It embodies the values of democracy, freedom, individualism, private initiative, and national pride. In this narrative, the Russian state lords over its citizens and imbues them with a false sense of pride and greatness, whereas Ukraine appears as the antithesis of Russia. In its imperial and Soviet guises, Russia looms over Ukrainian history as a colonial force of exploitation, assimilation, repression, and humiliation. For Ukrainians, the principal other, of course, has been Russia. Few notions of national identity exist without some kind of other, an opposing force against which the nation can be defined.
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This vision of Ukrainian history is full of striving dreamers, Ukrainians who sacrificed for their country and fought against many external oppressors. This narrative has become the basis for contemporary Ukraine’s school curriculum, civic education, and official historiography. They note that Ukrainians have a culture, a language, and religious traditions distinct from their neighbors. They see Ukraine as the successor to not just the briefly independent republic but to a thousand years of kingdoms, principalities, and other forms of states. Today, many Ukrainians imagine their country through the framework that Hrushevsky put in place. Hrushevsky was not just the father of modern Ukrainian nationalism and history but also a key political actor, the inaugural president of the first Ukrainian parliament from 1917 to 1918, and the spiritual leader of the national revolution that led to the creation of an independent Ukrainian republic between 19.
Hrushevsky’s vision of Ukrainian identity had much in common with similar schemes in eastern Europe: it was ethnocentric, teleological (insofar as it treated Ukrainian nationhood as the inevitable outcome of centuries of history), and powerful in its ability to mobilize broad swaths of people. That revival set the stage for a modern, independent Ukraine to join the family of nations in the twentieth century. Ukrainians did not surrender to this imperial domination just as other eastern European intellectuals turned to national liberation and self-determination in the nineteenth century, so, too, did Ukrainian thinkers and writers seek to revive their nation by constructing a modern language and a master narrative of their nation’s history. But by the nineteenth century, the territory of Ukraine was largely divided between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. Various Ukrainian polities followed, including the principality of Galicia-Volhynia and the kingdom of Ruthenia in the medieval period and a Cossack state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ukraine, as both a nation and a state, had its roots in the Kievan Rus’-a conglomerate of peoples ruled by a warrior elite that traced its ancestry to Scandinavia-that emerged on the banks of the Dnieper River in the late ninth century. Hrushevsky sketched the story of Ukraine in the following way.
A coherent and distinct Ukrainian national history, he argued, stretched back over a millennium. Weightily titled “The Traditional Scheme of ‘Russian’ History and the Problem of a Rational Organization of the History of the East Slavs,” the essay insisted that Ukrainian history was not a province of an overarching Russian story. In 1903, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, an academic based in Lviv, published an article that remains powerful today.
But for Ukrainians, the stakes are more existential: Putin’s reading of history would deny them the very right to exist. Like all grand narratives, both have their share of mythology. Putin’s desire to restore an imperial Russia (of which Ukraine is but a constituent part) has crashed into a Ukrainian nationalism that imagines a sovereign Ukrainian state and a distinct Ukrainian people persisting in various forms for over a thousand years.
In many ways, this war is the collision of two incompatible historical narratives. Ukrainians, too, harbor a particular understanding of the past that motivates them to fight. But history also propels the fierce Ukrainian resistance. Russian forces have been smashing their way through Ukraine for over two months now, spurred in large part by historical fiction. He published an essay in July 2021 making this case at length, a bloated historical exegesis that few expected would lead to an actual war. Russian President Vladimir Putin has ventured on wild forays into the depths of history to insist that Russians and Ukrainians are a single people, that Ukraine never truly existed as a sovereign entity until the Bolsheviks mistakenly brought it into existence, and that the territories of Ukraine are fundamentally Russian lands. Europe’s first twenty-first-century war is very much about the past.