Category Archives: Europe

by | 28 July 2026 · 5:44 am

Forster’s A Voyage Round the World

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 229-231:

By the end of 1776, less than four months after he had written the first word, the manuscript of A Voyage Round the World arrived at the printer. Publication was eagerly awaited—the naturalist Gilbert White (who was the publisher’s brother) excitedly informed friends and family at the end of January 1777 that publication was imminent. George felt no sense of relief because he had to begin the German translation immediately.

Reinhold had signed a contract with a German publisher who had travelled from Berlin to London in the previous summer. Karl Spener was an ambitious young man who had taken over his father’s firm at the age of twenty-three and who had met the Forsters already before the Resolution voyage when he visited England in 1771. Spener was only five years older than George and would become a trusted friend. George, Reinhold decided, would translate his own book, a daunting prospect given the many years in which George had spoken only English—he didn’t even converse in German with his family (and for the rest of his life, his father would speak and write to him in English). George’s letters to friends and acquaintances in Germany were always peppered with English words and his written German had become erratic. ‘I just have to ask one thing,’ he wrote to Spener with apprehension, ‘can the Berlin printers spell correctly?’ Someone would need to correct the final manuscript.

George was ill, exhausted, and had lost so much weight that even Reinhold Forster had to admit his son might need some assistance. It arrived in the form of Rudolf Erich Raspe, a brilliant eccentric who had fled the German state of Hesse-Kassel after it was discovered that he had been stealing and selling ancient coins from the collections of his employer, Landgrave Friedrich II. With news travelling slowly, Raspe wangled himself onto the guest list of the Royal Society but was soon expelled. He would later write the hugely successful Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia — a whimsical satire in which the eponymous protagonist performs such feats as riding on a cannonball, shooting a stag with cherry stones (the stag subsequently grows a cherry tree between his antlers) and visiting the moon. For the moment, Raspe was to work with George on the German translation of A Voyage Round the World. Progress was woefully slow and Raspe was often ill. Like his fictional character Munchausen, he also had a tendency to exaggerate and lie, coming up with excuses for his failure to deliver and reasons to borrow money from the Forsters. George spent a lot of time merging the voices of two translations into one and the collaboration ended in anger. Raspe, George told Spener, liked only himself and believed that others existed entirely to serve him.

The English edition of A Voyage Round the World was published on 17 March 1777. Six weeks later, Captain Cook’s own Voyage Towards the South Pole appeared, printed in a larger format and illustrated with more than sixty engravings after the drawings by William Hodges, the expedition artist—but the images of animals and plants were copied from George’s drawings which Banks had bought. It was one thing that George hadn’t been allowed to use Hodges’ evocative landscapes and depictions of indigenous people (as his father believed had been initially agreed with the Admiralty), but quite another that he couldn’t use his own drawings after Reinhold had sold them. But to see them published in Cook’s book now was a terrible blow.

Thankfully, the reviews of George’s A Voyage Round the World were mostly positive, with several writers commenting that they felt as if they were actually travelling on the Resolution. George was delighted. Samuel Johnson, one of the great literary figures of the age and the author of A Dictionary of the English Language, called the book ‘a great affection of fine writing’. Johnson’s friend and biographer James Boswell declared that ‘he carries you along with him’. Those who compared the two books favoured George’s A Voyage Round the World. ‘Captain Cook’s own narrative is a mere sailor’s journal,’ wrote one reviewer, but he was disappointed by the lack of illustrations in George’s account. ‘Every page of it abounds with life and character,’ raved the reviewer for The Town and Country Magazine, ‘painted with all the force of language.’ More than a dozen reviews were published in England, several with long extracts.

Rather than wait for the German translation, many German reviewers also read the English edition. Most admired the book, describing it as ‘ravishing’ and ‘admirable’, but there were also critical voices. One took offence at George’s description of the Dutch East India Company as ‘cruel and ambitious spice merchants’, and another disliked the favourable depiction of indigenous people, complaining about his ‘acerbic allusions to the cruelty, harshness and vices of the Europeans’. Confident about his arguments and portrait of the islanders, George sent a public reply to one of Germany’s leading newspapers, asking: ‘Why not deliver eulogies on virtues? They may appear anywhere—in a beggar’s hut or a palace, in Europe or Tahiti.’ He had no interest in repeating tedious prejudices against the indigenous people—‘I therefore show real virtues among savages, where in similar cases vices prevail among civilized people.’

The most glowing German review came from Christoph Martin Wieland, a distinguished writer who declared George nothing less than a poet. In an extensive commentary, published over three issues of the Teutsche Merkur, one of Germany’s most important journals, Wieland pronounced A Voyage Round the World a thrilling book. The descriptions were painterly and humanistic, executed with intensity and enthusiasm. It was a masterpiece. As always, Reinhold attempted to take the credit, insisting that he had shaped his son. ‘I alone was his leader, his teacher,’ he later said to Wieland, ‘who awakened the dormant spark of divinity in him.’

Within six months, pirated French and Swedish translations were available, followed by Spanish and Russian editions, and then even more French editions. None were authorized. Soon the book was declared a classic but it didn’t sell enough copies to support Reinhold’s spending habits, and of course they never received any money from the pirated translations. People loved pictures, George admitted, and at two guineas A Voyage Round the World cost the same as Cook’s generously illustrated and Admiralty-subsidized account. Father and son would have to find other ways to finance their life in London.

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Filed under Britain, Germany, language, publishing, science, travel

by | 25 July 2026 · 8:08 am

Explorers Return to Europe, 1775

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 207-208:

Before they had left England, it had been decided that the Resolution would return via Cape Town—which was why friends and families had sent letters there to wait for the crew on their arrival. The men devoured fresh food and letters and news. They read piles of old newspapers to catch up. ‘Sweden delivered from the yoke of aristocratical tyranny’, George was glad to learn. In the so-called Swedish Revolution, the young king Gustav III had been the mastermind in a coup d’état which had ended the stronghold that the nobility had exercised over the monarchy. He was not intending to take away freedom, the king had said, but wanted to stop aristocratic despotism and establish ‘a right kind of Liberty that only can make you, my dear subjects, happy’. Like other enlightened rulers at the time, he had then begun to reform the justice system and economy, as well as instituting limited religious freedom.

France had a new king: at the age of nineteen, Louis XVI had succeeded his grandfather in May 1774 during the second visit of the Resolution to Tahiti. Poland had lost vast swathes of land when Russia, Prussia and Austria had divided around a third of the country between them. Having added a huge territory to Prussia in the Polish partition, the Prussian king was, George noted, ‘resting from his triumphs’. George also read that Russia and the Ottoman Empire had signed a peace treaty in July 1774, ending the war that had begun in 1768. With Russia gaining land and the right to protect Christians in the Muslim realm, the treaty marked the beginning of the decline of the once powerful Ottoman Empire, which for long had controlled large parts of south-east Europe and the Middle East. George was optimistic. After the long years of war in Europe, peace seemed finally possible. Everything ‘promised general happiness to the human race’.

But trouble was brewing in the British colonies in North America. In December 1773 a group of colonists had dumped more than 300 chests of tea—the entire shipment of three East India Company vessels—into Boston harbour in protest against Britain’s new tax regulations on tea. A month later the rebels had tarred and feathered a British customs collector. On 5 September 1774, just as the Resolution had landed in New Caledonia, the colonists had convened the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia—a congress of elected colonial delegates—to discuss how best to respond to British rule in North America. Frustrated by the lack of parliamentary representation and economic restrictions, the delegates called for a boycott of British goods and recommended that each colony establish its own militia.

There was also news from the Adventure, which had stopped in Cape Town on her way to England exactly a year earlier, in March 1774. The men of the Resolution were horrified to learn that ten crew members had been killed and eaten by the Māori, but Cook refused to pass judgement until the news had been confirmed. He had always found the Māori to be brave and open-minded, ‘but they are a people that will never put up with an insult if they have an opportunity to resent it’. George agreed. John Rowe, one of the officers who had been cannibalized, had always shown a brutal disregard for indigenous people and ‘been exceeding desirous of firing upon them’. The Māori must have been provoked. ‘The whole tenour of their behaviour to Europeans, seems to acquit them of treachery and cruel malevolence,’ George wrote, ‘it is therefore greatly to be suspected that they took umbrage at some affront, perhaps unwittingly committed by the strangers, and revenged it.’

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Filed under Europe, migration, science, nationalism, Britain, Polynesia, travel

by | 18 July 2026 · 8:15 pm

George Forster’s Early Youth

From The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf (Knopf, 2026), Kindle pp. 27-28:

George Forster was ten when he went on his first expedition.

He was a slender boy, small for his age, but what he lacked in physical strength he made up for in tenacity during the five months that he and his father travelled through Russia. In charge of collecting and identifying plants, the ten-year-old would wander off alone, eyes wide open, searching for new discoveries—sometimes climbing trees, at others keeping his head near the ground to study the vegetation with a magnifying glass. When he returned to the tent with full bags, he would press the samples he had found between paper, carefully arranging blossoms and leaves so that he could classify them later. Soon his collection had risen to 700 specimens.

While other children sat on hard benches in orderly rows at school, learning by rod and rote, George found himself galloping on small Kalmyk horses across the Russian steppes and wading through marshes on the banks of the Volga river. He watched a violent wildfire race across the vast grasslands to the east, its ravenous flames consuming everything in its path. He remembered the terror he felt that day for the rest of his life. Instead of studying arithmetic or conjugating Latin verbs, he observed flocks of black herons, wild boars and wolves, and huge Bactrian camels used by the nomadic Kalmyks as pack animals, which evoked the stories of the Arabian Nights and Ali Baba. He met Muslim Tatar traders along the Volga, fierce Cossack warriors from the open steppes to the east who wore sheepskin hats, baggy trousers and colourful caftans, and German settlers so destitute that they lived in earth dugouts in the ground. Near today’s Russian border with Kazakhstan, he marvelled at Lake Elton, a huge shallow salt lake with a shoreline encrusted in a thick white layer like snow, against water which algae had turned blood red. And in the Ryn Desert just north of the Caspian Sea, he felt piercing winds whip across the dunes, as wild as the land itself.

Russia was on a different scale from the flat gentle countryside where George had been raised near Gdansk, in today’s Poland. Everything here was vaster and emptier. The skies, lakes and land were bigger, the distances immense, and the weather extreme. He feasted his eyes and tasted new foods. He ate wild asparagus, drank fermented mare’s milk—‘of a nauseous or disagreeable Taste’—and enjoyed the refreshing juice of bog cranberries mixed with water and honey after the long dusty days on horseback.

This was not like learning from the books he loved. He could see, smell and feel that he had entered another world. The food had a different flavour, the languages were unfamiliar, and the people looked nothing like those at home. In Russia, he absorbed a new and very foreign country for the first time. At the age of ten, he became a traveller.

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Filed under education, Germany, language, migration, Russia, science, travel, Ukraine

by | 14 July 2026 · 8:23 pm

Russia Boosts Ukrainian Nationalism

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 131-134:

The eight years of hybrid warfare that Russia had waged against Ukraine in the Donbas, divided by the Minsk agreements, turned Ukraine into a different country and society from those of 2014. A country divided by issues of history, culture, and identity when the Crimea was annexed was now united by the desire to defend its sovereignty, democratic order, and way of life at almost any price.

The war had changed the electoral map of Ukraine. The first wartime presidential elections, held in May 2014, yielded unprecedented results: Petro Poroshenko won in the first round with 55 percent of the vote—the first time this had happened since 1991. Even more important, Poroshenko carried 187 precincts out of 188 remaining under Ukrainian control. The dividing line of the previous presidential elections, which had split Ukraine in half between pro-European and pro-Russian candidates, was now gone. The war had produced a much more homogenous country.

Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and takeover of significant portions of Ukraine’s Donbas removed the traditionally most pro-Russian areas, with the greatest number of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine, from Ukrainian political and cultural space. Those areas had also served as bases for Russia-friendly political parties. Russia did its utmost to support former allies of the ousted president, Viktor Yanukovych, but they were divided and weak after losing a significant part of their electoral base. The forces led by the Ukrainian businessman and politician Viktor Medvedchuk, who was close to Putin, also remained weak despite the support of television channels and newspapers funded with Russian assistance.

The growth of Ukrainian political identity began with the rejection of symbols of the Soviet past. The Maidan protests of 2014 unleashed a wave of demolition of monuments to Vladimir Lenin, the main symbol of communist and, in the eyes of many, Russian domination of Ukraine. More than 500 such monuments were toppled by anti-communist activists in the first half of 2014, mostly in the center of the country. The rest, more than 1,500 that remained in the regions of southeastern Ukraine controlled by Kyiv, were removed in the course of the next few years by decision of parliament, which adopted the so-called “decommunization laws” prohibiting the public display of communist symbols.

Ukrainians survived the Russian onslaught during the first stage of the war, in 2014–15, by uniting across ethnic, linguistic, religious, and cultural lines. The war itself also promoted popular identification with the Ukrainian language and culture. Since Putin’s official rationale for invading Ukraine was the defense of Russian speakers, many Ukrainians and Russians who knew Ukrainian but used Russian as their language of preference began to switch to Ukrainian as an act of defiance. The number of those self-reporting their use of Ukrainian at home and at work spiked in 2014–15. That number returned to the previous norm once the immediate danger of all-out invasion passed, but readiness to adopt Ukrainian as the dominant language of government and education remained. In 2019, parliament adopted a new law making the Ukrainian language mandatory for government officials and public-sector employees. The Russian Foreign Ministry protested, claiming that the law would deepen divisions in Ukrainian society. That did not prove to be the case.

City and village bookstores were flooded with Ukrainian-language books, reducing Russian-language publications to secondary status. Works on Ukrainian history and culture began to top bestseller lists. Before the war, the government had spent little or no money on the promotion of Ukrainian culture abroad; now it created a special Ukrainian Institute under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Its task was to emulate Germany’s Goethe Institute and similar agencies in other countries, familiarizing foreign countries with the Ukrainian language and culture. At home, the Ukrainian Cultural Fund and the Ukrainian Book Institute were charged with supporting cultural events and promoting Ukrainian publications.

In 2018 the government provided strong support for the unification of the two branches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that were independent of the Moscow Patriarchate, which still dominated Orthodoxy in Ukraine, while striving to restrain competition between them. President Poroshenko attended the unification council of the two churches, which were placed under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople—a major blow to the prospect of continuing Russian Orthodox hegemony. Moscow protested and severed ties with the Patriarch of Constantinople but could do little more to maintain its position. The newly united Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) had mass popular support, and, given the ongoing if undeclared war with Russia, many Orthodox Ukrainians preferred a church independent of Moscow. The transfer of parishes from the Moscow Patriarchate to the OCU began in the first months of 2019.

Active government involvement in matters of language, memory politics, and religion met with substantial criticism not only from traditionally pro-Russian political forces but also from part of the country’s liberal establishment. Nevertheless, it was either supported or accepted by the population at large. After Russia’s aggressive weaponization of issues of culture and history in 2014–15, much of the population agreed that the new laws and policies were necessary elements of nation-building, designed to prevent further Russian aggression.

The new Ukrainian government fulfilled the promise of the Revolution of Dignity by moving closer to the European Union and Euro-Atlantic institutions, including NATO. The association agreement that had triggered the Maidan protests in 2017 was signed in June 2014. In March 2017 the European Union Council granted Ukrainians visa-free travel to the EU. The EU member nations provided badly needed financial assistance, altogether up to $14 billion, to help Ukraine deal with its losses of territory, population, and economic assets. An additional $2.2 billion came from the United States. Washington became the main sponsor of reform in the Ukrainian security sector, providing $1.6 billion for that purpose alone. Ukraine was rapidly acquiring a new professional army, and the government placed NATO membership back on its agenda by including it in the Ukrainian constitution.

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Filed under democracy, Europe, language, military, nationalism, religion, Russia, U.S., Ukraine, war

by | 11 July 2026 · 6:54 am

NATO’s Bucharest Summit, 2008

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 87-89:

As NATO leaders arrived for the Bucharest summit on April 2, 2008, Russia’s vocal protests against membership for Ukraine and Georgia were on their minds. Putin came to the Romanian capital in person to take part in the meeting of the Russia-NATO summit and warn the members of the alliance against extending invitations to the two post-Soviet republics. “The emergence of a powerful military bloc at our borders will be seen as a direct threat to Russian security,” Putin told President Bush. Bush was not particularly impressed. Before going to Bucharest he made a stopover in Kyiv, where he told the Ukrainians: “Your nation has made a bold decision, and the United States strongly supports your request.”

But key European members of NATO, France and Germany in particular, blocked the decision advocated by the United States and supported by the new East European members of the alliance to grant Ukraine and Georgia a Membership Action Plan. “We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO,” read the declaration before making it clear that no accession would take place any time soon. The MAP was promised but not given on the basis that the two potential applicants still had to meet some specific criteria in order to qualify. “[W]e will now begin a period of intensive engagement with both at a high political level to address the questions still outstanding pertaining to their MAP applications.”

The matter was postponed and would not return to the NATO agenda at the next summit or the one after that. Everyone knew that the decision to deny MAP to the two post-Soviet republics was a concession to their former master, Russia. Otherwise it was impossible to explain why the Bucharest summit invited Croatia and Albania to join NATO. For the two countries now perceived as threats by Russia, NATO’s non-decision on their membership was the worst possible outcome of the summit: their applications had been postponed indefinitely, leaving them with no protection from the alliance that they had publicly stated they wanted to join. While Russia would not dare to attack NATO, it could easily attack its aspirants, and it did so.

On August 8, 2008, a few months after the Bucharest summit, Russia launched a war on Georgia, ostensibly in defense of the Georgian enclave of South Ossetia, which had seceded from Georgia in the early 1990s. The Russian attack allegedly came as a response to the actions of the Georgian army, which had been ordered into South Ossetia, but there was no doubt that the war was directly linked to the outcome of the Bucharest summit. Russia had established official relations with South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two Georgian provinces that it was now “defending,” almost immediately after Putin’s return from the Bucharest summit. The Georgians fought back under the leadership of President Mikheil Saakashvili, who had been educated in Ukraine and the United States, but the Russian army, larger and superior to Georgia’s, moved deep into the country and threatened to occupy its capital, Tbilisi.

On August 12, Yushchenko, together with the leaders of Poland and the three Baltic states, flew to Tbilisi to show support for Saakashvili and his country. That day the Russian advance was stopped by means of a ceasefire negotiated by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France. Russian troops eventually left a good part of the occupied territory but stayed in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, ostensibly protecting the independence of the two provinces from Georgia and perpetuating its territorial division. That undermined Georgia’s chances of ever joining NATO, as the alliance was reluctant to accept any state with unresolved territorial issues. The Russian war on Georgia became the first instance of its initiating a major war beyond its borders. It sent a clear signal to the West that Russia was prepared to use military force to stop any expansion of the alliance. It also demonstrated to other post-Soviet republics that NATO would not come to their rescue in case of Russian attack.

The decision of the Bucharest NATO summit, coupled with the outcome of the Russo-Georgian War, dealt a devastating blow to Ukrainian aspirations to join the alliance. The changing of the guard in Washington and the inauguration of Barack Obama as president in January 2009 led to a thorough revision of all elements of US foreign policy and an attempted “reset” of US-Russia relations. In January 2010 Viktor Yushchenko, defeated in the first round of that year’s presidential elections, left office to make way for Putin’s old favorite, Viktor Yanukovych. The new president promptly dropped NATO membership from the Ukrainian foreign-policy agenda and signed a deal that was devastating for Ukrainian security because it extended the presence of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol until 2042.

The Bucharest summit put Ukraine in the most vulnerable position that it had experienced since declaring independence. Without nuclear weapons and NATO membership, Ukraine found itself at the mercy of Russia, which saw the ambiguous offer of membership extended to Ukraine by the Bucharest summit as a threat to its own security. Ukraine was a lone warrior on open ground pursued by hostile forces, running to take shelter in a secure fortress, only to find its gates closing because of disagreements among its defenders.

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Filed under Baltics, democracy, France, Germany, military, nationalism, Poland, Russia, U.S., Ukraine, war

by | 10 July 2026 · 3:21 pm

Post-Soviet Nations and NATO

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 82-84:

As far as Russia was concerned, the victory of the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine was a major blow to the Kremlin’s interests at home and abroad. “It was our 9/11,” declared the Russian political adviser Gleb Pavlovsky, who was close to the Kremlin. A native of Ukraine, he went to Kyiv to advise Prime Minister Yanukovych and his campaign. The Orange Revolution was also a personal defeat for Putin because it was supported by Boris Berezovsky, his onetime sponsor, later nemesis, and ultimately refugee from his regime. The Kremlin was concerned that under the Western-leaning President Yushchenko, Ukraine might leave the Russian orbit forever and join the Western camp.

With the fall of communism, democratic rule became a prerequisite for post-communist and post-Soviet states aspiring to join Western institutions, both political, like the European Union, and military, NATO in particular. Ukraine, with its chaotic but viable democracy, could be a candidate for both, while Russia, failing one democracy test after another and eventually setting on the path of authoritarian rule, could not. The success and durability of Ukrainian democracy was a threat to the Putin regime, since it encouraged whatever remained of the pro-democratic forces in Russia and, in geopolitical terms, brought democratic institutions closer to Russia’s borders. In Putin’s eyes, this was not just undesirable but unacceptable.

By 2004, Putin was well on the way to laying the foundations for a future autocratic regime. He took control of the Russian Duma in the December 2003 elections, which saw his party, United Russia, obtain three times as many votes as the communists to become the largest party in parliament. He then exploited a hostage crisis produced by Chechen radicals who attacked a school in Beslan in September 2004. It was mishandled by the Russian security services, whose personnel stormed the school, contributing to the death of 314 hostages, including 186 schoolchildren. This gave Putin an opportunity to intervene and curtail whatever remained of Russian democracy: elections of regional governors were abolished, and new laws were introduced curtailing the activities of political parties and NGOs.

Putin was eager to see a similar political system installed in Ukraine, openly campaigning for Yanukovych and secretly pushing Kuchma toward the use of force. He failed on both counts. In early 2005, mass protests also shook a number of other post-Soviet countries, including Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, where the “Tulip Revolution” unseated the local ruler, Askar Akayev, who had been in power since the late Soviet period. A year before the Orange Revolution, the “Revolution of Roses” in Georgia had brought to power a young, charismatic, pro-Western reformer named Mikheil Saakashvili. In Russia, all these protest movements were labeled “Orange.” Finding itself on the defensive, Moscow began to mimic the tactics used by the opposition during the Orange Revolution, creating and funding numerous pro-government youth organizations, the most notorious of which was “Nashi,” or “Ours.” “Ours” were there to defend the president against revolutionary upheaval, allegedly promoted by foreign powers. Ukraine was singled out in that regard, but behind Ukraine Moscow ideologues saw the threatening shadow of the West.

Indeed, as expected in Moscow, the Orange Revolution produced a major geopolitical shift in Kyiv. President Yushchenko returned to the pro-European policies launched by Kuchma before the Melnychenko tapes scandal of 2001. Those included gradual integration into European structures, from the European Union to NATO. Yushchenko wanted an invitation to join the alliance in the form of a Membership Action Plan, or MAP. His requests did not fall on deaf ears in Brussels, as NATO officials invited Ukraine to begin an Intensified Dialogue on possible membership. The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland, Ukraine’s western neighbors who had not wanted their efforts to join NATO to be compromised by association with Ukraine in the 1990s, now all supported Ukraine’s aspirations to membership. They were only too happy to yield their position on NATO’s eastern flank, vulnerable to possible Russian attack, to Ukraine.

In February 2022, a few weeks after his inauguration, Yushchenko attended a meeting of heads of state of NATO member nations in Brussels, where he publicly declared that he wanted his colleagues to regard Ukraine as a future member of the alliance. He did so in the name of the Orange Revolution that he had led and the people who had elected him to the presidency. “I’m pretty much sure, dear friends,” began Yushchenko, “that the people who went onto Kyiv’s squares and streets were motivated because they wanted to see Ukraine in Europe, not as a neighbor of Europe, because we are a country located in the center of Europe. And we would like to see Ukraine integrated into the European Union and into the North Atlantic Alliance.” Before leaving the podium, Yushchenko went out of his way to reassure Russia that his NATO aspirations and those of his country were not directed against Russia. “Russia is our strategic partner,” declared Yushchenko, “and Ukraine’s policy toward NATO will by no means be against the interests of other countries, including Russia.”

Ukraine was trying to solve its security dilemma as best it could. Since NATO had established a strategic partnership with Russia, the idea of Ukraine’s acceding to NATO without antagonizing Russia was theoretically feasible in the 1990s. But in the wake of the Orange Revolution, Kyiv faced a difficult choice: either to accommodate Moscow, which had long-standing territorial claims on Ukraine and had intervened directly in that country’s presidential elections, or to seek protection in a military alliance that could guarantee its territorial integrity and sovereignty. The threat from Russia was real and immediate, while membership in NATO was hypothetical and removed in time. After long vacillation, Kyiv opted decisively for NATO.

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Filed under Central Asia, Czechia, democracy, Europe, Hungary, military, nationalism, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine, USSR

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 | 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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Filed under economics, food, Germany, labor, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, Ukraine, USSR, war

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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Filed under Belarus, democracy, France, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, Russia, Ukraine

by | 28 June 2026 · 12:59 am

Polish Realia: Italian Pizza

Here are some informative paragraphs from the placemats at Tutti Santi, home of “legendary Italian pizza” in Kielce, Poland.

Włosaka pizza to setki lat historii. Na to, jak smakuje, ma wpływ jakość produktów, ale tez wiele lat poszukiwan, odkryc i zaangażowania ludzi, dla których pizza stała się życiową pasją. Zamów swoją ulubioną pizzę i rozsmakuj się w tej wyjątkowej historii.
Italian pizza embodies centuries of history. Its taste is shaped not only by the quality of the ingredients but also by years of exploration, discovery, and the dedication of people for whom pizza has become a lifelong passion. Order your favorite pizza and savor this unique story.

Włoskie Rzemiosło Italian Craftsmanship
Przepis na prawdziwą, włoska pizzę to tajemnica, do której dostęp mają tylko nieliczni. Tutti Santi to jedyna restauracja w Polsce, w której spróbujesz pizzy według receptury Mistrza Włoch i Europy Valerio Valle. Ciasto jego autorstwa jest delikatne, cienkie i lekko chrupiące.
The recipe for authentic Italian pizza is a secret accessible to only a few. Tutti Santi is the only restaurant in Poland where you can taste pizza made according to the recipe of Italian and European Champion Valerio Valle. The dough he created is delicate, thin, and slightly crispy.

Cierpliwość Patience
Ciasto według autorskiej receptury Mistrza Valerio Valle wymaga czasu i cierpliwości. Dojrzewanie ciasta trwa 48 godzin, w tym czasie zachodzą w nim niezbędne procesy, dzięki którym zawsze jest pyszne i lekkostrawne.
The dough, based on Master Valerio Valle’s original recipe, requires time and patience. The dough undergoes a 48-hour maturation process, during which essential changes occur that ensure it is always delicious and easy to digest.

Pomidory Tomatoes
Pomidory nie zostały odkryte we Włoszech, ale to Włosi odkryli ich potencjał i zamienili je w symbol włoskiej kuchni. Nasz sos tworzymy tylko z włoskich pomidorów, które dojrzewają w gorącym słońcu południa, co daje im wyątkową słodycz.
Tomatoes were not discovered in Italy, but it was the Italians who discovered their potential and turned them into a symbol of Italian cuisine. We make our sauce exclusively from Italian tomatoes ripened in the hot southern sun, which gives them exceptional sweetness.

Mąka – Sekret Ciasta Flour – Secret to the Dough
Wyselekcjonowaliśmy specjalny rodzaj włoskiej mąki o odpowiedniej zawartości białka. Mąkę sprowadzamy prosto z włoskich młynów, które od blisko 200 lat należą do jednej rodziny, gdzie przez pokolenia przekazuje się najlepsze tradycje i wielowikowe doświadczenie.
We have selected a special type of Italian flour with the appropriate protein content. We source our flour directly from Italian mills that have belonged to the same family for nearly 200 years—mills where the finest traditions and centuries of experience have been passed down through generations.

Naturalny Ogień Natural Fire
Nasze pizze wypiekamy w specjalnych kopułowych piecach opalanych drewnem. Od czterech pokoleń są one produkowane przez jedną rodzinę Valoriani. Od ponad 100 lat specjalizuje się ona w tradycyjnych piecach chlebowych, wykorzystując moc ognia, właściwości lawy wulkanidznej i widzę na temat rzemieślniczych metod wypieku ciasta.
We bake our pizzas in special wood-fired dome ovens. For four generations, they have been produced by the Valoriani family. For over 100 years, they have specialized in traditional bread ovens, harnessing the power of fire, the properties of volcanic lava, and expertise in artisanal baking methods.

Unikalne Smaki Unique Tastes
Do przygotowania każdej pizzy w Tutti Santi wykorzystujemy selektywnie wybrane produkty, które sprowadzamy bezpośrednio z Włoch od regionalnych, rzemieślniczych producentów. W naszym menu znajdziecie m.in. szlachetną szynkę San Daniele, Mozzarellę di Bufala z mleka bawolego, sery Stracchino, Provolone i wiele innych regionalnych produktów!
To prepare every pizza at Tutti Santi, we use carefully selected products imported directly from Italy from regional, artisanal producers. Our menu features, among other things, premium San Daniele ham, buffalo milk Mozzarella di Bufala, Stracchino and Provolone cheeses, and many other regional products!

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