Was Ukraine always part of Russia?
This popular misconception is based on a recent and relatively brief period in Ukrainian history—1945 to 1991—when the entire territory of the present-day Ukrainian state (then constituted as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic) was part of the Soviet Union.
The Ukrainian SSR and the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic were just two of 15 theoretically equal republics in the federation, although in practice the Russian language and culture predominated. Historically, however, relations between these two peoples were more complex. One could argue, as do Ukrainian patriotic historians, that originally Russia was part of Ukraine and not the other way around. They refer to the fact that the first East Slavic state, Kyivan Rus, was centered in what is now the Ukrainian city of Kyiv, while the present-day Russian heartland, including the Moscow region, was colonized somewhat later.1After the disintegration of Kyivan Rus, the Ukrainian lands west of the Dnipro River became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and, subsequently, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Kingdom of Hungary and the Romanian principality of Moldavia (itself a vassal of the Ottoman Empire) also incorporated some present-day Ukrainian territories. For centuries, these lands had very limited contacts with the realm of the Muscovite tsars. Instead, they experienced the influence of European legal and corporatist concepts. Unlike Muscovy, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had an elaborate legal code that was composed in Old Slavonic, the bookish language of Kyivan Rus. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which at its peak included roughly half of present-day Ukraine, instituted municipal self-government under Magdeburg Law and the notion of an elected monarch responsible to the elites. Also unlike Muscovy, Poland professed religious tolerance and allowed a significant Jewish population to reside within its borders.
Ukraine's historical relations with Poland and other Western neighbors had a profound and lasting impact. There is little that is “Russian” about the architecture and multinational historical heritage of such western Ukrainian cities as Lviv or Chernivtsi. Most Ukrainians in the three western provinces constituting the historical region of Galicia belong to the Ukrainian Catholic Church, which differs from the Orthodox churches in that it recognizes the pope.Russia came to control most of what is now Ukraine as a result of imperialist expansion. The signing of an ambiguously worded treaty with the Ukrainian Cossacks in 1654 inaugurated the gradual incorporation of Ukrainian lands east of the Dnipro, but the Russian Empire annexed much larger swaths of territory west of this river during the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century. Additional territories in the southern steppes were gained in conquest from the Ottoman Empire at around the same time. Meanwhile, Galicia and other smaller historical regions in the west became part of a different expanding empire, Austria (later Austria- Hungary). While the Romanovs refused to acknowledge the existence of Ukrainian culture and eventually banned it, the Habsburgs allowed publishing and education in Ukrainian. As a result, in the late nineteenth century the center of Ukrainian cultural life shifted temporarily to Galicia. Ukrainians also received their first experience of modern political participation and civic organization in the Habsburg Empire.
After the Romanov and Habsburg empires collapsed in 19171918, Ukrainian republics were proclaimed on both sides of the border, but they were ultimately unable to survive in the military turmoil engulfing the region. However, the Bolsheviks constituted the Ukrainian territories they had inherited from the Russian Empire as a separate Ukrainian Soviet republic within the Soviet Union, rather than incorporating them into the Russian SFSR. The Ukrainian regions previously held by the Austro-Hungarian Empire were divided among Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.
Ethnic Ukrainians had very mixed experiences in these new states during the interwar period, but their experiences certainly differed from those of Ukrainians in the Soviet Union who endured Stalinist “socialist construction." When the Soviet Union annexed the remaining Ukrainian regions from its western neighbors in 1939-1945, these lands underwent extensive and painful “Sovietization." However, in no sense did they become part of Russia. Rather, their incorporation contributed to Soviet Ukraine, which acquired a more defined Ukrainian ethnic character.When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, its 15 constituent republics became independent states. As the two most populous republics of the USSR, Russia and Ukraine legally seceded from the Soviet federation, which ceased to exist as a result. The popular perception of Ukraine's relatively recent separation from a common whole does exist among Russians and some Ukrainians, but it has more to do with belated acknowledgment of a separate Ukrainian ethnic identity.