Brief history of Ukraine
In The Beginning
Archeological finds show that the earliest inhabitants
of Ukraine were Neolithic tribes in the Dnipro and Dniester
valleys, who had settlements in the area of Kyiv 15,000
to 20,000 years ago. At that time, the area between
the Black Sea and the glacial ice sheet of the last
Ice Age was a level, fertile region with a cool, temperate
climate: ideal for nomadic people and their flocks.
The first organized society in the region were the Scythians,
who had tamed horses and used this mobility to rule
most of the region north of the Black Sea. The Scythians
flourished in the 8th to 1st century B.C. before succumbing
to successive waves of migrating tribes sweeping in
from the north and from Asia. In the 1st century BC
to 6th century A.D. the region was overrun in turn by
the Goths, Ostragoths, Visigoths, Huns, and Avars. The
last such wave of migration were the Khazars, who ruled
the region from the 7th to the 9th centuries. Their
empire in turn started to crumble with the arrival of
Kyivan Rus.
Rise Of The Kyivan Rus
The origin of Ukraine and its people dates from
the late 600s when a Nordic people known as the Rus
(from which we get the term "Russian") first entered
the region. At first, the Rus were concerned mainly
with reaching Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey)
along a network of rivers and portage roads reaching
from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Down this route flowed
furs, slaves and the priceless Baltic amber. In return,
manufactured goods, wine, silks and gold flowed north.
To further this effort, the Rus established several
small trading settlements along this "Amber Route"-
notable among them being Kyiv (known as Kiev in the
west); a point where several rivers meet. The Rus settlers
of Kyiv built their first citadel at the end of the
5th and the beginning of the 6th centuries on the steep
right bank of the Dnipro River to protect themselves
from the marauding nomadic tribes of the region. The
evolution of Kyiv into a city was tied closely to the
development of the Kyivan Rus feudal state. Later, Kyiv's
Grand Princes built their palaces and churches on Starokievska
Hill, while artisans and merchants built their houses
next to the wharf on the Dnipro.
 Although
vastly outnumbered, the warlike Norsemen used a combination
of discipline, diplomacy and ruthless aggression to
establish a strong, and ultimately dominant, position
along the Amber Route. Within a few centuries, the Rus
had evolved into three separate and distinct cultures:
the Baltic Rus in the north, the Rus proper in the midlands
around what later became Moscovy, and the Kyivan Rus
in the south.
By the end of the 9th century, the Kyivan Rus princes
had united the scattered Slavic tribes, with Kyiv as
the political center of the Eastern Slavs. Legends and
historical documents describe courageous Kyivites defending
their city over the ages against the Khazars and Pechenegs,
Polovtsi, Mongols, Lithuanian and Polish feudal lords,
the Duchy of Muscovy, and the Russian Empire.
The Kyivan Rus reached their peak during the reign of
Prince Volodymir the Great (980-1015). In 988, intent
on strengthening his position, Volodymir introduced
Christianity to improve political and cultural relations
with the Byzantine Empire, the Bulgarians, and other
countries of Western Europe and the Near East. By the
11th century, Kyiv was one of the largest centers of
civilization in the Christian World. It boasted over
400 churches, eight markets and nearly 50,000 inhabitants.
By comparison, London, Hamburg and Gdansk each had around
20,000.
After the death of the great Kyivan Prince Vladimir
Monomakh (1125), the Kyivan Rus became involved in a
long period of feudal wars. Foreign powers were quick
to take advantage of this situation and the various
Kyivan princelings spent as much time battling foreign
aggressors as each other. But it soon developed that
the Kyivan Rus, along with the rest of Europe, had a
common, more pressing problem: the Mongols.
The Scourge Of The East
In the mid-13th century, the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan swept out of Asia like wildfire. The Mongols fielded an army only about 20,000 strong, but they were entirely highly trained horsemen who used tactics later copied by Heinz Gudaren and Erwin Rommel. Against the European's press-ganged peasant mobs, it was no contest. The Golden Horde routinely crushed armies ten times their size. Were it not for the untimely death of the Genghis Khan, all of Europe might have been overrun.
Pawns Of Empire
Despite foreign rule, Kyiv retained
its artisan, trade, and cultural traditions of the ancient
Kiyvan-Rus and remained an important political, commercial
and cultural center. The furocious Mongols, ill suited
for city life, soon began to assimilate and lose much
of their former aggressiveness. As they melted into
the local culture, a new political structure, the Galician-Volynian
principality, grew from the blending of Rus and Mongol.
The late 14th century brought a growing threat from
the northwest. The Kingdom of Lithuania (the Baltic
Rus) and Poland began to enlarge their territory at
the expense of their eastern neighbors. Soon the Poles
were pressing into the western part of Ukraine while
the Lithuanians helped themselves to the area just to
the north (in modern Belarus). This was not a large
scale invasion as such, but more a series of small scale
actions in which various feudal nobles were overthrown
and their lands occupied in a sort of creeping conquest.
At the same time, to the south and southeast, the Turks
were making similar moves into the Crimea and along
the Sea of Azov. Unfortunately, the Galician-Volynian
principality had lost much of the warrior spirit of
their ancestors and proved too weak and decentralized
to organize an effective defense. While nobles and religious
factions feuded among themselves, the rot settled deeper
into the principality and the foreign armies grew ever
closer to Kyiv. At the beginning of the 16th century,
a new force appeared on the scene: the Ukrainian Kozaks
(Cossacks). The Kozaks started as semi-autonomous slavic
tribes settled in various regions of Ukraine. As the
authority of Kyiv waned, these tribes took increasing
control of their own affairs and were soon forming loose
knit alliances. As the Galician-Volynian principality
fell apart, this alliance rallied under the Zaporozhyan
Sich, which became the military and political organization
of the Ukrainian Kozaks and thus of Ukraine. By the
mid-17th century, the foreign erosion had taken over
half of Ukraine, with the Poles finally occupying Kyiv
itself. This led the Zaporozhyan Sich to war against
Poland (in 1648-1654) to regain this lost territory.
However, the Poles (then at the height of their military
strength) proved to be too great a challenge. In desperation,
Ukraine turned to their northern neighbor, the Duchy
of Moscovy, for protection.
The Romanovs
 Modern
Russia came into being in the 1300s when a Rus Duke known
as Ivan the Terrible began expanding his influence along
the Amber Route from the Baltic to the Mediterranean.
As part of this effort, he fortified the monastery at
Moscovy (in Russian, the word Kremlin means "fortified
city") and made it his formal capital.The Russian
Empire was ruled from first to last by the heirs of Ivan
the Terrible: known as the Romanov Dynasty and originally
styled as the "Tsars of All Russians". (The
term "Tsar" is the Russian translation of "Caesar".)
Later, as the nation state concept came into being, the
Romanovs began to think of themselves as the Emperors
of a group of subject states, and thus began calling themselves
the "Tsars of All Russias".
In 1654, a treaty of political and military alliance was
signed and Ukraine came under the influence of Moscovy
for the first time. What had been supposed as a military
alliance soon grew into Russian domination over Ukraine.
For nearly a century, the Zaporozhyan Sich maintained
a nominal, if increasingly fictional, sovereignty. In
1775, however, the Sich was finally suppressed by the
Tsar and Ukraine became a vassal state.
Despite this, the Kozaks were not a force to be ignored.
What emerged was something of a unique phenomenon: from
the later 1700s until the Great War, the Kozaks held a
special role as "overseers", a form of middle
class, maintaining order among the serfs at the behest
of the Romanov aristocracy.
As late as the beginning of the 20th century, the Tsar
was a true despot, answerable to no one except the ever
present risk of assassination.
The 20th Century
The last 100 years have been a time of turmoil for Ukraine, starting with an all but forgotten war in the far Orient.
Historically, whenever the Tsars lost a war, they were forced by public unrest to institute social reforms. (It was the disastrous showing of the Tsarist armies in the Crimean War that resulted in the freeing of the serfs in 1863.) The Russo-Japanese war of 1905-1906 was no exception. In short order, the bulk of the Tsarist navy was sunk and the Tsarist armies fought to a bloody stalemate in Mongolia. Even the peace imposed by western powers could not prevent a tidal wave of unrest from erupting into revolution.
In Ukraine, actual revolt was limited and sporadic, although the Ukrainians siezed on the opportunity to strengthen their national identity. To prevent yet another uprising in the south, the Tsar conceded a limited autonomy to a loose knit Ukrainian nationalist movement. Political and labor organizatons came into being and the ban on the Ukrainian language recended. It was enough to keep the lid on until the revolts in the north and west could be crushed.
This reprive for the Tsar was short lived, however. In the Great War of 1914-1918, the generalship of the Tsarist officer corps was abysmal. By 1917, the Tsarist armies had been bled white at battles such as Tannenburg- where over 500,000 Russians were killed in action. This time, the situation was beyond saving. The rising unrest and mounting battlefield losses were simply too much: the decayed Romanov aristocracy collapsed, plunging Russia into civil war.
When the Tsar abdicated in early 1917, Ukraine made its first tentative steps toward independence as a provisional government, the Central Rada, was formed. When the Bolsheviks staged their revolution late in the year, the Central Rada formally declared independence and Ukraine, after two centuries, finally became free.
Unfortunately, Ukraine was simply not ready for political independence. The country split in two, with the western part becoming a separate state
As a practical matter, Ukraine soon became a stronghold of the "White" (Tsarist) Russians during the civil wars of the 1920s. When they were finally suppressed, the "Reds" (Soviets) ruthlessly crushed any remaining nationalist tendencies in a series of purges that saw millions killed or sent into exile in Siberia. Notable among these were the Kozaks, who had fought fiercely for their traditional rulers, and the reminants of the Tartars.
The dream of an independent Ukraine ended with the triumph of the Bolsheviks and the founding of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1922. In an attempt to stack the deck at the newly formed League of Nations, the new Soviet Empire was made up of supposedly separate states in a "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics". In reality, however, Ukraine was a conquered province ruled directly from Moscovy.
The 1930s, the purges begun by Lenin continued- and grew- under Joseph Stalin.
There were also any number of "Hero Projects"- public works programs which, though badly needed to modernize the USSR, relied heavily on slave labor. Throughout the Stalinist era (and later) the KGB spent much of its time rounding up supposed "enemies of the state" on the flimsiest of legal excuses (often fabricating testimony and evidence) to be sentenced for construction work in Siberia.
Ukraine, having long been a rebellious region, suffered more than the run of the mill Russians.
The Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 saw Ukraine overrun by the Nazi armies. When the Germans first arrived, they were greeted by many Ukrainians as liberators (an error of perception that the SS and Gestapo soon rectified). In short order, the Ukrainian hinterland seethed with systematic guerella warfare and few Germans who wandered outside their fortified cities returned alive.
The German field commanders seemed perplexed at this tenacious resistance, wondering why anyone would fight to return to Stalin's rule. They would learn the hard way a lesson that all too many aggressors overlook: that a people will fight not for their dictators, but for their homes and families.
This truth would contribute to the Nazi downfall. The resistance that plagued the German rear areas drew away troops, consumed badly needed supplies and disrupted the rail lines, which had a direct impact on the fighting further to the east and led to the eventual distruction of an entire German Army Group at the battle of Stalingrad.
When the war ended, most Ukrainian cities - notably Kiev, Dnipropetrovs'k and Sevastopol - were in ruins. The Dnipro river was a major German defensive line prior to the general retreat of 1944, and these cities suffered prolonged sieges.
Not only did the fighting cause great destruction,
but both sides practiced scorched earth policies to deny
resources to their foes. Just as the retreating Soviets
had done in 1941, the retreating Germans in 1944 systematically
wreaked the railroads and other infrustructure and stripped
the region of all resources, leaving its population to
starve. To this day, mention of the "Fascists"
will produce a sharp reaction from most Ukrainians.
The returning Soviet Armies were ruthless with the remaining
population. In the immediate postwar period, there was
an upswell of Ukrainian nationalist sentiment. In the
paranoia of Stalinist Moscovy, anyone who had not fled
or died fighting could very well be collaborators. A key
province such as Ukraine, flushed with victory after driving
the Germans out and fielding a substantial army, was something
that Stalin could not accept for a moment. (Further west,
Yugoslavia was in a similar situation, although their
tough and well equipped army was a more formidible proposition
than the Ukrainian guerella bands.) Moscovy was quick
Postwar treaties enlarged the Ukraine at the expense of
German allies Hungary and Romania.
The Rebirth Of Ukraine
By 1990, the economic situation in the Soviet Union was
so bad that even the KGB could no longer keep the lid
on. With the coming of glasnost, Ukrainian nationalist
and separatist sentiments were increasingly voiced.
The brief Kremlin revolt of 1991, a last ditch attempt
by the hard liners to maintain the USSR, actually goaded
several regions, including the Baltic States, Moldova,
Belarus and Ukraine, into declaring independence.
Another headache Ukraine inherited was a sizable chunk
of the Soviet military, including an enormous nuclear
arsenal and the substantial Black Sea Fleet. Sensibly,
they arranged for the nuclear missiles to be dismantled
and returned to Russia (thus becoming the first nuclear
power to voluntarily disarm). The brand new Ukrainian
Navy took over most of the small craft (patrol boats,
frigates and destroyers) of the Black Sea Fleet while
Soviet land and air units (which were largely defunct
due to mass desertions) were absorbed into the Ukrainian
Army and Air Force.
The Crimean peninsula has a substantial ethnic Russian
population due to their long standing military presence.
The Russian navy still maintains a fleet base at Sevastopol
and other military bases in the region. This fleet (cruisers,
nuclear submarines and a small carrier) is largely rusted
scrap and the military units demoralized and ill equipped
due to Russia's financial straits. This, along with the
traditional emnity Ukrainians feel for Russians has led
to political tensions and social unrest in Crimea.
Ukraine has been extremely wary of Russia's influence
in post-Soviet interrepublican affairs and has moved to
limit its economic integration with the Russian-dominated
CIS. (This break from the past and the ever closer relations
being forged with the West have made Ukraine one of the
few former regions of the USSR that is showing any sign
of recovery.)
In the time since independence, Ukraine has passed several
critical milestones in its evolution to a free society.
Notable among these is the creation of a multiparty political
system, an independent judiciary and the orderly election
of a new President. Ukraine is also building close ties
to the European Economic Union and has begun a series
of economic reforms.
While there are still severe economic and social problems,
including serious inflation, energy shortages, deteriorating
infrastructure and high unemployment, Ukraine is the most
stable and prosperous of the successor states of the former
Soviet Union.
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