by | 8 July 2026 · 4:47 am

Ukraine’s Dirty Election of 2004

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 60-61:

The Ukrainian constitution did not allow the president to serve in office more than two terms, and after some hesitation Leonid Kuchma decided to abide by it, rejecting the idea of running for a third term on the grounds that his first election predated the adoption of the constitution and thus should not be counted. Once again Kuchma reached out for the Russian or, more specifically, Yeltsin’s precedent, looking for a successor who would guarantee his personal safety and the integrity of his assets.

The choice fell on the leader of Ukraine’s largest regional clan, the governor of Donetsk oblast, Viktor Yanukovych, who had led the largest grouping in the pro-presidential faction of parliament. Yanukovych had been appointed prime minister and approved by parliament in November 2002. The presidential campaign of 2004, which pitched Yanukovych, supported by Kuchma, against the former prime minister, Viktor Yushchenko, who led the largest faction in parliament, was the dirtiest in Ukrainian history. The Yanukovych camp used government media, administrative pressure, government handouts to the most vulnerable social groups, as well as the financial power of the Donetsk clan to prevail in the elections. It also resorted to an act of terrorism against Yushchenko.

In September 2004, the fifty-year-old Yushchenko fell violently ill and was soon diagnosed with dioxin poisoning. The individuals suspected of arranging it had fled to Russia and were given safe haven there. Yushchenko miraculously survived the attack and managed to return to the electoral campaign defaced but alive. Instead of knocking Yushchenko out, the attack on the opposition candidate increased his popularity. When Ukrainians went to the polling stations on October 31, most of them voted for Yushchenko, not Yanukovych.

That was the result of the exit polls conducted by numerous Ukrainian institutions on election day, but the Central Electoral Commission, controlled by Kuchma and Yanukovych, announced a different outcome. According to the commission’s report, it was Yanukovych who had won the race with 49 percent of the vote over Yushchenko’s 47 percent. Yushchenko’s supporters, refusing to accept the forged result, flooded Kyiv’s main square, the Maidan, and set up a tent city there. Kyivans were soon joined by supporters from the provinces. The Orange Revolution, which took its name from the colors of Yushchenko’s electoral campaign, had begun.

Numerous factors contributed to the outbreak of the Orange Revolution. Among them were the protracted and unresolved conflict between the presidential and legislative branches of government; the split within the political elite, including the oligarchs with their media resources, who supported opposite sides; and, last but not least, Kuchma’s halfhearted support for Yanukovych, who was not his preferred choice for successor but was forced on him by circumstances. Ultimately it was Ukrainian regionalism, rooted in political and cultural differences, that came to the rescue of Ukrainian democracy. The supporters of the Orange Revolution, many of them residents of Ukraine’s west and center, associated themselves with Ukrainian identity, language, and culture, as well as an orientation toward the liberal West.

Faced with continuing mass protests and the split within the elite, Kuchma decided to put Yeltsin’s precedent aside. Despite demands from Yanukovych, he refused to use the army against the protesters and open fire, as had been the case in Moscow in 1993. Instead, he opted for a compromise. The Yanukovych camp agreed to a new round of elections in exchange for Yushchenko’s promise to amend the constitution to limit presidential prerogatives. On December 26, in the third round of the presidential elections, Yushchenko was elected with 52 percent of the vote against Yanukovych’s 44 percent.

The crisis that had begun in April 2000 with Kuchma’s attempt to increase the power of the presidency by means of a referendum came to an end in December 2004 with the weakening of presidential powers. Some presidential prerogatives were transferred to the prime minister, whose appointment and political fortunes depended on the disposition of political forces in parliament. Ukraine was entering the new century as a presidential-parliamentary republic with divided governing power. It was anything but an ideal outcome, for under the new system neither the president nor the prime minister had sufficient power to implement policy independently. But it was the outcome that saved Ukrainian democracy.

During his last year in office, Kuchma had published his memoirs under the telling title, Ukraine Is Not Russia. After trying the Russian model more than once and inevitably failing to achieve the desired result, he knew exactly what he was talking about. The book was published in Moscow and launched there before its Ukrainian translation became available to readers in Kyiv. It sent a message that very few in Russia took seriously and no one in the Kremlin was prepared to accept.

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by | 7 July 2026 · 4:39 am

Ukraine’s Economic Turnaround c. 2000

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 56-57:

In the fall of 1999, as Yeltsin was getting ready to step down and promote Putin as his successor, the president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, was preparing to run for a second term. During his first term he had managed to stabilize the Ukrainian economy by launching large-scale privatization and working closely with Western donors, especially the International Monetary Fund. Kuchma had also brought Ukrainian politics into temporary equilibrium by adopting a new constitution that introduced a power-sharing agreement between president and parliament. Yet the system was anything but stable, as the two political actors did not agree on the political and economic direction of the country. The global financial crisis of 1997 and the Russian default of 1998 hurt the Ukrainian economy, enhancing the position of the communists as the most powerful parliamentary faction. In the parliamentary elections of 1998 they gained 25 percent of the popular vote. The national democrats, organized in Rukh and led by the former dissident Viacheslav Chornovil, came second with 10 percent of the vote, while the Kuchma-backed People’s Democratic Party garnered a mere 5 percent.

In 1999 Kuchma was pretty much in the same place as Yeltsin on the eve of his reelection in 1996. He decided to take a page from Yeltsin’s electoral campaign, presenting himself as the only force capable of stopping a communist return to power. This stance appealed to the new industrial bosses in eastern Ukraine, who had managed to privatize former state-owned enterprises on Kuchma’s watch and with his assistance. Electors in the western regions, who cherished Ukrainian independence, oriented themselves toward Europe and against a return to the USSR.

Using his control of state-run media and obtaining support from media controlled by the regional bosses and oligarchs who had emerged during his first term, Kuchma managed to carry both eastern and western Ukraine, losing only in the center, where the countryside was still controlled by holdovers of the collective farm system. He gained 58 percent of the popular vote versus 39 percent for his opponent, the Ukrainian communist leader Petro Symonenko. Like Yeltsin, Kuchma decided to use his victory over the communists to push market reforms forward. He was luckier than his Russian counterpart, as there was no Asian financial crisis to interfere with his plans.

Upon his reelection, Kuchma initiated a new course toward integrating Ukraine into European political and economic structures. He appointed Viktor Yushchenko, the young head of Ukraine’s national bank who was strongly supported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as the new prime minister. In slightly more than a year, Yushchenko and his ally Yulia Tymoshenko, who became deputy prime minister in the new government, managed to stop the economic decline, increase revenues by closing loopholes for big business and the newly emergent oligarchic clans, and repay unpaid wages, salaries, and pensions. The economy began a rapid recovery led by the metallurgical and mining industries, which doubled their exports. Economic growth would continue well into the first decade of the new millennium.

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by | 6 July 2026 · 2:51 am

Russian vs. Ukrainian Transitions, 1990s

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 43-44:

In Ukraine, as in Russia, the economy and public reaction to the dissolution of the USSR were the two key issues that turned national politics into a never-ending drama, casting president and parliament in opposing roles. But those issues played out differently in Ukraine, where, most importantly, the political elite enhanced rather than undermined the democratic institutions born out of the chaos of Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms. Russia’s “democratic moment” became an “era of democracy” in Ukraine.

Leonid Kravchuk was never the revolutionary that Yeltsin had become during the late Soviet period. If Yeltsin had served in the course of his party career as a regional boss responsible for administering large administrative and economic entities such as Sverdlovsk oblast (province) and Moscow, Kravchuk was a quintessential apparatchik, running the propaganda department of the Ukrainian Central Committee. While Yeltsin left the Communist Party early, protesting the slow pace of Gorbachev’s reforms, Kravchuk remained loyal to the end. If Yeltsin was elected to parliament and then became its chairman against the will of the party leadership, then Kravchuk took the helm of the Ukrainian parliament thanks to the support of the party bosses. And while Yeltsin ran for the Russian presidency against a communist candidate supported by the Kremlin, Kravchuk competed successfully against a pro-democratic candidate who also happened to be a former prisoner of the Gulag.

The differences between Yeltsin and Kravchuk extended to their styles of presidential leadership. If Yeltsin was a charismatic populist, highly voluntarist in his attitude to power, Kravchuk was a cunning apparatchik and consensus builder. He would need those skills in office, as he led a country very different from Russia and faced a very different parliament. Ukraine was divided by history, culture, and the political orientations and instincts of its people as the Russian Federation never was.

The east and south of Ukraine had been the industrial heartland of the Soviet Union, was highly Russified in culture, and had millions of ethnic Russians among its inhabitants. The center was largely rural and Ukrainian-speaking, a product of the Soviet Ukrainian national project of the 1920s, which tolerated Ukrainian cultural but not political identity. Then there was the west, which had long been part of central European states and empires. Its strongly exclusivist national identity had been strengthened by the interwar nationalist movement and the lengthy guerrilla war against Soviet rule waged by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

As in Russia, the Ukrainian “democrats” emerged as the most dynamic force in late Soviet and early post-Soviet politics. Their principal concern was not economic reform but state-building. By the end of 1991 Yeltsin had established control over all-Union managerial cadres and institutions that had plenty of experience in running an independent state; in Ukraine such institutions had to be built almost from scratch on the basis of ministries that in Soviet times had merely relayed orders from Moscow to the periphery, ensuring that production quotas and directives from the top were fulfilled in a timely manner.

When it came to market reforms, the Ukrainian parliament lacked a strong lobby to advocate or adopt them, and the public was not ready to support them. Economic reform meant hardship, which might very well split the country and scupper its independence. A poll conducted in 1993 suggested that only 19 percent of Ukrainians were prepared to endure economic reforms in order to strengthen and maintain independence, while 44 percent were not. Most of the former resided in the west, while most of the latter lived in the east and south. Thus, Ukraine found itself first resisting, then delaying, and finally emulating reforms.

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by | 5 July 2026 · 2:45 pm

Romanian Realia: Online Investing

This flyer is from a bank in Moldova:

Ai Grijă unde investești ONLINE!
Take care where you invest ONLINE!
Nu te lăsa păcălit de promisiuni false.
Don’t let yourself be fooled by false promises.

STOP investițiilor false
Stop false investments

STOP! Informează-te înainte să accepți oferte “atractive” de învestiții online.
Stop! Inform yourself before accepting “attractive” offers of online investment.

Cănd sună prea frumos să fie adevărat, e momentul să te OPREȘTI.
If it sounds too attractive to be true, it’s the moment to STOP.

VERIFICĂ! Dacă ai dubii, consultă o persoană de încredere sau un angajat bancar.
Verify! If you have doubts, consult a trusted person or a bank employee.

EVITĂ completarea sondajelor care cer informații sensibile și nu oferi datele tale personale sau bancare pe site-uri necunoscute.
Avoid completing surveys that ask for sensitive information and don’t offer personal or bank data on unfamiliar sites.

Ferește-te de “juriștii” de pe internet care promit că îți recuperează banii rapid. În realitate, poate fi doar o altă înșelătorie.
Protect yourself from “lawyers” on the internet who promise that you can quickly recover your money. In reality, it may be just another scam.

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by | 4 July 2026 · 11:17 pm

Ending the Soviet Empire

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 28, 31:

In 1995, in his review of Matlock’s memoir, titled Autopsy on an Empire, Kennan wrote: “I find it hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance more inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance from the international scene, primarily in the years 1987 through 1991, of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.” Kennan referred to the fall of previous empires as gradual. That of the Soviet Union was not. “How then to explain the extreme abruptness, the sharp quick ending, and not least the relative bloodlessness with which the great Soviet Empire came to an end in the four years in question, bearing with it those attributes of the earlier Russian Empire which it had contrived to incorporate into itself?” Kennan asked himself and his readers.

Was the Soviet experience unique? We can start by considering the British Empire, the most powerful such institution of the modern era, which offered the Russians a Commonwealth model for opting out of a traditional imperial project. British imperial disentanglement was gradual indeed. It began, arguably, with the eighteenth-century American Revolution, followed by slowly developing autonomism in the dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Attempts to crush South African and Irish movements for independence proved unsuccessful in the wake of World War I; in the decades after World War II Britain withdrew from India and subsequently from its African colonies.

…

To the surprise and relief of many, the Russians, led by Boris Yeltsin, refused to follow in the footsteps of the Serbs, who turned the former Yugoslav army into an instrument of Serbian aggrandizement and then of genocide. Nor did the Russians cling to the Soviet republics that Russia had dominated, as the French and Belgians did to their former colonies. Instead, the Russians seem to have taken a page from the dissolution of the Portuguese empire. Both empires ceased to exist as a result of relatively peaceful revolutions that took place in their capitals, where reformers tried to dismantle authoritarian government and initiate political, economic, and social reforms. In both countries, the existence of empire was an obstacle to such reforms.

Boris Yeltsin and his advisers sought to implement their reforms in Russia, not in the Soviet Union, where Gorbachev’s efforts to democratize the system were opposed by the conservatively minded communist elites that controlled most of the Soviet republics. To free his Russian reformers from the limitations imposed on them by Gorbachev’s vacillating political center, which was stymied by competing pro- and anti-reform factions, Yeltsin allied himself with pro-democratic reformers in the Baltic states and pro–status quo elites in Central Asia, all in an effort to undermine existing Soviet institutions. Yeltsin did not intend to subvert the Soviet Union in the process, but once the disintegration that he helped to set off developed a momentum of its own, he went along. His main political rival, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Soviet Union itself were swept away as a result.

Keeping the secessionist republics under Russian control by military force was an unlikely policy choice for other reasons as well. One of them was the enormous political, ideological, and economic influence that the United States wielded over the Soviet Union at this time, as well as the place that America occupied in the imagination of Soviet-era reformers, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin and beyond. Washington did not want the republics to fight one another, fearing the possibility of a “Yugoslavia with nukes”—a scenario that Gorbachev never tired of raising in his conversations with President George H. W. Bush.

The Russian president was prepared to use force against autonomous republics within the Russian Federation if they should attempt to secede, but not against similar aspirations of Union republics such as Ukraine. Moreover, the Soviet Army was short of resources, and Russians serving in it were not eager to fight.

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Filed under Africa, Australia, Britain, Canada, democracy, military, nationalism, Russia, South Asia, Ukraine, USSR, war, Yugoslavia

by | 3 July 2026 · 12:10 am

Ukraine in 1917

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 15-16:

On the eve of his all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Vladimir Putin would claim that it was the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin in particular, who had created a Ukrainian state and, indeed, modern Ukraine itself. Even a cursory acquaintance with the history of the Russian Revolution and the concomitant fall of the Russian Empire indicates that the modern Ukrainian state came into existence not thanks to Lenin but against his wishes.

In May 1917, soon after the fall of monarchy, the Central Rada (Council), the revolutionary Ukrainian parliament, created in Kyiv and led by historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, proclaimed Ukraine’s autonomy within a future Russian republic. But it was only after the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd in the fall of 1917 that the Central Rada declared the creation of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, which encompassed most of present-day Ukrainian territory within the borders of the Russian Empire, including the mining region of the Donbas. The new state wanted to maintain federal ties with Russia, but the Bolshevik invasion of January 1918 made that impossible.

The Central Rada declared the independence of Ukraine and entered in the anti-Bolshevik alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Bolsheviks waged war on the Ukrainian government under the banner of their own Ukrainian People’s Republic—a fiction created to provide a degree of legitimacy for the Bolshevik takeover of Ukraine. Bolshevik troops massacred the population of Kyiv, killing hundreds if not thousands of its citizens, including Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoiavlensky) of the Orthodox Church. The Bolshevik commander in Kyiv, Mikhail Muraviev, sent Lenin a telegram: “Order has been restored in Kyiv.”

The Central Rada had to leave Kyiv but soon returned, having signed an agreement with Germany and Austria-Hungary, whose troops moved into Ukraine in the spring of 1918 and drove the Bolsheviks out of its territory, including the Donbas. The Germans soon replaced the democratic Central Rada with the authoritarian regime of hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, but the democratic Ukrainian People’s Republic was restored when the Germans withdrew from Ukraine late in 1918. The Bolsheviks moved in once again, this time under the banner of their adversary Ukrainian People’s Republic, formally independent of Russia.

By the time the Bolsheviks reemerged in Ukraine and launched their military campaign to bring the Ukrainian provinces of the former Russian Empire back under central control, Ukrainian national consciousness was so widespread that Vladimir Lenin felt compelled to change his strategy. He concluded that Ukrainian aspirations to independence were so strong, not only among Ukrainians in general but even among the Ukrainian Bolsheviks themselves, as to require the granting of a degree of autonomy and a status equal to that of Russia.

Not only were the Ukrainians recognized as a distinct nationality (as were the Belarusians), no longer a “tribe” of a tripartite Russian nation as in tsarist times, but pro forma recognition of independence was given to a puppet Soviet Ukrainian state, and Ukrainian became its official language.

Realizing that the national movements brought to power by the effects of World War I and the Revolution of 1917 would have to be accommodated, the Bolsheviks strove to gain the cooperation of Ukraine’s new political and cultural elites. This accommodation eventually went beyond issues of language, culture, and the recruitment of local cadres into de facto occupation administrations. It also included the creation of state institutions and recognition of the formal independence of the Bolshevik-controlled puppet states formed to delegitimize the new truly independent states and governments established by the national minorities in the borderlands of the former empire.

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Filed under Austria, democracy, Germany, language, nationalism, Ukraine, USSR, war

by | 2 July 2026 · 12:03 am

Ukraine Votes for Independence, 1991

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 2-3:

While the disintegration of the Soviet Union had been underway for some time, it became irreversible on December 1, 1991, when the citizens of Ukraine, the Union’s second-largest republic after Russia, went to the polls to decide whether they wanted their country to become independent. The turnout exceeded 84 percent of eligible voters, and more than 92 percent of them chose independence. Even residents of the Ukrainian Donbas (Donets Basin), adjoining Russia’s western border, voted for independence by a margin of almost 84 percent. In the Crimea, the only region of Ukraine with a majority Russian population, 54 percent supported independence. Sevastopol, the home port of the Black Sea Fleet, did even better, registering 57 percent support for Ukrainian independence.

The vote came as a shock to Gorbachev but not to President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, Gorbachev’s onetime protégé and then his challenger and rival. Yeltsin had been briefed on the likely outcome a few days earlier by his adviser Galina Starovoitova, an anthropologist and pro-democracy activist. On hearing the projections, Yeltsin was incredulous. “It cannot be true!” was his first reaction. “This is our fraternal Slavic republic! There are 30 percent Russians there. The Crimea is Russian! All the people living east of the Dnieper gravitate toward Russia!” It took close to 40 minutes for Starovoitova to convince her boss that the polling data were pointing in one direction and one direction only, an overwhelming vote for independence. Yeltsin made his decision on the spot: he would recognize Ukrainian independence and meet with the soon-to-be-elected president of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, to forge an alliance and a new union different from the one led by Mikhail Gorbachev.

The meeting took place on December 7 and continued into the next day at the Belavezha hunting grounds on the Belarusian-Polish border. The Belarusian leaders, including the head of the republic’s parliament, Stanislav Shushkevich, hosted the Russian and Ukrainian presidents, who decided the fate of the USSR. Once Kravchuk refused to join the reformed Union proposed by Gorbachev, Yeltsin’s aide Gennadii Burbulis proposed to dissolve the USSR altogether. Frightened by this, the head of the Belarusian KGB reported the treasonous proposal to his bosses in Moscow, but there was no active response—by that time, Gorbachev had few remaining supporters in the Soviet capital. The Soviet Union was replaced by the Commonwealth of Independent States, a regional international organization rather than a new state. Less than two weeks later, the leaders of the Central Asian republics joined the Commonwealth as its founding members. Now Gorbachev had no allies in the republics either. Bowing to the inevitable, he resigned on December 25, 1991.

Gorbachev’s foreign-policy aide, Anatolii Cherniaev, who was also the principal drafter of his superior’s resignation speech, later wrote in his assessment of the Soviet Union’s last year of existence: “What actually went on with the USSR that year was what happened ‘at the appointed time’ to other empires when the potential allotted to them by history expired.” The fall of empires was very much on Cherniaev’s mind when he introduced such phrases as “What is most ruinous in this crisis is the disintegration of statehood” and “We are heirs to a great civilization” into the draft of Gorbachev’s speech. But he also admitted the futility of any attempt to save the failing empire. “Gorbachev’s efforts to rescue the Union are hopeless spasms,” wrote Cherniaev in his diary in November 1991, going on to observe: “And yet it would all have blown over were it not for Ukraine, for the Crimea, which cannot be returned.”

The Soviet Union fell on account of the Ukrainian referendum, as the Ukrainians were the only ones who put the question of their independence to a vote. Gorbachev argued in favor of an all-Union referendum on the fate of the USSR, but there was no referendum in any other republic. Most of them, including Russia, simply accepted the results of the Ukrainian referendum as a verdict not only on the independence of the Ukrainian republic but also on the future of the USSR. Neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin imagined the Soviet Union without its second-largest republic, a key element of Russian imperial and Soviet history and mythology. Restoring the imperial project in any form would depend on Russia’s ability to bring Ukraine back into the fold. “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire,” remarked Zbigniew Brzezinski a few years later.

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by | 1 July 2026 · 12:33 am

Changing USSR Nationality Policy

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 18-21:

The USSR began its life with massive affirmative action for the non-Russian cultures outside the Russian Federation. But cultural Russification of the borderlands returned in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Stalin emerged as Lenin’s sole successor and began preparing the country for war. One reason for the change was industrialization, which, given Russian control of the all-Union party, came with the advance of Russian as the language of administration, science, and technology. Another reason was accommodation of the Russians as the largest nationality in the now Soviet empire, along with concern to integrate the non-Russian nationalities culturally so that they would not switch sides in the coming war.

In Ukraine, the largest non-Russian republic of the USSR, the change of nationality policy was signaled by show trials against the Ukrainian intelligentsia. The first such trial, which took place in 1929, was followed by an attack on the Ukrainian party cadres and the peasantry, which reached its peak during the Holodomor, or the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33. A number of key Ukrainian communists committed suicide, while others were dismissed from their positions and jailed. As many as four million people were starved to death as part of a concerted campaign to crush the peasant resistance to the collectivization and maximize grain delivery for Soviet industrialization. In the month leading up to the start of the famine, Stalin warned his associates that such measures were needed to prevent loss of control over Ukraine. The Holodomor turned Ukraine, previously known as the breadbasket of Europe, into a land devastated by famine.

World War II led to another shift in Moscow’s policy toward the nationalities. Although Russocentrism was not abandoned, more manifestations of Ukrainian and other non-Russian patriotism were allowed. The Soviet takeover of Poland’s eastern provinces following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 was justified as liberation of fellow Ukrainians and Russians from Polish capitalist oppression. It was also celebrated in ethnic terms as the reunion of western Ukraine and western Belarus with the corresponding Soviet republics. The old imperial reunification paradigm was back, dressed this time in Ukrainian and Belarusian clothing. After Hitler attacked the USSR in June 1941, non-Russian nationalism was mobilized once again, especially in Ukraine, to encourage patriotic resistance to the German invasion. Once German forces occupied all of Ukraine with the assistance of their Romanian and Hungarian allies, Moscow did not mind promoting the Ukrainian language, culture, and history to mobilize resistance and inspire the loyalty of more than six million Ukrainians drafted into the Red Army. The Ukrainian card was also played at home and abroad to justify the military takeover and annexation of western Ukrainian lands ruled by Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania during the interwar period.

In 1914 the Russian army had captured the city of Lviv, then under Austrian rule, justifying it as liberation of fellow Russians—that was the tsarist authorities’ official term for the local population. As World War II drew to an end, the Soviets played not the Russian but the Ukrainian national card when they integrated Lviv into the Ukrainian SSR, although the city was largely Polish in ethnic composition, with Jews (largely exterminated during the Holocaust) as the second-largest ethnic group.

While the authorities were eager to exploit Ukrainian ethnicity to justify Soviet westward expansion, they did not welcome or tolerate every expression of Ukrainian patriotism and nationalism. The radical Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), formed in the western Ukrainian lands during the interwar period, was considered particularly dangerous. Its members were known to the Soviets as Banderites: their leader, Stepan Bandera, and some of his followers were imprisoned in German concentration camps after a failed attempt to declare an independent Ukrainian state in alliance with Germany and against the USSR in the summer of 1941. The Nazi occupiers, who regarded Slavs as subhuman, deported more than two million Ukrainians to Germany as slave laborers and persecuted Ukrainian patriots of every description.

The two branches of the OUN, one led by Bandera, the other by his less-known rival Andrii Melnyk, turned against the Germans by the end of 1941. In 1943 the Bandera faction assumed leadership of the 100,000-strong Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a guerrilla force that fought against the Polish Home Army and the Nazis and, later, against the Red Army for control of western Ukraine. The Ukrainian nationalist insurgency was not completely crushed until the early 1950s, the last years of Stalin’s rule, earning the designation of the strongest and longest-lasting movement of resistance to the Soviets anywhere in east-central Europe.

The Soviets did their best to discredit the Ukrainian nationalists by condemning their early collaboration with the Germans and exposing the participation of some OUN members in the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing of Poles during the German occupation of Ukraine. They also made major concessions to the Ukrainian language, which became dominant in western Ukrainian government institutions, replacing Polish. But the Sovietization of western Ukraine was carried out mainly by repression. Not only the captured fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army but also civilians suspected of helping the insurgents were resettled or deported en masse to gulag camps in the Russian SFSR, making Ukrainians the largest ethnic group of political prisoners in the Soviet Union—a phenomenon documented by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago.

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by | 30 June 2026 · 12:06 am

Building a Ukrainian National Language

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 215-218:

AMONG THE UKRAINIANS prepared to fight Napoleon with arms in hand was the founder of modern Ukrainian literature, Ivan Kotliarevsky. A native of the Poltava region in the former Hetmanate, he formed a Cossack detachment to join the struggle. The son of a minor official, Kotliarevsky studied in a theological seminary, worked as a tutor of children of the nobility, and served in the Russian imperial army, taking part in the 1806–1812 Russo-Turkish War. In 1798, while on military service, the first part of his poem Eneïda appeared in print, a travesty based on Virgil’s Aeneid, whose main characters were not Greeks but Zaporozhian Cossacks. As one would expect of true Zaporozhians, they spoke vernacular Ukrainian. But the choice of language for the poem seems logical only in retrospect. In late eighteenth century Ukraine, Kotliarevsky was a pioneer—the first to write a major poetical work in the vernacular.

…

Kotliarevsky wrote the first part of Eneïda when the shell of Church Slavonic, which had dominated Russian imperial literature of the previous era, was crumbling and falling apart, allowing literatures based in one way or another on the vernacular to make their way into the public sphere. Russia found its first truly great poet in Alexander Pushkin; Ukraine got its own in the person of Kotliarevsky. Whatever his original motives for using Ukrainian, Kotliarevsky never regretted his choice. There would be five more parts of Eneïda. He would also author the first plays written in Ukrainian, among them Natalka-Poltavka (Natalka from Poltava), a love story set in a Ukrainian village. The language of Kotliarevsky’s homeland, the Poltava region of the former Hetmanate, would become the basis of standard Ukrainian for speakers of numerous Ukrainian dialects from the Dnieper to the Don in the east and to the Carpathians in the west. With Kotliarevsky, a new literature was born. The language received its first grammar in 1818 with the publication of the Grammar of the Little Russian Dialect by Oleksii Pavlovsky. A year later, the first collection of Ukrainian folk songs by Mykola (Nikolai) Tsertelev appeared in print.

…

The birthplace of Ukrainian romanticism was the city of Kharkiv, where the imperial government opened a university in 1805, inviting professors from all over the empire to fill vacant positions. Being a professor at that time often meant taking an interest in local history and folklore, and Kharkiv had a rich tradition. It served as the administrative and cultural center of Sloboda Ukraine, settled by Ukrainian Cossacks and runaway peasants in the times of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this land was often referred to as “Ukraine.”

…

The centrality of the Cossack past to romantic literary interests, already manifested by Kotliarevsky’s Eneïda, was further evidenced by the Kharkiv romantics’ readiness to embrace and popularize by far the most influential Ukrainian historical text of the period, Istoriia rusov (The History of the Rus’).

Well, my Kindle app has informed me that I’ve nearly reached the publisher’s limit in copying from the text of this book, and this seems a good place to end this series of excerpts—at the point where a national language begins to develop. So I have decided to buy the latest book by the same prolific author, and begin reading and posting excerpts from The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History (W. W. Norton, 2023), the first chapter of which summarizes many of the highlights that I have excerpted from this book.

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by | 29 June 2026 · 12:05 am

Polish & Ukrainian Anthems

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 213-214:

THE UKRAINIAN NATIONAL anthem begins with the words “Ukraine has not yet perished,” hardly an optimistic beginning for any kind of song. But this is not the only anthem whose words do not inspire optimism. The Polish national anthem starts with the familiar line “Poland has not yet perished.” The words of the Polish anthem were written in 1797 and those of the Ukrainian one were penned in 1862, so it is quite clear who influenced whom. But why such pessimism? In both cases, Polish and Ukrainian, the idea of the death of the nation stemmed from the experience of the late eighteenth century—the partitions of Poland and the liquidation of the Hetmanate.

Like many other anthems, the Polish one was originally a marching song written for the Polish legions fighting under the command of the future emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, in his Italian campaigns. The song was originally known as the “Dąbrowski mazurka,” named for a commander of the Polish troops, Jan Henryk Dąbrowski. Many of the Polish legionnaires, including the commander himself, had taken part in the Kościuszko Uprising, and the lyrics were meant to lift their spirits after the destruction of their state by the partitioning powers. The song’s second line asserts that Poland will not perish “as long as we are alive.” By associating the nation not with the state but with those who considered themselves its members, the Polish anthem gave hope not just to the Poles but also to representatives of other stateless nations. A new generation of patriots in Poland and Ukraine refused to accept the disasters of the previous century as the final verdict on their nations. Both Polish and Ukrainian activists promoted a new understanding of a nation as a democratic polity made up of citizen patriots rather than a territorial state.

IN THE FIRST decade of the nineteenth century, Napoleon and his soldiers brought the ideas of nation and popular sovereignty to the rest of Europe in their songs and at the points of their bayonets. In 1807, the dream of the Polish legionnaires came a step closer to realization when, after defeating Prussia, the French emperor created the Duchy of Warsaw out of territories annexed by that country during the partitions of Poland. To the Poles, this offered the exciting prospect of the restoration of their homeland. In 1812, after Napoleon’s invasion of the Russian Empire, Poles under Russian rule rose in support of the French invader, whom they considered a liberator. Adam Mickiewicz, the foremost Polish poet of the era, reflected the Polish nobility’s excitement at the advance of the French army into today’s Belarus in his epic poem Sir Thaddeus, which is still required reading in today’s Polish (but not Belarusian) schools. “Glory is ours already,” says one of the poem’s Polish characters, “and so we shall soon have our Republic again.”

In 1815, when entering the University of Vilnius, the sixteen-year-old Mickiewicz gave his name as Adam Napoleon Mickiewicz. By that time, Polish hopes of having “our Republic again” had been crushed. Napoleon, Dąbrowski, and their French and Polish troops had retreated from the Russian Empire in defeat.

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