Ukraine and Russia: The Backstory

As readers all must know, there is at least some possibility that World War III will begin within the next few days or weeks if Russia invades Ukraine and NATO, including our own nation, rushes to its defense. As I write these words, that possibility still seems unlikely. But, of course, who wouldn’t have thought it unlikely a century and a decade ago that the assassination of a single Austrian man in 1914 would lead to a world-wide conflagration that would last for years and eventually cost the lives of well over 17 million people? What really will happen if Russian troops cross the border into Ukraine, I have no idea. I don’t think anyone really does, including not the Russians themselves. But what I want to write about today is not specifically about the various scenarios that could plausibly ensue if Russia attempts to annex, or even just temporarily to occupy, Ukraine. Instead, I’d like to talk about the shocking—to me, at least—lack of perspective even people writing in our most respected newspapers and websites seem content to allow to form the basis of their analysis of the situation.

To read most of the article and essays that I’ve come across about the Ukraine crisis, you would think that Russia and Ukraine are “just” two contiguous countries that happen to share a common border, like Bolivia and Peru or Italy and Switzerland. Starting from that vantage point, it is simple for authors to find the idea of Russia launching a full-scale invasion of its neighbor to the south inexplicable. But the reality is far more complicated than anyone seems to know. For one thing, the backstory goes back centuries. In other words, what we are watching on CNN these evenings is the thousandth page in a novel still being written. And just as one could hardly just jump into an unfinished novel on page 1000 and get the gist of what’s going on with any sort of accuracy, so is it not really possible to understand what’s going on between Russia and Ukraine without getting a running leap into the story by stepping back in history and attempting to understand today’s details in terms of the larger picture to which they belong. Of course, most American know more or less nothing about Russian, let alone Ukrainian, history. Maybe about the Russian Revolution a little. But the history of pre-Communist Russia is a mystery to most. And the even-more-obscure history of Ukraine is well known, as far as I can see, almost to none.

I begin more than a thousand years ago in the tenth century. Kievan Rus, compromising all of western Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and eastern Poland, is the largest nation in Europe. Its capital is in Kyiv, formerly known to most of us as Kiev, the capital of today’s Ukraine. The principal players—who set the table at which both Russians and Ukrainians still dine—are famous abroad but unknown here. Vladimir the Great, for example, reigned from 980 to 1015 and brought Christianity to his nation. His son, Yaroslav the Wise, ruled over the kingdom at the greatest limits of its power and size. But it wasn’t to last: the ethnic groups within the nation were too eager to assert their own autonomy and the unified nation had already begin seriously to disintegrate when the Mongol hordes arrived from the east and completely devastated the nation, burning Kyiv to the ground in 1240 and massacring its citizens.

There followed all sorts of attempts to recreate the original nation. There was no nation called Russia and none called Ukraine, but there were successor states to Kievan Rus that too appear to be unfamiliar to almost all today, including the columnists I read the most regularly.

Where Russia is today, there emerged something called the Grand Duchy of Moscow, which did not manage to achieve real independence until King Ivan III (called “the Great”) finally threw off all foreign domination and united most of today’s Russia under his rule. But it was his son, Ivan IV (called “the Terrible”) who first proclaimed himself czar in 1547 as a way of asserting his legitimate right to rule over his world as the emperor of Rome once did over his. (The Russian word tsar, written in English either as tsar or czar, is the equivalent of the Latin caesar, just as is the German equivalent, Kaiser.)

Where Ukraine is today arose a nation called Galicia-Volhynia. The rest of what had been Kievan Rus was united by a man called Danylo Romanovych into a country called Ruthenia with its capital at Kyiv, in its day the most powerful state in Eastern Europe. But this situation too didn’t last. King Casimir III of Poland invaded Galicia-Volhynia in the mid-fourteenth century and annexed those land to his own. In the meantime, the Lithuanians invaded Ruthenia and annexed it to its own nation. From that point on, the story becomes so complicated that it’s almost impossible to follow at all, let alone easily. In 1386, Poland and Lithuania joined together in something later called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and ruled over most of today’s Russia and Ukraine. In the meantime, the Cossacks began to form armed militias with the specific intention of wrestling control of the territory from foreign domination. But this was also the period when the Tartars began to invade from the east, taking huge numbers of Ukrainian and Russian peasants into the slave trade, eventually selling and deporting as many as two million peasants as slaves. Finally, in 1648, Bogdan Chmyelnitski and Petro Doroshenko led a massive revolt that resulted in the establishment, for the first time, of some version of Ukrainian autonomy. (It was also a terrible time for the Jews—who recall the years 1648 and 1649 as a time of mass slaughter of innocents on a scale that would only be matched three hundred years later during the Shoah.) But then, in 1654, Chmyelnitski offered to put his entire country under the control of Czar Alexis, who accepted only too gratefully. This led to another Russo-Polish War (there had already been several), as a result of which today’s Ukraine was split into two parts, leaving only the eastern part of the country under Russian rule.

From that point on, the story becomes even more complicated. Cossacks, Mongols, Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, Genoans, Austrians and any number of others vied with each other to control some or another part of Ukraine. (There was no actual country called Ukraine, of course.) A period of history in the mid-seventeenth century called “The Ruin” featured a war between Russia, Poland, the Crimean Khanate (don’t ask where this came from), Cossacks, and the Ottoman Empire that brought death to hundreds of thousands and was only concluded with the signing of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace (hah!) in 1686 that basically divided up today’s Ukraine between Poland and Russia. And mixed in with all of this are the three separate so-called Partitions of Poland that took place in 1772, 1793, and 1795, decisions forced on the Poles that brought half of today’s Ukraine under Austrian rule and the other half under the rule of Russia. Eventually, this led to Ukrainians entering the First World War on both sides: about 3.5 million Ukrainians fighting with the Russians and about a quarter-million fighting with the Austrians.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 freed the area from all foreign domination except by Russia. And then, and for the first time, a series of Ukrainian entities began to exist: the Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1917, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, and several others. The Polish-Ukraine War of 1918 and 1919, ended with the so-called Peace of Riga according to which western Ukraine became part of Poland and the rest joined the USSR as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a theoretically independent nation that was actually a puppet-state totally and absolutely under the thumb of their Russia overlords. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in the early 1990s, Ukraine finally—and one could even say for the first time—became an independent state in the way the term is normally used by most people today.

None of any of this appears to be known to the people whose political essays I read in the newspapers I read and online news sources I frequent, all of which seem to consider that Ukraine and Russia are “merely” neighboring states with no back history at all. You can trust me that I’ve only skimmed the surface here—the actual story is a thousand times more complicated and difficult to follow. (No wonder they don’t teach any of this in high school!) But the result is a nation of pundits, op-ed piece writers, and columnists attempting to analyze the events of the day almost in a vacuum.

The relationship between Russia and Ukraine is almost un-unravelable. No nation has ever been dissected so many times and by so many different peoples than Ukraine…or that would be the case had Ukraine ever actually existed. The Ukrainians clearly have the same right to self-determination that any nation has…but even that is a complicated thought since the world completely arbitrarily awards that right to some but not to others. (Oh yeah? Just ask a Chechen, a Basque, a Navaho, an Inuit, a Uighur, a Rohingya, a Lapp, or an Ainu what they think. Or, if it were only possible, ask any of the Jews interned by the Brits for the crime of wishing to live freely and autonomously in their own homeland before 1948.) The Russians’ interest here seems to be purely imperialistic: they wish to dominate a neighboring state because they deem that to serve their own best interests. But to leave it at that without considering carefully the thousand years of history that go into the reality we see on today’s map—that also seems a bit naïve.

To understand Putin’s thinking about Ukraine, you need to know the backstory. You can actually read an essay on the topic by Putin himself entitled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” that is posted on the website of the President of Russia. (Click here to take a look.) It is unconvincing, its logic self-serving and rooted in the past rather than the present. Or at least that’s how it reads to me. But Putin’s essay—which is certainly worth reading—is deeply rooted in the history outlined above, which is why I’ve chosen this week to write at least cursorily about the details hiding behind the story unfolding on our screens now daily.