Historical Perceptions

Ukraine has been under the rule of foreign powers, especially Poland and Russia, for long periods of time. As a result, in historical writings Ukraine has often been treated not as an entity unto itself, but rather as a sort of appendage to a larger state structure, whether the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire, or the Soviet Union.

In effect, the history of Ukraine came to be associated solely with the growth of the Ukrainian national idea, which skeptics argued could be dated only from the beginning of the nineteenth century at the earliest. Such perceptions of the historical past led to questions about the present and future. Faced with the existence of a Ukrainian national movement, those unsympathetic to Ukrainian distinctiveness would ask: If there was no Ukrainian state and therefore no Ukrainian history before the nineteenth century, on what grounds can one justify the creation of a sovereign state in the future? Because of the political implica­tions as well as the scholarly significance of historical writings, it seems important that the reader be familiar with at least the main outlines of the various percep­tions of the history of Ukraine. These may be classified as the Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Soviet viewpoints.

The Russian historical viewpoint

The various perceptions actually reflect a serious debate concerning the history of eastern Europe as a whole, or, more specifically, of the East Slavic peoples - the Russians, Belarusans, and Ukrainians. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the first scholarly histories of eastern Europe began to be written, the only East Slavic state in existence was the Russian Empire. This state was headed by an all-powerful monarch, or tsar, of the Romanov dynasty, which had