A History of Ukraine, 2nd Edition

A History of Ukraine

Although the new state of Ukraine came into being only in 1991 as one of manystates formed in the wake of the Revolution of 1989, it was hardly a new country. Yetwhat the world generally knows of Ukraine is often associated with relatively recenttragedies - Chernobyl' in 1986, Babi Yar in 1941, the Great Famine of 1933, and thepogroms of 1919. But there is more to Ukrainian history than tragedy in the mod-ern era and, indeed, more to Ukraine than Ukrainians.

Until now, most histories of Ukraine have been histories of the Ukrainianpeople. While this book too traces in detail the evolution of the Ukrainians, PaulRobert Magocsi attempts to give judicious treatment also to the other peoples andcultures that developed within the borders of Ukraine, including the CrimeanTatars, Poles, Russians, Germans, Jews, Mennonites, Greeks, and Romanians, all ofwhom form an essential part of Ukrainian history.

A History of Ukraine has been designed as a textbook for use by teachers and stu-dents in areas such as history, political science, religious history, geography, andSlavic and East European Studies. Presented in ten sections of roughly five chap-ters each, it proceeds chronologically from the first millennium before the com-mon era to the declaration of Ukrainian independence in 1991. Each section pro-vides a balanced discussion of political, economic, and cultural developments;each chapter ends with a summary of the significant issues discussed. The whole iscomplemented by forty-two maps, nineteen tables, and sixty-six 'text inserts' thatfeature excerpts from important documents and contemporary descriptions, andvivid explanations of specific events, concepts, and historiographic problems. Stu-dents will also benefit from the extensive essay on further reading that providesbibliographic direction for each of the sections in the book.

PAUL ROBERT MAGOCSI , a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a professor ofhistory and political science at the University of Toronto and director of theMulticultural History Society of Ontario. He is the author of several books, includ-ing the Historical Atlas of East Central Europe, Ukraine: A Historical Atlas, and Galicia: AHistorical Survey and Bibliographic Guide.

This page intentionally left blank

A History ofUkraine

Paul Robert Magocsi

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESSToronto Buffalo London

University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1996Toronto Buffalo LondonPrinted and bound in Canada

ISBN 0-8020-0830-5 (cloth)ISBN 0-8020-7820-6 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication DataMagocsi, Paul R.

A history of Ukraine

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-8020-08305 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-7820-6 (pbk.)l. Ukraine - History. I. title.

0x508.51.M34 1996 947'-?i C96-930233-9

This book has been published with the financial assistance of the H.U.M.E. Foundation.University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishingprogram of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council.

For Tinka

Preface

In 1991, a new state came into being - Ukraine. It was one of many new statesformed in the wake of the Revolution of 1989, perhaps the most influential event inEurope's political evolution since the French Revolution two centuries before.Ukraine may have achieved independence only in 1991, but it was hardly a newcountry. For thousands of years, prehistoric and historical civilizations had flour-ished on Ukrainian territory. Even the idea and realization of Ukrainian statehoodwas nothing new: it had existed, albeit briefly, during the second decade of thetwentieth century.

Despite these realities, the world has generally known little of Ukraine. Andwhat it has learned and remembered seems to be associated only with tragedy,whether the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl' in 1986, the Nazi massacre of civiliansat Babi Yar in 1941, the death of millions of Ukrainian peasants in the GreatFamine of 1933, or the pogroms against Jews in 1919. Yet there is certainly more toUkraine than tragedy, and there is as well more to Ukraine than Ukrainians.

Ukraine is, after all, a land of many peoples and many cultures. It is the placewhere much of the treasure of Scythian gold was created during the half millen-nium before the common era; where Borodin's imagined Polovtsian dances wereperformed before the twelfth-century Kievan Rus' prince Ihor; where Gogol'sCossack, Taras Bul'ba, and the darling of the Romantic era, Ivan Mazepa, carriedout their exploits; where Florence Nightingale did her early nursing work andLord Tennyson found the subject for one of his most famous poems; where theNobel Prize laureate and Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz set his trilogy aboutthe decline of Poland in the second half of the seventeenth century; where life inthe Galician countryside provided Leopold von Sacher-Masoch with lurid talesthat became the source for the concept of masochism; where the Jewish Hasidicmovement was born; and where the writer Shalom Aleichem re-created late nine-teenth-century life in a Jewish shtetl, in a work that North Americans later came toknow as Fiddler on the Roof. The contexts for these and many other stories are whatis to be found on the pages of this book.

Until now, most histories of Ukraine have been histories of the Ukrainian peo-ple. While this book also traces the evolution of Ukrainians, it tries as well to give

viii Preface

judicious treatment to the many other peoples who developed within the bordersof Ukraine, including the Greeks, the Crimean Tatars, the Poles, the Russians, theJews, the Germans, and the Romanians. Only through an understanding of alltheir cultures can one hope to gain an adequate introduction to Ukrainian history.In other words, this book is not simply a history of Ukrainians, but a survey of awide variety of developments that have taken place during the past two and a halfmillennia on the territory encompassed by the boundaries of the contemporarystate of Ukraine.

This book began as long ago as 1980-1981, in the form of a lecture course, at theUniversity of Toronto, on Ukraine from earliest times to the present. The work hasretained the structure of a textbook that can be used in a university survey course,whether a full-year course or two half-year courses. There are ten sections ofroughly five chapters each, for a total of fifty chapters. The arrangement is essen-tially chronological, from the first millennium before the common era to the dec-laration of Ukrainian independence and its confirmation by national referendumduring the second half of 1991. Within each of the ten sections, there has been anattempt to provide an equally balanced discussion of political, economic, and cul-tural developments. Dispersed throughout the narrative are sixty-six textual insertsthat contain the texts of important documents, contemporary descriptions, orexplanations of specific events, concepts, and historiographic problems. Unlessotherwise indicated, the texts of documents and other cited material have beentranslated by the author. Interspersed as well are nineteen statistical tables andforty-two maps depicting the historical evolution of all or part of Ukraine.

In works about multicultural countries like Ukraine, it is impossible to avoid theproblem of which linguistic form to use for personal names and place-names. Forpersonal names, spellings are in the language of the nationality with which theperson generally identified. In the case of individuals in the medieval period whowere of East Slavic background, the modern Ukrainian spelling of their names isused. Transliterations from languages using the Cyrillic alphabet follow theLibrary of Congress system; names of Jewish figures follow the spellings used in theEncyclopedia Judaica. For towns, cities, provinces, and regions, the language used isdetermined by present-day international boundaries - thus, the Ukrainian formfor L'viv, in Ukraine; the Belarusan form for Polatsk, in Belarus; and the Polishform for Przemysl, in Poland. In general, historic names are used on maps cover-ing earlier periods: for example, Akkerman (today Bilhorod), Theodosia/Caffa/Kefe (today Feodosiia), luzivka/Stalino (today Donets'k), and Katerynoslav (todayDnipropetrovs'k). A few Ukrainian geographic names and place-names are ren-dered in their commonly accepted English forms, such as Bukovina, Dnieper,Galicia, Podolia, Pripet, Volhynia, and Zaporozhia (for the historic region, butZaporizhzhia for the modern city). Since the writing of this book, the governmentof Ukraine has adopted the form Kyiv as its official transliteration for the country'scapital city. The more traditional English form, Kiev, is used here.

No individual could hope to be fully informed about the entire range of Ukrain-

Preface ix

ian history, which is vast in chronological and thematic scope. I am, therefore,deeply indebted to many colleagues who at different times during the past decadehave read all or parts of the various drafts of this work: Henry Abramson (Univer-sity of Toronto), Karel C. Berkhoff (University of Toronto), Bohdan Budurowycz(University of Toronto), John-Paul Himka (University of Alberta), Stella Hryniuk(University of Manitoba), laroslav Isaievych (Shevchenko Scientific Society, L'viv),Ivan S. Koropeckyj (Temple University), Lubomir Luciuk (Royal Military Collegeof Ontario), James Mace (University of Illinois), Alexander Motyl (Columbia Uni-versity) , and Stephen Velychenko (University of Toronto).

I am also grateful to the many persons who contributed to preparing the manu-script for publication, including, at the first stage, the typists Maureen Harris,Nadia Diakun, Florence Pasquier, and Cindy Magocsi; and, at the latter stage,Darlene Zeleney of the University of Toronto Press and, in particular, Tessie Grif-fin, who did an outstanding editorial job. Special appreciation as well to KarelBerkhoff for his accuracy in preparing the index, and to Byron Moldofsky and hisstaff at the Cartographic Office of the University of Toronto for their elegant draft-ing of the maps. While the counsel and constructive criticism of all these personshave helped greatly to improve the text, I alone am responsible for the interpreta-tions and for whatever factual errors may remain.

Paul Robert MagocsiToronto, OntarioDecember 1995

Contents

PREFACE Vll

LIST OF TA B L E S Xxiii

LIST OF MAPS XXV

Part One: Introduction and Pre-Kievan Times

1 Ukraine's Geographic and Ethnolinguistic Setting 3Territory and geographyClimateNatural resourcesAdministrative and ethnolinguistic divisionsPopulationNomenclature

2 Historical Perceptions 12The Russian historical viewpointWhat is eastern Europe fThe Polish historical viewpointThe Ukrainian historical viewpointKostomarov on Ukrainians, Russians, and PolesThe Soviet historical viewpoint

3 The Steppe Hinterland and the Black Sea Cities 25The steppe hinterlandNomadic civilizations on Ukrainian territoryThe nomads of the steppe hinterlandThe Greeks of the coastal regionThe Pax Scythica, the Sarmatians, and the Pax RomanaScythian customsThe Byzantines and the Khazars

xii Contents

4 The Slavs and the Khazars 36The origins of the SlavsThe original homeland of the SlavsThe migrations of the SlavsThe AntesArchaeology in UkraineThe Pax ChazaricaThe Slavic tribes in the shadow of the Khazars

Part Two: The Kievan Period

5 The Rise of Kievan Rus' 51The origin of Rus'The great debate: The origin of Rus'Europe in the ninth centuryThe Varangians in the eastThe era of growth and expansion

6 Political Consolidation and Disintegration 65Volodymyr the GreatThe meaning of Rus'Christianity and the baptism of Rus'Christianity in Ukrainelaroslav the WiseThe Kievan system of political successionThe conference of Liubech and Volodymyr MonomakhThe era of disintegration

7 Socioeconomic and Cultural Developments 83Demography and social structureThe ruling social strataThe social structure of Kievan Rus'The subordinate social strataOther social strataThe legal systemThe economic orderThe voyage from Kiev to ConstantinopleByzantine cultural influencesThe Byzantine Empire and its attitude toward Kievan Rus'Kievan Rus' architectureKievan Rus' language and literatureWhat was the language of Kievan Rus' ?The 'Lay oflhor's Campaign'

Contents xiii

8 The Mongols and the Transformation of Rus' Political Life 105The rise of the MongolsThe Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus'The Golden HordeThe Pax Mongolica and Italian merchants

9 Galicia-Volhynia 114Galicia and Volhynia before their unificationThe unification of Galicia and VolhyniaThe metropolitanate of Rus'The demise of Galicia-Volhynia

Part Three: The Lithuanian-Polish Period

10 Lithuania and the Union with Poland 127The consolidation of the Lithuanian stateThe Polish-Lithuanian connectionMuscovy and the Polish-Lithuanian union

11 Socioeconomic Developments 138Lithuania's social structureLithuania's administrative structurePoland's social and administrative structurePeasants, nobles, and JewsThe manorial estateThe coming of Jews to UkraineThe realignment of international trade patternsPoland's economic and cultural revival

12 The Orthodox Cultural Revival 151The Metropolitanate of KievThe Metropolitanate of Kiev and All Rus'The monastic movementThe role of townspeople and magnatesL'viv's Stauropegial Brotherhood

13 Reformation, Counter Reformation, and the Union of Brest 160The Protestant ReformationThe Counter Reformation and Orthodox UkraineThe Union of BrestThe views of Prince Kostiantyn Ostroz'kyiThe Union of Brest

xiv Contents

14 The Tatars and the Cossacks 170The Cossacks and the steppeThe name 'Ukraine'The Crimean KhanateCrimean socioeconomic lifeDuma about the Lament of the CaptivesThe rise of the CossacksThe Cossacks of ZaporozhiaThe Cossacks in Polish societySocial estates in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century UkraineA male-dominated society ?The international role of the CossacksThe Cossacks and OrthodoxyOrthodox versus UniateThe calm before the storm

Part Four: The Cossack State, 1648-1711

15 Khmel'nyts'kyi and the Revolution of 1648 195Khmel'nyts'kyi's early careerThe revolution of 1648Khmel'nyts'kyi and the JewsKhmel'nyts'kyi as a national leader

16 Muscovy and the Agreement of Pereiaslav 207The rise of MuscovyMuscovy, Poland, and UkraineKhmel'nyts'kyi and PereiaslavThe agreement of Pereiaslav

17 The Period of Ruin 217Changing international alliancesThe Cossack turn toward PolandThe Union ofHadiachAnarchy, ruin, and the division of Ukraine

18 The Structure of the Cossack State 229Registered and unregistered CossacksInternal administrationWhat to call the Cossack state1?The Cossack state administrationInternational status

Contents xv

19 Mazepa and the Great Northern War 238The image of MazepaThe rise of MazepaMazepa as hetman: The early phaseMazepa during the Great Northern WarMazepa 's defectionMazepa and Ukraine after Poltava

20 Socioeconomic and Cultural Developments in the Cossack State 249Social structureSocial estates in the Cossack stateEconomic developmentsChurch and stateCultural developmentsThe transformation of Ukraine after 1648

Part Five: The Hetmanate and the Right Bank in theEighteenth Century

21 Ukrainian Autonomy in the Russian Empire 263Muscovy becomes the Russian EmpireSloboda UkraineZaporozhiaThe HetmanateCentralization and the end of Ukrainian autonomy

22 Socioeconomic Developments in the Hetmanate 277The changing social structureEconomic developmentsInternational trade and commerce

23 Religious and Cultural Developments 283The integration of the Orthodox churchEducationArchitecture and paintingLiterature and history writing

24 The Right Bank and Western Ukraine 290The return of Polish rule in the Right BankSocial protest and the haidamak revoltsUman' as a symbol for Ukrainians, Poles, and JewsThe Partitions of Poland

xvi Contents

Part Six: Ukraine in the Russian Empire

25 Administrative and Political Developments in Dnieper Ukraine 305Territorial divisionsAdministrative structureAdministrative structure in Dnieper Ukraine before the 1860$Administrative structure in Dnieper Ukraine after the i86osThe evolution of the Russian Empire, 1814-1914

26 Socioeconomic Developments in Dnieper Ukraine 316Social estates before the 186osSocial estates in Dnieper UkraineThe reforms of the 186osEconomic developments

27 The Peoples of Dnieper Ukraine 331The RussiansThe PolesWhat Ukraine means for PolandThe JewsMemories of the 'shtetl'PogromsThe Germans and MennonitesThe Crimean TatarsThe RomaniansOther peoples

28 The Ukrainian National Renaissance in Dnieper Ukrainebefore the i86os 351The idea of nationalismWhat is a nationality ?The phenomenon of multiple loyaltiesThe early histories of UkraineThe belief in mutually exclusive identities

29 The Ukrainian National Movement in Dnieper Ukraineafter the Era of Reforms 365The Right Bank and the 'khlopomany' movementUkrainianism in St Petersburg and the renewal of the organizational

stageRussian reaction to the Ukrainian movementThe Valuev decreeSchools in Dnieper UkraineThe Ems Ukase

Contents xvii

The church in Dnieper UkraineThe return to the heritage-gathering stageThe beginnings of the political stage

Part Seven: Ukraine in the Austrian Empire

30 The Administrative and Social Structure of Ukrainian Landsin the Austrian Empire before 1848 385Austria acquires Ukrainian landsThe structure of the Austrian EmpireThe demographic and administrative status of Galicia and BukovinaThe economic status of Galicia before 1848Other peoples in eastern Galicia

31 The Ukrainian National Awakening hi the Austrian Empirebefore 1848 397The Austrian government and the Ukrainian national awakeningThe heritage-gathering stage in GaliciaBukovina and Transcarpathia before 1848

32 The Revolution of 1848 406The revolution in AustriaThe revolution in Galicia and the UkrainiansThe Supreme Ruthenian CouncilThe Galician-Ukrainian national movement: The organizational stageThe revolution of 1848 in Bukovina and Transcarpathia

33 The Administrative and Socioeconomic Structure of UkrainianLands in the Austrian Empire, 1849-1914 417Administrative structureInternational developments and Austria's internal politicsAustria's parliamentary structureSocial structure and economic developmentsThe problem of statisticsThe Ukrainian diasporaOther peoples in eastern Galicia and BukovinaUkraine's other diasporas

34 The Ukrainian National Movement in Austria-Hungary,1849-1914 436In search of a national identityOld Ruthenians, Russophiles, and UkrainophilesLanguage as the symbol of identityThe national movement in Galicia: The organizational stage

xviii Contents

The national movement in Galicia: The political stageIndependence for UkraineAt the bottom of the pecking orderThe national movement in BukovinaThe national movement in Transcarpathia

Part Eight: World War I and the Struggle for Independence

35 World War I and Western Ukraine 461The outbreak of World War IThe Russians in Galicia and BukovinaUkrainian political activity in Vienna

36 Revolutions in the Russian Empire 468Russia's first revolution of 1917Revolution in Dnieper UkraineThe Central RadaFirst Universal of the Ukrainian Central RadaThe Bolshevik RevolutionThird Universal of the Ukrainian Central Rada (Preamble)The Ukrainian National RepublicThe Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

37 The Period of the Hetmanate 488The establishment of the HetmanateAuthoritarian in form, Ukrainian in contentThe fall of the Hetmanate

38 The Directory, Civil War, and the Bolsheviks 494The Directory of the Ukrainian National RepublicThe BolsheviksThe peasant revolutionThe White RussiansThe EntenteThe West Ukrainian National Republic and Dnieper UkrainePoland and Dnieper UkraineThe revolutionary era and Dnieper Ukraine's other peoplesPetliura and the pogromsMennonites caught in the revolution

39 The West Ukrainian National Republic 512Austria's Ukrainians prepare for their postwar futureWest Ukrainian independence and warThe West Ukrainian government-in-exile

Contents xix

Bukovina and TranscarpathiaThe Ukrainian revolution: Success or failure?

Part Nine: The Interwar Years

40 The Postwar Treaties and the Division of Ukrainian Lands 523The Paris Peace ConferenceSoviet Ukraine and the Soviet UnionTreaty of Union between the Russian SFSR and the Ukrainian SSR

41 Soviet Ukraine: The Struggle for Autonomy 529The government of Soviet UkraineThe Communist party (Bolshevik) of UkraineThe policy of UkrainianizationCommunism and the nationality questionUkrainianization, the governing elite, and demographic changeUkrainianizationUkrainianization and the return of the emigresUkrainianization in educationUkrainianization in the artsReligionUkrainianization in the era of transition

42 Soviet Ukraine: Economic, Political, and Cultural Integration 548War communism and the New Economic PolicyNEP in Soviet UkraineTheendofNEPCentral planning and industrializationThe collectivization of agricultureDekulakization and the Great FamineUkraine's Holocaust: The Great Famine 0/7933The apogee and the decline of UkrainianizationThe end of UkrainianizationPurges and integrationThe purges

43 Minority Peoples in Soviet Ukraine 572Nationality administration in the Soviet UnionThe RussiansThe JewsThe PolesThe GermansThe TatarsThe Greeks

xx Contents

44 Ukrainian Lands in Interwar Poland 583The administrative status of Ukrainian-inhabited landsThe economic status of Ukrainian-inhabited landsPoland's initial policies and Ukrainian reactionsThe cooperative movementWomen and the Ukrainian national ethosUkrainian political parties, schools, and churchesArmed resistance and pacification

45 Ukrainian Lands in Interwar Romania and Czechoslovakia 599Ukrainians in RomaniaThe Rusyns/Ukrainians of Czechoslovakia

Part Ten: World War II and the Postwar Years

46 The Coming of World War II 611Germany and the 'new order' in EuropeAutonomy for Carpatho-UkraineThe fall of PolandThe 'reunification' of western UkraineThe Generalgouvernement

47 World War II and Nazi German Rule 622The German and Romanian invasions of UkraineNazi rule in UkraineNazi racial policies and the HolocaustThou shalt not killNazi policies toward UkrainiansResistance to Nazi rule

48 Soviet Ukraine until the Death of Stalin 638Wartime destruction and territorial expansionVoluntary reunification, Soviet styleThe minority questionIndustrial and agricultural reconstructionThe nationality questionWestern Ukraine

49 From Stalin to Brezhnev 652Ukraine under KhrushchevThe sixties phenomenonEconomic developmentsBrezhnev and the era of stability

Contents xxi

National repression in Soviet UkraineUrbanization and the new Ukraine

50 From Devolution to Independence 666The Gorbachev revolutionThe Soviet heritage in Ukraine'Glasnost" in UkraineThe road to sovereignty and independenceDeclaration of Independence

NOTES 677

FOR FURTHER R E A D I N G 685

I N D E X 727

List of Tables

1.1 Nationality composition of Ukraine, 1989 91.2 Ukrainians beyond Ukraine (on contiguous ethnolinguistic territory),

1989 91.3 Ukrainians beyond their contiguous ethnolinguistic territory, 1989 10

26.1 Population of Dnieper Ukraine's largest cities, 1860-1914 32426.2 Average size of peasant landholdings in Dnieper Ukraine, 1863-1900 32527.1 Nationality composition of Dnieper Ukraine, 1897 33127.2 Nationality composition of Dnieper Ukraine's urban population,

i897 33230.1 Nationality composition of Galicia, 1849 39033.1 Nationality composition of Galicia, 191 o 42442.1 Ukrainian industrial output in selected categories, 1928-1940 55443.1 Nationality subdivisions in Soviet Ukraine, circa 1930 57343.2 Nationality composition of Soviet Ukraine, 1926 57343.3 Nationality composition of the Crimean ASSR, 1926 57944.1 Landholdings in interwar eastern Galicia, 1931 58644.2 Ukrainian-language and bilingual schools in interwar Poland,

1922-1938 59445.1 Schools in interwar Subcarpathian Rus' 60648.1 Nationality composition of Soviet Ukraine, 1959 64348.2 Ukrainians beyond Soviet Ukraine (on contiguous ethnolinguistic

territory), 1959 64349. i Selected characteristics of Ukrainians in Soviet Ukraine,

!959-!989 664

List of Maps

1 Geographic features 42 Ukrainian ethnolinguistic territory 73 The Greeks and the Scythians in Ukraine 294 The original homeland of the Slavs 375 The East Slavic tribes and the Khazars 436 Trade routes, eighth to tenth centuries 597 Kievan Rus', circa 1054 748 Kievan Rus', circa 1240 819 The Mongol invasions 108

10 The Golden Horde, circa 1300 ill11 Galicia-Volhynia, circa 1250 11612 The expansion of Lithuania 12813 The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, circa 1570 13514 Religion and culture, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 15415 The Crimean Khanate and southern Ukraine, circa 1600 17416 The Khmel'nyts'kyi era 19817 Ukrainian lands after 1667 22618 The Cossack state, 1651 23219 Ukraine, circa 1740 26420 Sloboda Ukraine 26621 Zaporozhia and New Russia 26822 The Right Bank and western Ukraine, 1750 29123 The Partitions of Poland 30224 Dnieper Ukraine, circa 1850 30625 Railroads and canals before 1914 32826 The peoples of Ukraine, circa 1900 333

xxvi Maps

27 Ukrainian lands in the Austrian Empire, 1772-1815 38628 Ukrainian lands in Austria-Hungary, circa 1875 41929 Western Ukraine during World War I 46430 Ukraine, 1917-1918 47631 Ukraine, 1919-1920 49632 The West Ukrainian National Republic, 1918-1919 51433 Ukrainian lands, 1923 52434 Soviet Ukraine, 1932 55235 The Great Famine 56236 Ukrainian lands in Poland, circa 1930 58437 Ukrainian/Rusyn lands in Romania and Czechoslovakia, circa 1930 60038 Carpatho-Ukraine, 1938-1939 61539 Western Ukraine, 1939-1941 61840 Ukraine, 1941-1944 62341 The advance of the Red Army 63642 Ukraine, 1945 640

PART ONE

Introduction and Pre-Kievan Times

_!Ukraine's Geographic andEthnolinguistic Setting

Territory and geography

Ukrainian territory can be defined in basically two ways. First, there is the territoryas delimited by the political boundaries of a Ukrainian state that evolved in thetwentieth century. Second, there is Ukrainian ethnolinguistic territory. An ethno-linguistic group consists of people who speak the same language or, more prop-erly, varying dialects of one language, and who have common ethnographiccharacteristics. Accordingly, Ukrainian ethnolinguistic territory, is made up of thecontiguous lands where Ukrainians live that are both within and beyond theboundaries of the Ukrainian state.

The state of Ukraine comprises 232,200 square miles (603,700 square kilo-meters) and is thus larger than any European country except Russia. Put anotherway, Ukraine is the size of Germany and Great Britain combined, in Europe; ofthe states of Arizona and New Mexico combined, in the United States; or of theprovince of Manitoba in Canada. Ukrainian ethnolinguistic territory (whichincludes most, though not all, of Ukraine) comprises 288,800 square miles(750,800 square kilometers). This is approximately the size of Germany, Austria,and Italy combined, or of Texas in the United States.

The geographic setting for both Ukraine and the ethnolinguistic territoryinhabited by Ukrainians is not complex. Almost the entire land mass in ques-tion consists of vast plains and plateaus which seldom rise more than 1,600 feet(500 meters) above sea level. These include coastal lowlands along the northernshores of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, a vast plain to the east of the DnieperRiver, a low marshy plain in the northwest, and somewhat higher plateaus withslightly rolling hills toward the west and in the far east. Outside the borders ofUkraine but still within Ukrainian ethnolinguistic territory, that is, in the regioneast of the Sea of Azov, the geography consists of a continuation of a flatlowland similar to that north of the Black Sea. Thus, the plain and slightlyhigher plateau are the predominant and somewhat monotonous features of theUkrainian landscape. This fact prompted the Ukrainian geographer StepanRudnyts'kyi, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to comment, 'Nine-

MAPI GEOGRAPHIC FEATURES

Geographic and Ethnolinguistic Setting 5

tenths of Ukrainians have certainly never seen a mountain and do not evenknow what one looks like.'1

There are mountains within Ukraine, but they are along the extreme edges ofits territory. In the far west are the north-central ranges of the Carpathians, whosehighest peak (Hbverla) reaches 6,760 feet (2,061 meters). At the southern tip ofthe Crimean Peninsula - actually outside Ukrainian ethnolinguistic territory - arethe Crimean Mountains, whose highest peak (Roman Kosh) is 5,061 feet (1,543meters). Just beyond the very southern fringes of Ukrainian ethnolinguistic terri-tory in the southeast are the Caucasus Mountains, whose highest peaks reach wellover 16,400 feet (5,000 meters). Thus, the only 'Ukrainian' mountains are oneportion of the Carpathian range, which comprises no more than five percent ofall Ukrainian territory.

Dominated as it is by open plains and plateaus, Ukraine lacks any real naturalboundaries. Even the Carpathian Mountains, which in any case cover a very smallarea of Ukraine, contain several passes through which communication has beenmaintained. Lacking any natural geographic barriers, Ukraine has historicallybeen open to all peoples, friendly or unfriendly, who might wish to come there.

Throughout Ukraine's broad plains and plateaus, a rather well knit network ofrivers has facilitated north-south travel and communication. Most of these riversare part of the Black Sea or Pontic watershed. The major rivers run essentially in asoutherly direction, emptying into the Black Sea or its subsidiary, the Sea of Azov.From west to east, the major rivers are the Dniester, Southern Buh, Dnieper, andDonets', a tributary of the Don, which in turn empties into the Sea of Azov. In thefar southwest, Ukrainian territory is bounded by the mouths of the Danube Riveras they empty into the Black Sea; in the far southeast, the Kuban River descendsfrom the Caucasus Mountains, flowing westward through Ukrainian ethnolinguis-tic territory before reaching the Sea of Azov. Only along the very western edge ofUkrainian territory are there a few rivers that are not part of the Pontic watershed.These include the Buh (Western Buh) and San, which flow north into the Vistulaas part of the Baltic watershed. Finally, there is the Tysa/Tisza River, south of theCarpathians, which flows westward and then southward across the HungarianPlain into the Danube.

The Baltic and Pontic watersheds are rather closely interrelated in westernUkraine, where for centuries they have been part of an important communicationnetwork. This network links the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea via the Vistula, Buh,San, and Dniester Rivers. Of even greater historical significance has been theDnieper River, which connects Belarusan and Russian cities in the north with theBlack Sea in the south, and from there beyond to the straits of the Bosporus,which connect to the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas.

Climate

Just as its landscape has few extremes, so the temperature throughout Ukraine isrelatively moderate, the yearly average for the vast majority of the territory beingbetween +43 and +48 F (+6 and +9 C). Only the very extreme ends of Ukrainian

6 Introduction and Pre-Kievan Times

territory have higher temperature averages - these being along the Black Sea coast,with Odessa having +5OF (+g.8C) and Yalta, in the Crimea, +56F (+13.4C).

The Ukrainian average of +43 to +48 F (+6 to +9 C) is considerably lowerthan average temperatures in central or western Europe. For instance, London,which is at a latitude farther north than any city in Ukraine except Chernihiv,has a yearly average temperature of +5iF (+io.3C). The more severe wintersaccount for the lower Ukrainian readings. As the following comparison with west-ern European cities reveals, Ukrainian cities have considerably colder averagewinter temperatures with slightly warmer summer averages:

January July January JulyL'viv +24F (-4.6C) +64F (+i8C) London +38F (+3.5C) +64F (+i7.gC)Kiev +2iF (-6.2C) +66F (+19.2C) Brussels +36F (+2C) +64F (+l8C)Kharkiv +l8F (-8.3C) +7OF (+2O.9C) Frankfurt +33F (+0.7C) +66F (+i8.7C)

From the standpoint of temperature, most of Ukraine -with a January mean tem-perature of +23F (-5C) and a July mean of +68F (+2OC) - is more likeToronto, Canada, than western Europe.

Natural resources

Because of the large expanse of plains and the relatively moderate continentaltemperatures with adequate rainfall, Ukraine has traditionally been a rich agricul-tural region. As much as two-thirds of the country's surface land consists of the so-called black earth (chornozem), a resource that has made Ukraine one of the mostfertile regions in the world and famous as the 'breadbasket' of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and then of the Russian Empire and the SovietUnion. Ukraine has always had an abundance of truck-farming produce, indus-trial crops (in particular, sugar beets), and grains - wheat, corn, rye, and barley.On the eve of World War I, for instance, Ukraine produced 98 percent of all thewheat in the Russian Empire, 82 percent of its sugar, and 75 percent of its rye. His-torically, however, the ease in obtaining a harvest has played a role in preventingprogress and inventiveness in farming methods, which have traditionally comefrom areas much less richly endowed with favorable natural conditions.

Ukraine is also rich in minerals. Salt, used as a preservative since medievaltimes, contributed to the wealth of Galicia and the Crimea, where it was found.Beginning in the late nineteenth century, rich deposits of coal, iron ore, andmanganese, found especially in eastern Ukraine, helped to transform the countryinto one of the world's major centers of heavy industry. By the beginning of thetwentieth century, Ukraine was producing 80 percent of the coal and 62 percentof the iron in the Russian Empire.

Administrative and ethnolinguistic divisions

Ukraine is divided into twenty-five regions, called oblasts. With few exceptions,

MAP 2 UKRAINIAN ETHNOLINGUISTIC TERRITORY


the oblasts do not coincide with the historical regions of the country, even if somemight use historical names. It is, however, the historical regions which will bementioned most often in this text. Among these, from west to east, are Trans-carpathia, Bukovina, Galicia, Podolia, Volhynia, Chernihiv, Poltava, SlobodaUkraine, Zaporozhia, the Donbas, the Black Sea Lands, the Crimea, and theKuban Region.

Ukrainian ethnolinguistic boundaries do not coincide with the boundaries ofUkraine. This makes Ukraine similar to many other states in the world, whichoften have (i) a dominant ethnolinguistic group within their own borders as wellas members of the same group living on contiguous territory in neighboringstates, and (2) one or more ethnolinguistic groups different from the numericallydominant one.

Ukrainian is one of the twelve Slavic languages, which are grouped into WestSlavic (Polish, Serbian, Czech, Slovak), South Slavic (Slovene, Croatian, Serbian,Macedonian, Bulgarian), and East Slavic (Russian, Belarusan, Ukrainian). As anEast Slavic language, Ukrainian is structurally closest to Belarusan and Russian,although some dialects, especially in western Ukraine, have been heavily influ-enced by either Polish or Slovak.

Linguists generally refer to three major Ukrainian dialectal groups: (i) north-ern dialects, which are spoken in Polissia, northern Volhynia, the northern Kievregion, and the Chernihiv region; (2) eastern dialects, which are spoken in a vastterritory east and south of a line running roughly from Zhytomyr to Odessa; and(3) western dialects, which are spoken in southern Volhynia, Podolia, Galicia,northern Bukovina, and Transcarpathia. In a sense, the Ukrainian languagereflects the geographic makeup of the country with its vast stretches of plains andplateaus. That is, there is little variation in dialects and subdialects throughout thenorthern, the eastern, and even most of the western dialectal regions. Only in thefar west on both sides of the Carpathian Mountains - in southern Galicia, north-ern Bukovina, Transcarpathia, and the Ukrainian-inhabited lands of easternPoland and Slovakia - do the number and degree of differences among local dia-lects increase substantially, so much so that there has often been considerabledebate among scholars and the people themselves as to whether they should beconsidered ethnically Ukrainian.

Population

According to the census of 1989, there were 51.4 million people living in Ukraine.Nearly three-quarters, or 37.4 million inhabitants (73 percent), were Ukrainian,while the remaining 14 million inhabitants (27 percent) belonged to severalethnolinguistic or national minorities (see table 1.1). Although Ukrainians havetraditionally made up the majority of the country's population, in the last two cen-turies there has been a great discrepancy between their numbers in rural and inurban areas. For instance, in 1897, Ukrainians made up only 30 percent of theurban population of Ukraine, a percentage that has steadily increased since then,reaching 65 percent in 1989. As for other peoples, the Russians live primarily in


TABLE 1.1Nationality composition of Ukraine, 19892

Nationality

UkrainiansRussiansJewsBelarusansMoldovansPolesBulgariansHungariansRomaniansTatars and Crimean TatarsGreeksArmeniansRoma (Gypsies)GermansAzerbaijanisGagauzOthers

Number

37,419,00011,356,000

486,000440,000324,000234,000219,000163,000135,000134,00099,00054,00048,00038,00037,00032,000

234,000

Percentage

72.722.10.90.80.60.50.40.30.20.20.20.10.10.10.10.10.5

51,452,000 99.9

the urbanized industrial regions of eastern Ukraine, the Jews and Belarusans inurban areas throughout the country, and the Tatars mostly in cities of the Crimea.The remaining groups mostly inhabit rural areas: the Moldovans live in areas adja-cent to Moldova; the Poles in islets scattered throughout Volhynia and easternGalicia; the Bulgarians in southern Bessarabia; the Hungarians in southernTranscarpathia; the Romanians in northern Bukovina; and the Greeks along theshores of the Black Sea (near Odessa) and the Sea of Azov (near Mariiupol').

Aside from the 37.4 million Ukrainians within the boundaries of Ukraine, in1989 there were another 1.7 million Ukrainians living on contiguous ethnolinguis-tic territory in bordering countries (see table 1.2).

TABLE 1.2Ukrainians beyond Ukraine3(on contiguous ethnolinguistic territory), 1989Russia (Kursk, Belgorod, Voronezh, 600,000

Rostov, Krasnodar oblasts)Moldova 600,000Belarus 290,000Poland 150,000Slovakia 60,000Romania 52,000

TOTAL 1,752,000

TOTAL

io Introduction and Pre-Kievan Times

In Belarus, Ukrainians live within the marshland of the Pripet River valley; inPoland, along its eastern border in the Podlachia, Chehn, San, and Lemkoregions; in Slovakia, in the far northeast known as the Presov region; in Romania,in the Maramure district, southern Bukovina, and the Danube Delta; in Moldova,along its northern and eastern border; and in Russia, along the Don and KubanRiver valleys.

Aside from Ukrainians living in areas contiguous to Ukraine, there are stillanother estimated 7.6 million Ukrainians in other parts of the former SovietUnion and the world (see table 1.3). They are the descendants of Ukrainians whomigrated to those areas in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

TABLE 1.3Ukrainians beyond their contiguous ethnolinguisticterritory, 19894

RussiaKazakhstanBaltic republicsUzbekistanKyrgyzstanCaucasus republicsOther Central Asian republics

PolandFormer YugoslaviaCzech Republic

3,800,000896,000185,000154,000108,00092,00077,000

150,00013,0008,000

Other European countries 93,000

United StatesCanadaSouth AmericaAustralia

TOTAL

741,0001,100,000

170,00020,000

7,607,000

The above statistics indicate that there are 46.7 million Ukrainians worldwide.Other sources suggest the figure might be as high as 51.8 million.

Nomenclature

Many different names have been used to designate the inhabitants and territoryknown today as Ukrainians and Ukraine. Indeed, it is not uncommon for any ter-ritory in Europe or elsewhere to have had different names for its inhabitants andits homeland in the past. The very question of nomenclature is frequently an inte-gral part of a given nationality's historical development. It is not surprising, there-fore, that the names used to designate Ukrainians and Ukraine in the distant andnot so distant past have often been chosen to reflect a certain political stance, andsometimes even to deny the very existence of Ukrainians as a distinct nationality.


Until recently, knowledge of Ukraine in other parts of the world derived fromRussian secondary sources. After the second half of the seventeenth century,when Muscovy and, later, the Russian Empire came to control most Ukrainian ter-ritory, Russian writers included Ukraine within Russian history. As part of thisaccommodation, old terms took on new meanings. Medieval Kievan Rus' becameKievan Russia, its culture and inhabitants Kievan Russian or Old Russian. For laterperiods, Ukraine was referred to in whole or in part as Little Russia, South Russia,West Russia (together with Belarus), or New Russia (the steppe and Black Seacoastal regions), and its indigenous East Slavic inhabitants as Little Russians. Inthose parts of Ukraine not ruled by Muscovy or Russia, the territory was at timescalled Ruthenia and the East Slavic inhabitants Ruthenians.

The terms and concepts Kievan Russia/Old Russian, Little Russia/Little Russian,Ruthenia/Ruthenian, are still found in older and even in some contemporary pub-lications about Ukraine written by authors from Europe, North America, and otherparts of the world. In this volume, which is concerned primarily with the historicalevolution of territory within the boundaries of present-day Ukraine, the termUkraine will be used to designate the territory and Ukrainians to designate the majornationality inhabiting that territory. When discussing the medieval period, that is,approximately from the eighth to the fourteenth century, the terms Rus' or KievanRus' will be used for the territory and the Rus' or the Rus' people for its inhabitants.The progressive use of Rus'/Ukraine and Rus'/'Ukrainian people in this volume isanalogous to the use of Franks /French, or Romans /Italians in volumes surveying thehistory of France or Italy.

Historical Perceptions

Ukraine has been under the rule of foreign powers, especially Poland and Russia,for long periods of time. As a result, in historical writings Ukraine has often beentreated not as an entity unto itself, but rather as a sort of appendage to a largerstate structure, whether the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the RussianEmpire, or the Soviet Union. For instance, it was common for Russian or Polishhistorians writing in the nineteenth century to fit into their respective nationalhistories the history of those territories that were at one time or another part ofRussia or Poland. The result was that certain areas such as Ukraine and Belarusbecame in many Russian, Polish, and, subsequently, western-language accountscountries without a history.

In effect, the history of Ukraine came to be associated solely with the growth ofthe Ukrainian national idea, which skeptics argued could be dated only fromthe beginning of the nineteenth century at the earliest. Such perceptions of thehistorical past led to questions about the present and future. Faced with theexistence of a Ukrainian national movement, those unsympathetic to Ukrainiandistinctiveness would ask: If there was no Ukrainian state and therefore noUkrainian history before the nineteenth century, on what grounds can one justifythe creation of a sovereign state in the future? Because of the political implica-tions as well as the scholarly significance of historical writings, it seems importantthat the reader be familiar with at least the main outlines of the various percep-tions of the history of Ukraine. These may be classified as the Russian, Polish,Ukrainian, and Soviet viewpoints.

The Russian historical viewpoint

The various perceptions actually reflect a serious debate concerning the history ofeastern Europe as a whole, or, more specifically, of the East Slavic peoples - theRussians, Belarusans, and Ukrainians. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcenturies, when the first scholarly histories of eastern Europe began to be written,the only East Slavic state in existence was the Russian Empire. This state washeaded by an all-powerful monarch, or tsar, of the Romanov dynasty, which had

2

Historical Perceptions 13

WHAT Is EASTERN EUROPE?The term eastern Europe is difficult if not impossible to define with precision.Logically, one might assume that the term refers to the eastern half of theEuropean continent. After World War II, however, it came to have more apolitical than a geographic meaning: eastern Europe referred to the territoryencompassed by the new postwar boundaries of those countries (East Ger-many, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, andAlbania) that had just come under Communist rule and that were at one timeor another closely allied, if not subordinate, to the Soviet Union.

Such a definition produced obvious geographic anomalies. Greece and Aus-tria were excluded simply because they were non-Communist, regardless ofthe fact that both were as far east as or even farther east than some of the other'eastern' European states. Such an illogical conceptualization of easternEurope is no longer defensible, on what were anyway rather tenuous post-World War II political grounds. This has become the case especially since1989, as the former 'eastern' European countries have abandoned Communistrule and as the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union itself have ceased to exist.

Accordingly, use of the term eastern Europe in this book will be based solelyon geographic criteria. Since Europe as a continent stretches from the coasts ofIreland and Portugal in the west to the Ural Mountains in the east, the west-east geographic divide is roughly along the 25 latitude line, which runs verynear the present-day western border of Belarus and Ukraine. It is interestingto note that the exact north-south as well as west-east geographic mid-pointof the European continent - one that was carefully calculated in the secondhalf of the nineteenth century - is actually on Ukrainian territory, near the vil-lage of Dilove, in the southeastern corner of the Transcarpathian oblast.

This means that geographic eastern Europe is made up of virtually all ofBelarus and Ukraine, Russia west of the Urals, and smaller parts of Finland,the Baltic countries, Romania, and Bulgaria. Hence, if geographic and histori-cal criteria are combined, eastern Europe can be said to coincide in the mainwith the homelands of the East Slavs - Russians, Belarusans, and Ukrainians -and it is in this context that the term will be used here.

ruled from Moscow and, later, St Petersburg since the early seventeenth century.Not surprisingly, both the Romanov dynasty and the Russian imperial state it rep-resented encouraged the publication of works presenting a historical scheme thatjustified their existence. Among these works were the first two histories of Russia,by the eighteenth-century authors S.O. Mankeev (1715, published 1770) andVasilii M. Tatishchev (1739, published in five volumes, 1768-1818). Both were elab-orate tracts justifying the existence of absolute rule under the Romanov dynasty.


The best example of the dynastic approach to Russian history was the monu-mental twelve-volume Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskago (History of the Russian State,1818-29), by Nikolai M. Karamzin. Karamzin brought his historical coverage fromearliest times to 1613 - that is, to the founding of the Romanov dynasty. He por-trayed the Muscovite tsardom from the fourteenth to the late sixteenth century ascoincident with the era of Russia's greatest well-being, especially because it was atime when autocratic rule was supposedly at its height. 'Delivered by the princesof Moscow from the disaster of internecine wars as well as from the foreign yoke ...and satisfied with the uses of authority, the people did not argue over rights. ... Inthe end, all Russians began to look upon the tsar as a terrestrial god.'1 The directimplication was that Russia's nineteenth-century tsars should follow the autocraticexample of their Muscovite predecessors.

An indispensable part of glorifying any state or monarchy is proving its propergenealogical lineage and descent. This is what in our times Bernard Lewis has soaptly called the foundation myth: the need for countries and peoples and powers most of whom 'arise from humble origins' 'to improve or conceal their undis-tinguished beginnings and attach themselves to something older and greater.'2 Inthis regard, Russian historians could draw on a conceptual framework developed inthe fourteenth century by medieval churchmen. At that time, when the Muscovitestate was in its early stage of development, monastic scribes recopied earlier histor-ical chronicles, which they then 'improved' and expanded in order to show thedescent of their own secular rulers, the Muscovite princes, from the rulers of KievanRus', who belonged to a dynasty that could be traced back to the ninth-centurysemi-legendary ruler of Novgorod, Riuryk. The Muscovite princes were ostensiblythe direct descendants of the Riuryk dynasty, which after the early seventeenth cen-tury was continued by the Romanovs. The Riurykid genealogical scheme, whichargued for the historical continuity of Kievan Rus', Muscovy, and the RussianEmpire, was also given a prophetic ecclesiastical twist in the early sixteenth century,when a monk named Filofei sought an explanation for capture by Muscovy (1510)of his native western Russian city of Pskov. In the wake of the earlier fall ofConstantinople, the capital of the Eastern (second) Roman Empire, to the Otto-man Turks (1453), Filofei was content to explain that event and the catastrophethat later beset his native city as part of God's larger plan: 'All Christian empires willcome to an end and, in accordance with the prophetic books, will merge with theempire of our sovereign, that is, the Russian tsardom. For two Romes have fallen,and a third [Muscovite Russia] still stands, but a fourth shall never be.'3

By the nineteenth century, secular historians had begun to explain Russia'smanifest destiny in eastern Europe not with genealogical or religious criteria, butrather in terms of political and sociodemographic patterns. This new trend hadalready been heralded in Karamzin's multivolume history. Karamzin believed inthe unity of all the East Slavs, whom he referred to as the Russian people and whosefirst political center was Kiev. After the Mongol invasion of the mid-thirteenth cen-tury and the destruction of Kiev, the political and religious center of the 'Russian'people shifted north, first to Vladimir-na-Kliazma, then to Moscow, and finally, inthe early eighteenth century, to St Petersburg. This became in Russian history what


might be called the theory of the displacement of political centers. The 'mother ofRussian cities,' according to the popular image, was Kiev, and it was the duty of thedescendants of that mother to ensure that one day all the lands that were once partof Kievan 'Russia' would again be part of a unified Russian state. Since the Musco-vite princes were considered the rightful heirs of the Kievan inheritance, their sur-vival ensured that the historical destiny of the Russian people would be fulfilled.That destiny was the unification of Veliko-Rus' 'Great Russia', Belo-Rus' 'White Rus-sia', and Malo-Rus' 'Little Russia' - the biblical three in one.

Although Karamzin believed that the inhabitants of what he called Great,White, and Little Russia constituted a single Russian people, by the early nine-teenth century, linguistic and ethnographic research, together with the publica-tion of contemporary descriptions and travel accounts, was forcing many scholarsto realize that there were, indeed, considerable differences among the variouscomponents of the so-called one Russian people, in particular between the GreatRussians and the Little Russians, or Ukrainians. The confirmation of such differ-ences not only would undermine the idea of a single Russian people, but alsomight threaten the link between medieval Kiev and Moscow and thus render pre-carious the whole framework upon which the Russian imperial conception ofhistory was built. Hence, a suitable explanation for this potentially dangerous dis-crepancy had to be found.

The explanation was provided in the writings of Mikhail D. Pogodin, an influ-ential nineteenth-century historian and publicist for the Russian version of Pan-Slavism. In 1856, Pogodin put forth his depopulation theory, according to whichthe ancestors of the Muscovites had supposedly lived in the central (Dnieper-Ukrainian) lands of Kievan Rus' from the tenth through the twelfth century, buthad fled to the north after the Tatar invasion of the mid-thirteenth century. Later,in the thirteenth and, especially, fourteenth centuries, peasants from Polish- andLithuanian-controlled areas in the west came into barren Ukraine. This newimmigrant population represented the ancestors of the present-day Ukrainians.Thus, to Karamzin's theory of the displacement of political centers was addedPogodin's theory of shift in population.

This conception of the history of the East Slavs was adopted by perhaps themost influential of all Russian historians, Sergei M. Solov'ev, in his twenty-ninevolume Istoriia Rossii s drevnieishikh vremeri (History of Russia from Earliest Times,1851-79) and by Solov'ev's student Vasilii Kliuchevskii in his even more widelyread five-volume Kurs russkoi istorii (Course of Russian History, 1904-21). Accord-ing to Solov'ev, 'At the end of the twelfth century [Kiev] ... revealed its incapacityto develop any solid foundations for a single state. Following a definite path fromthe beginning, all the best elements of the land poured out of the southwesttoward the northeast. Settlement moved in the same direction and with it thecourse of history.'4 Solov'ev's deterministic view was complemented by Kliu-chevskii's stress on supposed psychological change:

As soon as the population of northern Rus' felt that Moscow was capable of becoming thepolitical center around which could unite its forces to struggle against the foreign enemy,


that the Moscow prince could be a national leader in this struggle, a drastic change tookplace in the minds of people and in their relations. ... All the suppressed and inarticulatenational and political aspirations of the Great Russian race, aspirations that had so longand so successfully sought means of self-expression, then met with the dynastic ambitionsof the grand duke of Moscow and carried him to the exalted height of national sovereignof Great Russia.5

The Russian conception of eastern Europe's history, as presented most ele-gantly in the works of Solov'ev and Kliuchevskii, continues to dominate most his-tories of Russia. It was the conception put forward by Russian emigre historians,the most influential of whom were George Vernadsky and Michael Florinsky, andit has been repeated in most textbooks of Russian history published in westernEurope and North America during the twentieth century. Consequently, in theseworks the history of Ukraine, if considered at all, is treated as the history of one ofRussia's provinces. Moreover, since the Kievan period is treated as an integral partof Russian history, Ukrainian history per se is considered to have begun in thefourteenth century at best, or in the seventeenth century. For some Russian writ-ers, the very concept of Ukrainian history is illogical, since it is considered simplya political idea born in the nineteenth century - an idea, moreover, which wasused by foreign powers like Germany and Austria to undermine the unity of theRussian state.

Finally, there is the view that the very idea of Russia without Little Russia, orUkraine, is inconceivable. The dean of twentieth-century Russian specialists ofKievan Rus', Dmitrii Likhachev, best summed up this attitude: 'Over the course ofthe centuries following their division into two entities, Russia and Ukraine haveformed not only a political but also a culturally dualistic unity. Russian culture ismeaningless without Ukrainian, as Ukrainian is without Russian,'6

The Polish historical viewpoint

Somewhat related to the classic Russian conception of eastern European history,although clearly having other goals, is the traditional approach of Polish writers tothe history of Ukraine. During the nineteenth century, Poland did not exist as anindependent state. In such circumstances, Polish political commentatorss andwriters frequently looked to the historical past in an attempt to explain why theyhad lost their statehood and perhaps to discover what should or should not bedone to regain independence in the future. In their search through Poland'spast, most frequently it was the seventeenth century and the problem of the Cos-sacks in what was then Polish-ruled Ukraine that was considered the crucial turn-ing point and beginning of the decline of Poland.

The Polish perception of Ukrainian history was greatly influenced in thedecades before World War I by Aleksander Jablonowski in his seven volumes ofhistorical studies (Pisma, 1910-13) and his Historya Rusi Poludniowej do upadku Rze-czypospolitej Polskiej (History of Southern Rus' until the Fall of the Polish Common-wealth, 1912). Despite his relative sympathy for Ukrainian national strivings in the


late nineteenth century, Jablonowski concluded that historically the Ukrainianlands had never constituted a distinct entity nor the population of Ukraine a dis-tinct people. Rather, in the sixteenth century, when Poland annexed Ukraine,Poles discovered an uncivilized frontier, into which they brought culture and stateformations. While they recognized there had been a high level of culture duringthe period of Kievan Rus', they did not consider it specifically Ukrainian. More-over, because Polish and Kievan princely families intermarried, and becausePoland controlled parts of the Rus' federation (especially its western border-lands) and even Kiev itself during certain periods, there arose the view, especiallyafter Poland's incorporation of most of the Ukrainian lands in 1569, that thePoles had a legal and historical right to the Kievan inheritance.

Polish writers also implicitly accepted Pogodin's theory of the depopulation ofUkraine (southern Rus') after the mid-thirteenth-century Mongol invasion. Intothis supposedly barren wilderness of the Ukrainian steppe (Polish: Dzikie Pole'Wild Fields') came settlers from the Polish- and Lithuanian-controlled lands ofGalicia and Volhynia. Even if most of these people were East Slavs, they wereunder the organizational leadership of the Polish state and manorial nobility.Moreover, the cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity of the populations thatcame under Polish rule was tolerated in what Polish writers were fond of referringto as the democracy of the republic of nobles and commonwealth headed bykings of the Jagiellonian dynasty.

The era of Jagiellonian rule, which lasted from 1385 to 1572, was considered toepitomize the ideal Polish system of government, supposedly characterized bydemocratic institutions and, in general, by religious and national tolerance.Assuming the existence of such an ideal state, Polish writers quite naturallystressed that the country's inhabitants, whatever their religious or cultural back-ground, eagerly strove to identify themselves as free citizens of the Polish com-monwealth. Within such a constellation, Ukraine, together with neighboringBelarus and Lithuania, was viewed simply as part of the eastern kresy, or border-lands, which had been fortunate enough to be included within that bastion ofwestern and Catholic civilization, Poland.

To be sure, there were times when these apparently peaceful and productive'borderlands of western civilization' (to quote the popular twentieth-centuryPolish-American historian Oscar Halecki) were struck by disturbances. Takingtheir cue from several monographs on the Cossacks and their most famousleader, Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi, by the early twentieth-century historian Fran-ciszek Rawita-Gawronski, Polish authors generally have presented these disturb-ances as little more than barbaric outbreaks caused by destructive elementsamong the uncivilized Ukrainian masses. Sometimes the outbreaks would resultin major upheavals, as during the Khmel'nyts'kyi revolution of the mid-seventeenth century or the haidamak uprisings of the eighteenth century. Afterthey were put down and foreign (Turkish, Tatar, or Muscovite) intervention wasrepelled, the Ukrainian frontier was rightfully restored to Poland as part of itscultural and political patrimony. This pattern lasted until the late eighteenth cen-tury, when Poland's Ukrainian lands were forcibly annexed by Russia and Austria,

i8 Introduction and Pre-Kievan Times

who joined with Prussia eventually to remove all of Poland from the map ofEurope.

In essence, Ukrainian lands, especially those west of the Dnieper River (theRight Bank, Volhynia, Galicia), were considered an integral part of Poland.Hence, when the nineteenth-century efforts to restore a Polish state finally cameto fruition in 1918, it was expected that its boundaries would 'quite naturally'encompass Ukrainian and other eastern borderland territories in a reincarnationof the Jagiellonian state that would stretch from the Baltic to the Black Sea. As itturned out, such territorial designs proved impossible to achieve when Europe'sboundaries were being redrawn after World War I. A quarter century later, how-ever, most Poles did expect that the Ukrainian-inhabited lands (eastern Galiciaand western Volhynia) ruled by Poland during the interwar years would bereturned to the reconstituted country at the close of World War II. Some Polishcircles, especially among political exiles in the West, even revived the idea of aPoland from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Whereas the peripheral nature of Ukrainian developments was generallyaccepted in traditional Polish historical and in popular perceptions before WorldWar II, after that time Polish historians, initially under the impact of Soviet politi-cal influence in east-central Europe and the dominance of the Marxist approachto scholarship, considerably reassessed their views. The Cossack period continuedto be of primary interest, but in the writings of postwar historians like LeszekPodhorodecki, Wladyslaw Serczyk, and Zbigniew Wojcik, Ukraine is no longertreated simply as an appendage to Poland, but rather as a country with a distincthistorical process from earliest times to the present. Nevertheless, old attitudesdie hard, and even today it is not uncommon to find in Polish public opinion theconviction that whatever was positive in the Ukrainian past came not from indige-nous forces but solely from the country's association with the ostensibly civilizinginfluence of Poland.

The Ukrainian historical viewpoint

The beginnings of a specifically Ukrainian perception of eastern Europe's histori-cal development can be said to coincide with the appearance of the first generalhistories of Ukraine in the eighteenth century. Despite their titles, which referredto the works as general histories of Little Russia, they were in fact accounts of theZaporozhian Cossacks during the sixteenth and, especially, seventennth centu-ries. The Zaporozhians and Ukraine were also the subject of major works byFrench (Jean-Benoit Scherer, 1788), German (Carl Hammersdorfer, 1789), andAustrian (Johann Christian von Engel, 1796) authors.

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the appearance of the first multi-volume histories of Ukraine, by Dmitrii Bantysh-Kamenskii (1822) and MykolaMarkevych (1842-43), both of whom stressed the role of the Zaporozhian Cos-sacks in the Ukrainian historical process. The most influential work of theperiod, however, was the Istoriia Rusov (History of the Rus' People, 1846), ofuncertain authorship, which first appeared in an unpublished form in the late


18205. The popularity and influence of this work were perhaps due to the factthat it was more a political tract than a history. The Istoriia Rusov was one of thefirst works to treat Ukraine not as a province of Russia or Poland, but rather as anindependent country going back to Kievan times. Accordingly, Ukraine attainedits greatest heights during the Cossack era, and it began to decline only in theeighteenth century after coming increasingly under Muscovite, later Russian,rule. The ability of the Istoriia Rusov to provide a clear sense of historical continu-ity for Ukraine was to have an enormous impact on historians as well as on thepoets, folklorists, and language enthusiasts active in the slowly emerging Ukrain-ian national revival.

The first half of the nineteenth century was also a time when the Romanticmovement reached Ukraine. Both professional and, in particular, amateur histo-rians were receptive to Romanticism's emphasis on the distinctive genius of indi-vidual peoples as an alternative to the previous and often exclusive emphasis ondynasties and state structures as the driving force of the historical process. Adopt-ing such populist-Romantic attitudes, a new generation of scholars led byMykhailo Maksymovych, Mykola Kostomarov, and, at least initially, PanteleimonKulish saw the Cossacks as the quintessential expression of the supposedly demo-cratic and egalitarian ideals of the Ukrainian people. The new tone was set asearly as the 18305 in Kostomarov's political program, published under the titleKnyhy bytiia ukrams'koho narodu (Books of Genesis of the Ukrainian People),which presented a personified Ukraine that 'loved neither the tsar nor the[Polish] lord and established a Cossack Host ... in which Cossacks were all equalamongst themselves.' Moreover, 'day after day the Cossack Host grew and multi-plied and soon people in Ukraine would all have become Cossacks, that is, all freeand equal.'7 This idyllic scenario did not work out, according to Kostomarov,because of the intervention of outside forces - Polish landlords, Muscovite tsars,Catholic popes, and Jesuits.

The view that the people were the driving force in history also led populist writ-ers to try to discover the peculiar genius of Ukrainians, and by so doing arrive atboth their uniqueness and their difference from Russians and Poles. Again, Kos-tomarov best summed up this approach in an article 'Dve russkie narodnosti'('Two Russian Nationalities,' 1861), which subsequently came to be regarded asthe gospel of Ukrainian nationalism.

Besides striving to depict the uniqueness of Ukrainians, an effort which under-mined the conceptual unity of the East Slavs, Ukrainian scholars began chippingaway at another aspect of the Russian historical conception, the ostensible linkbetween medieval Kievan Rus' and Muscovy. In response to Pogodin's argumentthat the population of the Kiev region moved north after the thirteenth-centuryTatar invasion, studies begun by Maksymovych (1857) and continued later byVolodymyr Antonovych (1882) and Mikhail Vladimirskii-Budanov (1890 and1893) seemed to prove convincingly that central Ukraine was not depopulated inthe fourteenth century, and that a society continued to function there until theCossacks created new social and governmental structures in the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries. But despite such seeming flaws in the traditional Russian

2O Introduction and Pre-Kievan Times

KOSTOMAROV ON UKRAINIANS, RUSSIANS,AND POLES

The following excerpts are from Mykola Kostomarov's 1861 article 'Dverusskie narodnosti' ('Two Russian Nationalities'), published in the short-livedSt Petersburg journal Osaova,The Ukrainians are characterized by individualism, the Great Russians by collec-tivism. ... In the political sphere, the Ukrainians were able to create among them-selves free forms of society which were controlled no more than was required fortheir very existence, and yet they were strong in themselves without infringing onpersonal liberties. The Great Russians attempted to build on a firm foundation acollective structure permeated by one spirit. The striving of the Ukrainians wastowards federation, that of the Great Russians towards autocracy and a firmmonarchy.

The Great Russian element has in it something grand and creative: the spirit oftotality, the consciousness of unity, the rule of practical reason. The Great Russiancan live through all adversities and select the hour when action is most fitting andcircumstances most favorable.

The Ukrainians lack such qualities. Their free spontaneity led them either to thedestruction of social forms or to a whirlpool of striving which dissipated nationalefforts in all directions. Such testimony about these two peoples is provided byhistory....

The relations between the Ukrainians and the Poles are quite different If, lin-guistically, Ukrainians are less close to the Poles than they are to the Great Rus-sians, in national character they are more akin to the Poles....

To be sure, there is a deep gulf which separates the Poles and the Ukrainians, agulf which may never be bridged. Poles and Ukrainians are like two branchesgrowing in opposite directions; one is pruned and has born refined fruit - thenobility; the other produced a peasantry. To put it more bluntly: the Poles are aris-tocratic while the Ukrainians are a democratic people. Yet these two labels do notreflect the histories of the two peoples: Polish aristocracy is very democratic;Ukrainian democracy is very aristocratic. The Polish nobility has tried to remainwithin the limitations of its own class; in Ukraine, on the other hand, the peoplehave equal status and rights and often produce individuals who climb much higherand attain more for themselves, but in turn are again absorbed by the mass of thepeople from which they stem. Here and there this struggle often weakens thesocial structure, providing an opportunity for another people, who know the valueof a strong community, to seize it.

SOURCE: Dmytro Doroshenko, Survey of Ukrainian Historiography I Annals of the Ukrainian Academy ofArts and Sciences, Vol. V-VI (New York 1957), pp. 137-139.


conception of eastern European history, the overall framework still seemedplausible.

The first serious challenge to the Russian conception came at the beginningof the twentieth century, from the pen of Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi. In 1904,Hrushevs'kyi published an article entitled 'The Traditional Scheme of "Russian"History and the Problem of a Rational Organization of the History of the EasternSlavs.' Continuing in the tradition of the Istoriia Rusov, he not only pointed outwhat he considered the illogical aspects of the Russian conception of the easternEuropean historical process, but also provided a framework for a Ukrainian his-torical continuum that according to him began even earlier than the Kievanperiod and lasted past the Cossack era.

Even before the appearance of his seminal article, Hrushevs'kyi had begun toelaborate his framework for Ukrainian historical continuity in what was tobecome the monumental ten-volume Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy (History of Ukraine-Rus', 1898-1937). Although the ten-volume work reached only the year 1658,Hrushevs'kyi also prepared several one-volume historical surveys which covereddevelopments from pre-Kievan times to the struggle for a 'renewed' independentUkrainian state just after World War I. Thus, in his article 'The TraditionalScheme' and his popular one-volume histories - all backed up by the erudition ofhis ten-volume scholarly magnum opus - Hrushevs'kyi provided, for the first time,a Ukrainian conception of eastern European history that could rival the domi-nant Russian one. While subsequent Ukrainian historians such as Dmytro Doro-shenko and Viacheslav Lypyns'kyi may have challenged many of the populistinclinations of Hrushevs'kyi in favor of a more statist approach to the past,Ukrainianists outside the borders of the former Soviet Union - first in interwarGalicia and later in western Europe and North America - have followedHrushevs'kyi's framework for the continuity of a distinct Ukrainian historicalprocess that begins in pre-Kievan times and lasts until the present.

The Soviet historical viewpoint

The work of a few Russian historians such as Aleksander Presniakov (1918) andMatvei K. Liubavskii (1929) was influenced by the arguments of Hrushevs'kyi.These scholars began to seek the origins of the Muscovite Russian state not inKiev but in the northeastern lands of Rostov, Suzdal', and Vladimir. However, theBolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the creation of the Soviet state interrupted thedevelopment of Russian historical scholarship. While Russian emigre historians,led by George Vernadsky, continued to work within the framework of the nine-teenth-century Russian historical conception of Solov'ev and Kliuchevskii, in theSoviet Union - in both Russia and Ukraine - a new version of an old interpreta-tion developed.

In Soviet Ukraine, at least during the 1920s, the Hrushevs'kyi school continuedunder the historian's personal direction (he had returned from exile in the Westto Kiev in 1924). Hrushevs'kyi's basic framework was retained even by SovietUkrainian Marxist historians like Matvii lavors'kyi, who otherwise was concerned


with emphasizing socioeconomic developments and the class struggle in Ukrain-ian history.

Beginning in the 19305, however, when Stalin decided to eliminate all vestigesof any ideology that was not in keeping with his Great Russian Bolshevik version ofMarxism, most of the members of the Ukrainian historical school, includingHrushevs'kyi, were exiled or imprisoned, and effectively silenced. Those who sur-vived were expected to accept the new interpretation of eastern European history.That new interpretation as it applied to the non-Russian nationalities of the SovietUnion was epitomized by the so-called lesser-evil formula.

In the new Bolshevik state, founded as it was on Marxist ideological principlesadjusted to local conditions by Lenin and Stalin, the nationality problem was anissue of primary concern. Leninist nationality policy did not permit the excessesof tsarist Russian nationalism, which had denied the very existence of Ukrainiansas a distinct nationality. While the Bolsheviks recognized Ukrainians as a national-ity, they nonetheless expected them to live with Russians in the same state. Hence,the old Leninist revolutionary slogan that tsarist Russia was a 'prison of peoples'had to be adjusted. A solution to this seemingly contradictory state of affairs wasthe theory of the 'lesser evil,' summed up by the former Soviet historian Konstan-tin Shteppa in the following manner: 'Although the annexation of non-Russianpeoples to Russia was an evil - particularly when annexation meant the loss oftheir national independence - it was a lesser evil by comparison with that whichcould be expected to have resulted from their annexation to some other largestate. Thus, Ukraine's annexation to Russia in the seventeenth century had to beregarded, according to this theory, as an evil, but a somewhat lesser evil thanabsorption by Poland, Turkey or - later - Sweden would have been.'8

To diminish even further the negative impact of this 'lesser evil,' Soviet Russianand Soviet Ukrainian historians emphasized, whenever and wherever possible, thefriendship between the two peoples, their relationship being presented - becauseRussia had always been stronger and thus the 'elder brother' - as having been par-ticularly beneficial to Ukrainians. The most outstanding example of this friend-ship between the 'brotherly Russian and Ukrainian peoples' was the so-called actof union reached at Pereiaslav in 1654, in which the Cossack leader BohdanKhmel'nyts'kyi pledged his loyalty to the tsar. In honor of its 3OOth anniversary in1954, the Pereiaslav act was celebrated with great pomp in the Soviet Union bymeans of various popular and scholarly events and numerous publications. Thedepiction of the act in Soviet textbooks graphically reveals the evolution of SovietMarxist historical perceptions, as in the following summary.

In 1928, a brief history of Ukraine by Matvii lavors'kyi proclaimed thatseventeenth-century Ukrainians 'did not know that a fate worse than that underthe [Polish] szlachta [nobility] awaited them in the future at the hands of the Mus-covite dvorianstvo [nobility] and its autocrat - the "white tsar".'9 In 1940, however,a textbook of Soviet history concluded that 'Ukraine's incorporation into the Rus-sian state was for her a lesser evil than seizure by Poland of the lords or Turkey ofthe sultans.'10 Finally, by the 19505, incorporation purely and simply 'signified areunion of two great brotherly peoples which was to save Ukraine from seizure by


Poland and Turkey.'11 The fact that the 1654 act was being hailed 300 years lateras an act of 'reunification' rather than union reveals how Soviet scholarship hadreturned to a variant of the pre-revolutionary Russian framework for understand-ing the history of eastern Europe.

According to the accepted Soviet historical framework, which was clung to as akind of dogma until the 19805, Kievan Rus' was the common cradle of all the EastSlavs. The political and cultural traditions of that medieval entity were subse-quently carried on most forcefully by the 'elder brother' - the Russians - firstthrough their Muscovite state, later through the Russian Empire, and mostrecently by its Soviet successor state. As for the common Kievan patrimony, it wasinhabited by what is described as the 'Old Russian nationality' (and its inhabitantsostensibly spoke the Old Russian language). Moreover, it was not until after theMongol invasion in the mid-thirteenth century, when the southern and westernRus' lands were 'torn away' from the rest of old Rus', that the Ukrainian and Bela-rusan territories began to develop separate existences while under the control ofLithuania and, later, Poland. Thus, according to the Soviet historical framework,the Ukrainian and Belarusan nationalities (and languages) began to be formedsometime between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Suggestions of a sepa-rate Ukrainian development before that time (whether in politics, language, ornational distinctiveness) were condemned as 'bourgeois nationalist' ideology.Such an ideology reflected the views of Hrushevs'kyi, whose historical scheme wasconsidered 'hostile,' 'reactionary,' and a 'threat' to another Soviet dogma - thecenturies-old unity and friendship between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples.

In summation, present-day perceptions of the history of eastern Europe and inparticular of Ukraine derive largely from historical frameworks formulated in thenineteenth century. These differ in varying degree according to whether authorswrote from a Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, or, by the twentieth century, Soviet per-spective. The Russian perception stresses a pattern of steady political growth,which begins in so-called Kievan Russia in medieval times and subsequently is con-tinued by the displacement of political centers and population to the north - firstto Vladimir-na-Kliazma, then to Moscow and St Petersburg, and finally back toMoscow under the hegemony of the Soviet state. In such a framework, Ukrainehas no independent historical existence.

The traditional Polish perception also fails to allow for a distinct Ukrainian his-torical process, since Ukraine is considered to be no more than a borderland ofPolish civilization. Most of Ukraine, especially the territories west of the DnieperRiver, is viewed as an integral part of Poland in which the only redeeming politicaland cultural developments of the past were those undertaken by the 'defenders ofwestern civilization,' the Poles.

The Ukrainian perception sees the formation of a Ukrainian ethos even beforethe ninth century and the beginning of medieval Kievan Rus'. Moreover, Kiev'spopulation was not entirely dispersed after the mid-thirteenth-century Mongolinvasion, a time when Rus' civilization shifted only slightly westward, to Galiciaand Volhynia, before returning to Dnieper Ukraine in the form of a Cossack polit-


ical entity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rus'-Ukrainian civiliza-tion was subsequently continued in the form of a national revival in thenineteenth century and the achievement - albeit short-lived - of independence inthe twentieth century.

After World War II, the Soviet view became a variant of the pre-revolutionaryRussian view. Kievan Rus' came to be seen as the cradle of all the East Slavs,although the Russian branch was depicted as the elder protector of the other two(the Belarusan and the Ukrainian) against the imperialistic tendencies of Polandand the Ottoman Empire before the eighteenth century and against westernEuropean powers, especially Germany, in the twentieth century.

Scholars in the West, particularly in the United States, have essentially adoptedthe traditional Russian view of the history of eastern Europe. Kievan Rus', Mus-covy, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union are all seen as part of a singlehistorical continuum and are referred to in popular and often in professionalliterature simply as Russia. Those who accept the traditional Russian view are, inturn, quick to dismiss the framework of Ukrainian history formulated by Hru-shevs'kyi and his successors with arguments that Ukrainian writings are suspectbecause they serve the political interests either of former anti-Soviet cold warriorsor of extreme anti-Russian local nationalists. The rest of this volume will be lessconcerned with adopting or denying any of the existing frameworks than with try-ing to present in a basically chronological sequence the events that have takenplace from roughly the first millennium before the common era (BCE) to thepresent on the territory of what, since December 1991, is the independent repub-lic of Ukraine.

The Steppe Hinterland and theBlack Sea Cities

The first period of Ukrainian history, or, more precisely, prehistory, lasted fromabout 1150 BCE to 850 CE. These twenty-one centuries of human development onUkrainian territory witnessed a slow evolution from primitive agricultural andnomadic civilization to more advanced societies that attempted to create centrallyorganized state and socioeconomic structures. During these millennia, Ukrainianterritory was divided into two rather distinct spheres: (i) the vast steppe andforest-steppe zones of the hinterland, and (2) the coastal regions of the Black Seaand Sea of Azov. While in each of these spheres there were quite different socio-economic and political structures, the two were closely linked in a symbiotic rela-tionship based on a high degree of economic interdependence.

In general, the hinterland was inhabited by sedentary agriculturalists ruled bydifferent nomadic military elites who most often originated from the steppes ofCentral Asia. The Black Sea coast, on the other hand, was characterized by theestablishment of Greek and, later, Romano-Byzantine cities that either functionedas independent city-states or joined in federations that had varying degrees ofindependence or that were dependent on the Greek, Roman, or Byzantine home-lands to the south. In effect, the Black Sea coastal cities functioned for over twomillennia as appendages or dependencies, whose economic, social, and culturalorientation was toward the classical civilizations of the Aegean and MediterraneanSeas.

The steppe hinterland

The earliest information about the steppe hinterland and its inhabitants comesfrom contemporary Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Arab writers, who almostinvariably painted negative descriptions of fierce barbarians from the east whoseonly purpose in life was to destroy the achievements of the civilized world as rep-resented by Greece and, later, Rome and the Byzantine Empire. The few writtensources from this early era give a general picture of an unending swarm of 'bar-baric' Asiatic peoples with strange-sounding names such as Cimmerians, Scythi-ans, Sarmatians, Alans, Huns, Avars, Bulgars, and Khazars, who successively ruled

3


the steppe hinterland before being driven out by the next nomadic invaders. Tobe sure, recent archaeological discoveries, especially during the twentieth cen-tury, have revealed that these nomadic peoples were neither as uncivilized nor asbent on destruction as the classical Greek and Romano-Byzantine writers madethem out to be. In fact, the civilizations established by these nomads from the eastwere often directed to maintaining a stable environment that would allow theirincome from trade and commerce to increase.

Before turning to the chronological evolution during these two millennia(1150 BCE to 850 CE), a few general caveats should be kept in mind. When consid-ering the various nomadic groups and their invasions of the Ukrainian steppe, thereader may form the impression - and misconception - that the fierce warriorscoming from Central Asia belonged to compact tribes each made up of a particu-lar people. Moreover, it might seem that these nomads entered territory north ofthe Black Sea that was uninhabited, and that a particular tribe remained as thesole inhabitants until pushed out by another nomadic people, who, in turn, tooktheir place and began the demographic cycle all over again. Such a scenario doesnot reflect what really occurred.

First of all, the Ukrainian steppe was never virgin uninhabited land into whichnomadic hordes poured. Archaeological evidence has shown that the steppe and,for that matter, all Ukrainian territories were inhabited throughout the StoneAge, from its earliest (the Paleolithic, ca. 200,000-8,000 BCE) to its most recent(the Neolithic, ca. 5,000-1,800 BCE) stage. The most important change duringthese hundreds of millennia occurred at the beginning of the Neolithic period(ca. 5,OOO BCE), when the inhabitants of Ukraine changed their means of liveli-hood from hunting and mobile food-gathering to the cultivation of cereals andthe raising of livestock. This sedentary and agricultural way of life continued gen-erally without interruption through the Neolithic or Bronze Age (ca. 2,500-1,800BCE), which is also known on Ukrainian territory as the era of late Trypillianculture.

The end of the Neolithic or Copper Age was accompanied by a change in therelatively stable and isolated existence of sedentary communities in Ukraine. Thischange took place because during the second millennium BCE, Ukrainian landswere exposed to the movement of peoples from east-central Europe, to the arrivalof traders from the Aegean and Oriental lands, and, finally, to the disrupting inva-sions of steppe peoples from the east. Nonetheless, both before and during theperiod 1150 to 850 BCE there were always fixed settlements throughout Ukrainianterritory inhabited by people who derived their livelihood from agriculture andthe raising of livestock and, secondarily, from hunting and fishing.

The other misconception about this period

Documents

A History of Ukraine, 2nd Edition