The Disappearance of Poland-Lithuania
Strangely enough, some features of democracy were adopted by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and played out to some extent in Ukraine. There was an odd concern that monarchs might need to be controlled.
Of course, the peasants were not allowed to vote, but nobles voting for a non-hereditary king was a step in the democratic direction. In 1791, the Commonwealth even adopted a constitution, the second in the world after the USA. Under the influence of the French Revolution and the American Revolutionary War, the acceptability of raw conquest began to be questioned by some intellectuals.Sadly, none of this had time to trickle down to the Ukranians. The Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth was rapidly imploding. By 1795, the Austrians, Prussians, and Russians had divided it into bits by treaty, and taken possession. When the new edition of the map of Europe appeared, there was no more Poland or Lithuania. Russia had already annexed Crimea from the Mongols in 1783 (does this ring any bells?). Most of the rest of Ukraine, the so-called “Right Bank” and the former Polish province of Volhynia (inhabited mostly by Ukrainians), slipped into Russian hands.