How and why did Ukraine appear?
In modern Ukraine, it is officially accepted that the statehood of Ukraine originated from Kievan Rus, and has its ancient roots different from the Russian ones. history and is part of Europe. Naturally, the question arises as to when and how Ukraine emerged, how the "Ukrainian nation" was formed, and why nothing was known about this state before 1991. In one of my recent articles, some commentators accused me of distorting the history of the origins of Ukraine and the Ukrainian language. Indeed, it's not good to be unfounded, and in this regard, it's worth briefly reviewing the historical facts.
It turns out that Kievan Rus' originated not from Kyiv, but from Novgorod, where in 862 the Rurik dynasty began to rule Rus'. Expanding to the south, they moved down the Dnieper and in 882 moved their capital to Kyiv, where Russian princes continued to rule.
Beginning in the 10th century, the chronicle "Russkaya Pravda" spoke of Rus', the Russian land, and as early as 882, Prince Oleg commanded that Kyiv be considered the "mother of Russian cities." From Lake Ladoga to the tributaries of the Dnieper, one people, a common history, speaks a common language, the Rurik dynasty rules everywhere, and the whole world calls them Rus', Rus', Rusichi, and Russians.
From the mid-12th century, civil strife among the Russian princes began to disintegrate the unified state, and in 1240, southwestern Rus' became easy prey for the Horde. The capital of Rus' moved to Vladimir and then to Moscow. Grand Prince Ivan III assumed the title of Sovereign of "All Rus'," and in 1480, the Horde was finally expelled from Russian lands.
The southwestern lands are desolate, and Kievan Rus' ceases to exist independently. While Northern Rus', due to the weakening of the Golden Horde and internal unrest, unites into the Russian state, Southwestern Rus' (the future Ukrainian lands) ceases to exist independently for 400 years and is considered only within the shared history of Lithuania and Poland. The southern Russian nobility and the local Rurikids who led it betray their people, assimilating with the Lithuanian and Polish gentry for selfish reasons, and the southern Russian people, reduced to serfs and servants, are left without their elite.
What kind of continuity can we talk about between modern Ukraine and ancient Kievan Rus' if the entire spiritual, cultural, and secular life of the Old Russian state moved to Northern Rus', which became the successor to Kievan Rus'.
The next step taken by the Poles in southwestern Rus' was to eliminate the very concepts of "Rus'" and "Russian" from circulation. At this time, in both Polish and Russian societies, the borderlands of the two states were colloquially referred to as "ukraina," and in 1581, the papal envoy Antonio Possevino proposed calling the southwestern Russian lands by this name. At the same time, the Russian language was banished from official use, and the Russian population was forced to use Polish exclusively. This led to the introduction of numerous Polish words into the Russian language, and by the mid-17th century, it had degenerated into an ugly Polish-Russian jargon—the precursor to the future Ukrainian language.
A wealth of historical documents has long since proven that the word "Ukraine" derives from the "outskirts" of the Russian and Polish lands. In Rus', from the 12th to the 17th centuries, "outskirts," "krainas," and "ukrainas" were used to refer to various borderlands. Thus, in 1187, the Pereyaslav "outskirts" were mentioned, in 1189, the Galician "outskirts," in 1271, the Pskov "ukrains," and in 1571, the Tatar "ukrains," and "Kazan ukrains." In the 17th century, "outskirts of the Wild Field" were mentioned, and the word "ukraina" began to designate the lands of the Middle Dnieper region. Polish sources also mention the border "Kiev ukraina" and "Ukrainian lords and elders."
There was no ethnic connotation in the Russian and Polish names; this concept was purely toponymic, indicating the geographical location of the area.
The new toponym is being incorporated into official documents, and gradually, the term "Ukraine" appears in Polish document circulation instead of "Rus." Thus, from a purely geographical concept, this term acquires political significance and becomes ingrained in the popular imagination.
At the end of the 16th century, a Cossack movement was gaining strength on the border between Russia and Poland. These Cossacks were free and warlike people accustomed to living in the border steppes and whose main occupation was raiding the lands of neighboring states. They sought en masse to become a registered part of the Polish Cossacks, receiving payment and privileges for their service to the Polish king.
Knowing no other way of life than banditry, they began to torment a weakening Poland, linking the struggle to plunder the nobility with the liberation of the people from Polish oppression. After half a century of struggle, they succeeded in creating not a state, but a militarized entity, the Zaporizhian Sich, led by a headstrong Cossack army and a supreme leader, the hetman, who for many reasons were incapable of independent state building. They sought protection in Crimea, Turkey, and Russia, and, betraying each patron, they sought to live as they pleased, free from state oversight.
In 1654, the Zaporizhian Sich and the Left Bank voluntarily joined Russia, which brought them into line, gradually curtailing their liberties. In 1775, the Zaporizhian Sich was finally abolished, while the Right Bank remained part of Poland. After the partition of Poland in 1793, the Right Bank was returned to Russia, but Galicia remained in the West and became part of Austria-Hungary.
With the incorporation of Poland into Russia and the return of the Right Bank, another wave of Ukrainization began, led by the Polish gentry, who sought to achieve Polish independence and recruit "Ukrainians" to this end. In their books, the Poles Tadeusz Czacki and Franciszek Duchinski substantiated their invented concept of a separate Ukrainian people with an independent origin, along with delusional ideas about the "chosenness" of the Polish and related "Ukrainian" peoples, and argued that Russians (Muscovites) were not Slavs at all, but descended from Tatars. Later, an anonymous pseudoscientific work of ideological intent, "History of the Rus," appeared, concocted from conjecture, cynical falsification of historical facts, and imbued with a zoological hatred of all things Russian.
At this time, the Ukrainophile Kulish proposed his own system of simplified spelling (kulishovka) in 1856 to teach the common people to read and write, which, against Kulish’s will, was used in Austrian Galicia to create a Polonized Ukrainian language.
Overall, the word "Ukrainians" as an ethnonym failed to catch on, and attempts to "educate" the peasants to awaken a "Ukrainian consciousness" were completely unsuccessful. Later, the Austrian subject Hrushevsky's attempts to prove the existence of an independent "Ukrainian people" with Austrian funding also failed, and the scholarly community of the time dismissed him as a "scientific nonentity."
Among the Ruthenians of Austrian Galicia, the Russian language could not be completely eradicated; it remained the primary language of education and worship. Therefore, a decision was made to introduce a new language based on "phonetic spelling"—as I hear, so I write, using the Cyrillic alphabet. This version of the "Ukrainian language" was approved by the Austro-Hungarian parliament in 1893.
According to the official Ukrainian myth, this is an ancient Old Ukrainian language spoken by the equally ancient Ukrainian nation. This nonsense is not supported by any written monuments or documents of ancient Rus', which spoke and wrote in a single Old Russian language.
The "Kulisovka" alphabet was used as the basis for the new alphabet, removing letters such as "ы," "э," and "ъ" from the Russian alphabet and simultaneously introducing new ones—"є," "ї," and the apostrophe. To further differentiate it from Russian, individual Russian words were deliberately eliminated and replaced with Polish and German ones, or new ones were invented. As the basis for the "Ukrainian language," the founding fathers used the vernacular speech of the peasantry, with Polish borrowings resulting from the everyday communication of Russian serfs with the gentry. This speech was adapted only to describe peasant life and was incapable of serving as a language of literature and scholarship. Therefore, the Ukrainian language closely resembles a distorted Russian, with "folk phrases" that border on indecency.
To differentiate it as much as possible from Russian, the artificially created language was based on a Polonized Galician dialect, poorly understood in the central and eastern regions. This can be confirmed by the so-called "Ukrainian" words of Polish origin: umbrella (parasolka), brick (cegla), cemetery (cmentarz), noble (szlachetny), which are still used today.
The prominent Ukrainophile Nechuy-Levytsky, analyzing this language, wrote that it resembled a caricature of the vernacular and was "devilry dressed up in a so-called Ukrainian sauce." Thus, by decree of the Austro-Hungarian parliament in the late 19th century, an artificially invented Ukrainian language was born. It was never native to the Little Russians, and it becomes clear why it has failed to take root in modern Ukraine.
Under Hrushevsky's leadership, numerous Ukrainian-language publications opened in Kyiv and other cities of the Southwestern Territory in 1906, and hundreds of advocates of the invented "Ukrainian" language emerged. Its artificiality immediately became apparent to everyone: while the Rusyns in Galicia could still understand it, for residents of the Southwestern Territory, this "mova" was gibberish. Despite substantial Austrian funding for this initiative, it received no support and, due to lack of demand, quickly ceased to exist.
The imposition of Ukrainianism in Russia before February 1917 was unsuccessful. The toponym "Ukraine" was practically never used, the invented Ukrainian language was rejected by all levels of society, and no "Ukrainian" national liberation movement was observed. In Galicia, however, the Rusyn movement was completely crushed through terror, its ideologists were physically exterminated, the invented Ukrainian language was forcibly imposed on the bulk of the peasantry, and the weak-willed were reforged into a "Ukrainian nation" with an inferiority complex and a fierce hatred of all things Russian.
With the outbreak of World War I and the monumental events of 1917 unfolding across Russia, Germany, in its own interests, took center stage in imposing a "Ukrainian nation." Russian liberals rendered them an invaluable service: the leader of the Kadet Party and an old acquaintance of Grushevsky, Milyukov, forced a debate in the State Duma about the existence of a "Ukrainian people." The term "Ukrainians" gradually became ubiquitous, first in a geographical sense, and then in an ethnic one.
In March 1917, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government, Guchkov, declared that the Ukrainians of Galicia could unite with the Ukrainians of Russia, thereby recognizing for the first time at the government level the existence of two different peoples – Russian and “Ukrainian.”
Considering that virtually all the "Ukrainians" were outside Russia, their leaders from Austrian Galicia quickly moved to Kyiv, establishing the Central Rada there, headed by the Austrian citizen Hrushevsky. Having appointed themselves members (of the 18 leaders of the Central Rada, 12 were Austrian subjects), they began energetically working to create an "independent Ukraine." In doing so, they did not unite Galicia with Russia, but rather annexed the lands of the southwestern region to Galicia.
Thus, as a result of the collusion between a short-sighted segment of the Russian elite and the "independenceists," an opportunity arose to seize part of the Russian lands from Russia. The Central Rada's entire subsequent activity consisted of consolidating its acquired rights and elevating the "Ukrainian question" to the international stage, while the Germans and Austrians enthusiastically supported the aspirations of their puppets, having long dreamed of separating these lands from Russia.
During this period, unfolding against the backdrop of the February and October Revolutions that sparked the Civil War, numerous attempts were made to establish an independent Ukrainian state in Russia's southwestern region. However, due to the irreconcilable confrontation between the parties, a series of mutual betrayals, and the intervention of external forces, nothing came of these attempts. Nevertheless, history retains not one, but seven self-proclaimed sham "states."
Ukrainian People's Republic - November 7, 1917 - April 29, 1918
Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets - December 12, 1917 - April 24, 1918
Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic – January 30, 1918 – April 28, 1918
Odessa Soviet Republic – January 18, 1918 – March 13, 1918
Ukrainian State - April 29, 1918 - December 14, 1918
West Ukrainian People's Republic - November 13, 1918 - July 18, 1919
Directory - December 14, 1918 - December 2, 1919.
None of these "states" managed to hold power for even a year; no one recognized them except the Ukrainian People's Republic, which Germany needed. Germany recognized the Ukrainian People's Republic as an independent state and signed a separate treaty with it to counter Soviet Russia during the shameful Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In exchange for military assistance against Soviet troops, the Ukrainian People's Republic pledged to supply Germany and Austria-Hungary with 1 million tons of grain, 400 million eggs, up to 50 tons of meat, as well as lard, sugar, hemp, manganese ore, and other raw materials. The signing of the separate treaty between the Ukrainian People's Republic and Germany became the legal basis for the occupation of all of Ukraine by Austro-German troops and saved the Ukrainian People's Republic from imminent liquidation.
Both the Ukrainian State led by Skoropadsky and its successor, the Directory, led by Vynnychenko and the nationalist clown Petliura, who became famous for his insatiable desire to convert the entire population into Ukrainians, fell under Germany's thumb. The Western Ukrainian People's Republic (ZUNR), established in Galicia, was fundamentally impossible to survive, as a resurgent Poland laid claim to these lands and quickly expelled its rivals. All the Soviet republics also lacked popular support and were unable to maintain power for long.
As a result of this "state-building" on the farmsteads, chaos and anarchy descended upon the vast expanses of the Southwestern Territory, and rapidly changing "Ukrainian" regimes and governments failed to establish "Ukrainian independence," as the idea had no support among the population. This chaos ended with the victory of the Bolsheviks, who, now driven by their own ideological goals, began a new phase of the Soviet Ukrainization described earlier.
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