Regular viewers of OSP may know that we plan
our videos out several months in advance, and in this case, I've had it in my
schedule for a year and a half to make a video about Ukraine. But it's a big
topic, long history there, so I held off, ultimately procrastinating my way into an Actual
F*cking WAR. Embarrassingly, that is the second time I've done this. I had this video slated for
summer, but given the gravity of the situation, this frankly can't wait any longer. Because not
only have the people of Ukraine shown themselves to be iron-willed legends in defense
of their country, but some delusional amateur historians have claimed that the entire
concept of the Ukrainian identity is imaginary, and their nation state is nothing more than some
Russians who got lost and picked up an accent. As a result, I would say that some historical
context is in order. So, to learn the course of Ukrainian civilization and understand what their
patriots are fighting for, let's do some history. One technicality before we dig in, the name is
just Ukraine, no The. “Ukrayina” means Borderland according to one version of the etymology,
as it referred to territory between Kyiv and the many many empires that surrounded it over the
centuries, so traditional names essentially called it The Borderlands. But since the dissolution of
the USSR (don’t worry we’ll get there) it’s a tad declassee to use The. Ukraine calls itself
Ukraine, and thus so should we. One of the reasons it’s been neighbors with so many different
people is because the East European Plain just goes. Everything north of the Black Sea and
East of the Carpathian Mountains is flat, open, and full of rivers, so it’s an easy walk, ride,
or sail. In the 600s, the land of the Eastern branch of Slavs reached up along the Dnieper, a
river that would soon be dominated by our boys The Vikings. Sailing south from their Baltic home
to schmooze with the fat cats in Constantinople, Vikings followed the rivers through Slavic
land, building up some handy waystations for the long trips. And in a remarkable contrast from
literally the entire rest of European history, the Slavs apparently invited the Vikings to
stay — at least, according to the Primary Chronicle from three centuries later, the Slavs
invited three Viking brothers to come rule over the northern Dnieper valley and protect
them from the Turkic Khazars to their east. In the decades following, Viking enthusiasm
for new local cultures led them to Slavicize, and so the two cultures merged, giving the
predominantly-Slavic lands of what was known as the “Rus” a characteristically Scandinavian
talent for seafaring. And after Prince Rurik established what would become a seven-century
dynasty in 862 at the northern town of Novgorod, his successor Oleg pushed south along the Dnieper
to take Kyiv as his new capital in 882 — a city that would remain the beating heart of Rus
civilization for centuries. Now, the Slavic+Viking cultural mosaic of what Historians now call
the “Kyivan Rus” had a third piece to add, and that was Byzantine Christianity. Princess Olga
of Kyiv converted while visiting Constantinople in the 950s, and is honored as a saint for her
efforts in the early Christianization of the Rus. This pairs interestingly with her tenure as
Princess-Regent after her husband’s murder, because she exacted a rather thorough revenge
on the party responsible, going so far as to sack a city with improvised incendiary pigeons.
Allegedly. Still, points for ingenuity. Later that century, Grand Prince Volodymyr wanted a
political marriage to the Byzantine princess, so he obliged the emperor’s request to please stop
being a heathen and convert to Christianity. But Volodymyr’s baptism in 988 had much wider effects:
converting the entire Kyivan Rus, adopting the Cyrillic alphabet, and building new schools
and churches. The Byzantines, for their part, got a band of 6,000 elite Varangian mercenaries,
plus a much friendlier neighbor and trading partner to the north. Grand Prince Yaroslav the
Wise kept pace with a new legal code and a booming literary culture, making the 1000s a Golden Age
for the Kyivan Rus and a transformational period in Slavic history. If we look at Ukraine,
Russia, and Belarus today, we’re seeing the legacy of the Kyivan Rus, not just in the root of
their name, nor just in their geography, but as a civilization made from the combination of Slavic,
Scandinavian, and Byzantine Orthodox cultures. Yet, as we’ve seen time and time again, states and
empires are fragile things in the medieval period, so after trade along the Dnieper slowed and wars
on the eastern frontier drained the treasury, subsequent infighting among the princes
sapped the Kyivan Rus of the power and wealth it enjoyed before. The state began
decentralizing after Yaroslav’s death in 1054, but it went splitsies for-real after a
Grand Prince died in 1132 & local lords got grabby. Kyiv still held onto its immediate
vicinity, but Novgorod and Vladimir became their own centers of power in the north, with many
smaller principalities sprinkled in between, such as Galicia and Volhynia in the far southwest,
who combined in 1199 and got promoted by the Pope to the Kingdom of Ruthenia in 1253 — that name
being the Latin for “Rus”, and an early name for Ukraine before just, Ukraine — the kingdom founded
a new capital at Lviv in 1272, from where they traded with Poland, Hungary, the post-crusade
Byzantines, and the Mongols. Yeah, about that. So while all that was happening, the lands of the
former Rus got turbo-stomped by the Mongol armies, with Moscow sacked in 1238 and Kyiv biting
it in 1240. What wasn’t directly absorbed into the Golden Horde was made a vassal,
and this left an opening for the Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania to go
snapping up all the defenseless principalities over the next century. By 1400, Poland pushed
through Lviv down to Bilgorod at the coast, and the recently-Christianized Lithuania
punched into the Dnieper valley for Kyiv, with the Golden Horde still holding the
coast from Crimea eastward. And so Ukraine’s trajectory breaks away from Russia (and later
Belarus) and toward a long history at the borderlands of foreign empires. The next century
of Polish-Lithuanian dominion saw a steady process of Polonization in what they called Ruthenia.
This meant promoting Catholicism in place of Orthodoxy and encouraging Ruthenian nobles to
act more like the Polish-Lithuanian nobility. However, this influence couldn’t reach everywhere,
so an Orthodox ethnic Ukrainian group called the Cossacks made the “Wild Fields” of the far
southeast a bastion of Ukrainian culture. When and how exactly they did so is tricky
to pinpoint, but by the 1600s they had grown from seasonal hunting communities into a
democratically-self-governing cultural militia sort of thing. Because in addition to Poland they
were also sandwiched between the Russian empire and the Ottomans. Poland appreciated when
the Cossacks fought the Ottomans but didn’t repay that with autonomy or more rights, so after
decades of previous attempts, the leading Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky rose against the Polish crown
and succeeded in creating the Cossack Hetmanate, the first independent Ukrainian state
in over 300 years. The sovereign spirit of this moment is captured in the 1891
painting Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, wherein after the Ottoman Sultan sent them
a letter politely asking their surrender, the Cossacks had the absolute time of their
lives drafting a response telling the Sultan why and specifically how he could f*ck
off. In detail! Stuff of legends, in this case quite literally because it was
probably just a story, but nonetheless hilarious. The Hetmanate made diplomatic overtures to their
assorted imperial neighbors, but they were all pretty flakey, and so the Cossacks see-sawed
between various alignments, until 1667 when Russia and Poland split the difference by splitting
Ukraine. Carving it up along the Dnieper with Poland taking the “Right Bank” and Russia taking
the Left. Both coopted religion for the benefit of the rulers, as the Orthodox Church in the Russian
Empire governed from (and in the interest of) Moscow, while the fully-Catholic “Ruthenian Uniate
Church” was the only Liturgically-Orthodox option allowed in Poland. Ukrainian culture did
have its own Baroque era at the turn of the 1700s – with such monuments as the Kyivan Golden
Age Saint Sophia Cathedral getting restored and gorgeously embellished in Baroque style – but it
was swiftly followed by a century of stronger and stronger outside interference, culminating
in the Russian Empire & friends destroying Poland and conquering almost all of Ukraine,
along with Crimea, for itself. The Cossack Hetmanate was no easy ride, as it’s tough to be
independent amid a game of Hungry-Hungry-Empires, but this moment of re-emerging statehood
represented a new mode of Ukrainian culture, defined in part by its borderland encirclement
and independent aspirations in spite of big angry neighbors. Easy, perhaps, to see
why that might be a powerful motivator. So, coming into the 1800s, we find ourselves
neck-deep in The Russia Plotline, where we will stay, for a while. Hot of their success
in obliterating Poland, step 2 was “Russifying” their newly acquired territories: moving Russians
into the east and south to replace Crimean Tatars with ethnic Russians, building up urban centers
to Russian spec, and later banning the Ukrainian language to replace it with Russian. The one
exception being Austrian-held Galicia, where Ukrainian and Polish thinkers were able to express
their national identity through literature. And that cultural groundwork came in mighty handy
when the Russian Empire imploded in 1917 — longer story, World War 1 is a wild ride. With the Tsars,
the Austrians, and the Ottomans out of the picture entirely, and rather suddenly at that, Ukraine
and several neighbors declared independence. The idea of Ukrainian nationhood was in the air for
the past century, but as each of the newly-formed Eastern European states soon found out, actually
creating a country is a complicated business. Unfortunately, the choice was taken out of their
hands, as the Russian revolutionaries who replaced the Tsars soon rolled into Ukraine and looped it
into the new United Soviet Socialist Republic. Administratively, this was different from
the old empire, as Ukraine was its own Soviet Socialist Republic within the wider
Soviet Union, alongside Belarus, Russia, and the other 12 constituent Republics. And at
first, Soviet policy celebrated this variety, creating a specifically Ukrainian Orthodox
Church and promoting the language and culture. However, that was before Stalin. Again,
longer story, Communism is a wild ride, but as far as Ukraine was concerned, Joseph Stalin
was the mustachioed embodiment of Hell Itself. As part of his policy to punish
Ukraine for crimes ranging from not being Communist enough to existing at all,
Stalin ordered nearly all Ukrainian wheat to be exported for industrialization, essentially
orchestrating an artificial famine that killed over four million Ukrainians in the early
1930s. This coincided with a systematic purge of Ukrainian intellectuals and their orthodox
clergy. Now, Ukraine had handled Polonization and Russification under the old empires,
but this was full-on Genocide. This wasn’t some tragic but necessary consequence of Soviet
ideology, this was the point: keep them poor, break their spirit, take their resources,
and hope they forget they exist. And just when it couldn’t get worse… World
War 2! Russia’s invasion of Poland in 1939 added Galicia to the Ukrainian SSR, but 2 years
later Germany launched a surprise-ish attack, and took all of Ukraine. The Soviets, for their
part, made a point to burn everything on the way out, killing political prisoners, destroying
infrastructure and wrecking food supplies. By the time the USSR was reassembled and the war was won,
Ukraine suffered another 8 million deaths. And from being down a quarter of the population inside
of a decade, it was hard for things to get worse. With the exception of the Chernobyl nuclear
disaster of 1986, Ukraine’s postwar history was a steady albeit slow climb upward, culminating
in the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 and a 92% vote in favor of Ukrainian Independence. Given
everything we have learned about Ukraine over the thousand-plus years of their history, this should
not be surprising. But this of course does not mean that the story is over. Political corruption
is a habit that dies hard, so Ukrainians took to the streets in 2004 and again in the Maidan
uprising of 2014 to oust Viktor Yanukovych, both times, from office, the result of which
was the Russian Federation annexing the Crimean peninsula and violently exacerbating an
insurgency in the eastern Donbas region. In 2018 the Russian Orthodox Church severed ties
with the Orthodox church in Constantinople for recognizing Ukraine’s religious independence
from Moscow. And, of course, in 2022, Russia monstrously and disgracefully invaded
the sovereign nation of Ukraine — longer story, the 2020s are a wild ride.
But as we’ve clearly seen, Ukrainian history isn’t just backstory
to a modern conflict, it’s a tale of a civilization crafting an identity from the
confluence of multiple different cultures, then defending that identity against invasive
forces, and then recontextualizing that identity as that precise borderland struggle. In a part
of Europe otherwise known for Giant Empires, that’s somethin’ — and something very much worth
fighting for, at that. Russkiy voyennyy korabl', idi nakhuy – Slava Ukraini.[Russian Warship,
Go F*ck Yourself – Glory to Ukraine.] Thank you so much for watching. OSP will
be donating the advertising-revenue from this video to Direct Relief in Ukraine, providing
urgently-needed medical care across the country. So if you would like to do something to help but
can’t afford to donate your money, simply share this video with a friend. Everything we donate and
everything we learn makes a massive difference.
