HISTORY
The first identifiable groups
to populate what is now Ukraine were Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians,
and Goths, among other nomadic peoples who arrived throughout
the first millennium B.C. These peoples were well known to colonists
and traders in the ancient world, including Greeks and Romans,
who established trading outposts that eventually became city-states.
Slavic tribes occupied central and eastern Ukraine in the sixth
century A.D. and played an important role in the establishment
of Kiev. Situated on lucrative trade routes, Kiev quickly prospered
as the center of the powerful state of Kievan Rus. In the 11th
century, Kievan Rus was, geographically, the largest state in
Europe. Christian missionaries, Cyril and Methodius, propagated
the Christian faith and the Cyrillic alphabet. Kievan Rus Prince
Volodymyr converted the Kievan nobility and most of the population
to Christianity in 988. Conflict among the feudal lords led to
decline in the 12th century. Mongol raiders razed Kiev in the
13th century.
Most of the territory of what
is modern Ukraine was annexed by Poland and Lithuania in the 14th
century, but during that time, Ukrainians began to conceive of
themselves as a distinct people, a feeling that survived subsequent
partitioning by greater powers over the next centuries. Ukrainian
peasants who fled the Polish effort to force them into servitude
came to be known as Cossacks and earned a reputation for their
fierce martial spirit and love of freedom. In 1667, Ukraine was
partitioned between Poland and Russia. In 1793, when Poland was
partitioned, much of modern-day Ukraine was integrated into the
Russian Empire.
The 19th century found the
region largely agricultural, with a few cities and centers of
trade and learning. The region was under the control of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire in the extreme west and the Russian Empire elsewhere. Ukrainian
writers and intellectuals were inspired by the nationalistic spirit
stirring other European peoples existing under other imperial
governments and were determined to revive Ukrainian linguistic
and cultural traditions and reestablish a Ukrainian state. Taras
Shevchenko (1814-1861), national hero of Ukraine, presented the
intellectual maturity of the Ukrainian language and culture through
his work as a poet and artist. Imperial Russia, however, imposed
strict limits on attempts to elevate Ukrainian culture, even banning
the use and study of the Ukrainian language.
When World War I and the Russian
revolution shattered the Habsburg and Russian empires, Ukrainians
declared independent statehood. In 1917 the Central Rada proclaimed
Ukrainian autonomy and in 1918, following the Bolshevik seizure
of power in Petrograd, the Ukrainian National Republic declared
independence under President Mykhaylo Hrushevsky. After three
years of conflict and civil war, however, the western part of
Ukrainian territory was incorporated into Poland, while the larger,
central and eastern regions were incorporated into the Soviet
Union in 1922 as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
The Ukrainian national idea
persevered during the twenties, but with Stalin’s rise to
power and the campaign for collectivization, the Soviet leadership
imposed a campaign of terror that ravaged the intellectual class.
Stalin also created an artificial famine (called the Holodomor
in Ukrainian) as part of his forced collectivization policies,
which killed millions of previously independent peasants and others
throughout the country. Estimates of deaths from the 1932-33 famine
alone range from 3 million to 7 million.
When the Nazis invaded the
Soviet Union in 1941, some Ukrainians, particularly in the west,
welcomed what they saw as liberation from Communist rule, but
this did not last as they quickly came to understand the nature
of Nazi rule. Nazi brutality was directed principally against
Ukraine's Jews (of whom an estimated 1 million were killed), but
also against many other Ukrainians. Babyn Yar in Kiev was the
site of one of the most horrific Nazi massacres of Ukrainian Jews,
ethnic Ukrainians, and many others. Kiev and other parts of the
country were heavily damaged.
After the Nazi and Soviet
invasions of Poland in 1939, the western Ukrainian regions were
incorporated into the Soviet Union. Armed resistance against Soviet
authority continued as late as the 1950s. During periods of relative
liberalization--as under Nikita Khrushchev from 1955 to 1964 and
during the period of “perestroika” under Mikhail Gorbachev
-- Ukrainian communists pursued nationalist objectives. The 1986
explosion at the Chornobyl (Chernobyl in Russian) nuclear power
plant, located in the Ukrainian SSR, and the Soviet government’s
initial efforts to conceal the extent of the catastrophe from
its own people and the world, was a watershed for many Ukrainians
in exposing the severe problems of the Soviet system. Ukraine
became an independent state on August 24, 1991, and was a co-founder
of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) following the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, although it has not officially
joined the organization.
