Ukraine since the tsars
A brief history of Ukraine from the fall of the Romanovs to the present day
Photo by Sally Haddock Birchard.
Growing up in northeastern Ohio, I met numerous people with family heritage from Eastern Europe, and I became familiar with the innumerable issues that many of the different ethnic groups had with each other. For those people who complain that the attention lavished on the Ukrainian refugees that was not given to refugees from, say, South Sudan is motivated by racism, I daresay that might be partially true, but the more relevant consideration is that so many of us know people from Ukraine and even know quite a bit about Ukrainian history. By contrast, I cannot name one leader from Sudan or South Sudan . . . ever. That makes the war in South Sudan seem foreign in a way that the war in Ukraine never will.
Back near the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War in March 2021, one of my friends asked me for a rough summary of the issues between Russia and Ukraine. Creating this rough summary required me to go back to the end of WWI and the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in the Russian Empire. But it’s probably worth preserving here.
In February 2022, most analysts expected that Russian leader Vladimir Putin would make the same arguments about intervening in Ukraine as Adolf Hitler had made in 1938 about intervening in Czechoslovakia: he was just trying to protect the native Russophones (Russian-speakers) in eastern Ukraine (which includes Mariupol, the seaport site of the heaviest continuing fighting for the first month of the war) against the Ukrainophones (Ukrainian-speakers) in western Ukraine, which was the argument he previously used to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, which ended with Russia in control of Crimea (which it took using its regular army and then annexed to Russia) and the cities (ghost towns?) of Luhansk and Donetsk (which it took using Russian-trained irregulars (think “Bay of Pigs”) and only sent in regulars when Ukraine was about to recapture the two cities). It came as a shock to most Westerners when that wasn’t what Putin did, although Kremlin insiders were celebrating his victory over Ukraine after only four days, apparently sharing Putin’s view that once again enslaving a formerly-free country would come as easily to Russia in 2022 as it had in the past.
To examine the roots to all this, let’s bounce back to 1914, when the Russian Empire was still under the monarchy. There weren't any geographic divisions within the monarchy, although the monarch referred to himself as "King of all Rus': Great, Little, and White". Great Rus' was Russia. Little Rus' was Ukraine. White Rus' was Belarus. But there weren't distinct borders to these areas.
But then Russia got hammered by Germany in WWI and the monarchy collapsed. A Ukrainian Republic including Kyiv and Lviv declared independence in 1917 with its capital as Kyiv, just as a lot of areas that had been in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire were also doing. Despite that, Kyiv remained occupied by Germany until November 1918.
As the war wound down that year, the Bolsheviks had a second Ukrainian government founded, the so-called Ukrainian Soviet Republic, with its capital in Kharkiv, which had traditionally been the southernmost town in Russia, and also including Russian Empire territory all the way to Donetsk and Luhansk, so that there would be more native Russians in Ukraine than native Ukrainians. The civil war between these two governments centered around Kyiv, which changed hands 16 times in 1920.
The Kyiv group appealed for help to the USA and Western Europe, which blew them off because American president Woodrow Wilson believed (foolishly) that a large pan-Slavic state would constitute a check on Bolshevik expansionism (though the quote of British PM David Lloyd George about Ukrainian independence was clearly much worse). In 1921, the Kharkiv group won. During the struggle, Lviv managed to get itself annexed to Poland, but the Kharkiv government made Russian the only official language in Ukrainian SSR.
Less than three years after that, Lenin died (1924). Lenin actually wrote a will asking for Stalin to be removed as general secretary of the Communist Party; when that became public, Stalin barely retained power. But retain power he did, and after a three-year battle, Trotsky had to flee for his life, and Stalin took over the USSR.
Meanwhile, Ukrainians were still demanding to speak Ukrainian and were trying to spearhead a Ukrainization program throughout Ukrainian SSR, countering the USSR’s Russification efforts. But soon after taking over, Stalin made a try for his own final solution for Ukraine: starving millions to death in the Kiev area in the Holomodor (which the New York Times officially reported was not happening . . . and was awarded a Pulizer Prize for its pro-Stalin propaganda, leading to the sarcastic “Walter Duranty Prize” given by satirists to writers who parrot propaganda). After than, Stalin agreed to let the capital of Ukrainian SSR move from Kharkiv to Kiev in 1934.
By the time Nazi Germany was ready to start WWII in 1939, the USSR signed a pact with Germany to partition Poland, such that the USSR got to grab territory from it for Belarus and Ukraine, including Lviv again, and also from Czechoslovakia for Ukraine. But after the Holomodor and the collapse of the Soviet-German alliance, a sizable proportion of Ukrainians ended up siding with Germany against the USSR during WWII. They formed a pro-Nazi government in Ukraine during the German occupation of Ukraine, which appears to be the historical reason that Putin has accused the current Kyiv government of being Nazis. Basically, first the Nazi Army and then the Soviet Army raped their way across Ukraine (which now included part of Poland) throughout the war. For almost five years. And then “the Ukraine” (as Russians called it) resumed being a disadvantaged part of the USSR for about 45 more years.
At the point when the USSR broke up in 1991, Ukraine remained a fairly disunified country. The western half generally disliked or even hated Russia and had longstanding historic grievances -- and one of the very first things the newly independent government did was make both Ukrainian and Russian official languages in Ukraine. The eastern half, however, spoke Russian and was generally loyal to Russia, often with a significant number of family members still in Russia.
The original Ukrainian governments after the dissolution were generally led by Russophones from the east -- until the Orange Revolution of 2004, which was led by the western Ukrainians. What the Orange Revolution really did was kick out one corrupt group from eastern Ukraine and substitute another corrupt group from western Ukraine, which doesn’t seem like a big deal. The new government could only reach a tentative agreement with the European Union . . . to enter into a second agreement with the EU that would create a path for Ukraine someday to join the EU. But we need to look more carefully at these agreements.
To someone from the western democracies, these agreements look like tissue paper. An agreement to negotiate another agreement that might lead to a third agreement regarding membership? Anyone would know that was just a stall, right? After all, the two ex-Soviet republics of Ukraine and Moldova may be looking westward because of their status as former parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire prior to WWI, but in 2022, they are the two poorest countries in Europe. The annual gross domestic product per capita of those two countries is about $3,400 each. By contrast, the poorest country in the EU is Bulgaria, with an annual GDP per capita around $11,350 (Croatia and Romania are each about $3,000 higher).
The EU actually does internal wealth transfers to try to boost the standard of living in those poor EU countries. But Ukraine is so poor in comparison that a direct entry of it into the EU isn't possible now and won’t be possible in the near future, until Ukraine’s economy can at least partially catch up to the rest of Europe.
However . . . that’s how we in the western democracies see the effect of the Orange Revolution on the Ukraine issue. What about a wannabe successor to the tsars?
The Wall Street Journal ran a feature article about this on April 1 that was somewhat mis-titled (“Vladimir Putin’s 20-Year March to War in Ukraine — and How the West Mishandled It”) but was nevertheless quite informative. Putin saw this as a coup engineered by the United States and the EU to hold him back.
When the Bush administration told Russia that it had only contributed $14 million with regard to the Orange Revolution, mostly to nongovernmental institutions that were promoting democracy, it thought Putin would understand that the U.S. wasn’t behind the Orange Revolution. Instead, one of the members of Bush’s national security council said that the Russians “were impressed at the result that they thought we got for $14 million.” And Putin started ranting about how the US, the EU, and George Soros (always need a Jewish villain in these conspiracy theories) had pulled this off.
Interestingly, German chancellor Angela Merkel didn’t take Putin’s threats seriously, according to one of the sources quoted in the article. When US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told German diplomats at a NATO summit in 2008 that Putin saw gaining control of Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia as the key to making Russia great again (“MaRGA”?), the article notes that the Germans thought that Russia was now too weak and too dependent on the west to be a serious threat. Perhaps we know where Barack Obama came up with the idea that fear about Russia should be relegated to 1980s foreign policy. [By that point, late 2012, Putin was dismissing Ukraine as a “made-up” country.]
In 2010, Putin’s candidate for leader of Ukraine, who had lost after the Orange Revolution in 2004, easily won the 2010 elections with strong support in eastern Ukraine. As part of his standard operating procedure (similar to his operations in Russia), Putin put together a group of corrupt oligarchs (perhaps looking to get super-rich) to form the government in Ukraine.
In 2013, this government decided to tear up the EU agreements and instead sign new agreements with Russia, in part to become "Little Rus'" again, as Putin wished. But giving up on dreams of pan-European wealth and embracing Russian poverty proved to be a hard sell for the Ukrainian government. Too hard. Instead, the residents of Kyiv and points west revolted against a pro-Putin government (for a second time in a decade) in the Maidan Revolution of 2013-14, and when many of the eastern members fled to Russia one step ahead of angry mobs, the government fell. The new interim government, now missing most of the representatives from Russophone areas, promptly passed a law that would require all schooling in Ukraine to be done in Ukrainian, which (needless to say) was hugely unpopular and quite controversial in the Russophone east. This law never took effect, because the interim government vetoed it.
However, Putin, following the old political maxim of never letting a crisis go to waste, tried to instigate a popular revolution based on the language law. First, Putin used the Russian army and navy (minus their military insignias, earning them the epithet “little green men”) to seize Crimea (where Russia maintained naval bases under a treaty with Ukraine) and also captured most of the Ukrainian navy, which was also based in Crimea. Putin then turned his attention to the Donbas (the easternmost region of Ukraine, with significant towns in Donetsk and Luhansk), where a coordinated pro-Russian rebellion managed to take over a few city halls in Russophone Ukraine but then petered out about the time that new Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, from a city near the Romanian border in western Ukraine, was inaugurated.
Undeterred, Russia launched an invasion from its border with Ukraine in that region, relying on a mixture of former Russian servicemen and Russian-leaning locals, and gobbled up the two main cities fairly quickly. However, although Ukraine didn't have an army, the shock of Russian-supported troops attacking Ukraine from Russian territory caused a popular outpouring of (untrained) Ukrainian support, and Russia soon had to bring in Moscow-based support to hold onto its gains in the Donbas long enough to agree to a cease-fire. Putin apparently expected that, after the cease-fire, the rest of the country would quickly collapse, as did certain “Friends of Putin” such as “The Former Guy” (or “TFG”), who told CPAC 2014 that Putin took all the wealth of Ukraine (in Crimea) and the rest would collapse from within.
TFG may have actually believed that — or may simply have been gullible enough to believe anything that people who flatter him told him, but it proved not to be true. Poroshenko’s new government realized that it had to build a national army, and quickly, because Putin would clearly be back soon for the rest of Ukraine, and it made a deal with the U.S. to train its new army.
There was one problem. Poroshenko’s new government was so focused on building an army that it didn't address the corruption that still existed in Ukrainian government, which was one of the reasons that Ukraine was so poor. And this lack of focus showed up in the investigation of a company called Burisma, which was led by one of the billionaire oligarchs who was a friend of Putin and who had served in the Ukrainian government that fell in 2014. Now he was corrupt, and the new prosecutor investigating him was also corrupt and wanted a payoff. Instead, the oligarch followed the traditional Soviet patterns and paid off a “princeling” relative of a powerful figure on the other side (Hunter Biden), who then got his dad to demand the prosecutor be replaced. There are no good guys in that story, and the continuing corruption in Ukraine led Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a trained lawyer who had become a successful comedian and actor (and was a native Russophone), to seek the presidency of Ukraine in 2019 on just two platforms: ending corruption and reunifying the country.
He won overwhelmingly in the country's third straight honest election, and the first such election which was followed by the losing candidate (Poroshenko) voluntarily surrendering power to the winning one (Zelenskyy). And the new government was largely successful in implementing a post-corruption regime, but it quickly learned that Putin's only endgame on reunification involved Ukraine becoming a crippled vassal state dominated by Russia . . . and the Ukrainian government bending the knee to Putin.
When Zelenskyy refused to do so . . . well, Putin decided that military demonstrations of Russia's might would intimidate him. Instead, Zelenskyy told his fellow Russophones that the real issue wasn't a language issue after all but rather the desire of an evil dictator to keep the country separated . . . and he got the entire country (including the east, which now openly turned on Russia) onboard with appealing to Europe and the West for help. And Putin lost it . . . which brought us to February 2022.
The outcome of the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War is still in doubt, but I’ll have more to say about it as more of the fog of war starts to lift. (But hopefully not at this length again!) We’ve already seen substantial evidence of Russian war crimes, and we still don’t know the status of the Donbas or Mariupol. However, none of that is likely to influence the pro-Putin, pro-TFG bloc. And we’ve seen Putin’s surrogates rant against “Ukrainization” in a manner that would have thrilled Stalin. As F. Scott Fitzgerald would have put it to Putin, once he became mindful of Putin’s goal to recreate the Russian Empire of the Romanovs: “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Be seeing you.
I wrote a comment and it got lost in my internet ineptitude! The gist was as follows. You start your narrative in 1914, perhaps not helpful but perhaps helpful, you could reach back just 10 or so years earlier to 1904/5. The Russian empire has always been very distinct from the west and the east and very much sees itself as deserving of great power status (to the extent a "culture" exists and can have motives). By virtue of the vastness of the Russian empire conflict coupled with a startling ineptitude in military matters especially against smaller foes seems to have been a consistent theme. I am thinking of the curb stomping the Japanese inflicted on Russia starting at Port Arthur where the Japanese Navy (in a sneak attack eerily reminiscent of Dec. 7th 1941) launched a devasting attack on the Russian Navy. The Japanese proceeded to humiliate the Russian military on land and at sea. History seems to be repeating itself as the illusion of Russian military prowess is yet again shattered. Interestingly enough the Japanese success reshaped the world order at the time (although I don't think West fully appreciated it until 1941). Tsar Nicolas, like Putin with the Ukrainians, was advised that the Japanese would not fight.