A short History of Ukraine

By Mykhailo Hrushevsky

As with many peoples who return to political life late in life, history, the guardian of the past and the inspiration of the present, has played a role in the Ukrainian renaissance that cannot be overstated. Throughout the 19th century, a host of writers and scholars devoted their energies and time to delving into the annals of the nation; they wanted to bring before the eyes of their compatriots the heroic struggles of their ancestors, to seek out the ideas that had sustained them in their sorrows, to find the thread that connects the mentality of today with that of the past, to show their precursors to the new apostles. Many of these historians, whether distinguished by their literary qualities or by the solidity of their science, have made themselves known to the literate world of Europe above all by their writings in Russian, German or Polish. But never a work which claimed to expose clearly the general history of Ukraine appeared in any of the great European languages. And yet Voltaire was struck by the original features of our nation in his time. Already in the 17th century our great national struggles for freedom had aroused the interest of the civilised world and were the subject of a host of memoirs in Latin, French, Italian and German. We shall only quote those of Beauplan, Chevalier, Vimina and Grondski, which gave their contemporaries a fairly accurate idea of what was then happening in Eastern Europe.
It is therefore surprising that Ukrainian scholars have not made the results of their work on the history of our nation accessible to the widest possible audience. From the point of view of the interest it can inspire, both to the sociologist, the historian of law and morals, and to the curious person interested in “human documents” and the simple lover of dramatic situations and glorious exploits, it is in no way inferior to that of other peoples...

• Language: English
• Publisher: XinXii
• Release date: Mar 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9783989836198

Book preview

Foreword.

As with many peoples who return to political life late in life, history, the guardian of the past and the inspiration of the present, has played a role in the Ukrainian renaissance that cannot be overstated. Throughout the 19th century, a host of writers and scholars devoted their energies and time to delving into the annals of the nation; they wanted to bring before the eyes of their compatriots the heroic struggles of their ancestors, to seek out the ideas that had sustained them in their sorrows, to find the thread that connects the mentality of today with that of the past, to show their precursors to the new apostles. Many of these historians, whether distinguished by their literary qualities or by the solidity of their science, have made themselves known to the literate world of Europe above all by their writings in Russian, German or Polish. But never a work which claimed to expose clearly the general history of Ukraine appeared in any of the great European languages. And yet Voltaire was struck by the original features of our nation in his time. Already in the 17th century our great national struggles for freedom had aroused the interest of the civilised world and were the subject of a host of memoirs in Latin, French, Italian and German. We shall only quote those of Beauplan, Chevalier, Vimina and Grondski, which gave their contemporaries a fairly accurate idea of what was then happening in Eastern Europe.

It is therefore surprising that Ukrainian scholars have not made the results of their work on the history of our nation accessible to the widest possible audience. From the point of view of the interest it can inspire, both to the sociologist, the historian of law and morals, and to the curious person interested in human documents and the simple lover of dramatic situations and glorious exploits, it is in no way inferior to that of other peoples. Unfortunately, it was only available in a fragmentary state and, in a way, as an appendix to the history of Russia or Poland.

In order to fill this obvious gap, the Ukrainian Sociological Institute, which is currently being organised and whose purpose is, among other things, to inform European society about the scientific movement in our country, has considered it one of its most important duties to publish this summary of Ukrainian history, which will give the European reader an opportunity to gain an idea of the results achieved in our country by historical studies.

The author, who for twenty years taught national history at the University of Lviv and is a member of the Academies of Sciences in Cracow and Prague, has published several works on this subject in Ukrainian. First of all, the great History of Ukraine, which he was able to complete before the war, up to 1650, and which already includes eight large volumes in octavo, and abridgments in Ukrainian and Russian for the school and for the population, copies of which have been distributed to several hundred thousand. He could have been satisfied with translating one of these works, but, in order to respond more accurately to the intentions of the Sociological Institute, he preferred to put into the hands of the foreign reader a book in which he could easily find an answer to the questions that might interest him. He will consider his task accomplished if he has been able to arouse in the public a desire for further information, and he has placed in the appendix an index to his great History of Ukraine to facilitate any research that may be deemed useful.

He knows that the public is not very familiar with the subject of his book and especially with geographical names or proper names of persons, although the fights of these last years have unfortunately put many of them in the limelight, which the press has not failed to spell with a certain fantasy. We have taken care not to change the spelling of those who have long been established. For the others, we have tried to come as close as possible to the Ukrainian pronunciation, because, according to all the rules of common sense, there is no reason why they should be disfigured by the Russian, German or Polish pronunciation before reaching the foreign ear.

The funds for this publication were provided by Ukrainian organisations in the United States, Brazil and Canada, and we thank them warmly for this support inspired by the most enlightened patriotism.

Ukrainian Sociological Institute

Geneva, 31 March 1920.

I.

Ukraine.

Geographically, the country we call Ukraine comprises the easternmost part of the Mediterranean region. Linked by certain geological and climatic features, by certain traits of its flora and fauna, on the one hand to Eastern Europe, on the other to Western Asia, it is nevertheless the only part of this enormous plain, which some have called Eurasian, which is subject to the influence of the Mediterranean climate. Not only its climate, but also its geology, flora and fauna link it to the Mediterranean. These immense plains, which came out of Asia between the Ural Mountains and the Caspian, advance into Europe, narrow between the forest zone and the sea, sink into the Danube basin, become Europeanised in their western part, lose their purely Asiatic and strictly continental character, soften under the influence of the maritime climate, in a word, become Mediterraneanised. This is the dominant geographical character of Ukraine.

In the light of these geographical observations, let us examine the history of the country and we will see that, thanks to its location, Ukraine provided the point of contact between Europe and Asia, where the Mediterranean civilisation met the civilisation of central and Northern Asia. The streams of the great Turanian invasions, crossing these wide steppes to pour towards the West, came into contact here with the Mediterranean civilisation, which, subjecting to its influence each new wave of these Asian migrations, managed to make itself felt as far as the distant lands from which they came. Thus Ukraine was the scene of extremely interesting struggles between the two civilisations and became the witness of European conquests. History has so far been able to record only some of the phases of these ethnic encounters, which were so important for civilisation; others are clarified by archaeological monuments.

Traces of Palaeolithic man can be found on the banks of the Dnieper at Kiev (Kyiv) and on those of its tributaries the Desna and the Uday; these remains are analogous to those of Western Europe in the Magdalen period and later. In the much more numerous Neolithic monuments, and in those of the transitional period, when metals began to be used, the influence of Asia can be seen. The period that has been called pre-Mycean, at the beginning of the use of metals, is very instructive in this respect. It is characterised by an extremely curious polychrome painted ceramic. This civilisation suddenly appears over a very vast territory – from east to west: in Turkestan, Ukraine, Moldavia, the Balkans – and soon disappears. It should also be noted that in the early period of the use of iron, bronze works of the same style spread from the Adriatic and the Danube to the shores of the Black Sea, including the Caucasus, and from the coast of the seas they penetrated the interior of the continent. The art known in the West as Merovingian before it appeared here is revealed in the excavations in Persia and on the Black Sea coast.

If we move on to historical monuments, we encounter the migration of the Alans, which gives us a vivid example of this Eurasian push. The first traces of them are discovered in the vicinity of China, they then inhabit for a long time the steppes of the Caspian and the Sea of Azov, leave their remains in the mountains of the Caucasus and Crimea, and then finish their migration in Spain. The Huns, a few centuries later, followed more or less the same path.

For the history of the penetration of European civilisation into Asia through Ukraine, the earliest historical document is provided by the account of Aristaeus, reported by Herodotus. According to the best interpretations, it gives us information about the caravan route, starting from the Greek colonies on the northern coast of the Black Sea and leading through the eastern continent of Europe to the depths of Asia, near the borders of China. Marco Polo, almost eighteen centuries later, set out from the Venetian colonies on the Black Sea coast and followed the same route, thus testifying to the persistence of commercial and intellectual relations, which, although intermittent, were renewed at the first opportunity. The accounts of Arab geographers of the 9th and 10th centuries, speaking of Israelite merchants from Spain who crossed Germany and passed through the ports of the Black Sea to penetrate the depths of Eastern Europe and the centre of Asia, give us further evidence of this.

The existence of these trade routes and the passage of merchants gave rise to projects of conquest, which were to be renewed from century to century. Whoever was master of the ports of the Black Sea or the Ukrainian steppes could not help but direct his desires towards the East. The expeditions of Darius and Nero were matched by the incursions of the ancient Russians on the Caspian coast, in rich India, the memory of which has been preserved in the epic poems of the north (bylines). Then came the Cossack expeditions in the 17th century, and the role played by India in the projects of Charles XII, Peter I, Catherine II and Napoleon.

In modern times, the expansion of European civilisation into Eastern Europe and Northern Asia is merely a repetition of ancient endeavours, which have come to fruition over the centuries. The Greek colonies on the Black Sea coast are the starting point for these conquests of Mediterranean civilisation. The ancient Chersonese was the source from which the Kievan princes drew the intellectual means necessary to consolidate and organise their state, and it was through Kievan that Byzantine civilisation reached the other political centres of Eastern Europe. First it became established there, then it spread to the eastern frontiers, over the Ural Mountains, into Northern Asia and as far as the shores of the Pacific. The disciples of the Kiev school, as soon as the union of Ukraine with Muscovy was sealed, propagated the civilisation in which they had been nurtured in Moscow and Kazan, in Tobolsk as well as in Irkutsk, and even in Yakutsk and Vladivostok. They were natives of Ukraine, who together with other peoples colonised the immense spaces of Turkestan and Siberia as far as the Amur and Ussuri regions.

Thus in the course of the ethnic and social fluctuations, of which Ukraine was the theatre, the especially Ukrainian type, which we have today, was formed.

But if we were asked to say what the Ukrainian people is, we would answer: it is that group of tribes of the Eastern Slavs, which, leaning on the southern edge of the wooded area, has endeavoured for centuries to gain a foothold on the coast of the Black Sea, to open up ways to the regions of the Mediterranean civilization, and has succeeded in doing so, in spite of all obstacles, because it has not shrunk from any sacrifice.

II.

The Ukrainian people.

The Southern Ukraine of the steppes was thus the great way by which the Asiatic peoples, not without struggle and without blows, emigrated towards the West. Some were exhausted in these struggles, crumbled and disappeared forever, others more fortunate managed to make their way towards the West. Driven by the need to expand and by the invincible attraction that the south and the sun produce on the peoples of the north, the tribes, largely Slavic, of the wooded regions, also tried to spread out into the steppe. There they came up against the nomadic hordes and had to either bend northwards or disappear or merge with the wandering tribes.

Today, Eastern Europe is considered to be the cradle of the Indo-European peoples, who were once located on the slopes of the Himalayas. This is a hypothesis, but it has been proved beyond all discussion that the Indo-European tribes of the Lituo-Slavic branch, the ancestors of the present Slavs and Balts, were established in the centre of Eastern Europe from the earliest times, long before Tacitus and Ptolemy had occasion to mention the Venedi and Aestii. But we know nothing about their way of life at that time. It is only from linguistic research that we can deduce that the Slavs at that time possessed a fairly advanced civilisation, that they already knew certain manual arts and that they lived under the stable regime of patriarchy.

For a long time we cannot follow the traces of their expansion towards the west and the south. It is only towards the end of the fourth century, after the invasion of the Huns, that we get a clearer idea. From that time onwards we find evidence of those southern tribes of the Eastern Slavs, who provided the immediate ancestors of the Ukrainian people. They appear on the historical scene, seeking to settle on the shores of the Black Sea, striving to gain a foothold on the coast in the closest vicinity of the Mediterranean world, with the same aspirations, which will remain for a long succession of centuries the nerve of the political life of the Ukrainian people. In Jornandés we find the memory of the battles which the Goths fought against the king of the Antes Boz and his tribal chiefs, when the latter, taking advantage of the defeats inflicted by the Huns on these Germanic tribes, advanced towards the south. It seems that it was thanks to the support of the Huns, and in a way under their protection, that the Antes were able to expand southwards. At the time when Byzantium, regenerated by Justinian, was making contact with the Slavic colonies of the Black Sea. Procopius in his history of the Gothic War – and many other writers of this period (6th century) – not only explains the meaning of the name Antes, but also provides us with information about their way of life, their political organisation and the extent of their colonisation.

The name Antes was given to the Slavic tribes, who had managed to get close to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. The Dniester separated them from the tribes, who later settled in the Balkans and became the ancestors of the present-day Bulgars. Having populated the steppe, the Antes were forced to wage constant war with all the nomads who passed through, especially with the Avars and Bulgars. This is why these outposts of the colonisation of the Eastern Slavs acquired, in the midst of daily battles, a warlike spirit, a great skill, which manifested itself above all in the war of skirmishes, and finally a great strength of resistance, which enabled them to maintain themselves in the confused melee of the steppe. Like the Cossacks, of whom they were the prototype, they cared little for the sedentary arts, neglected agriculture, and spent their lives in warlike expeditions, sometimes joining forces with the Bulgars or Avars, sometimes placing themselves in the service of Byzantium to fight its enemies. They lived, says Procopius, in a democracy, having no stable organisation; they united only to face some more formidable danger and deliberated on all internal affairs in the assemblies of the tribes.

This is the information that the sixth century has given us. In the 7th century, Byzantium, weakened and diminished, lost contact with the Black Sea regions; the Antes were no longer mentioned. Geographically or politically, this name is no longer mentioned. However, the colonies to which this name was given had every opportunity during these two centuries to consolidate and even expand. After the Bulgarian hordes had moved to the Danube, it was the Khozars who came to camp in the steppes of the Caspian and barred for a time the wide plains of the Black Sea to the waves of nomadic invasions. The Khozars, less warlike and more civilised, held in high esteem the peace, well-being and commercial relations which enriched them in the ports of the Caspian and the Sea of Azov.

Therefore, we can imagine the end of the 7th century and the 8th century as a time not only of consolidation for the Slavic colonies in Ukraine, but also of development for civilisation, for trade relations, an era favourable to the establishment of urban centres, especially in the steppe area that bordered the Greek cities of the coast. But we find only vague memories of it in later Ukrainian chroniclers or in Arab geographers. Indeed, when historical information about this region reappears in the 9th and 10th centuries, the Slavic colonies on the shores of the Black Sea are already in ruins. The ancient tribes of the Antes on the left bank of the Dnieper and in the vicinity of the Sea of Azov had disappeared almost without trace; as for the right bank, the 11th century chronicler vaguely recalls the names of the Ulytches and the Tyvertses. The centre of gravity shifted northwards to the regions of the early Ukrainian tribes of the Siverians, Polians, Derevlians and Doulibes, who already touched the forest zone from the north.

This is because the power of the Khozars had already diminished in the 9th century. New hordes of nomadic plunderers invaded the region: the Magyars, then the Pechenegues, and later still (in the 11th century) the Torques and the Cumans. The Slavs, who for a century had become accustomed to a quieter life and had lost much of their warrior virtues, could not adjust to this new way of life, so they moved northwards into the wooded area adjacent to the steppes, where they had previously lived. The need to ensure trade relations and the existence of urban life hastened the development of forms of defence and precipitated the organisation of political life and the state. Moreover, the influx of more civilised emigrants from the shores of the Black Sea, where they had been more influenced by Mediterranean civilisation, brought a new leaven to the region, which accelerated this process.

At the same time, Norman chiefs from the north began to appear. The Vikings, at the same time as they ravaged the coasts of France and England, set out on the other side in the Eastern Way, as the Scandinavian sagas say. One of the Kievan chroniclers of the eleventh century even hypothesised that the ‘Russians’, who formed the warrior and ruling class in the state of Kiev in the tenth century and who begin to be mentioned in the historical documents of Europe at the beginning of the eleventh century, were nothing more than Normans, Scandinavians, who would have been called Varegans in Eastern Europe. This hypothesis, which was taken up and imagined in the eighteenth century by German scholars, is now very much in vogue in science, although no evidence of the name Russ in Scandinavia has yet been found. Whatever the case, it is certain that these Varegians played a great role in the 10th century and probably already in the 9th in the political relations of Ukraine, that they powerfully helped the development of the military power of Kiev, which was flourishing at that time, and of which they had made their centre, thus accelerating the evolution of this kingdom.

III.

Kingdom of Kiev.

Kiev, situated on a hill overlooking the Dnieper, a little downstream from its confluence with the Desna, had a very favourable situation for trade at a time when the rivers were the main routes of communication. Its importance as a commercial, political and military centre must have dated back a long way, since when its chroniclers began to gather information about the beginnings of its political life and its dynasty, they could only gather simple legends. They say that Kiev originated from a ferry established there on the Dnieper, whose ferryman was called Kyi; other stories claim that Kyi was a prince of the Polian tribe who had settled in this region and was the first to build a castle there.

The first princes of the Kiev dynasty about whom we have certain information and who lived in the first half of the 10th century were Prince Igor and his wife Olga, who was baptised in the middle of the 9th century. From their marriage came Prince Sviatoslav, whose son Vladimir christianised the country, organised the church and gave impetus to intellectual life and consequently to literature. Before Igor there was a Prince Oleg, who has kept a reputation in literature as a wise and somewhat magical prince (in the bylines he is called Volga, a name similar to that of Princess Olga, the wise princess), but it is not known what his links were with the dynasty. Probably we are faced with a pure conjecture by one of the editors of the Kiev chronicle, who claims that Prince Igor was the son of the Varegian Rurik, Prince of Novogorod: Igor with his uncle Oleg came to Kiev with Varegian-Russians and conquered the country. Treaties concluded by Oleg and Igor with Byzantium in 907, 911 and 944, which came to the attention of one of the later editors of the Kiev chronicle, confirm that these princes were indeed rulers in Kiev, that they called themselves Russian princes and that many Scandinavian names were to be found in their entourage. This obviously gave the chronicler the idea of attributing a Scandinavian origin to the Russians and the Kiev dynasty, and as the name Russian was not known in Sweden or Scandinavia in general, the chronicler was obliged to state that Rurik, on his way to the Slavs, had taken with him all the Russians.

Whatever the origin of this name, in the 9th and 10th centuries it referred to the military and trading caste that dominated Kiev, gradually subjugated the neighbouring Slavic countries, and traded in slaves and products that it collected as tribute from the regions it controlled. It was to Kiev and its surroundings, the land of the Polians, that the name Russia was given. This is a well-established fact, whether the name was imported by foreigners called Russians or was a local name adopted by the Varegian troops. Naturally, as the Kievan