Introduction

Wars, revolutions, occupations, forced deportations, voluntary evacuations, ethnic cleansings, and genocides in the first half of the twentieth century killed tens of millions of Europeans, displaced even more physically and psychologically, and profoundly altered the international political order for both the victors and the vanquished.

Since the nineteenth century’s demographic surge, industrial advances, and Europe’s “political awakening,” armies had become larger and more mecha­nized and military operations more intensive and extensive. The French rev­olutionary and Napoleonic wars, the American Civil War, and the 1870 Franco-Prussian War had activated civilian populations and homefront econ­omies, no longer exempting them from enemy attack. All in all, the division between combatants and non-combatants slowly started to disappear.²

With the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, European leaders con­cluded that in an era of mass communications, mass politics, and mass production, “wars [would be] waged between whole populations, soldier and civilian alike.”³ The age of total war had arrived.⁴

Between 1914 and 1950, these total wars and state-sponsored interven­tions constituted the most destructive clashes in human history, “killing more people in aggregate absolute terms as well as per war.”⁵ In the First World War, more than ten million died and more than twenty million were gravely wounded. In the war’s wake, the world also experienced a highly contagious influenza outbreak in the winter of 1918-19, killing up to fifty million.

By constantly vilifying their enemies, including non-combatants, the warring elites raised modern-day brutality and dehumanization to an un­precedented standard.¹⁰ Mass hatred generated more mass hatred. Enormous battlefield casualties, depopulations, and extensive population transfers during these two total wars destabilized the majority of the home fronts of the belligerents, eroded the war efforts of the weaker powers, and mobi­lized national and social identities throughout the world. By activating enormous social and psychological dislocations, these total wars and revo­lutions not only accelerated previously existing trends, they also ignited powerful political movements and social contradictions.

These total wars encompassed not only wars between empires and states (external wars), but also violent political disorders within states. Those who sought to overturn a state’s political and social order launched internal wars, which combined aspects of different types of violence, such as civil, national, and anti-colonial wars, revolts, rebellions, uprisings, guerilla wars, mutinies, jacqueries, coups d’etat, terrorism, and insurrections.¹¹

Total wars became a major driver of social developments, producing diverse sets of changes in different states and societies.¹² In various ways they recast the world’s economies, political systems, social institutions, and cultures.

These conflicts disrupted the international social, economic, and political status quo and undermined the hegemony of long-standing multinational empires. Not only did these major bloodlettings shape and realign the European state system, they also accelerated the processes of state building and nation building among groups that did not possess their own sovereign states. By creating a strong sense of “us against them,” modern wars forced people to take sides and to “confirm their loyalty and identity” in public.¹⁴ These mass disturbances transformed the Ukrainian-speaking populations of East Central Europe into actors, not just objects, of their own history. Unlike historians with the luxury of perspective decades after events, these men and women had to make choices within a confusing and very fluid environment (the “fog of war”) and had “to consider their moves in almost complete ignorance of their opponents’ intentions, resources, and will.”¹⁵ Their responses to this violence and their post-war representations helped delineate the imagined boundaries of the Ukrainian community.¹⁶ These wars, in short, facilitated the making, remaking, and unmaking of modern Ukraine, currently the second-largest European state (after the Russian Federation) in terms of size (603,700 square kilometres/ 233,090 square miles) and sixth in terms of population (44,400,000).¹⁷ The physical and psychological dislocations they generated also helped create self-conscious Ukrainians.

Over a forty-year period, the people living in the contiguous areas that became Ukraine bore the brunt of constant mobilizations and demobiliza­tions and a long continuum of mass violence, which decimated entire gen­erations of young men and killed enormous numbers of civilians.

Each of these armed contests changed international borders, fostered the creation of sovereign and quasi-sovereign states which sought to de­fine their citizens, and sparked national and civil wars. Each of these catas­trophes expanded on the previous ones and institutionalized the idea that the Ukrainian-speaking population differed from the Poles and Russians. These social earthquakes became the primary locomotives of the history of modern Ukraine and helped it emerge as what scholars have classified as both a pivotal and cleft state in the second half of the century, especially after independence in 1991.

The former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski once observed that the most important countries in the world are either geo­strategic players or geopolitical pivots. Active geostrategic players possess “the capacity and the national will to exercise power or influence beyond their borders in order to alter... the existing geopolitical state of affairs.” They are, in his words, “geopolitically volatile.” France, Germany, Russia, China, and India belong to this Eurasian club of geostrategic players.¹⁹ In contrast to this group, geopolitical pivots are “states whose importance is derived not from their own power and motivation but rather from their sensitive location and from the consequences of their potentially vulnera­ble condition for the behavior of geostrategic players.

In Brzezinski’s view of the world, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, South Korea, Turkey, and Iran constitute important geopolitical pivots.²¹ Throughout the twentieth century, the majority Ukrainian-speaking territories played a key role in shaping the competition between the great powers (active geopolitical players) of Central and East Central Europe, especially Poland, Germany, and Russia (later the USSR). In this period, the inten­sity of the political allegiances and the national identities of the peoples living on these territories helped decide the success of Moscow’s efforts to assert its influence along its western flank. Ukraine’s emergence as an in­dependent state after 1991 both enhanced Poland’s security and challenged Russia’s hegemony over the post-Soviet region.²² (See map 1.)

In addition to being a pivotal state, Ukraine is to some extent what the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington called a cleft country. As defined by Huntington, a cleft country is one whose population includes large groups belonging to different civilizations. China, India, Indonesia, the Phillipines, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore, the Sudan, Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia are all examples.²³ Internal conflicts develop in cleft countries “when a majority group belonging to one civilization at­tempts to define the state as its political instrument and to make its language, religion, and symbols those of the state.”²⁴ The prevailing view becomes “we are different peoples and belong in different places.”²⁵

In his controversial book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Huntington problematically described Ukraine as “a cleft country with two distinct cultures. The civilizational fault line between the West and Orthodoxy runs through its heart and has done so for centu­ries.”²⁶ Ukraine’s political and cultural identity is both more complex and less fragile than he allows.

Ukraine’s cleftness did not emerge in a political vacuum. External geopo­litical contexts, the overall balance of power, and foreign interventions of­ten helped shape its internal developments. Each of the past century’s brutal wars, revolutions, and subsequent social cataclysms opened new doors and opportunities while closing others, producing a new set of menus, options, contingencies, and unintended consequences for the people living in the Ukrainian-speaking provinces. As the status quo crumbled with each catas­trophe, chaos brought novel challenges as well as opportunities. Men and women had to adapt to a different world, one containing heretofore un­imagined political and social possibilities. People had to reassess their em­bedded perceptions and assumptions of the world, create new mental maps, make serious political decisions, and even choose sides. Although the mass­es did not determine the political list of options from which to choose, they could select from various alternatives, however limited in number.²⁷ As mass politics dragged almost everyone into its volatile undercurrents, the possibility of neutrality disappeared. Ukraine’s geographic location and turbulent political environment helped determine these outcomes.

Geographic Factors

Situated in the southwestern portion of the East European plain, Ukraine is slightly smaller in area than Alaska, Texas, or most of the Canadian provinces and territories. Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Moldova border it to the west; Belarus to the north; and the Russian Federation to the northeast and east. To the south are the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Richly endowed with natural resources, including iron ore, coal, timber, natural gas, and a limited amount of oil, Ukraine is also one of the most bountiful agricultural regions in the world. Its fertile plains offer a spa­cious passageway to Asia.

Ukraine (Ukraina, meaning borderland), as its name suggests, makes up one of Europe’s eastern boundaries, the transitional zone between Roman Catholic and Orthodox Europe, between Christian Europe and the non­Christian Eurasia, and between the Slavic and the non-Slavic linguistic zones. Most importantly, this area’s overwhelmingly flat natural terrain made it an intermediate region between different worlds. Approximately 40 per cent of Ukraine consists of a vast semi-arid, grass-covered plain (the so-called steppe), divided by the Dnieper (Dnipro) River, which flows into the Black Sea. With the exception of the Carpathian Mountains in the west and the Black Sea to the south, the Ukrainian territories lack natural boundaries.

As with most frontier regions throughout world history, the Eurasian steppe played an important role in the development of pre-modern and modern Ukraine. This land, which stretches for nearly 8,000 kilometres (5,000 miles) from Hungary in the west to Manchuria in the east, attracted the Mongols and other nomads who moved easily on horseback from one end of Eurasia to the other across an endless ocean of grasslands.²⁸ These horse-powered pirates rallied large, mobile cavalry forces, which quickly overwhelmed their opponents. They sought to control the steppe by orga­nizing trade or by engaging in pastoralism, plunder, and slave hunting. To block nomadic incursions, agricultural settlers sought to stabilize the steppe and to regulate the human traffic passing through it. The Ukrainian territories soon became one of Eurasia’s epicentres of the confrontation between the nomadic and settled worlds.

The steppe’s vast, uninhabited distances highlighted the awesome pow­er of nature and the powerlessness of man. The steppe presaged freedom, rebirth, and enormous opportunities for those who dared to endure its many threats. Oftentimes, it failed to deliver on its promises. Just as the flat uniformity of its landscape could easily lead the inexperienced astray and to death, the tall grasslands also camouflaged marauding nomads on slave-hunting expeditions. Despite these dangers over centuries, men and women braved the steppe in successive waves and put down roots.

In order to survive, these Slavic and Orthodox pioneers accommodated themselves to the wilderness’s harsh conditions and adopted aspects of the nomadic lifestyle. These trailblazers slowly tamed the wild, organized a deep-rooted sedentary society, and later experienced absorption into neigh­bouring states and empires.²⁹

Political Environment

The Ukrainian frontier nurtured various cultural and political break­throughs, such as the emergence of Kiev Rus, the first powerful East Slavic and political/commercial entity on Eurasia’s western steppe. Founded by the Vikings in the ninth century a.d., it stretched from the Baltic to the Black Seas. Its ruler, Grand Prince Volodimer the Great, ac­cepted the Christian faith headquartered in Constantinople in 988 a.d. In the thirteenth century, with the withering of Eurasian trade routes passing through Kiev and with the Mongol conquest, Kiev Rus collapsed.

After its fall, Mongols, Ottoman Turks, Crimean Tatars, Lithuanians, and Poles competed to dominate the territories of present-day Ukraine. The Roman Catholic-led Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth gained control of most present-day Ukrainian territories between 1569 and 1795, pro­viding its Orthodox elites with a political model to follow. But the Commonwealth failed to maintain its initial tolerance of the Orthodox Christian faith or to protect adequately all of the Polish king’s subjects from the Turks and Tatars.

If the Polish kings could not provide security on the steppe, the Cossacks - fierce frontiersmen - could. These Slavs and Orthodox believers escaped the serfdom of their Polish landlords, penetrated the steppe, created com­munities independent of Polish control, and learned to defend themselves from the Turks and Tatars by mastering the fighting methods of their ene­mies. In time, many came under the Commonwealth’s jurisdiction. Although the Cossacks served as its frontier militia and safeguarded its southern bor­ders, their interests and those of the Polish nobles often clashed. Cossack rebellions against the Commonwealth culminated in the bloody Khmelnytsky Revolution, which started in 1648 when the Cossack elite sought equality with Polish Catholic nobles and the masses struggled to end serfdom. Both groups failed to achieve their goals. This uprising established the Hetmanate, an autonomous polity that transferred its allegiance from Poland to Muscovy (Russia) by the Treaty of Pereiaslav in 1654. Subsequently, the Hetmanate was split into two: the Right Bank reverted to Polish rule while the Left Bank remained under Moscow’s authority. By the early eigh­teenth century the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth abolished the Right Bank Hetmante. Over the long run, this revolution and the subsequent Polish-Muscovite wars fatally undermined this autonomous Cossack entity and, a century later, the Commonwealth itself.

Until the Russian Empire secured the steppe in the second half of the eighteenth century, the inhabitants on these territories experienced con­stant onslaughts from the Ottoman Turks and their allies, the Crimean Tatars. With the conquest of the steppe and the partitions of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth in the second half of the eighteenth century, the Russian and Austrian Empires acquired most of the Ukrainian­speaking territories and retained the institution of serfdom until the mid­nineteenth century (see table I.1).

As these various territories fell at different times under the domination of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Ottoman Empire, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the Soviet Union, its people became subjects of these

Table I.1 Austrian, Muscovite, and Russian Imperial Acquisitions (1526-1917) of Territories That Became Part of the Ukrainian SSR, 1918-1954

empires and states and experienced different political systems and politi­cal cultures, diverse institutional arrangements and socio-economic envi­ronments, and dissimilar religious and secular organizations, factors which nourished Ukraine’s present-day religious, cultural, national, re­gional, and economic fault lines.³⁰

The Orthodox political elites and intelligentsia (churchmen and lay) fre­quently expressed the idea that the Ukrainian-speaking population dif­fered significantly from Poles and Lithuanians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the peasantry quickly absorbed this notion.³¹ But the view that the Muscovites and Ukrainian speakers stood apart spread glacially to the peasant masses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the course of the eighteenth century the concept of Little Russia with a specific historical consciousness and the idea of loyalty to a Ukrainian political entity within the framework of an Imperial Russia took hold.³² The wars and revolutions of the twentieth century rapidly undermined this ambiguous, multilayered paradigm and institutionalized the dissimi­larities between the two groups. By killing tens of millions and by displac­ing many more physically and psychologically, these wars and revolutions overturned the international status quo, undermined the hegemony of long-standing empires, and provided the native populations with hereto­fore unimagined political and social options.

By exploring how Ukraine became a geopolitical pivotal and cleft state, this history of the first half of the twentieth century recognizes that un­spoken assumptions about national identity and political engagement in the past do not necessarily coincide with those of the present. The peoples of Ukraine did not follow a linear, inevitable, or irreversible road to the present. Their history contains many contingencies, discontinuities, and complex turning points.

Unlike the excellent surveys produced by Orest Subtelny, Paul Robert Magocsi, Andrew Wilson, and Sergei Yekelchyk, this book concentrates on the formation and evolution of modern Ukraine as an interactive re­sponse to the total wars and mass violence of the last century.³³ My study affirms Timothy Snyder’s assessment of East Central Europe as Europe’s bloodlands, but challenges his claim that these mass murders started in 1932.³⁴ (The Great Powers inaugurated this long-term bloodshed in 1914.) By highlighting the famine of 1932-3 as Ukraine’s second total war, an integral part of the continuum of the mass violence the First and Second World Wars unleashed, this account extends the arguments in Norman Naimark’s Stalin’s Genocides and builds on those in Terry Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire.³⁵

This book seeks to provide a context to the unspoken assumptions, so­cial options, and individual choices of Ukraine’s modern period, which begins with the late nineteenth century, building on the collective memo­ries of the past. The twentieth century’s total wars, revolutions, and mod­ernization projects brought mass literacy and education, industrialization, urban growth and urbanization, increased secularism, and enhanced roles for women to the Ukrainian-speaking masses. By undermining their local and parochial loyalties, these wars and revolutions introduced the people of Ukraine to new ideas, which led to a renewed search for self-definition. These ferocious conflicts reinforced the region’s role as a geopolitical piv­ot. At the same time, they helped transform it into a divided state.

In short, the twentieth century’s wars, revolutions, and mass social en­gineering projects overturned the age-old status quo and generated a new environment conducive to the introduction of new identities and new po­litical systems in East Central Europe. But these breakthroughs came at great human cost - and with unintended consequences.