion) from the RSFSR to Ukraine in 1954. Southern Ukraine, a highly nationally mixed region since the eighteenth century, lost large numbers of its national minorities in the 1930s and during the war. With its incorpora­tion into the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, the Crimea acquired an inherently Russian identity that outlasted the demise of the Soviet Union.³⁹

Even after their incorporation into the USSR, Bukovina, Galicia, and Transcarpathia retained a “unity in negation.” These Ukrainian-speaking territories did not experience long-term Russian rule; they had developed within the framework of the evolving Habsburg constitutional order (al­though Transcarpathian Ukrainian and Rusyn speakers did not enjoy the same political environment as did the first two crownlands).⁴⁰ Under the Habsburg umbrella, these economically impoverished territories pro­duced a vibrant and pluralistic civil society.

Acquired by Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, these three Ukrainian-speaking territories remained divorced from the Soviet politi­cal sphere, which between the wars endured “some of the most radical socio-economic changes known to history, and in the 1930s it experienced systematic, extensive terror that threatened to eradicate Ukrainian nation­al culture completely.”⁴¹ The Ukrainians from these territories possessed highly differentiated levels of national consciousness and different intensi­ties of feelings of religious cultural superiority or inferiority regarding the Russians and Poles.⁴² This Western Ukrainian legacy remained for decades afterwards, undermining Soviet efforts to integrate these territories politi­cally as well as psychologically.⁴³

In the first half of the twentieth century, Ukraine symbolized one of Europe’s most volatile social laboratories, a borderland which suffered human slaughter on a ruthless and unprecedented scale.⁴⁴ The political and social experiments performed here transformed the peasant, rural, and il­literate way of life to a highly urban and educated one in less than a cen­tury. Within this timeframe, Ukraine - a multicultural region with a majority Ukrainian-speaking population - became primarily a bicultural (Ukrainian/Russian) state with a majority of its population identifying themselves as Ukrainians, although not necessarily Ukrainian speakers in their personal and professional lives.

The brutality of the Second World War solidified these trends, and the Soviet post-war political order sustained and even expanded this effort to create neutered national identities. In the post-war era, new socio-economic currents and party policies simultaneously promoted greater integration and greater fragmentation throughout the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR.⁴⁵

Most importantly, how the citizens of Ukraine perceive their own past, current status, and future of their political community will determine the expansion or contraction of the Ukrainian nation. The incentives for individuals to identify themselves as Ukrainians in an increasingly global­ized and alienating world remain in flux, as they did in the past and as they will in the future. Mass perceptions of group worth, economic backward­ness, feelings of equality with (or inferiority to) the Russians, and stan­dards of personal and national dignity fluctuate and remain difficult to measure and map in a fluid social environment; they remain “incessantly open to interpretation and renegotiation.”⁴⁶ As in the past, unforeseen cri­ses may produce unexpected responses.

Mass violence, a dynamic interplay of negotiations of the meaning of its indigenous national identities, contradictory state policies, and the ever­shifting international political order made and remade Ukraine in the first half of the twentieth century. Wars, revolutions, radical social dislocations, and tensions between the elites and the masses as well as tensions within these groups in this period helped pave the painful road to modernity. These events and trends reinforced Ukraine’s role as a pivotal cleft state, its rifts long institutionalized within the framework of the Soviet Ukrainian state. At the start of the twenty-first century, many in Western Ukraine perceived that their future lay with the European Union and the West; many in the eastern provinces envisaged closer ties with Russia. But this cleftness is not necessarily a permanent feature of Ukraine’s political anat­omy.

As this narrative illustrates, past trends do not necessarily predict future outcomes. Although the assertion that tomorrow is uncertain “is obvi­ous,” according to James C. Scott, “so is the capacity of human actors to influence this contingency and help shape the future.”⁴⁷ The past and pres­ent provide a foundation for the future, but more often than not, these tectonic plates shift unexpectedly and reshape the political environment in unanticipated ways, especially when cataclysmic events and new ideas arouse the masses. As independent Ukraine’s political and cultural elites struggle to acclimate themselves to the demands of a ruthless international political and economic order, the Ukrainian project - the wager to rein­force the psychological boundaries between Ukrainians and Russians, to join pan-European institutions as an equal partner, and to acquire direct access to the larger world - still remains a work in progress.⁴⁸ The 2014 Euromaidan Revolution and the current Russian war against Ukraine may have accelerated these processes.