A Brief History of Ukraine

by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
February 19, 2023

The full-on hysteria that surrounded the announcement of Tucker Carlson's arrival in Moscow and his subsequent interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin—including Hillary Clinton branding Carlson a "useful idiot" and Bill Kristol's call to bar him from re-entering the US—was, upon release of the interview itself, quickly overtaken by a different (but equally misguided) reaction: "Why on earth did Putin spend so much time talking about ancient history?"

That reaction says a lot about our historical ignorance. Not just our ignorance of history itself, but our ignorance of the role history plays in understanding what is happening in the world today.

We tend to think of arguments among historians as purely academic affairs: a bunch of stuffy, grey-templed, pipe-smoking, tweed jacket-wearing professors debating over tea and crumpets the colour of Alexander the Great's hair or Frederick the Great's talent as a flutist.

But we are wrong.

Far from a boring, scholarly pursuit, the study of history has high-stakes, real-world consequences. Just ask the Ukrainians.

For centuries, the subject of Ukrainian history—including the origins of the Ukrainian state, the struggle for Ukrainian independence, and even the nature of Ukrainian identity itself—has been weaponized by various forces as part of a broader political conflict. As journalist Christian Esch has observed of this ongoing battle over Ukraine's past: "As always, war is fought in the symbolic field as well as on the battlefield[.] [. . .] History, it seems, has itself become the battlefield."

The fact that Putin spent a significant portion of his time with American deep state operative Tucker Carlson expounding on medieval history, then, is baffling only to those who continue to labour under the impression that history isn't important.

So, what do we know about Ukraine's history? What is up for debate? And what does the controversy tell us about the conflicts raging in that part of the world today? Let's find out.

Ancient History

Let's start with some basic History 101-type questions: Who are the Ukrainians? Where did they come from? When was Ukraine founded? By whom? How did the country develop into the modern nation-state that we know today?

These seem like simple enough questions to answer, but they aren't. Instead, as usual, the answers to these questions very much depend on who you're asking.

If you ask Vladimir Putin, you're going to get either a rambling, two-hour history lesson delivered to a befuddled-looking American broadcaster or a rambling, 7,000 word essay "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians," in which he argues that Ukrainians are really just little Russians (so why can't they just be happy being ruled by Moscow?).

The name "Ukraine" was used more often in the meaning of the Old Russian word "okraina" (periphery), which is found in written sources from the 12th century, referring to various border territories. And the word "Ukrainian," judging by archival documents, originally referred to frontier guards who protected the external borders.

As you might imagine, this argument is not popular with many Ukrainians.

So, what do the Ukrainians think? Once again, it depends on which Ukrainians you ask.

If you ask a panel of academic historians put together by the Viktor Pinchuk Foundation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, they'll bloviate at length about paleolithic archaeological discoveries that prove Ukraine was the real cradle of civilization. (Did you know that Ukrainians were building cities at the same time as the Egyptians? Or that all Indo-European languages trace back to Ukraine? Well, gosh darn, you will know that by the time these scholars are done talking!)

Or, if you ask the type of Ukrainian who gets featured in slick propaganda videos by well-connected documentary filmmakers that go "spontaneously" viral at the height of a US deep state-backed colour revolution, Ukrainians are people who simply seek freedom (and "you can help us only by telling this story to your friends, only by sharing this video!").

But perhaps all these responses really tell us is that we shouldn't be asking these people anything.

So, what about the average Ukrainian on the street? You know, the typical Joe Sixpack and Jane Soccermom? . . . Errr, I mean, the average Hryhory Horilka-swiller and Fedora Footballmom. What would they tell you about the origins of Ukraine?

Well, skipping all the paleolithic stuff, most sides would agree that what we think of as modern-day Ukraine emerged from a significant series of events that took place in the 9th century. That's when the East Slavic tribes were first united in a state, with Kiev as its capital. At its height, that state—ruled by a monarch sporting the title Grand Prince of Kiev—encompassed a territory stretching from the Carpathian Mountains on the west to the Volga River on the east, and from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.

But what was this state called? Who came to rule it and how? When and why did it fall apart, and what does it have to do with the historical fraternity (or lack thereof) between Ukrainians and Russians and Belarussians? That is where the minefield begins.

Again, we're not talking about some dry, dusty history lesson here. We're talking about the birth of a nation. And, as students of cinema might recognize, The Birth of a Nation can be highly controversial stuff, to say the least.

In fact, the way this story is told is of paramount importance. Told one way, it provides the Russian government with a justification for invading Ukraine in February 2022. Told another way, it allows the Ukrainian government to crack down on political dissent and to outlaw critical news outlets and to jail and kill American reporters and to kill innocent people who happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. In other words, history can be the most fiercely contested terrain of any political battle.

Just take the example of that 9th-century proto-state, the one that united the East Slavs (and Finns and Norsemen) in their first shared polity. What was it called? Many history textbooks refer to it as "Kievan Rus'" . . . but Ukrainian historians contend that the name was invented by Russian historians in the 19th century as a part of a political ploy by modern-day Russians to make historical claims over Ukraine's lands.

Or take Vladimir the Great (or is that Volodymyr the Great?), ruler of Kievan Rus' (or whatever it was called) in the late 10th century. Having converted to Orthodox Christianity in 988, he is the man credited with Christianizing the Rus' people and he is canonized by the Eastern Orthodox Church as Saint Vladimir. But is he Ukrainian? Or Russian? Is he another link in the chain connecting the Ukrainian and Russian people, as Putin argued in his essay? Or something else entirely?

Prince Volodomyr, as he is known in Ukraine, is hailed as one of the founding fathers of the Ukrainian nation: he consolidated rule over Kyiv and Novgorod, ruled over the Rus' from Kyiv before Moscow was even built, and Christianized the nation. But on the 1,000th anniversary of his death in 2015, Russia celebrated his legacy as one of the founding fathers of Russia by hosting nationwide events and erecting a statue in his honour in Moscow, a city that didn't even exist during Vladimir's lifetime.

Or take Yaroslav the Wise, one of Vladimir/Volodymyr's sons and the man who ruled as Grand Prince of Kiev (or is that Kyiv?) from 1019 to 1054. Like his father, Yaroslav is venerated as a founding father of both Ukraine and Russia. He expanded the Kievan Rus' territory to its greatest extent, introduced the first legal code of the Rus' people and promoted public education. And, like his father, he has become a point of vicious political contention between Ukrainian and Russian patriots.

The tale of Yaroslav's legacy is especially bizarre, centering as it does on the mystery of what happened to his bones, which were preserved for centuries at St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv. The crypt was opened in 1939 and the skeletons inside—one male and one female, presumed to be the remains of Yaroslav and his second wife—were shipped to Leningrad and carbon dated to the 11th century. The bones were then returned to Kyiv and supposedly reinstalled in the crypt in 1964. But, when the crypt was reopened in 2009, Yaroslav's bones were missing.

What would seem like a strange and macabre historical mystery has predictably turned into a major political row. Ukrainian authorities are determined to recover the remains (which may or may not reside in New York) in a bid to reclaim Ukrainian history and to prevent Russians from, as Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba puts it, "instrumentaliz[ing] the history of Rus in order to serve modern Putinist myths and illegitimate territorial claims."

I could go on, but you get the point by now. Everything in the history of Ukraine is a bone of contention, a potential weapon in the ongoing war between the various factions seeking to control Ukraine and its peoples.

If there is one thing that all sides would agree on, it is that the Ukrainian people have been subject to rule by outside powers for almost the entirety of their history.

The Mongol invasion of the 13th century completed the disintegration of Kievan Rus', which had been in decline since its Yaroslav heyday. This led to the lands we know as Ukraine being variously partitioned and ruled by a series of foreign powers: the Kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Austrian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the Tsardom of Russia.

Along the way, there were moments of quasi-autonomy. The Cossack uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1648 led to the establishment of the Cossack Hetmanate, an independent Cossack state in central Ukraine. But that independence was short-lived. In a bid for security from the Poles, the Cossacks had to pledge their allegiance to the Tsar of Russia. The resulting Russo-Polish War of 1654–1667 and the eventual "Treaty of Eternal Peace" of 1686 (cited by Putin in his interview with Carlson) re-affirmed that, whatever degree of autonomy the Cossack Hetmanate enjoyed under Russian rule, it was indeed under Russian rule. The Hetmanate was finally abolished under Catherine the Great, and the process of Russification of the Ukrainian nobility continued apace.

In the 19th century, writers like Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko spurred the formation of a new Ukrainian national consciousness. Motivated by nostalgia for past Cossack glories and outrage at Russian repression, this Ukrainian revival began to worry the tsarist court, which passed a series of laws banning Ukrainian language books, public readings and stage performances. This repression led to the rise of hromada, "communities" that formed a secret society network to promote Ukrainian culture, language and education in direct opposition to Russian rule.

And then, at the dawn of the 20th century—as the Russian revolution of 1905 weakened Tsarist rule and the Revolution of 1917 brought the Romanov dynasty to an end—the unthinkable happened: Ukraine achieved its independence. With the formation of the Ukrainian People's Republic in 1917 and its formal declaration of independence from Russia on January 22, 1918, Ukraine was finally its own independent state. . . .

Modern History

. . . But if you thought that was the end of the story then you don't understand this story yet.

The Ukrainian People's Republic was almost immediately superseded by the Ukrainian State (aka the "Second Hetmanate") of April–December 1918. After the Ukrainian State collapsed, there was yet more confusion. The Ukraine People's Republic briefly merged with the West Ukrainian People's Republic and together they fought a war with the Second Polish Republic. After losing that war, the Ukrainians were forced to sign the Treaty of Warsaw, ceding part of their territory to the Poles.

Oh, and did I mention the Ukrainian–Soviet War of 1917–1921 and the formation of the Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets and its successor, the Ukrainian Soviet Republic? Or how Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Russia joined forces to fight the Poles during the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921? Or how that war resulted in the Treaty of Riga, thus sounding the death knell for the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic?

Did you follow all that? Of course you didn't.

Here's the long story short: less than five years after its tenuous declaration of freedom, Ukraine was once again under foreign yoke. This time, it was part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And, in case there was any doubt about who was really calling the shots in this "union" of socialist "equals," Moscow soon got to work dispelling any lingering fantasies of Ukrainian independence.

As I wrote about last year, Stalin's so-called "War on the Kulaks" was not about freeing the glorious Soviet state from those fancy-pants capitalist peasant landowners, as he claimed. Instead, it was about branding the opposition to his collective farming policy as a dangerous, reactionary element that had to be "smashed in open battle." And, given largely agrarian Ukraine's status as the "breadbasket of the Soviet Union," this ultimately meant that it was the Ukrainian peasants themselves who would have to be smashed.

This campaign of "dekulakization" naturally resulted in a series of peasant rebellions and armed uprisings in Ukraine. Determined to put down the rebellion and to turn Ukraine "into truly a fortress of the USSR, a truly model republic," Stalin began confiscating all privately held grain in the country and sealed off the Russia–Ukraine border under a "No food in, no people out" policy. By the winter of 1932–1933, the campaign had reached its crescendo. Roving bands of communist apparatchiks raided the homes of peasants, confiscating not just grain but food, supplies, farm animals and even pets.

The tragic outcome of this sordid tale was mass starvation and one of the most egregious examples of cruelty inflicted on any population in the 20th century. Known to history as the Holodomor, this man-made famine—immortalized by Raphael Lemkin, the lawyer who coined the term “genocide,” as “the classic example of Soviet genocide"—killed millions of Ukrainians.

Incredibly, even brutality on this scale was not enough to suppress the Ukrainian nationalist movement. In the run-up to World War II, a new, radical breed of Ukrainians emerged under the banner of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The OUN quickly splintered into two groups: older moderates (led by Andriy Melnik) and younger radicals (led by Stepan Bandera). The latter—called the "OUN-b"— consciously patterned themselves on German and Italian fascists. Just days after Adolf Hitler launched the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the OUN-b took the lead in declaring a "renewed” Ukrainian state in Lviv.

According to Bandera's deputy and the self-declared "Prime Minister" of the new state, Yaroslav Stets’ko, this newly independent Ukrainian state would "work closely together with National Socialist Greater Germany." And, as Stets'ko wrote to Bandera privately, that new state would also form "a militia that will help eliminate Jews and protect the population."

Although this "renewed" Nazi-collaborationist Ukrainian state was itself short-lived, the OUN and its various sister organizations and splinter organizations (like the Ukrainian Insurgent Army) continued to fight for Ukrainian independence from the Soviets after World War II. This made them a convenient proxy force for Western intelligence agencies to employ in their own battle against the Russkies during the Cold War. The record of that support and the historical linkages between Western intelligence and Ukrainian nationalists (and Nazis) is too extensive for this brief history, but it has been exhaustively documented by the likes of Ted Snider at AntiWar.com.

Without getting bogged down in all the niggly details, let's fast forward to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

If you've read this far, you'll find it no surprise to learn that Ukraine was the first state to formally declare its independence from the USSR in December of that year. At long last, after centuries of struggle, the Ukrainian nationalists had achieved their dream. Ukraine had become an independent state.

Surely that's the end of the story, right?

Of course not. In fact, we haven't even gotten to the point where most "Histories of the Ukraine Conflict" even begin.

As you might have guessed, in the post-Soviet era the centuries-long trend of outside powers fighting over Ukraine has continued apace. In this latest iteration of the age-old battle for the heart of Ukraine, the Western powers—including the Americans, the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—have squared off against their Russian rivals for control of the prized Ukrainian square of the grand chessboard. And, as usual, the Ukrainian people have paid with their lives for the ill fortune of being caught in the middle of two great powers.

Team Russia started off the match against the West by signing a treaty with Ukraine in 2004 that promised to create “a Single Economic Space (SES) in which regulation of their economies would be shared and trade tariffs abolished to ensure the free movement of goods, services, capital, and labor."

Team Russia looked like it was going to score another victory later that year, when Viktor Yanukovych, the Kremlin's preferred candidate for Ukrainian president, won Ukraine's presidential election. However, the match tilted back in Team West’s favour when the so-called "Orange Revolution"—which even The Guardian had to admit was "an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing"—overturned the election results and swept Viktor Yuschenko, the White House's preferred candidate, into office.

Team West secured the advantage in 2008 when Yuschenko's government signed a "Strategic Partnership" with the US, offering Ukraine lucrative trade deals and security pledges in return for its implied allegiance to Team West in the grand chess match.

Team Russia fought back in 2010 when Viktor Yanukovych once again won the presidential election and this time actually assumed office. In one of his first acts as president, Yanukovych signed a deal with the Kremlin to extend the lease on Russia’s naval base in Crimea, causing some on Team West to muse that the move could be "the end of Ukraine’s EU integration."

Team West countered in 2012 with an EU-Ukraine "Association Agreement," which, like Ukraine’s "strategic partnership" with the US, dangled the promise of trade deals and economic integration in front of the Ukrainian people in return for their chessboard allegiance.

Things came to a head in 2013 when Yanukovych refused to sign the association agreement despite the fact that it had already been approved by Ukraine's parliament. Team West's proxy forces sprung into action and, as in the Orange Revolution of 2004, tens of thousands of Ukrainians flooded Independence Square demanding Yanukovych's resignation. After fierce clashes between police and protesters that left over 100 protesters and 13 police officers dead, Yanukovych was run out of office and fled to Russia, where he accepted a pledge of protection by the Russian government.

Thus began a new, deadlier stage of the chess match. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, for example, was as notable for the hysterical reaction of Team West—with Hillary Clinton predictably comparing Putin to Hitler—as it was for Team Russia’s embarrassingly obvious manipulations—such as its sham referendum on Crimea’s accession to the Russian Federation. It received the type of unbelievable 96.77% approval not seen since the bad old days of single-candidate Soviet "elections."

But whereas the match had up to this point been confined to such political wrangling and public relations bloviating, it was now a real life-and-death struggle in which, like all such grand chessboard contests, both teams happily sacrifice their Ukrainian pawns to achieve victory.

The ensuing decade saw the country descend into a long-simmering civil war, with Kiev employing military force on its own citizens in order to maintain control of its Russian-leaning eastern region. And then, in 2022, Team Russia raised the stakes once again by launching its "Special Military Operation," which seems to have brought us back to . . .

The Present (?)

To head off the inevitable "Well, ACKSHUALLY . . ." retort from the Ukrainian nationalists, Russian supremacists, NATO stooges, tweed jacket-wearing academics and assorted other fact checkers in the audience, let me state the obvious:

Yes, of course the idea of doing justice to the complex, chaotic, highly contested 1,000-year-long tale of a volatile region of the globe in a pithy 4,000-word "brief history" is ridiculous.

Yes, of course hundreds of years of that history have been completely elided over and even the parts that I have dwelt on have not been treated with anything like the depth they deserve.

Yes, of course you will almost inevitably disagree with some (or even all) of what I've written or claim that this or that presented fact is a skewed take representing a biased perspective on history.

That's precisely the point. No "brief history" or infographic timeline or dinosaur media listicle or factoid-laden MSM article purporting to fill you in on the historical context of the current Ukraine crisis is going to actually fill in all those blanks in a clear, concise and perfectly bias-free way.

That's not only because the history of Ukraine is so detailed and complex, but also because all of the undisputed historical facts in the world do not add up to a history.

History is, after all—to use the well-worn cliché—his / story. And each person's rendition of that story—including what parts of the tale they tell and what parts they leave out, what they emphasize and what they downplay, how they frame the events and characters, and even what spelling they use (is it Vladimir or Volodomyr, Kyiv or Kiev?)—will form a very different narrative, from which different conclusions can be drawn.

So, perhaps now you can see why Putin devoting half-an-hour to a history lecture to provide some context to the Russian–Ukrainian war isn't so ludicrous after all—even if you find his historical narrative to be a tad biased.

But perhaps that brings us to the most important question: given that multiple narratives can be told about the history of Ukraine, who should be allowed to answer those questions about Ukrainian history that we started off this exploration with? Who gets to define Ukrainian identity? Who gets to circumscribe the nature and limits of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty? A Russian president? An American president? Some other outside power? Or Ukrainians themselves?

I imagine most people would at least give lip service to the right of Ukrainians to decide what happens in Ukraine, but you know me: I'm one of those weird voluntaryist people! I say why stop at letting "Ukrainians" decide what happens in "Ukraine?" Why can't the people of Donetsk decide what happens in Donetsk? And then, what if someone in Donetsk doesn't consent to be ruled by whatever presumed political authority 50%+1 of his neighbours vote for?

Who gets to impose their view of history on someone else and where does that justification come from? The barrel of a gun? That's Putin's logic, isn't it?

But there I go complicating things again. All I know is that Putin had better be careful what he wishes for. Does he really want to make geopolitical conquest a game of using ancient history to justify current-day territorial claims? Because, if so, the Chinese are calling, and they want Vladivostok back.

Like this type of essay? Then you’ll love The Corbett Report Subscriber newsletter, which contains my editorial as well as recommended reading, viewing and listening. If you’re a Corbett Report member, you can sign in to corbettreport.com and read the newsletter today.

Not a member yet? Sign up today to access the newsletter and support this work.