The Role of the Ukraine in Modern History

Abstract

A striking difference between the historical development of the countries of Western Europe and that of those of the eastern half of the continent has been often observed. The former, particularly France and England, have enjoyed, in spite of some periods of revolutionary upheaval, a millennium of continuous growth. Germany's fate has been much less favorable, and farther to the east it is impossible to find any country which has not experienced, at one time or another, a tragic breakdown and an epoch of a national capitis deminutio, sometimes extending for centuries. Here one will think of the subjugation of the Balkanic peoples and Hungary by the Turks, of the crushing of Bohemia by Habsburg absolutism, of the partitions of Poland. The Ukraine is a typically East European nation in that its history is marked by a high degree of discontinuity. The country suffered two major eclipses in the course of its development. The medieval Rus' received a crippling blow from the hands of the Mongols, was subsequently absorbed by Lithuania, and finally annexed to Poland. In the middle of the seventeenth century the Ukraine rose against Polish domination, and a new body politic, the Cossack State, came into existence. By the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the autonomy of the Cossack Ukraine was destroyed by the Russian Empire. A new upward cycle started in the nineteenth century. The movement of national regeneration culminated in the 1917 Revolution, when a Ukrainian independent state emerged, to succumb soon to Communist Russian control. This third, last great division of Ukrainian history, which lasts from the 1780's to the Revolution, and in a sense even to the present, forms what may be defined as modern Ukrainian history. When nationalist movements got under way in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, they were of two different types. In one, the leadership remained with the traditional upper class (nobility), into which newcomers of plebeian background were infused only gradually. Their