The Name Ukraine

The name Ukraine (Ukrainian: Ukraina) as a designation for a territory is both very old and relatively new. Etymologically, the term is of Slavic origin and is derived from the Indo-European root *krei ‘to cut’, with the secondary mean­ing of an edge (krai) or borderland (ukraina).

The name Ukraine is first attested in written documents which date from a much later period but which describe events in the twelfth and thirteenth cen­turies. The oldest reference is 1187, the death of Prince Volodymyr of Pereia- slav, at which time, according to the Hypatian text of the Primary Chronicle (copied in the fifteenth century), ‘The ukraina groaned with grief for him.’* But neither in this instance of the term nor in others in the Primary Chronicle (Hypatian text), describing events in 1189, 1213, 1280, and 1282 in various Ukrainian lands (Ilalych, the Buh region, etc.), is the term ukraina ever used in reference to a specific territory. Rather, when it is used, ukraina simply means an undefined borderland. The term ukraina appears as well in other Rus' chronicles, describing non-specific borderland areas in the Pskov, the Polatsk, and other northern principalities.

It is not until the sixteenth century that the name Ukraine is used for the first time to refer to a clearly defined territory. At that time, Polish sources began to use the name in its Polish form, Ukrajina, to describe the large east­ern palatinate of Kiev, together with Bratslav (after 1569) and Chernihiv (after 1619).

With the demise of Polish rule, the name Ukraine fell into disuse as a term for a specific territory, and it was not revived until the early nineteenth cen­tury. At that time, writers who promoted the national movement began to speak of Ukraine as the appropriate name for all territory in which Ukrainians lived. The term was once again non-specific, however, because in the context of Russian and Austrian imperial rule there was no possibility of a distinct ter­ritorial entity called Ukraine.

Not until the revolutionary period beginning in 1917 was the name Ukraine again used to refer to a specific territory. It was used by the Ukrainian National Republic, by the Hetmanate, and by the Bolshevik party. By 1920, the Bolshe­viks had succeeded in creating the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, with specific boundaries largely encompassing the lands inhabited by ethnic Ukrainians.

Thus, as a term referring to a non-specific and even ethnically non­Ukrainian territory, the name Ukraine dates from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; as a name for a specific territory, it dates from the late sixteenth cen­tury; and as a name for lands inhabited by ethnic Ukrainians, it dates from the nineteenth century.

•Cited in Henryk Paszkiewicz, The Making of the Russian Nation (London 1963), p. 3050.293.

reached 36 inhabitants per square mile (14 inhabitants per square kilometer). Such demographic discrepancy did not begin to change until the second half of the sixteenth century, notably after 1569, when Poland annexed the Ukrainian- inhabited palatinates of Volhynia, Kiev, and Bratslav from Lithuania, and then in 1619, when it annexed Chernihiv from Muscovy.

By the end of the sixteenth century, Poland had become the granary of Europe. Its continuing economic well-being depended on the development of new sources of agricultural exploitation. Ukrainian lands became especially attractive, prompt­ing local Rus' nobles, joined by their Polish counterparts farther west, to stake out claims to large tracts of land and setde them with peasants from the more popu­lated palatinates of Galicia, Belz, and western Volhynia. The settlement eastward was gradual, beginning in eastern Volhynia and Podolia and then continuing into the palatinates of Kiev, Chernihiv, and Bratslav - three regions which in Polish sources came to be referred to collectively as Ukraine (Ukrajina). Nonetheless, along the southern fringes of these three palatinates, and beyond that along both sides of the lower Dnieper River, lay the open steppe - the Wild Fields (Dzikie Pole) in contemporary writings - which remained untouched by any sedentary agricul­tural population. Actually, the steppe was a kind of no-man’s-land separating the settlements within Poland-Lithuania farther north from another civilization found along the very southern fringes of Ukrainian territory, that of the Crimean Tatars.

The Crimean Khanate

Chapters 8 and 10 discussed the Crimea and northern shore of the Black Sea in the fourteenth century, by which time Genoese merchants had come to dominate commerce in this region under the protection of the Mongolo-Tatar Golden Horde. By the end of that century, the Golden Horde, based farther east at Sarai, on the lower Volga, had suffered internal political crises and foreign invasions (by Lithuanians from the north and Tamerlane from the east), with the result that by the fifteenth century the once-powerful Mongolo-Tatar state was disintegrating. In its stead, Tatar tribesmen established three new states, known as khanates. Two of these came into existence during the 1440s in peripheral regions of the Golden Horde: the Kazan' Khanate along the upper Volga River, and the Crimean Khanate in the Crimean Peninsula and the areas around the Sea of Azov.

It was the Crimean Khanate that had the most direct bearing on Ukrainian lands. Well before the final disintegration of the Golden Horde at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Crimean Khanate had evolved into a distinct political entity. The Crimea had traditionally been a refuge for leaders who had failed in their bid for power in the Golden Horde, and their having fled there gave rise to the subsequent Crimean view that their rulers were direct descendants of Chingis Khan. One of these displaced leaders, Haci Giray, had formed an independent government during the first half of the fifteenth century. His successor, Mengli Giray I (reigned 1478-1514), effectively established the region’s first dynasty, the Girays. In the course of their rise to power, it was inevitable that the Crimean khans of the Giray family would clash with the rulers of the Golden Horde in Sarai (who still claimed authority over the Crimea), as well as with the still-dominant power in the south of the peninsula, the Genoese, whose control of trade and the coastal cities was particularly resented.

Then, in the midst of this three-way struggle for power among the Crimean Tatar leaders, the Genoese, and the Golden Horde, a new contender entered the field for control of the valuable Crimean Peninsula.

point that by the early seventeenth century Kefe was one of the largest cities in eastern Europe. The Ottomans eventually recognized Mengli Giray I, who was the dominant power in the region, as Crimean khan, and in 1478 Mengli was able to regain control of the peninsula from the Genoese with Ottoman military support.

The presence of Ottoman authority in the Crimea beginning in the last quarter of the fifteenth century prompted a new realignment of political power. It is true that the Ottomans respected their fellow Muslims, the Crimean Tatars, especially since the Giray dynasty seemed to have strong claims to descent from Chingis Khan (from whom the Ottomans also would have liked to make hereditary claims). In many ways, however, the Crimean Khanate became little more than a client state of the Ottoman Empire. The Crimean Tatars served as soldiers in Ottoman cam­paigns and protected the northern frontier of the Ottoman state.

Crimean socioeconomic life

Crimean society under Tatar rule consisted of the ruling khans (generally from the Giray family) and tribal clans who controlled most of the productive agricul­tural lands on the peninsula. Below these upper social strata were Tatar and Turkic herdsmen and peasants. By the sixteenth century, the khanate had become divided into twenty-eight jurisdictions, each headed by representatives of the khan, who governed according to precise codes relating to finance and juris­prudence. Under Mengli Giray I, the former administrative center of the Golden Horde on the eastern side of the peninsula, Solkhat (later, Eski Kirim/Staryi Krym), was made the capital of the Crimean Khanate and was suitably trans­formed into an impressive center of Islamic culture. The architectural beauties of Solkhat were later surpassed by those of Bakhchesarai/Bahf esaray, on the western side of the peninsula, which after the 1530s became the new Crimean capital.

While the Crimean Tatars were themselves basically sedentary, another ele­ment within their sphere of control was nomadic. This was the Nogay Tatars. The Nogay were originally one of many tribes within the Golden Horde, and since they lived north of the Caucasus Mountains, they later came under the rule of the Astrakhan' Khanate. But in 1556, when Muscovy finally conquered Astra­khan', the Nogays migrated westward to the steppe zone north of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov. The Nogays themselves were split into several tribal confedera­tions: the Kuban Nogay (north of the Sea of Azov), the Yedickul Nogay (north of the Crimea), the Jamboyluk Nogay (between the Dnieper and Southern Buh Rivers), the Yedisan Nogay (between the Buh and Dniester Rivers), and the Bucak Nogay (between the Dniester and Danube Rivers).

These Nogay tribes, generically referred to as Tatars, are the subject of much attention in Ukrainian history. Theoretically, the various Nogay tribes were expected to recognize the authority of the Crimean khan, usually in the form of a representative sent from Bakhchesarai. In practice, however, they usually followed their own whims and often rebelled against the Crimean Tatars. ‘Yet,’ as the histo­rian Alan Fisher has remarked, ‘the Nogays served a useful purpose for the Crimean Khanate: They prevented the establishment of solid Slavic settlements in the steppe and provided the Crimean slave markets with a never ending supply of captives.’¹

The Crimean economy was based primarily on the slave trade. Slavery as such was illegal according to the law of Mohammed, but the prophet’s successors made one important exception. According to Islamic legal theory, captives taken in war might be enslaved. The Ottoman Empire, with its military forces and harems, was always in need of slaves, and before long its new vassal state in the Crimea became the primary source of this commodity. Interestingly, before the Ottoman presence in the Crimea beginning in the 1470s, the Tatars seem to have reached a modus vivendi along their northern frontier, where, like the Ukrainian inhabitants north of the steppe, they began to settle down to agriculture. But under the impact of Ottoman economic needs, the Tatars saw in the Ukrainian steppe a source of greater wealth than that produced by agriculture. Beginning with their first major recorded incursions in 1468 and 1474 and from then until the end of the seventeenth century, Tatar raiders made almost annual forays into Ukrainian agricultural communities in the north searching for settlers to capture and sell as slaves.

After the mid-sixteenth century, it was the various Nogay tribal confederations, especially the Yedifkul, who carried out the slave raids, while the Crimean Tatars acted as middlemen between their Nogay suppliers in the north and Ottoman purchasers in the south. It is also from this period, the sixteenth and early seven­teenth centuries, that the anonymous lyrical epic tales known as dumy arose in Ukrainian society. The earliest dumy are primarily laments on the fate of young men coerced to serve in the armies of the Ottoman Turkish ‘infidel’ (Duma about the Lament of the Captives) or of young women forced to enter harems and serve the personal needs of the Ottoman rulers (Duma about Marusia from Bohuslav).

Thus, the Crimean and, later, Nogay Tatars represented the most recent in a long line of nomadic or sedentary civilizations (the Scythian, the Sarmatian, the Khazar, the Golden Horde) that came to dominate the southern steppes of Ukraine and that continued the symbiotic economic relationship between the coastal cities and the hinterland. Because captured slaves represented the most important resource from the hinterland in the Crimean economy, much of the area south of the Bratslav and Kiev palatinates from the Southern Buh to the Dnieper River and beyond became a sparsely settled or entirely uninhabited no- man’s-land, known as the Wild Fields. In effect, this part of the country became what the name Ukraine suggested: a borderland or frontier, not in the sense of the end of a civilized area, as is often assumed, but rather in the sense of a buffer zone between Poland-Lithuania to the northwest, Muscovy to the northeast, and the Crimean Khanate and Ottoman Empire to the south.