Written
by Vladislav B. SOTIROVIĆ on 20/02/2018
German
troops in Kiev, 1918
The
German occupation forces were those who have been the first to create and
recognise a short-lived state’s independence of Ukraine in January 1918 during
the time of their-own inspired and supported anti-Russian Bolshevik Revolution
of 1917−1921. As
reoccupied by the Bolshevik Red Army, the eastern and southern parts of the
present-day territory of (a Greater) Ukraine joined in 1922 the USSR as a
separate Soviet Socialist Republic (without Crimea). According to 1926 Soviet
census of Crimea, the majority of its population were the Russians (382.645).
The second largest ethnic group were the Tartars (179.094). Therefore, V. I.
Lenin has to be considered as the real historical father of the Ukrainian
statehood but also and as of the contemporary nationhood.
The
territory of the present-day Ukraine was devastated during the WWII by the Nazi
German occupation forces from 1941 to 1944. During the war the Ukrainian
nationalists of S. Bandera (1900−1959) committed
a genocide against the Poles, Jews and Russians [on Stepan
Bandera, see: Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Stepan Bandera: The Life and
Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist. Fascism, Genocide, and Cult,
Stuttgart, ibidem, 2014]. The Jewish holocaust in Ukraine was one of the most
terrible in whole Europe. For instance, the Ukrainian militia (12.000) directly
participated in the 1942 holocaust of some 200.000 Volhynian Jews together with
140.000 German policemen. The Ukrainian mass killers learned their job from the
Germans and applied their knowledge as well as on the Poles [Timothy
Snyder, Tautų
rekonstrukcija: Lieuva, Lenkija, Ukraina, Baltarusija 1569−1999,
Vilnius: Mintis, 2009, 183].
During
the 1947 Operation Zapad (West) 76,192 pro-Bandera
Ukrainian collaborators were deported by the Soviet authorities to Kazakhstan.
Nevertheless, in 1945 the lands of Transcarpathia, littoral Moldova
(Bessarabia), Polish Galicia and part of Romania’s Bukovina followed by Crimea
in 1954 were handed to Soviet Ukraine by Moscow’s Politburo. These
territories, which never have been part of any kind of Ukraine and
overwhelmingly not populated by the ethnolinguistic Ukrainians were included
into the Soviet Ukraine primarily due to the political activity by the
strongest Ukrainian cadre in the USSR – Nikita Khrushchev, a person who was
installed in Kremlin after Stalin’s death in 1953. On this place, a parallel
with Croatia is an absolute: for the Croat committed genocide on the Serbs, Jews
and Roma by A. Pavelić’s regime (a Croat version of S.
Bandera) during the WWII on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia a
post-war (Socialist Republic of) Croatia was awarded by a Croat-Slovenian
dictator of Yugoslavia J. B. Tito with the lands of Istria, Adriatic islands
and Dubrovnik – all of them never have been in any kind of the state of Croatia
before the WWII.
Post-WWII
Ukraine, 1947. Photo by Robert Capa.
Gorbachev’s
policy of deliberate dissolution of the USSR from the time of Reykjavik
bilateral meeting with Ronald Reagan in 1988 caused a revival of the ethnic
nationalism of the Ukrainians who proclaimed an independence on August 24th,
1991 (confirmed on referendum on December 1st, 1991 only by those
who did not boycott it) in the wake of anti-Gorbachev’s military putsch in
Moscow (mis)using the political situation of paralyzed central government in
the country. The state’s independence of Ukraine was proclaimed and later
internationally recognized within the borders of a Greater Stalin-Khrushchev’s
Ukraine with at least 20% of the ethic Russian population living in a compact
area in the eastern part of the country and as well as making a qualified (2/3)
majority of Crimea’s population. The coming years saw the rifts with
neighbouring Russia with the main political task by Kiev to commit as possible
as the Ukrainization (assimilation) of ethnic Russians (similar to the policy
of the Croatization of ethnic Serbs in Croatia orchestrated by the neo-Nazi
government in Zagreb led by Dr. Franjo Tuđman). At
the same time the Russian majority in Crimea constantly required the
peninsula’s reunification with mother Russia but getting only an autonomous
status within Ukraine – a country which they never considered as their
natural-historical homeland. The Russians of Ukraine were becoming more and
more unsatisfied with conditions in which they have been leaving from the time
when in 1998−2001 the Ukrainian taxation system collapsed
what meant that the central government in Kiev was not able to pay the salaries
and pensions to its own citizens. A very weak Ukrainian state became in fact
unable to function normally (“failed state”) and as a consequence it did not
have a power to prevent a series of politically motivated assassinations
followed by popular protests which had been also very much inspired by economic
decline of the country [on history of Ukraine and the Ukrainians, see more and
compare with: Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, New
Heaven: Yale University Press, 2009; Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe:
A History of Ukraine, New York: Basic Books, 2015; Anna Reid, Borderland:
A Journey Through the History of Ukraine, New York: Basic Books, 2015].
As
a matter of fact, it has to be stressed that the Ukrainian historiography on
their own history of the land and the people is extremely nationalistic and in
very cases not objective like many other national historiographies. It is
basically politically coloured with the main task to present the Ukrainians as
a natural ethnolinguistic nation who have been historically fighting to create
a united independent national state and unjustifiably claiming certain
territories to be ethnohistorically the “Ukrainian”. As a typical example of
such tendency to rewrite history of the East Europe according to the nationalistic
and politically correct framework is, for instance, the book by Serhy Jekelčyk on the birth of a modern Ukrainian nation
in which, among other quasi-historical facts based on the self-interpreted
events, is written that the USSR in 1939−1940
annexed from Poland and Romania the “West Ukrainian land” [Serhy Jekelčyk, Ukraina:
Modernios nacijos gimimas, Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2009, 17].
However, this “West Ukrainian land” never was part of any kind of Ukraine
before the WWII as Ukraine as a state or administrative province never existed
before V. I. Lenin created in 1923 a Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine
within the USSR but at that time without the “West Ukrainian land” as it was
not a part of the USSR. Moreover, the Ukrainians were either not leaving or
being just minority on this land what means that Ukraine even did not have
ethnic rights over the biggest part of the “West Ukraine”. Even today around
half of Ukraine’s state’s territory is not populated by the Ukrainians as a
majority of the population. Moreover, in some regions there are no Ukrainians
at all. Therefore, the cardinal question became: On which principles the
Ukrainian borders are formed?
National
University of Chernivtsi
As
another example of the Ukrainian historiographic nationalistic misleading we
can find in an academic brochure on Bukovina’s Metropolitan’s residence,
published in 2007 by the National University of Chernivtsi. In the brochure is
written that this university is “…one of the oldest classical universities of
Ukraine” [The Architecturial Complex of Bukovynian Metropolitan’s Residence,
Chernivtsi: Yuriy Fedkovych National University of Chernivtsi, 2007, 31] that
is true only from the present-day rough political perspective but not and from
a moral-historic point of view. Namely, the university is located in the
North Bukovina which in 1775 the Habsburg Monarchy had obtained. The land was from
1786 administrated within the Chernivtsi district of Galicia and one hundred
years after the affiliation of Bukovina to the monarchy, the Franz-Josephs-Universität was
inaugurated on October 4th, 1875 (the name day of the emperor). In
the other words, the university’s origin as whole Bukovina has nothing to do
with any kind of both historical Ukraine and ethnic Ukrainians as before 1940
it was outside of administrative territory of Ukraine when the whole North
Bukovina was handed to the USSR in August 1940. While the Ukrainian
nationalists claim that USSR “occupied” Ukraine, the annexation of the North
Bukovina and other territories from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania in 1940
are for them a legitimate act of “historical justice”. Here we have to notice
that according to Soviet-German non-aggression agreement, the
territories of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are as well as annexed by the USSR
that is considered by their historians and politicians as “occupation”, what
means (illegal) act of aggression that is braking international law and
legitimate order. Nevertheless, they never accused Ukraine of doing the same in
regard to occupied lands from its three western neighbours in 1940/1944 [see,
for instance: Priit Raudkivi, Estonian History in Pictures,
Tallinn: Eesti Instituut, 2004 (without numeration of the pages); Arūnas Gumuliauskas, Lietuvos istorija (1795−2009),
Šiauliai: Lucilijus, 2010, 279−295].
Political
assimilation of certain separate Slavonic ethnolinguistic groups in Ukraine was
and is one of the standardized instruments for the creation and maintaining of
the Ukrainian national identity in the 20th century. The most
brutal case is of the Ruthenians (Rusyns) who are simply proclaimed as
historical Ukrainians known under such name till the WWII. Their land, which
was in the interwar period part of Czechoslovakia, that was annexed by the USSR
at the end of the WWII and included into a Greater Soviet Ukraine is simply
renamed from Ruthenia into the Sub-Carpathian Ukraine. However, the Ruthenians
and the Ukrainians are two separate Slavonic ethnolinguistic groups as such
officially recognized, for example, in Serbia’s Autonomous Province of
Vojvodina where the Ruthenian (Rusyn) language is even standardized and studied
together with Ruthenian philology and literature at a separate department at
the University of Novi Sad. Unfortunately, the Ruthenian position in Ukraine is
even worst in comparison with the Kurdish position in Turkey as the process of
Ruthenian assimilation is much speeder than of the Kurdish case.
From
the current perspective of the Ukrainian crisis and in general from the point
of solving the “Ukrainian Question” it has to be noticed a very historical fact
that a part of the present-day East Ukraine became legally incorporated into
the Russian Empire in 1654 as a consequence of the decision by the local hetman
of Zaporozhian territory Bohdan
Khmelnytsky (c. 1595−1657)
based on a popular revolt against the Polish-Lithuanian (the Roman Catholic)
occupation of Ukraine which broke out in 1648 [Alfredas Bumblauskas, Senosios
Lietuvos istorija, 1009−1795,
Vilnius: R. Paknio leidykla, 2007, 306; Jevgenij Anisimov, Rusijos
istorija nuo Riuriko iki Putino: Žmonės. Įvykiai. Datos,
Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų
leidybos centras, 2014, 185−186]. It means that the core of
the present-day Ukraine voluntarily joined Russia, therefore escaping from the
Roman Catholic Polish-Lithuanian oppression. Subsequently, B. Khmelnytsky’s ruled territory has to be
considered from a historical point of view as the motherland of all present-day
Ukraine – the motherland which already in 1654 chose Russia.
More
in The Episodes:
- Did The Cold War
Ever Really End?03/05/2018
- Fragility
of Belarussian National Identity (II)25/04/2018
- Fragility
of Belarussian National Identity (I)17/04/2018
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