The Setting of the Problem

A striking difference between the historical development of the countries of Western Europe and that of those of the eastern half of the continent has been often observed. The former, particularly France and England, have enjoyed, in spite of some periods of revolutionary upheaval, a mil­lennium of continuous growth.

Ukraine is a typically East European nation in that its history is marked by a high degree of discontinuity. The country suffered two major eclipses in the course of its development. Medieval Rus’ received a crip­pling blow from the hands of the Mongols, was subsequently absorbed by Lithuania, and finally annexed to Poland. In the middle of the seven­teenth century Ukraine rose against Polish domination, and a new body politic, the Cossack State, came into existence. By the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the autonomy of Cossack Ukraine was de­stroyed by the Russian Empire. A new upward cycle started in the nine­teenth century. The movement of national regeneration culminated in the 1917 Revolution, when a Ukrainian independent state emerged, to suc- ∣cumb soon to communist Russian control. This third, last great division of Ukrainian history, which lasts from the 1780s to the Revolution, and in a sense even to the present, forms what may be defined as “modem Ukrainian history. ’’

When nationalist movements got under way in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, they were of two different types.

Prima facie evidence assigns Ukraine to the category of “non-histor­ical” nations. The modem Ukrainian nation is not simply a continuation or restoration of the Cossack Ukraine of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or, of course, even less of Kievan and Galician Rus’.¹ On tht other hand, one must not overlook the links that connected the nine­teenth-century national risorgimento with the Cossack epoch.

Ukrainian history of the nineteenth century may mean two differen things: a history of the nationalist movement on the one hand, and a his tory of the country and the people on the other hand. The two are closel) interrelated, but they do not coincide.

Beginning with the 1840s and until the 1917 Revolution, there was aι uninterrupted chain of groups and organizations, formal and informal that were committed to the idea of Ukraine’s cultural and politica regeneration as a separate nation. Combated and persecuted by tsarist au thorities, the movement was irrepressible. At times it demonstrated ; great vitality (as in the 1870s); at other times it seemed to have gone into hibernation (as in the 1880s). It would be a fruitful task, which has not yet been fully accomplished by historical scholarship, to trace the course of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, somewhat as the course of the Russian revolutionary movements has been traced by Jan Kucharzewski and Franco Venturi.

It is clear, however, that until the eve of the 1917 Revolution, Ukrain­ian nationalism retained the character of a minority movement. (This refers to Russian Ukraine only; the situation was different in Austrian Galicia.) The peasant masses were, until 1905, little touched by the na­tionalist movement. Thoroughly Ukrainian in all their objective, ethnic traits, they had not yet adopted a modern national consciousness, and generally remained politically amorphous. The members of the upper classes were mostly Russified and, except for those engaged in the Ukrainian movement, regarded themselves as belonging to the Russian nation.

A memoirist has noted the following observation. If the train from Kiev to Poltava which carried delegates for the unveiling of the monu­ment to the poet Kotliarevsky in 1903 had crashed, this would have meant, it was said jokingly, the end of the Ukrainian movement for a long time; nearly all the leading personalities of the movement travelled in two cars of that train.³ But how is one to explain a movement that at the turn of the century had only a few thousands of self-professed adher­ents, by 1905 began to assume a mass character, and after another twelve years erupted, in 1917, as a nascent nation of over thirty million? The an­swer can be only this: there were at work among the population of Ukraine other forces which, without being identical with the nationalist movement, were pointed in the same direction, and finally, as if drawn by an irresistible attraction, merged with it. The nationalist movement played the role of the catalyst, and in this sense it was extremely impor­tant. But we cannot historically explain the origins of the modern Ukrain­ian nation if we concentrate on the nationalist movement alone. We must also take into account various other forces: for instance, the activities of the Ukrainian zemstvo or those of the Ukrainian branches of “all­Russian’’ revolutionary organizations, from the Decembrists, through the populists, to the Marxist and labour groups at the turn of the century.⁴ I All of them made their contributions to the formation of modern Ukraine. Moreover, a closer scrutiny shows that these movements, though not en­dowed with a fully crystallized Ukrainian national awareness, usually possessed it in an embryonic stage in the form of a “South Russian’’ sec­tionalism, or “territorial patriotism.’’

Thus it may be stated that the central problem of modern Ukrainian history is that of the emergence of a nation: the transformation of an ethnic-linguistic community into a self-conscious political and cultural community.

The character of modern Ukrainian history changes definitely after 1917. The making of the nation was basically completed during the revo­lutionary years 1917—20.⁵ For the last four decades the central issue of Ukrainian history has been the nation’s struggle for survival under for­eign rule and for the restoration of its liberty and independence. The struggle was —and is to the present day—primarily directed against Soviet Russia. But in the inter-war period it was, in the western portion of Ukraine’s territory, directed also against Poland, and during the years of World War II against Nazi Germany as well.