The search for identity
The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy
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WHAT WAS the worst mistake made in Tsarist Russian foreign policy, asked Solzhenitsyn. His answer was: the handing back to Austria, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, of eastern Galicia. This takes some explaining. The Austrians had taken southern Poland – Galicia – after 1772. Its eastern part was Orthodox, not Roman Catholic, and in 1809 the Russians, then in alliance with Napoleon against Austria, had annexed it. In 1814 they gave it back. In time, it became a centre of Ukrainian nationalism, which Solzhenitsyn rightly saw as the greatest tool in the hands of Russia’s enemies. The bulk of its inhabitants in 1815 counted as Ruthenes – the word comes from the Polish dog-latin for ‘Russian’ – but in time they became identified as Ukrainian. Over the Russian border there was a vast area called ‘Ukraine’, which means ‘on the edge’, and Tsar Alexis Mikhailovitch, father of Peter the Great, had taken it over from the Poles in the 17th century. His claim was in part historical, in that Kiev, the capital, counted as ‘mother of Russian cities’, and in mediaeval times its rulers had run a great state that had adopted Orthodoxy, as distinct from the Catholicism of Poland, also at the time a great state. But ‘Edgia’ was flat and open to cavalry armies, the Polish-russian clash being complicated by Turkish and Tatar raids; and the locals produced their own legendary horsemen, the Cossacks, who figure largely in Ukrainian nationalism.
They came to terms with Tsar Alexis, and as ‘Little Russians’, were a vastly important part of the Tsarist Empire. In 1914, they accounted for a good half of Russian industry, and the bulk of Russia’s agricultural exports. In 1918 the Ger- mans forced defeated Russia to recognise an independent Ukraine, which returned to Russia after their defeat. In 1991 when the Soviet Union fell apart, the Ukraine became independent and dropped its ‘the’. Its history since then has not been very happy. What are its natural borders? Is it European (i.e. German) or Russian?
Most Russians have a Ukrainian grandmother or great-aunt (as most English people have something Scottish somewhere) and cannot take an independent Ukraine very seriously. The language is a mixture of Polish and Russian, the latter predominating the further east you go, and the Ukrainian contribution to Russian culture is immense, from Gogol and Bulgakov to Svyatoslav Richter and David Oistrakh. Cossacks were a formidable part of the Tsars’ army. In the Russian Ukraine, there was no religious difference, and Kiev, with the Cave Monastery, was a sort of Orthodox Canterbury. Russians naturally see it as an artificial country, and in 1914 they dismissed the language as ‘jargon’. Here, they were not entirely right. Professor Plokhy does not refer to David Saunders’ The Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture (1985) but it was for this reviewer an eye-opener. Ukrainians benefited from a Polish, Catholic education, and flourished in the uncouth Moscow of 1730; a Ukrainian accent was the thing to have, and Ukrainian noble dynasties were formed – Bezborodko, Razumovsky. Then, as Baltic Germans took over, Kiev became a backwater. St Petersburg established itself as the capital, and Russia experienced a cultural refulgence. Peasants spoke Ukrainian, and a Russian view of it appears in Bulgakov’s White Guard, where he sends it up, more or less as Evelyn Waugh sends up Welsh in Decline and Fall. It is irritating of Professor Plokhy, a professional historian, to eschew historical names, like Kiev and Odessa, in favour of peasant versions, though he clings to the obsolete German form for the River Dnieper.
If events had taken a normal course, the Russian Ukraine would probably just have become Russian. But they did not. Stalin imposed a great famine on the peasantry, and Professor Plokhy is very good on this horrible subject. The Ukrainians were good farmers, and did not want the collectivisation of agriculture that Stalin imposed. When they resisted, he removed even their seedgrain, and in 1932–33 millions starved to death or were transported to inhospitable places in Central Asia. This left a legacy of hatred, which was expressed in the Second World War, when Ukrainians often collaborated with Nazis, until the Nazis’ methods alienated them. The country had experienced helter-skelter industrialisation, and many Ukrainians flourished in Communist Moscow (the French proverb ‘the north works and the south governs’ applies surprisingly