Thread by @FAB87F

History of Ukraine Part One - From Birth to Rebirth.

To understand the recent history of Ukraine including the current war we need to understand the genesis of the place which is now called Ukraine.
#Ukraine

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Lithuanian southward expansion reached its peak during the reign of Grand Duke Algirdas (ruled 1345-77) who succeeded in unifying all of the Belarusian and most of the Ukrainian territories in what many scholars have referred to as the Lithuanian-Ruthenian state.

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During the height of its expansion this state included nearly half of the former territory of Kyivan Rus'.

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Under the rule of Vytautas the Great (1392-1430) the Lithuanian-Ruthenian state incorporated all the lands between the Dnister River and Dnieper River as far south as the Black Sea and reached the summit of its greatness.

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However, after his defeat by the Tatars in battle at the Vorskla River in 1399, Vytautas was forced to abandon his expansionist plans in the east and seek union with Poland.

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With the Union of Lublin, signed on 1 July 1569, the Lithuanian-Ruthenian period in Ukrainian history came to an end. This treaty united Poland and Lithuania into a single Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita).

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In practical terms the union was dominated by the Poles, who now took direct control over most of Ukraine. The Polish influence on Ukraine was profound. Most of the Ukrainian nobles, granted equal rights with their Polish counterparts, were quickly Polonized.

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Ukraine was therefore bereft of its own social elite. The last vestiges of the Kyivan Rus' state disappeared as the Ukrainian lands were divided into six voivodeships, or provinces.

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Large tracts of land were granted to Polish nobles, who established sizable manorial estates (filvarky) that could produce effectively for the booming European grain trade. Some of the largest estates (latifundia) in the Commonwealth were situated in Ukraine.

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Greater demands were placed on the Ukrainian peasantry, which was being reduced to serfdom. The religious tolerance in the Commonwealth, phenomenal for its times, also had an impact in Ukraine.

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The Reformation saw the influence of Protestant groups, such as the Socinians and Lutherans, spread into Ukraine through Poland. Also pressure was put on the predominantly Orthodox population of Ukraine to convert to Catholicism.

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This resulted indirectly in the establishment of the Ukrainian Catholic church by the Union of Berestia (1596).

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At the same time Ukraine experienced a tremendous revival. Theological and secular education, literature, and the fine arts all began to flourish, and printing was introduced.

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The ideas of the Renaissance began to work their way into Ukraine through Poland as the 'Golden Age' of 16th-century Polish culture left its mark.

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The situation in Ukraine under Polish rule became increasingly more volatile in the first half of the 17th century as socioeconomic, religious, and national tensions grew.

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These tensions peaked in 1648, when a full-scale uprising led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky erupted in Ukraine and engulfed the Commonwealth in the Cossack-Polish War.

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The history of the Ukrainian Cossacks has three distinct aspects: their struggle against the Tatars and the Turks in the steppe and on the Black Sea.

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Their participation in the struggle of the Ukrainian people against socioeconomic and national-religious oppression by the Polish magnates; and their role in the building of an autonomous Ukrainian state.

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The first period of the Cossacks' history spans the years 1550-1648.

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The town Cossacks were organized by the local officials, such as Ostafii Dashkevych, Przeclaw Lanckoronski, Samuel Zborowski, and Prince Dmytro Vyshnevetsky (Baida), to defend the southeastern borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from Tatar incursions.

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Following the establishment of the Zaporozhian Sich, the town and Zaporozhian Cossacks ventured far into the steppes in pursuit of the Tatars in order to rescue captives or to attack Tatar and Turkish coastal towns.

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By the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century, the Cossacks also mounted several bloody uprisings against the oppressive Polish landowners and the Polish government...

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The Cossack Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky is one of the most celebrated and at the same time most controversial political figures in Ukraine's early-modern history.

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A brilliant military leader, his greatest achievement in the process of national revolution was the formation of the Cossack Hetman state of the Zaporozhian Host (1648-1782).

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His statesmanship was demonstrated in all areas of state-building--in the military, administration, finance, economics, and culture.

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At the height of the Cossack-Polish War (1648-57), Khmelnytsky concluded the fateful Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654 with Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich of Muscovy, as a result of which Ukraine became a protectorate of the tsar and was placed in the Muscovite sphere of influence.

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Some of the most prominent Ukrainian intellectuals, such as Taras Shevchenko, criticized Khmelnytsky for this strategic error which resulted in the centuries of Muscovite/Russian domination over Ukraine.

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The Khmelnytsky Uprising & the Cossack-Polish War led to the establishment of the Cossack Hetman state. At the time of Bohdan Khmelnytsky's death, the Cossacks controlled the former Kyiv, Bratslav, and Chernihiv voivodeships, an area inhabited by about 1.5 million people.

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The entire area was divided into 16 military and administrative regions corresponding to the territorially based regiments of the Cossack army. At the pinnacle of the Cossack military-administrative system stood the hetman.

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Assisting the hetman was the General Officer Staff, which functioned as a general staff and a council of ministers. The capitals of the Hetman state were Chyhyryn (1648-63), Hadiach (1663-8), Baturyn (1669-1708 and 1750-64), and Hlukhiv (1708-34).

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From 1654 the Hetman state was nominally a vassal of Muscovy. The political relationship between the two countries was renegotiated with the election of each new hetman, which led to the steady erosion of the Hetmanate's sovereignty.

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In the 18th century, the increasing political control of the Hetman state by Russia precluded the independent evolution of its administrative, financial, and judicial institutions.

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During the reign of Catherine II (1762-96) Ukrainian autonomy was progressively destroyed and the office of hetman was finally abolished by the Russian government in 1764.

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One problem today for the historian lies in the fact that all the later princes of the successor states named were princes of the Rus - and they had a tendency to call themselves Prince of all the Rus. While this is a history of Ukraine, we cannot ignore Moscow & Russia.

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Prince Ivan of Moscow (ca. 1288-1340), known as Kalita (the moneybag), was the tax collector for Sultan Ozbeg, the khan of the Golden Horde. Ozbeg awarded Ivan the title of Grand Prince prince, as rulers of Kyiv were traditionally known.

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This gave Grand Prince Ivan the ability to collect taxes from all Russian lands and made him the single point of contact to pay the tribute demanded by the Mongols from those diverse and fractured lands.

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Ivan and his successors subsequently used this title to claim all the lands of the Rus including those under Lithuanian and Polish rule as their patrimony.

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Ivan III (1440-1505), his son Vasily III (1478-1533) and his grandson Ivan IV, known as Ivan the Terrible (1530-1584) were the most successful gatherers of the land of the Rus in its initial phase, annexing the lands of rival Rus princes in the north and north east.

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Ivan had himself crowned “Tsar of All Russia” when he was just 16, pushing for a leadership role molded off Caesar of Rome – absolute and answerable only to God.

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It's worth mentioning that the portion of modern Ukraine which includes the Black Sea coast and Crimea, where at the time of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was called the Crimean Khanate.

This had been the most western of the Tatar Golden Horde states.

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The Crimean Khanate accepted the suzerainty of the sultans of the Ottoman Empire after 1475. The khanate ruled both the Crimean Peninsula and large areas of the steppes to the north until it was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1783.

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The Crimeans had a complex relationship with Zaporozhian Cossacks who lived to the north of the khanate in modern Ukraine. The Cossacks provided a measure of protection against Tatar raids for Poland–Lithuania and received subsidies for their service.

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They also raided Crimean and Ottoman possessions in the region. At times Crimean Khanate made alliances with the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Zaporizhian Sich.



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The Russian victory in the Battle of Poltava in 1709 freed Tsar Peter I from any further restraint in his policy aimed at absorbing Ukraine into the Russian Empire. Devastated by war, Russian repressions, and a plague epidemic, Left-Bank Ukraine became a military colony.

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The Cossack army was put under Russian command, and the hetman became subject to constant supervision by Russian residents of the tsar. In 1722 Peter I set up the Little Russian Collegium, which sharply reduced the powers of the Ukrainian government.

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Cultural and religious life was also subjected to restrictions: Ukrainian printing was proscribed in 1720, and the Kyivan Mohyla Academy was repressed.

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Several decades later Empress Catherine II completed the policy of centralization and institutional Russification that Peter I began in Ukraine. In 1764 she forced the abdication of the last Cossack hetman, Kyrylo Rozumovsky, and restored the Little Russian Collegium.

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The task of its president, Count Petr Rumiantsev, was to gradually eliminate Ukrainian autonomy. He neutralized the Ukrainian elite by recruiting their members into Russian service and giving them rank and promotions. In 1775 the Zaporozhian Sich was destroyed.

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By 1782 all the traditional Cossack regiments of the Hetman state were abolished. The imperial bureaucracy replaced Ukrainian administrative, judicial, and fiscal institutions and social and legal norms were replaced with Russian ones.

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In 1783 the Russian system of conscription and serfdom was extended into Ukraine. The Ukrainian elite acquiesced because they benefited from the changes: the 1785 charter gave them the privileges of Russian nobility.

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The Hetman state and the Cossack social order ceased to exist and most of Ukraine was transformed into a province of Russia..

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In 1783, after a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire, Russian Czarina Catherine the Great annexes the Crimean peninsula and secures access to the strategically important Black Sea.

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Not for the first time the fortunes of Ukraine and the fortunes of Poland and Lithuania were intertwined.

Poland and Lithuania cease to exist after a third and final partition divides up their lands between the Prussian, Austrian and Russian empires.

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Austria gains part of present-day Ukraine in the southwest, but Russia gains the majority of Ukrainian lands for the first time.

This belies the claims by Vladimir Putin that “Ukraine has always been Russia” or that Ukraine and Russia have always been one.

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Ukrainians under Austro-Hungary had a greater degree of freedom in both political and especially language and culture than those in tsarist Russia.

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The Revolution of 1848-9 in the Habsburg monarchy played a decisive role in the process of the emergence of Ukrainian political organizations and the shaping of a modern Ukrainian identity in Western Ukraine.

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Prior to the revolution there had been a Ukrainian national revival in Galicia and Transcarpathia, but the movement had been entirely cultural. With the outbreak of the revolution, however, the Ukrainian question became a political question.

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The first representative Ukrainian political organization was founded in Lviv on 2 May 1848, the Supreme Ruthenian Council.

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The major political goal advocated by Ukrainians during the revolution was the creation of a predominantly Ukrainian crown land within the Habsburg monarchy.

Although the relatively underdeveloped Ukrainian movements in Transcarpathia and Bukovyna were as yet unclear.

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on the point, the Ukrainians of Galicia repeatedly emphasized in their publications that the Ukrainians of the Habsburg monarchy were part of the same distinct Ukrainian nation that could be found in Ukraine in the Russian Empire.

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In June 1848 the Ukrainians of Galicia and Bukovyna participated in the first parliamentary elections ever held on Ukrainian territory and 30 Ukrainians were elected to the constituent Austrian Reichstag.

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The first Ukrainian-language newspaper, Zoria halytska, began to appear in Lviv on 15 May 1848, and the Halytsko-Ruska Matytsia, a Ukrainian literary and educational society, was established later that year.

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When the revolution was defeated in the fall of 1849, many of the achievements of the revolutionary years were undone.

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The Ukrainian leadership assumed a conservative 'Old Ruthenian' or Russophile orientations, but the legacy of revolutionary achievements shaped the Ukrainophile populist movement which became dominant in Galicia at the end of the 19th century.

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In the 1800s, nationalist movements spring up throughout Europe, and Ukraine is no exception. Pro-independence forerunners begin codifying and promoting the Ukrainian language, stressing Ukraine’s distinct culture and history.

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They refer to themselves as Ukrainians for the first time, and, eventually, calling for self-rule. Russia responds with a series of repressive measures, including a decree that bans the publication of Ukrainian-language books and newspapers.

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“A Little Russian language never existed, does not exist, and never shall exist. Its dialects as spoken by the masses are the same as the Russian language,” a Russian directive declares in the 1860s.



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The populist movement that emerged in the second half of the 19th century, first in Russian-ruled Ukraine & soon afterwards in Western Ukraine, played a crucial role in the evolution of Ukrainian national life and the formation of modern Ukrainian national identity.

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The populists, who included primarily members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, idealized the people (narod), which, practically speaking, meant the peasantry.

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The main tenets of Ukrainian populism were federalism, the emancipation of the peasantry, and the recognition of the cultural distinctiveness of the Ukrainian people.

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While some populists became involved in revolutionary activities, the dominant trend was for peaceful change and the majority of populists focused on the "organic work" among the peasants.

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Initially, this work focused on educational and cultural endeavors, such as Ukrainian Sunday schools for adults and children, village reading rooms, and various publishing activities of such organizations as the Prosvita (Enlightenment) society.

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Later, in their attempt to help Ukrainians improve their lives through their own resources, populist organizations became involved in economic activities, most notably in the co-operative movement.

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Populists also played an important role in various aspects of social work (including sports, physical-education, and scouting organizations) and health care (such as the temperance

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movement whose efforts to battle the wide-spread problem of alcoholism among the peasants were particularly effective in Western Ukraine).

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Co-operative associations are based on the ideas of economic co-operation and mutualism. By participating in a co-operative enterprise the members seek either to minimize their costs or to maximize their profits.

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The main features of co-operative associations are an unrestricted number of members, voluntary membership, equality of rights and obligations, and the election of officers.

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A co-operative attempts to gain for its enterprise lower interest rates on capital, a fair price for goods and services, and adequate wages. Some co-operatives try to improve the cultural life or the moral and civic virtues of their members.

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The co-operative movement in Western Europe emerged in response to the needs of industrial workers.

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The Ukrainian co-operative movement, however, emerged in the late 1860s in response to the socioeconomic needs of the recently emancipated peasants and the petty artisans and laborers in the towns.

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The Ukrainians attributed greater importance to the movement than did most nations. Under the political conditions of the time, it served as a means of social and economic self-defense and became an integral part of the struggle for national independence.

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The self-governing economic associations not only strengthened the people's economic power and taught the masses civic responsibility, but also trained large numbers of civic leaders, who played a prominent role in the period of Ukrainian statehood in 1917-20.

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Because of different political and legal conditions, the co-operatives developed differently in Russian-ruled central and eastern Ukraine, in Western Ukraine, and under the Soviet regime.

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The first co-operative associations in Russian-ruled Ukraine were the Union of Credit Co-operatives in Berdiansk (1901) and the unions of consumer co-operatives in Kyiv (1908) and Vinnytsia (1910).

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Co-operative movements in Galicia in the 1870s was connected with the efforts mainly of the clergy to alleviate misery among the peasants by organizing self-help fraternal loan associations, community warehouses, and other enterprises in parishes and communities.

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In 1899 the Farming and Trading Association was founded in Peremyshl, and in 1911 it merged with the trade syndicate of the Silskyi Hospodar association to form the Provincial Union of Farming and Trading Associations.

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The Revolution of 1905 in the Russian Empire had an important impact on the development of the Ukrainian movement in Russian-ruled Ukraine. In the face of widespread social unrest Tsar Nicholas II made concessions to the people in a manifesto of 30 October 1905.

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The revolution spread to the military, particularly the Black Sea Fleet. In June 1905 the crew of the battleship Potemkin in Odesa harbor mutinied; one of the chief leaders of the mutiny was the Ukrainian P. Matiushenko.

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Another prominent mutineer was Oleksander Kovalenko , who had been a founder of the Revolutionary Ukrainian party. In November 1905 the crew of the cruiser Ochakov, off Sevastopol, also mutinied.

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Among other things, the October manifesto established a limited parliament, the State Duma, in which Ukrainians participated in 1906-17.

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The manifesto also promised fundamental civil rights, including freedom of the press and freedom of association, which did much to accelerate the development of the Ukrainian movement in the Russian Empire.

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In the wake of the October manifesto Ukrainian newspapers and journals, previously banned by Petr Valuev's circular and the Ems Ukase, began to appear in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Lubny, Odesa, Poltava, and elsewhere. In 1906, 18 Ukrainian periodicals appeared.

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Several Ukrainian political parties--from the liberal nationalist Ukrainian Democratic Radical party to the Marxist Ukrainian Social Democratic Spilka--vigorously expanded their activity.

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By 1908, however, government restrictions against the rapidly spreading Ukrainian movement had mounted again. Attempts made during the revolution to introduce the Ukrainian language into educational institutions were thwarted by the Russian government.

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Most Ukrainian-language periodicals were banned and only a few of the voluntary Ukrainian associations, such as branches of the adult educational and cultural society Prosvita, survived the reactionary period.

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By the beginning of the twentieth century Ukraine had existed for just over 1000 years, if you consider the formation of the Kyivan Rus in the 9th century in Kyiv around 880AD.

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The Kyivan Rus was not a nation state like we know today but it can be considered the ancestor of the nation that we know as Ukraine.

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The twentieth century would bring another revolution, world wars, famines, and genocide, but also the rebirth of an independent Ukraine.

We will consider all these events in part two of this history.

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