Plokhy S. "The Frontline"

The Frontline

Ukrainian Research Institute

Harvard University
Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies 81

HURI Editorial Board
Michael S. Flier
George G. Grabowicz
Oleh Kotsyuba, Manager of Publications
Serhii Plokhy, Chairman
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Serhii Plokhy
The Frontline
Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present
Distributed by Harvard University Press

for the Ukrainian Research Institute
Harvard University
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Printed in the U.S. on acid-free paper
ISBN: 9780674268821 (hardcover),

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Cover illustration: Kazimir Malevich, “Red Cavalry Riding” (1928–1932).

Collection of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
Cover and book design by Mykola Leonovych, https://smalta.pro

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
A Note on Transliteration viii
Preface ix
1. Quo Vadis Ukrainian History? 1
I. COSSACK STOCK
2. Placing Ukraine on the Map of Europe 17

3. Russia and Ukraine: Did They Reunite in 1654? 37
4. Hadiach 1658: The Origins of a Myth 55
5. The Return of Ivan Mazepa 65
II. The Red Century
6. How Russian Was the Russian Revolution? 87

7. Killing by Hunger 95
8. Mapping the Great Famine 105
9. The Call of Blood 131
10. The Battle for Eastern Europe 163
11. The American Dream 169
III. FAREWELL TO THE EMPIRE
12. The Soviet Collapse 181

13. Chornobyl 183
14. Truth in Our Times 191
15. The Empire Strikes Back 225
16. When Stalin Lost His Head 241
17. Goodbye Lenin! 257
IV. EUROPEAN HORIZONS
18. The Russian Question 283

19. The Quest for Europe 299
20. The New Eastern Europe 325
21. Reimagining the Continent 335
Notes 349
Index 387
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to those who contributed most to the

appearance of this collection. Oleh Kotsyuba convinced me
to publish the book with my home institution, the Harvard
Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). My colleagues on the
HURI Editorial Board, Michael S. Flier and George G. Grabo-
wicz, supported the idea and provided valuable advice on how to
improve the manuscript. Myroslav Yurkevich edited new chap-
ters and standardized the editorial aspects of those chapters that
were published previously. Kostyantyn Bondarenko prepared the
maps used in this volume. Oleh Kotsyuba, with the assistance
of Michelle Viise, guided the book through the editorial and
production process from start to finish. Finally, I am grateful to
the editors of the publications in which the texts included here
first appeared for granting permission to publish them in this
collection. I alone am responsible for any shortcomings, of which
I hope there are not too many.
vii
A Note on Transliteration
In the text of this collection, a modified Library of Congress

system is used to transliterate Ukrainian and other East Slavic
personal names and toponyms. This system omits the soft sign
(ь) and, in masculine surnames, the final “й” (thus, for example,
Hrushevsky, not Hrushevs´kyi). The exception to this is the trans-
literation of the name of the medieval princedom of Rus´ and of
personal names where the soft sign indicates the softness of a
consonant before a vowel, for which "i" is used (thus Khvyliovy
rather than Khvylóvy). Furthermore, well-known personal names
such as Yeltsin, Yushchenko, and Yanukovych appear in spellings
widely adopted in English-language texts, while the spelling of
several other names of living authors follows their own preference.
In bibliographic references, the full Library of Congress system
(ligatures omitted) is used. Toponyms are usually transliterated
from the language of the country in which the designated places
are currently located. As a rule, personal names are given in forms
characteristic of the cultural traditions to which the given person
belonged. The Julian calendar used by the Eastern Slavs until 1918
lagged behind the Gregorian calendar used in the Polish-Lithu-
anian Commonwealth and Western Europe (by ten days in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and by eleven days in the
eighteenth century).
Preface
In the fall of 2013 Ukraine made a dramatic entry into world

politics and news media with the events that became known as
the Euromaidan Revolution, or the Revolution of Dignity. Hun-
dreds of thousands of Ukrainians protested against the govern-
ment’s refusal to sign the long-promised association agreement
with the European Union. The protests later turned against gov-
ernment corruption and police brutality, unleashed by the regime
on the peaceful demonstrations. The resulting popular uprising
in February 2014 saw the ouster of the authoritarian president
Viktor Yanukovych who fled to Russia.
Soon after, Ukraine found itself at the frontline of a series of
even more dramatic developments: illegal seizure of the Crimea
by Russia and the Kremlin-provoked, inspired, funded, armed,
and often manned war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
On two occasions—in the summer of 2014 and in the winter of
2015—Russia sent its regular armed forces into battle in order to
assure the survival of the two puppet regimes it established in
the area. The war soon acquired the traits of a regional conflict
with global ramifications and with no end in sight. At stake was
the future of the global post-Cold War order and the fate of
democracy in the post-Soviet space—the factors that motivated
the attention to the events in Ukraine worldwide.
The interest in Ukraine received a new boost in the sum-
mer of 2016 when Paul Manafort resigned from his position as
the chairman of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign. Later
on, Manafort was found guilty and went to prison for a number
ix
Plokhy. The Frontline
of financial violations, including undisclosed payments received

from the ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. In the
summer of 2019, Ukraine reemerged in the news because of Pres-
ident Trump’s attempts to coerce Ukraine’s new president, Volo-
dymyr Zelenskyi, into undermining Joe Biden—seen as the lead-
ing Democratic contender in the presidential race—by opening
a criminal investigation into his son, Hunter Biden, and his ac-
tivities in Ukraine. In exchange, war-torn Ukraine would receive
the much-needed military assistance from the US—a temptation
that the young democracy successfully withstood. In December
2019, the claim that President Trump had abused his power in
dealing with Ukraine was confirmed and he was impeached by
the US Congress. As a result, in the course of 2020, Ukraine
remained at the center of a presidential campaign that propelled
Joe Biden to victory.
Throughout these events, I found myself obliged to answer
numerous questions about Ukraine from both journalists and the
general public. Although those questions were informed by the
contemporaneous developments, a great many of them probed
into the country’s history and culture to understand its present
and future. My colleague Mary Sarotte and I sought to answer
some questions about the recent history of American-Ukrainian
and Russo-Ukrainian relations in an article for the Foreign Affairs
while the impeachment hearings were still going on.
This collection of essays strives to answer the very same set
question by looking at key moments in Ukraine’s history and how
the country relates to its own history today. As many of the essays
show, history is central to Ukraine’s current war with Russia and
its relations with the West. As a genre, essay collections produce
new knowledge and understanding by the collocation of individ-
ual texts, which places them in dialogue and reveals connections
of which the author or the reader were not previously aware.
The heuristic potential of this collection became evident to me
in the process of selecting, revising, and editing the studies that
comprise this volume.
Most of the essays collected here were written and published
in the last decade, which witnessed enormous change in Ukraine
and Eastern Europe in general. During that period, Ukraine un-
derwent the Maidan protests, a radical change of government,
x
Preface
Russian aggression, the loss of the Crimea, and war in the Don-
bas—developments that I discuss above and that could hardly
have been predicted a decade earlier and that inevitably changed
the self-understanding of Ukrainian society and its relation to
its history. In the last ten years, history has taken center stage in
Ukrainian politics and spilled over to the European and world
scene. In fact, battles over history have launched and become part
of a very real, not virtual, war.
In January 2010, a Ukrainian court ruled on the criminal re-
sponsibility of the Soviet leadership for the Holodomor—the
Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33‑and found Joseph Stalin and
his associates guilty of causing the death of close to four million
Ukrainian citizens. In the same month, before stepping down as
president of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko bestowed the highest
state award, the star of Hero of Ukraine, on Stepan Bandera,
a radical nationalist leader of the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury who was assassinated by a KGB agent in 1959. That decision
aroused numerous protests in Ukraine and abroad, and the new
president, Viktor Yanukovych, allowed a Donetsk regional court
to rescind the award. Yanukovych did not stop there: bowing to
Russian pressure, he refused to refer to the Holodomor as an act
of genocide despite an earlier decision of the Ukrainian parlia-
ment on that issue. Ukraine was in turmoil about its history, and
the political compass needle swung from pro-Russian to pro-
Soviet to pro-nationalist, depending on the head of state.2
Before the end of the decade, Ukraine underwent a process of
radical decommunization driven at least in part by the incompat-
ibility of post-Soviet historical narratives that presented the So-
viet period in a predominantly positive light and the Holodomor
narrative, which portrayed the Soviet regime as a genocidal mon-
strosity. Another major factor contributing to that process was
the drive to rehabilitate and fully integrate into the historical
mainstream the story of the nationalist-led Ukrainian Insurgent
Army, which fought for the independence of Ukraine during and
after World War II. The decommunization campaign resulted not
only in the demolition of monuments to Lenin and other leaders
of the Soviet regime but also in the mass renaming not only of
streets and squares but also of entire villages, towns, and cities,
changing the map of Ukraine in highly dramatic fashion.
xi
Russian aggression turned not only Ukraine but also

Ukrainian history into a battleground, demanding a response
from Ukrainian society on a number of historical fronts. Russia’s
use of imperial history to justify its annexation of the Crimea
and, in particular, its failed attempts to split Ukraine by creating
a quasi-state of “Novorossiia” (New Russia) vaguely based on the
area once claimed by an imperial province with the same name,
rekindled long-standing Ukrainian interest in the history of the
Cossacks, who settled the steppes of southern Ukraine prior to
Russian expansion there in the eighteenth century. Moreover,
Russia’s use in its aggression against Ukraine of Soviet mythology,
especially that of the “Great Patriotic War”—the Soviet compo-
nent of World War II—provided additional fuel and rationale for
the decommunization campaign.3
What I discovered while working on this collection but did
not fully understand before was that, by writing these essays in
the course of the last decade, I became involved in a process of
documenting new developments but also, more importantly, in
an attempt to understand and explain them to myself and others
in historical terms. I will explain below how the essays collected
here contributed to both processes by pointing out the relations
between individual essays and the historical shifts that have been
taking place during the last ten years in the self-perception of
Ukrainian society and its attitude toward history.
⁂
The volume begins with an introduction suggesting the need for
a new national history of Ukraine that would take account of the
main historiographic trends and achievements of the past few de-
cades. The title of the first section of the volume, “Cossack Stock,”
refers to the words of the Ukrainian anthem, a mid-nineteenth-
century text that declared all Ukrainians to be of Cossack stock.
Cossackdom became the founding myth of the modern Ukrainian
nation, but Cossack history itself produced more than one my-
thology. The essays in that section deal with various aspects of
Cossack history and the mythologies engendered by it.
The essay “Placing Ukraine on the Map of Europe” not
only examines the first appearance of the term “Ukraine” on
xii
Preface
a European map but also discusses the synergic relationship be-

tween Cossacks and princes, who were represented as antagonists
in traditional historiography. The next essay, “Russia and Ukraine:
Did They Reunite in 1654?,” analyzes the pitfalls of the Pereiaslav
mythology used in imperial and Soviet times to justify Russian
domination of Ukraine. The essay “Hadiach 1658: The Origins of
a Myth” considers the myth that served to counterbalance that
of Pereiaslav by presenting the orientation of the Cossack state
toward Poland as a preferable alternative. Finally, “The Return
of Ivan Mazepa” looks at the ways in which Ukrainian society
dealt with the imperial mythology of the Battle of Poltava (1709)
and the depiction of the Ukrainian hetman Ivan Mazepa, who
rebelled against the empire, as a latter-day Judas.
The second section of the volume, “The Red Century,” includes
articles and essays that discuss Europe’s and Ukraine’s bloodiest
century—the twentieth. It begins with a reinterpretation of the
Russian Revolution as a revolution of nations (“How Russian
Was the Russian Revolution?”) and continues with two articles
that discuss the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33, recently
recognized by the Ukrainian parliament and the parliaments of
a number of other countries as a genocide. The first of those two
articles, “Killing by Hunger,” is a review of Anne Applebaum’s
award-winning book Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, while
the second, “Mapping the Great Famine,” presents the results of
a GIS-based research project on the history of the tragedy that
firmly categorizes it as a man-made famine.
The next two essays, “The Call of Blood” and “The Battle
for Eastern Europe,” discuss the international politics of World
War II as related to Ukraine. In the first case, Stalin’s decision to
sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact brought about a partial re-
habilitation of the Ukrainian national project and rhetoric, since
they were needed to justify the Soviet annexation of parts of
Poland and Romania. In the second essay I argue that Soviet-
American relations deteriorated at the end of World War II as
a result of the two countries’ growing competition for Eastern
Europe, which included Ukraine then and now. The impact of
the start of the Cold War on the ordinary Ukrainian citizens is
discussed in the essay entitled “The American Dream.”
xiii
The third section of the volume, “Farewell to the Empire,”

includes essays on Ukraine’s late Soviet and post-Soviet history.
The disintegration of the USSR, whose history is discussed in
great detail in my book The Last Empire, is here treated in a short
piece entitled “The Soviet Collapse.” The history and memory of
the Chornobyl (in Russian, Chernobyl) nuclear disaster, one of
the factors contributing to the collapse, is discussed in the essays
“Chornobyl” and “Truth in Our Times.” “The Empire Strikes
Back” traces the evolution of Russian foreign policy and Russo-
Ukrainian relations after the collapse of the Soviet Union and
surveys the outbreak of the current conflict.
Essays on the politics of memory provide a context for un-
derstanding the Russo-Ukrainian war and its contribution to
major changes in Ukraine’s memory politics. The essay “When
Stalin Lost His Head” uses the story of the beheading of a Stalin
monument in Ukraine to analyze the clash between Soviet and
post-Soviet narratives of history and types of memory, both lib-
eral and nationalist. This is also the subject of the essay “Goodbye
Lenin!,” discussed above. It attempts to explain the changes in
Ukrainian society’s perception of history that became important
contributing factors to the “Leninfall” (Leninopad), the grass-
roots campaign to demolish statues of Vladimir Lenin, and later
to the parliament-driven process of decommunization.
Visions of Ukraine’s European future and their relation to
history are discussed in the four essays that constitute the fourth
and final section of the volume, “European Horizons.” The first of
those essays, “The Russian Question,” discusses the development
of the Russian national idea and nationalism as they have shaped
and justified the war. “The Quest for Europe” reconstructs the
image of Europe as it appears in the writings of Ukrainian intel-
lectuals from the nineteenth century on, arguing that the notion
of Europe has been constructed as an antipode to Russia and
continues to function in that capacity with regard to Ukrainian
history and identity.
In “The New Eastern Europe” I discuss the post-Cold War
shift in the application of the term “Eastern Europe” from the
Soviet satellite nations of the Cold War era to the former So-
viet republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. I examine the
consequences of that shift, as well as the rise of Ukraine as a new
xiv
Preface
battleground between the collective West and Russia, for the new
political and cultural map of Europe in the essay “Reimagining
the Continent.” I argue that the post-Cold War era has produced
a new understanding of the limits and frontiers of Europe that are
now being contested in the war in and over Ukraine.
Although they cover a large swath of territory, both chrono-
logical and historiographic, the essays collected in this volume do
not encompass all of Ukrainian history. I believe, however, that,
read as a collection, they offer a broader and deeper understanding
of Ukrainian history and Ukraine’s current challenges through
the interpretation of its past than they could do when published
individually. Taken together, they offer a fairly comprehensive
answer to the question of why Ukraine has been central to the
East-West confrontation of the post-Cold War era and has com-
manded world attention more than once during the past decade.
xv
1.
Quo Vadis Ukrainian
History?
The history of Ukraine as a territory, not unlike that of many

other places, countries, and peoples, has its origins in the kind
of historical writing that would probably be characterized today
as global or transnational history. In the mid-fifth century BC
Herodotus described what is now southern Ukraine and its multi-
ethnic population, dominated by the Scythians but not limited to
them, in his Histories. Comparing the Dnieper to the other rivers
known to the ancient Greeks, he concluded that it was second
only to the Nile. Thus the lands and peoples of Ukraine have been
part of global history ever since the father of historiography wrote
about them. Several centuries later, the first known inhabitants
of the Ukrainian lands, the Cimmerians, made it into the Bible.
When the Rus´ chroniclers in the city of Kyiv began to write
their own history in the mid- eleventh century AD, they already
had a significant body of literature on the subject, written largely
by learned Greeks, whose emperors and patriarchs had brought
Christianity to the former Scythian lands a few decades earlier.
The task of the chroniclers was anything but simple: they had to
collect local lore and fit it into the Christian and imperial his-
torical schema brought by the missionaries. They did their best
to place themselves, their rulers, and their land in the narrative
of the creation of the world, the myth of Slavic ethnogenesis,
and the history of the Byzantine Empire. They insisted that they
were in control of their own fate: allegedly, they had never been
conquered and had invited the Vikings (Varangians) to rule over
their land of their own free will, just as they had freely chosen
1
Christianity as their new religion. But the concept of world his-

tory and the chronological table they used to date the events of
their past came directly from Byzantine writings.
The vision of Kyiv and Rus´ as parts of the Christian uni-
verse remained fundamental to the chroniclers’ outlook despite
the shock of the Mongol invasion in the mid-thirteenth century.
But as the world of the Rus´ principalities became smaller, and
the ambitions of their rulers local rather than regional or global,
the chroniclers turned into guardians of local memory, which had
little connection with universal history. Not until the sixteenth
century did foreign writers again turn their attention to Kyiv
and the Ukrainian lands, prompting local authors to relate their
history to global developments. The onset of the Reformation,
with its battles between Protestants and Catholics—in Ukraine,
these mainly took the form of polemics over the Union of Brest
(1596)—made the two camps think of Orthodox Ukrainians and
Belarusians as participants in a broader religious struggle. Polem-
icists, both Orthodox and Uniate, conceived their history as part
of an epic battle between Christianity and heresy. The Cossack
wars that began in the mid-seventeenth century not only focused
the attention of Western writers on the region but also led them
to interpret the Cossack phenomenon as part of the general Eu-
ropean wave of revolutions or of the Christian struggle against
the Ottomans.
“Although Ukraine be one of the most remote regions of Eu-
rope, and the Cossackian name very modern; yet has that country
been of late the stage of glorious actions, and the inhabitants have
acquitted themselves with as great valor in martial arts as any
nation whatsoever,” wrote Edward Brown in 1672 on publishing
Pierre Chevalier’s history of the Cossacks in translation under
the title A Discourse of the Original, Country, Manners, Govern-
ment and Religion of the Cossacks.1 In Brown’s view, the Cossacks
resembled his own countrymen in some measure, as they had won
glorious victories at sea; the steppes settled by the Cossacks also
resembled the sea and required a compass to navigate them. This
initial attempt to explain Ukraine to the English reading public
emphasized military and naval history, heroic deeds, and parallels
with the English way of life.
2
Quo Vadis Ukrainian History
The eighteenth century brought the ideas of the Enlight-

enment to Eastern Europe, where they found interpreters and
promoters in enlightened despots such as Catherine II. The main
task of local historians—first Cossack officers and then noblemen
in the imperial service—became that of integrating their past into
that of the empire even as they stressed the peculiarities of their
region. That was a theme taken up by the Cossack chroniclers who
wrote after the Battle of Poltava (1709). The genre was perfected
by Oleksandr Bezborodko, a former Cossack officer who became
one of the architects of Russian foreign policy at the end of the
eighteenth century. His account of the post-Poltava history of his
native Hetmanate described it as having benefited from the en-
lightened rule of Catherine II. The imperial authorities, for their
part, were busy integrating the Ukrainian past into that of their
respective empires. In Ukraine, a local governor general sponsored
a History of Little Russia by Dmitrii Bantysh-Kamensky (1822).
The Galician past was actively incorporated into the history of
the Habsburg dynasty and empire.
The age of nationalism broke the link between local and im-
perial history, making the history of the nation and its territory
the main object of study. Mykhailo Hrushevsky not only moved
from one empire to another but also developed a nonimperial
intellectual framework to create a historical narrative for the
Ukrainian nation. National historians revolutionized historiog-
raphy by abandoning the annals of dynasties and empires and
studying the people. While they endowed their prospective na-
tions with separate and unique pasts, their anti-imperial project
also allowed for an element of universalism. Thus, most Ukrainian
historians from Mykola Kostomarov to Mykhailo Drahomanov
and Mykhailo Hrushevsky imagined their land as part of a future
federation—Slavic in Kostomarov’s case, European in Drahoma-
nov’s, and Russian in the case of the early Hrushevsky.
The twentieth century brought the idea of world revolution to
Ukraine. Communist writers imagined Ukraine as part of a world
community of socialist nations; some of them, such as Mykola
Khvyliovy, called on the Ukrainian cultural elite to reorient itself
toward Europe. Another, Matvii Iavorsky, saw Soviet Ukraine as
a Piedmont for Ukrainians outside the USSR. The Stalin regime
put a brutal end to such prospects, arresting and killing their
3
exponents. The concept of the “history of the USSR” reduced

the transnational aspect of Ukrainian history to an emphasis on
Russo-Ukrainian relations—a restriction lifted only with the un-
expected fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
In the West, Ukraine and its history remained largely unno-
ticed throughout World War I and the interwar period, but the
prelude to World War II, when Ukrainians found themselves
involved in the Czechoslovak crisis and emerged as a factor in the
German-Soviet partition of Poland, changed the situation. The
Ukrainian émigré historian Dmytro Doroshenko published his
survey of Ukrainian history in Canada, while the Russian émigré
historian George Vernadsky gave his imprimatur to an English
translation of Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s survey in the United States.
In the United Kingdom, W. E. D. Allen published his survey with
Cambridge University Press. He defined the “Ukrainian problem”
as “one of the chief reasons for the absence of balance in conti-
nental Europe.” 2
The European war soon became global, turning the atten-
tion of historians and the public at large away from Ukraine to
Russia and the Soviet Union as a whole. But the war also con-
tributed greatly to the internationalization of knowledge. In the
Ukrainian case, it drove hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian ref-
ugees and quite a few professional historians to Central Europe
and, eventually, to the United States and Canada. In the final
analysis, wartime developments not only directed the attention
of the English-speaking public to that part of the world but also
produced English-language authors who were prepared to write
about it.
The logic of the Cold War, which engulfed the world soon
after World War II, promoted the spread of anticommunism
and nationalism as a means of opposing the Russocentric Soviet
historical narrative. But the origins of Ukrainian history as an
academic discipline in North America also had distinctive trans-
national characteristics. When a chair of Ukrainian history was
created at Harvard University in 1975, its first occupant was Om-
eljan Pritsak, a renowned expert on the languages and cultures of
the Turkic world. His closest ally and cofounder of the Ukrainian
Research Institute, Ihor Ševčenko, was an authority on Byzan-
tine cultural history. Both wrote on Ukraine, placing its history
4
and culture in the broad context of the Eurasian and Byzantine

worlds. Pritsak’s successor, Roman Szporluk, had made a name
for himself as an expert on European intellectual history before
coming to Harvard in the late 1980s. In terms of their academic
background, interests, and expertise, the founders of Ukrainian
historiography in the United States and Canada could not imag-
ine Ukrainian history except as part of the Eurasian, Byzantine,
or East-Central European worlds.
Rethinking Ukrainian History

The first North American academic debate on Ukrainian history
took place on the pages of Slavic Review in 1963. It featured the
Turcologist Omeljan Pritsak, the specialists on the Revolution
of 1917–20 Arthur E. Adams and John S. Reshetar, Jr., and the
intellectual historian of East-Central Europe Ivan L. Rudnytsky.
Rudnytsky, who wrote the conceptual paper entitled “The Role
of the Ukraine in Modern History,” and Pritsak, who was one of
the commentators, were post–World War II immigrants to the
United States. Both had been influenced by Viacheslav Lypynsky,
who initiated the multiethnic approach to Ukrainian history in
the 1920s. The participants debated the issues of the historical
or nonhistorical status of the Ukrainian nation, continuity in
Ukrainian history, the nature of the revolution in Ukraine, and
its historical position between East and West.3
Ivan Rudnytsky, who claimed in 1963 that Ukrainian his-
toriography had not established itself in the North American
academy and was at best an adjunct to Russian studies, organized
a conference on Ukrainian history in Canada in 1978. It resulted
in the publication of a collection entitled Rethinking Ukrainian
History, including nine essays, as well as transcripts of a round-
table discussion on the major challenges facing Ukrainian his-
toriography in North America. By the time of the conference,
chairs of Ukrainian history and institutes of Ukrainian studies
had been established at Harvard University in the United States
and at the University of Alberta in Canada, and the training of
graduate students in history had begun. Some of those students,
including Orest Subtelny and Frank E. Sysyn, took part in the
conference and published their papers in the collection. Also
5
among the participants were Roman Szporluk, then of the Uni-

versity of Michigan, his former student John-Paul Himka, and
Alfred Rieber’s student at the University of Pennsylvania, Zenon
E. Kohut, a member of the Harvard circle of graduate students.
The first question to be resolved by the conference organizers
was whom they wanted to invite to the conference—Ukrainian
historians or historians of Ukraine. They opted for the latter, in-
viting historians of Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian background.
Among the latter was Patricia Herlihy, then of Wellesley College.
The organizers still had to prove to themselves and others that
“Ukrainian history” was a legitimate term for the history of the
Ukrainian lands prior to the emergence of the name “Ukraine”
as an ethnonym. Omeljan Pritsak resolved that issue during the
roundtable discussion by pointing to Spanish history, which dealt
with the history of Spanish regions long before the establishment
of the Spanish state and its official name. Issues of periodizing
Ukrainian history and establishing appropriate English-language
terminology attracted most of the participants’ attention during
the roundtable debates. But the overriding concern, formulat-
ed by Rudnytsky in his introduction to the conference volume,
was that under conditions preventing the free development of
Ukrainian studies in the Soviet Union scholars of Ukrainian his-
tory in North America had to take on the task of representing
Ukrainian historiography in the West.
“How should Western students of Ukrainian history respond
to this distressing situation?” wrote Rudnytsky with reference to
the sorry state of Soviet Ukrainian historiography. “Many in the
Ukrainian diaspora community believe that Soviet ideological
orthodoxy ought to be met with an equally rigid and militant
‘patriotic’ orthodoxy. In the conference organizers’ view, such an
approach would be self-defeating. What is needed is the applica-
tion of free, critical thought, untrammeled by dogmas of any kind,
whether Marxist or nationalist.” Rudnytsky argued that historians
of Ukraine in the West could remedy the “deformations” of Sovi-
et historiography if “they themselves study Ukrainian history in
a universal context.” He wrote that, by treating Ukrainian history
in the context of the country’s relations with the Mediterranean
world, Central Europe, and Eurasia, one could “bring to light
6
Ukraine’s unique historical identity” and contribute to the “better

understanding of the history of Eastern Europe as a whole.” 4
The two key decisions made by the conference organizers and
participants—to broaden the field of Ukrainian historical studies
by including non-Ukrainian scholars and make that newly con-
stituted field an integral part of North American historical schol-
arship—were clear departures from the model of Ukrainian his-
toriography practiced by Ukrainian émigré scholarly institutions,
in particular the Free Academy of Sciences and the Shevchen-
ko Scientific Society. Those decisions resulted in the training of
a first generation of Ukrainian historians in history departments
of North American universities and the subsequent publication of
monographs, issued predominantly by the institutes of Ukrainian
studies at Harvard and the University of Alberta.
Between 1982 and 1996, scholars associated with the new field
published three surveys of Ukrainian history. Roman Szporluk’s
influential Ukraine: A Brief History (1982) placed the modern his-
tory of Ukraine into the context of nation-building processes in
Central and Eastern Europe. From Harvard came the authors of
two major syntheses of Ukrainian history: Orest Subtelny pub-
lished his in 1988 under the title Ukraine: A History, while Paul
Robert Magocsi joined the field eight years later with his Histo-
ry of Ukraine (1996). Subtelny’s survey has often been regarded
as representative of the national paradigm of Ukrainian history,
while the second became an epitome of the multiethnic approach
to the subject.5
The appearance of an independent Ukrainian state in 1991 had
a major impact on Ukrainian historiography. Subtelny’s survey,
translated into Ukrainian, became a standard textbook in Ukraine
for some time, replacing the Russocentric and class-based nar-
rative of the Soviet period. It also competed there with outdated
approaches and models rediscovered or “repatriated” to Ukraine
through the works of Ukrainian émigrés belonging to the “stat-
ist” school of Ukrainian historiography. No less profound were
the changes in the West, where the emergence of Ukraine on
the political map provided much-needed political legitimacy for
Ukrainian history as a distinct field of study.
But the validation took place in a very peculiar way, with a de-
bate in the Slavic Review (1995) on an article by Mark von Hagen
7
provocatively titled “Does Ukraine Have a History?” Von Hagen

claimed that according to generally accepted Western political
and academic standards, Ukraine did not yet have a history: in
order to acquire that status, the subject would have to be fully
incorporated into North American historiography. A number of
scholars from the United States, Canada, Central Europe, and
Ukraine were invited to respond to von Hagen’s paper, indicat-
ing a major transformation of Ukrainian history as a subject of
study. It was now attracting the interest of leading scholars of
non-Ukrainian origin in the West, while those on the “ethnic”
Ukrainian side included new arrivals from post-Soviet Ukraine,
such as the present author.
Mark von Hagen’s essay offered a critical but sympathetic
review of the field and, more importantly, set an agenda for its fu-
ture development. Returning to the question of the perceived lack
of institutional, elite, and even cultural continuity in Ukrainian
history, von Hagen proposed to turn Ukraine’s “weaknesses” into
strengths. “Precisely the fluidity of frontiers, the permeability of
cultures, the historic multi-ethnic society is what could make
Ukrainian history a very ‘modern’ field of inquiry,” wrote von Ha-
gen, who specialized in the history of the interwar USSR. He
continued: “I want to make a case for the study of Ukrainian his-
tory and its re-emergence as an academic discipline both within
and without Ukraine as a history intrinsically interesting precisely
because it challenges so many of the clichés of the nation-state
paradigm.” 6
The arrival of the transnational paradigm in the field of
Ukrainian studies in general and Ukrainian history in particular
was heralded by a collection of essays edited by Georgiy Kasianov
and Philipp Ther in 2009 under the title A Laboratory of Trans-
national History: Ukraine and Recent Ukrainian Historiography.
Andreas Kappeler, one of the contributors to that collection, has
been particularly effective in revealing the limitations entailed
not only in the national but also in the multiethnic paradigm.
Ukraine, a country divided over the centuries by political and cul-
tural boundaries, and probably more influenced by transnational
trends than most other regions of Europe because of its stateless-
ness, may well stand to benefit particularly from a transnational
approach to the writing of its history.7
8
The Future of the Past

Historians from all over the world working on various topics in
Ukrainian history gained an opportunity to evaluate the state
of the field at three international conferences organized by the
Institute of Ukrainian History, National Academy of Sciences of
Ukraine, and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in 2012
and 2013. The conference on Ukrainian historical writing of the
interwar period was held in Munich in July 2012 and cosponsored
by the Ukrainian Free University; the conference on the Soviet
legacy, hosted by the Institute of History in Kyiv, took place in
May 2013 with the support of a grant from the Renaissance Foun-
dation; and the conference on the future of Ukrainian historical
studies, cosponsored by the Ukrainian Studies Fund, was held
at Harvard University in October 2013. Its theme, “Quo Vadis
Ukrainian History? Assessing the State of the Field,” provided
the title and main theme of this essay.8
The conference took place and the first drafts of papers were
written a few months before the Euromaidan protests and the
Revolution of Dignity, followed by the Russian annexation of the
Crimea and the Russo-Ukrainian conflict over eastern Ukraine.
Some authors took those developments into account in revising
their original contributions for the volume of conference pro-
ceedings published in 2016 under the title The Future of the Past:
New Perspectives on Ukrainian History. I discuss their importance
for the ongoing debate on the essence and future direction of
Ukrainian historical studies below. National history, especially
the national paradigm in the representation of the Ukrainian past,
was an object of critical examination as well as a point of depar-
ture for most of the historians who accepted the invitation to take
part in the conference.9
The most systematic attempt to take stock of the main charac-
teristics, advantages, and disadvantages of the national paradigm
was undertaken by Georgiy Kasianov and Oleksii Tolochko. They
added their voices to the ongoing discussion on the multivolume
history of Ukraine—the traditional “genre” produced by the Insti-
tute of History of the National Academy of Sciences10—and what
it should look like if the “genre” is to continue. The authors point-
ed to the limitations not only of the national paradigm per se but
9
also of traditional approaches to writing multivolume academic

histories of Ukraine. They proposed to overcome those limitations
by rejecting the “tyranny of territoriality” imposed by the concept
of the modern nation-state and focusing instead on individual
regions and/or territorial units larger than the nation-state.
These turned out to be the two main directions taken by
the authors of The Future of the Past in their reexamination of
Ukrainian history. What the study of Ukraine can tell us about
Soviet, European, and global history was the question raised
in Andrea Graziosi’s discussion of his personal “discovery” of
Ukrainian history. It was answered in the essays authored by
George Liber, Hiroaki Kuromiya, and Mark von Hagen, who
proposed to reinterpret Ukraine’s twentieth-century history and
political thought by considering them in the context of imperial-
ism and anticolonial resistance. In von Hagen’s view, Soviet policy
in Ukraine had clear colonial underpinnings and produced anti-
colonial resistance manifested in such diverse expressions as the
socialist writings of Pavlo Khrystiuk, the nationalism of Dmytro
Dontsov, and the writings of Ukrainian national communists of
the 1960s, such as Ivan Dziuba, who promoted Ukrainian-Jewish
understanding.
Shifting from the transnational to the regional and back in
an attempt to overcome the limitations of the national paradigm
has become a prominent trend in Ukrainian historiography of the
last few decades. Few regions of Ukraine have received as much
attention from historians, both Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian, as
Galicia. In the late eighteenth century, when the Habsburg histo-
rian Johann Christian von Engel produced the first Central Eu-
ropean work on Ukrainian history, its two main parts dealt with
the Ukrainian Cossacks and the Galician-Volhynian Principali-
ty.11 The annexation of Galicia to the Habsburg Monarchy after
the first partition of Poland launched a project of imagining and
reimagining it in the context of Austria and Austria-Hungary,
described with many important insights in Larry Wolff ’s Idea
of Galicia.12
In his contribution to the conference volume, Wolff examined
how Galician history was perceived by Habsburg elites in Vienna,
Polish intellectuals in the region, and Ukrainian nation-builders
such as Mykhailo Hrushevsky. Iryna Vushko added her voice to
10
those who criticize the tendency of adherents of nationally fo-

cused historiography to absolve representatives of their own na-
tions of wrongdoing or criminal acts committed against “others.”
She called on fellow historians to embrace the heterogeneity of
Galician and Ukrainian history in order to “place Ukraine at the
center of a European—not solely Ukrainian national—narrative.”
Right-Bank Ukraine, which had received little attention in
traditional Ukrainian historiography, was the focus of Faith Hil-
lis’s and Heather Coleman’s contributions, which dealt with the
second half of the nineteenth century. Both authors examined
the formation of modern national identities in the region, while
stressing its unique character and contribution to larger nation-
al and imperial identity-building projects. Hillis challenged the
dominant “national awakening” paradigm in Ukrainian histo-
riography and directed attention to proponents of Little Rus-
sian identity—an important factor in the history not only of
Russian nationalism but also of Ukraine that was marginalized,
if not completely overlooked, by historians working within the
Ukrainian national paradigm. Heather Coleman stressed that in
Right-Bank Ukraine no nation-building project could succeed
without taking into account and accommodating the local iden-
tities of religious and cultural figures such as Petr Lebedintsev.
This conclusion probably also applied to other regions of Ukraine.
While the transnational turn in the study of Ukrainian history
came in the wake of disappointment with the national paradigm
and growing criticism of the multiethnic approach, which repli-
cated the shortcomings of the former on a smaller ethnocultural
scale, a number of essays in the volume demonstrated the po-
tential of the transnational paradigm to reinterpret themes that
received considerable attention in the national and multiethnic
narratives, offering new ways of understanding familiar phenom-
ena. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern argued in favor of integrating
ethnic histories into the history of Ukraine as a region and mul-
tiethnic community. The transnational, national, and multicultural
converged in a new way in Mayhill Fowler’s appeal to “go global”
with the history of Ukrainian culture. Distinguishing “culture in
Ukraine” from “Ukrainian culture,” Fowler opted for the transna-
tional approach to promote study of the former. She called for the
“rediscovery” of imperial and Soviet layers of “culture in Ukraine.”
11
Relations between history and society in Ukraine and abroad

were featured in the essays by Marta Dyczok and Volodymyr
Kravchenko. Dyczok discussed the clash of Soviet models of rep-
resenting and interpreting the past with nationalist or nationally
inspired visions of Ukrainian history. She pointed to the lack of
consensus among politicians, historians, and society at large with
regard to a historical narrative. Kravchenko explained the lack of
consensus by taking a critical look at Ukrainian society’s troubled
relations with its Soviet legacy. He argued that the failure to “na-
tionalize” the Ukrainian past had made elements of Ukrainian
society receptive to the much more successful Russian project of
reappropriating and recasting parts of Soviet historical mythology
for purposes of Russian nation-building. Kravchenko suggested
a way forward by integrating the Soviet historical experience into
the Ukrainian national narrative and pointed to the “moderniza-
tion” paradigm as the most effective tool for achieving that goal.
The essays collected in The Future of the Past give a good idea
of the state of the study and, to some extent, also of the teach-
ing of Ukrainian history outside Ukraine, particularly in North
America, the center of non-Soviet research on the history of
Ukraine prior to 1991. They also point toward new ways of exam-
ining the Ukrainian past.
Toward a New Narrative?

As in the late 1970s, when scholars of Ukrainian history in the
United States and Canada gathered for their first conference to
assess the state of the field, so today a new generation of histo-
rians is seeking to define the field in relation to dominant histo-
riographic trends in Ukraine, where most research and writing
on the subject is done, and to the historical profession outside
Ukraine. Today, as in the 1970s, most of the “Westerners” reject
the historiographic trend dominant in Ukraine. In the 1970s that
trend was a variety of Soviet Marxist historiography; today it is
the national narrative of the Ukrainian past. The task also remains
largely the same as it was then—the integration of Ukrainian
historical research and writing into world historiography, taking
advantage of new trends emerging in the field.
12
Today, unlike in 1995, no one asks whether Ukraine has a his-

tory. As scholars of various backgrounds began contributing to the
field, bringing in themes and approaches from other fields of his-
toriography, the legitimacy of studying Ukrainian history ceased
to be an issue. As noted above, the achievement of Ukrainian
independence also served to legitimize the field. Recent research
on Ukrainian history conducted outside the country has been
profoundly influenced by the transnational and regional turns in
historical studies. The same is true of the continuing interest in
empires, borderlands, minorities, and national and cultural identi-
ties, as well as the growing interest in spatial elements of historical
research. All these approaches help expand the boundaries of
Ukrainian history and enhance its heuristic potential not only
at home but also, as Andrea Graziosi has shown, with regard to
European history as a whole.
Thus, Ukraine now has a history abroad. But does it have
one at home in the sense defined by von Hagen—an accepted
written record of past experience? The national narrative, now
dominant in Ukrainian historiography at home, has encountered
major problems in the last few years when it comes to its recep-
tion on the elite and popular levels. As Marta Dyczok and Volo-
dymyr Kravchenko show in the above volume, the ethnonational
narrative has exhausted its potential not only in purely scholarly
and heuristic terms but also as an instrument for organizing the
historical memory of Ukrainian society in such a way as to pro-
mote consensus. Should its practitioners be given another chance?
After all, Ukraine is still struggling with the process of
nation-building, which most European countries completed in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the help of the
ethnonational historical narratives that most contributors to the
above volume reject as not only outdated but also detrimental to
a better understanding of the Ukrainian past and its significance.
Is it fair to “impose” on Ukrainian society a historical understand-
ing informed by the transnational processes currently taking place
in the countries of the European Union at a time when Ukraine
is surrounded by and obliged to compete, sometimes militarily,
with states that have placed the national paradigm at the core of
their historical identity? 13
13
The events of the last few years—the Revolution of Dignity,

the loss of the Crimea, and the insurgency and Russo-Ukrainian
conflict in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine—have helped
mobilize Ukrainian society in defense of the country’s integrity
and sovereignty across ethnic, linguistic, religious, and regional
lines. The tragic experience of war, resettlement, and lost territory
has mobilized the Ukrainian civic nation. If one of the main tasks
of historical writing is to explain a given society’s origins to its
citizens, there is no better way to do so than by writing a history
of the land and its people, taking account of the country’s regional
and ethnic diversity while integrating its past into the history of
the part of the world to which it belongs.
With historians of empires discussing ways of writing a “new
imperial history,” the time has come to put on the academic agen-
da the need for a “new national history,” a genre of research and
writing that would go beyond the ethnonational paradigm of the
past and take advantage of opportunities presented by the global,
transnational, multiethnic, and regional approaches to meet the
growing demand of modern states, nations, and societies for com-
mon narratives and historical identities. Few countries are more in
need of that kind of history than is Ukraine. The transformation
of the Ukrainian historical narrative along the lines suggested by
the new trends of historical research would make that narrative
more inclusive and much more acceptable to various elements of
Ukrainian society, which remains divided less by issues of lan-
guage and culture than by the different historical experiences of
Ukraine’s diverse regions. That transformation would also make
Ukraine more understandable to its European Union partners,
whose history has often been the product of the same transna-
tional processes.
14
I
COSSACK STOCK
2.
Placing Ukraine on the Map
of Europe
The word “Ukraine,” which is now the name of an indepen-

dent country, has medieval origins and was first used by twelfth-
century Kyivan chroniclers to define the areas of today’s Ukraine
bordering on the Pontic steppes. In the second half of the sev-
enteenth century, the term “Ukraine” entered the international
vocabulary as one of the names of the Cossack polity created in
the course of the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648–57). By that time,
European geographers could already locate Ukraine on the maps
produced by the French engineer and cartographer Guillaume
Levasseur de Beauplan. But his was not the first depiction of
Ukraine on a European map.1
The terms “Ukraine” and “Cossacks” appeared on European
maps simultaneously in the first decades of the seventeenth cen-
tury. Both terms were first introduced on a map of Eastern Europe
produced by a group of cartographers and engravers assembled
by Mikalojus Kristupas Radvila (Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł)
the Orphan, one of the most prominent aristocrats in the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania. The map, entitled “Detailed Description of
the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Other Adjacent Lands,” cap-
tured not only major political and territorial developments but
also social and cultural changes that had taken place in the region
in the course of the sixteenth century.
The Radvila map covers the territories of the Grand Duchy
of Lithuania as they existed before the Union of Lublin (1569)
between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lith-
uania. It is supplemented by a separate map of the Dnieper River.
17
By far the most important development reflected on the Radvila

map was the emergence of a border dividing the Grand Duchy
almost in half. Some sections of the new boundary resemble the
present-day Ukrainian-Belarusian border, following the Prypiat
River and then diverging to the north. The word “Ukraine,” used
to describe part of the lands south of the new border, referred
to the territory on the Right Bank of the Dnieper extending
from Kyiv in the north to Kaniv in the south. Beyond Kaniv, if
one trusted the cartographer, there were wild steppes, marked
Campi deserti citra Boristenem (Desert plains on this side of the
Borysthenes [Dnieper]). “Ukraine” thus covered a good part of
the region’s steppe frontier, which had become the homeland of
the social group subsequently known as the Ukrainian Cossacks.2
The Radvila map provides unique insight into three inter-
related processes that shaped the future of the Pontic steppes:
the renegotiation of relations between the royal crown and the
local aristocracy; the economic and cultural colonization of the
Dnieper region; and, last but not least, the emergence of the
Ukrainian Cossacks as a powerful military and, later, political
and cultural force.
The Princes
The Radvila map is often attributed to Tomasz Makowski, its
principal engraver, but was in fact produced by a group of car-
tographers that included Maciej Strubicz. Most of the work on
the map was done between 1585 and 1603, while the first known
edition was published only in 1613 by Hessel Gerritsz (Gerard)
of Amsterdam.3
In many ways, the Radvila map was a continuation of work
initiated by King Stefan Batory at the time of the Livonian War
(1558–83) and may be regarded as sign of increased involvement of
the aristocracy in the political, religious, and cultural realms pre-
viously dominated by the king. Radvila was assisted in his work
by fellow aristocrats, and it has been argued that the informa-
tion on the Dnieper settlements was supplied to him by his peer,
the palatine of Kyiv and prominent Volhynian magnate Prince
Kostiantyn Ostrozky. Not unlike the Kronika polska, litewska,
żmódzka i wszystkiéj Rusi by Maciej Stryjkowski (1582), sponsored
18
Placing Ukraine on the Map of Europe
by a fellow Lithuanian aristocrat, Bishop Merkelis Giedraitis of

Samogitia (Žemaitija), Radvila’s map was not limited in scope to
the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and included the lands of Rus´,
which the Grand Duchy lost to Poland as a result of the Union
of Lublin (1569). The elites of the Grand Duchy were clearly un-
happy with the deal they got at Lublin in 1569 and were eager to
renegotiate the political and cultural spaces created by the Union.4
All over Europe, the sixteenth century was marked by the
strengthening of royal authority, centralization of the state, and
regularization of political and social practices. The other side of
the coin was increasing aristocratic opposition to this growth.
Both tendencies were fully apparent in the preparation and con-
clusion of the Union of Lublin, which had as its goal not only the
unification of the two parts of the Polish-Lithuanian state but
also the strengthening of the crown. If King Sigismund Augustus
wanted the Union, the aristocratic families of the Grand Duchy
of Lithuania opposed it. But many of their concerns had to be put
aside because of a growing external threat to the Grand Duchy
that could be met only with the help of Poland.
In 1558, after taking control of the Volga trade route by defeat-
ing and forcing into submission the two successors of the Gold-
en Horde, the Kazan and Astrakhan khanates, Ivan the Terrible
moved his armies westward, trying to gain access to the Baltic
Sea. The Livonian War, which Ivan started that year, would last
for a quarter century and see Sweden, Denmark, Lithuania and,
eventually, Poland involved in the struggle. In 1563, Muscovite
troops crossed the borders of the Grand Duchy, taking the city
of Polatsk (now in Belarus) and raiding Vitsebsk, Shkloŭ, and
Orsha. This defeat mobilized support for the Union among the
lesser Lithuanian nobility. Given Muscovite claims to the lands
of Kyivan Rus´, which included not only Polatsk but also the rest
of the Ukrainian-Belarusian territories of the Grand Duchy, the
future looked bleak for the Duchy’s ruling elite. Union with the
Kingdom of Poland now seemed the only possible solution.
In December 1568, Sigismund Augustus convened two Di-
ets in the city of Lublin—one for the Kingdom, the other for
the Grand Duchy—in the hope that their representatives would
hammer out conditions for the new union. The negotiations be-
gan on a positive note, as the two sides agreed to joint election of
19
the king, a common Diet, or parliament, and broad autonomy for

the Grand Duchy. Nonetheless, the magnates would not return
the royal lands in their possession—the principal demand of the
Executionists, a powerful group within the Polish nobility that
demanded the recovery of public and royal lands illegally held by
the magnates. Directed by Mikalojus Radvila (Mikołaj Radziwiłł)
the Red, the leader of the Lithuanian Calvinists and the victo-
rious commander of the Lithuanian army in its recent clashes
with Muscovite troops, the Lithuanian delegates made no con-
cessions. They packed their bags, assembled their retinues of noble
clients, and left the Diet. This move backfired. Unexpectedly for
the departing Lithuanians, the Diet of the Kingdom of Poland
began, with the king’s blessing, to issue decrees transferring one
province of the Grand Duchy after another to the jurisdiction of
the Kingdom of Poland.
The Lithuanian magnates who had feared losing their prov-
inces to Muscovy were now losing them to Poland instead. To
stop a hostile takeover by their powerful Polish partner, the Lith-
uanians returned to Lublin to sign an agreement dictated by the
Polish delegates. They were too late. In March, the Podlachia pa-
latinate on the Ukrainian-Belarusian-Polish ethnic border went
to Poland. Volhynia followed in May, and on 6 June, one day
before the resumption of the Polish-Lithuanian talks, the Ky-
ivan and Podolian lands were transferred to Poland as well. The
Ukrainian palatinates were incorporated into the Kingdom not as
a group but one by one, with no guarantees but those pertaining
to the use of the Ruthenian (Middle Ukrainian) language in the
courts and administration and the protection of the rights of the
Orthodox Church. The Lithuanian aristocrats could only accept
the new reality—they stood to lose even more if they continued
to resist the Union.5
Kostiantyn Ostrozky, by far the most influential of the
Ukrainian princes, decided the fate of the Union and his land
by throwing his support behind the king. The Lublin border,
which cut the Grand Duchy in half and separated the future
Ukrainian and Belarusian territories, reinforced differences long
in the making. Historically, the Kyiv Land and Galicia-Volhynia
differed significantly from the Belarusian lands to the north.
From the tenth to the fourteenth century, they were core areas
20
of independent or semi-independent principalities, and, if one

judges by the Primary Chronicle and its continuations in Kyiv
and Galicia-Volhynia, their identities differed from those of the
other Rus´ lands. The location of the Ukrainian lands on the
periphery of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the challenges
they faced on the open steppe frontier set them apart from the
rest of the Lithuanian world.
At the Lublin Diet, the Ukrainian elites saw little benefit
in maintaining the de facto independence of the Grand Duchy,
which was ill equipped to resist increasing pressure from the
Crimean and Noghay Tatars. The Kingdom of Poland could help
the Grand Duchy fight the war with Muscovy, but it was unlikely
to assist the Ukrainians in their low-intensity war with the Tatars.
A different attitude might be expected if the frontier provinc-
es were to be incorporated into the Kingdom. As things turned
out, the Volhynian princely families not only kept their posses-
sions but dramatically increased them under Polish tutelage.
Kostiantyn Ostrozky, who played a key role in the Lublin Diet,
kept his old posts as captain of the town of Volodymyr, head of
the Volhynian nobility, and palatine of Kyiv.
The opposition between the Volhynian princes who helped
Sigismund Augustus divide the Grand Duchy of Lithuania,
among whom Ostrozky was the most prominent, and the Lithu-
anian aristocrats did not last very long, as both camps soon found
common ground in developing political and cultural projects that
strengthened their independence of royal authority. The cultural
awakening took place on both sides of the new Polish-Lithuanian
border, fueled by the political aspirations of the princes and di-
rectly linked to the religious conflicts of the time. In Lithuania,
the Radvila family set an example of linking politics, religion, and
culture. The main opponent of the Union of Lublin, Mikalojus
Radvila the Red, was also the leader of Polish and Lithuanian
Calvinism and the founder of a school for Calvinist youth. His
cousin, Mikalojus Radvila the Black, funded the printing of the
first complete Polish translation of the Bible, which was issued
in the town of Brest on the Ukrainian-Belarusian ethnic border.
John Calvin dedicated one of his works to him. Since the Polish
kings remained Catholic, the dissident religion of their aristo-
cratic opponents served to strengthen the latter’s intransigence
21
toward royal authority. This was true for both Protestantism and
Orthodoxy. The initiative of the Radvila family in associating po-
litical opposition with religious dissent was picked up by their
Orthodox counterparts.
The first to do so was an Orthodox magnate, Hryhorii Khod-
kevych (in Belarusian, Khadkevich), who, like the two Radvila
cousins, had led the Lithuanian army as the Duchy’s grand het-
man—one of the supreme posts in the hierarchy. In 1566, two
years after the appearance of the Polish Bible, Khodkevych invited
two Moscow refugees, the printers Ivan Fedorov and Petr Msti
slavets, to his town of Zabłudów (Zabludaŭ). At Khodkevych’s
request and with his sponsorship, they published a number of
books in Church Slavonic there. Khodkevych died in 1572, caus-
ing the printers to stop their work, but his initiative would have
consequences.
A few years after Khodkevych’s death, Kostiantyn Ostrozky
began his own publishing project in Volhynia. In 1574 he moved
his residence from the Volhynian town of Dubno to nearby Os-
trih. He hired an Italian architect then living in Lviv to build
new fortifications, the remains of which can still be seen today
in Ostrih. He also employed one of Khodkevych’s printers, Ivan
Fedorov, who was summoned to Ostrih to take part in the prince’s
most ambitious cultural undertaking—the publication of the full
Church Slavonic text of the Bible. In his new capital, Ostrozky
assembled a team of scholars who compared Greek and Church
Slavonic texts of the Bible, emended the Church Slavonic trans-
lations, and published the most authoritative text of Scripture
ever produced by Orthodox scholars. The project was truly inter-
national in scope, involving participants not only from Lithuania
and Poland but also from Greece, while the copies of the Bible
on which they worked originated in places as diverse as Rome
and Moscow. The Ostrih Bible was issued in 1581 in a print run
estimated at fifteen hundred copies.6
The close contacts between Kostiantyn Ostrozky and the
Lithuanian aristocrats, as well as their shared interest in support-
ing cultural projects with broad political ramifications, support
the assumption of those scholars who claim that it was indeed
Kostiantyn Ostrozky who helped Prince Mikalojus Kristupas
Radvila to produce the map of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
22
While Radvila harbored no political ambitions that might un-

dermine his loyalty to the king and the Commonwealth—he
converted from Calvinism to Catholicism and opposed the Ze-
brzydowski Rebellion of 1606—his map suggests that he had
never given up the historical and cultural claims to the lands of
the Grand Duchy lost as a result of the Union of Lublin. It was
their interest in those territories, especially the ones located along
the Dnieper River, that united Ostrozky and Radvila.7
Ukraine
The Radvila map of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania offers a look
at Eastern Europe as seen from the palace window of a Lithu-
anian aristocrat, not a residence of the king or his servants. The
mapmakers presented the old Grand Duchy of Lithuania as if
it had never been cut in half by King Sigismund Augustus and
his supporters at the Lublin Diet of 1569. Although the new bor-
ders of the greatly diminished Grand Duchy are marked on the
map, they are hardly visible, and the map itself includes the old
Lithuanian possessions all the way to the Dnieper estuary. The
settlements most prominently marked on the map are not the
administrative centers of royal rule but the seats of the princes,
including Radvila’s own Olyka, which ended up on the Polish side
of the divide after the Union of Lublin, and the town of Ostrih,
the seat of the Ostrozkys.
Both Olyka and Ostrih are located in Volhynia, the region
that emerges on the map as the main stronghold of the princes.
It extends all the way to the Dnieper, covering the region marked
on the map as “Volynia ulterior, quae tum Vkraina tum Nis ab
aliis vocitatur” (Outer Volhynia, known either as Ukraine or as
the Lower [Dnieper]). According to the map, Ukraine, which is
only one of three possible names of the region, extends from Kyiv,
the seat of Ostrozky as palatine of the region, in the north, to the
Ros River and the fortress of Korsun, built by King Stefan Bato-
ry in 1581, in the south. It borders on the steppes, called “Campi
deserti” (Desert plains), which are depicted with numerous horse-
men, suggesting a battleground more than an inhabited desert. It
seems to be a fast-growing area, dotted with numerous castles and
settlements that had not appeared on earlier maps. The Radvila
23
map covers the territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as

they existed before the Union of Lublin (1569), which united the
Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy (Figure 1, pp. 206–7),
and has a supplement consisting of a separate map of the Dnieper
(Figure 2, pp. 208–13).
The reference to “Ukraine” as “Volynia Ulterior” speaks vol-
umes about the views and ambitions of the Ostrozky and other
Volhynian princes, the likely advisers to the makers of the Radvila
map. This usage reflected the perception of “Ukraine” on the Right
Bank of the Dnieper as the territories annexed to the Volhynian
Land, while stressing the role that the Volhynian princes had
played in the colonization of those territories. The lands marked
on the Radvila map as “Ukraine,” “Volynia Ulterior,” and “Nis”
had indeed become the playground of the Volhynian princes in
the second half of the sixteenth century.
The Lublin Diet prohibited the princes from fielding their
own armies in wartime. But because of the constant danger of
Tatar attacks on the steppe frontier, the Commonwealth’s stand-
ing army could not do without the military muscle of the princes.
Ostrozky alone could muster an army of twenty thousand soldiers
and cavalrymen—ten times the size of the king’s army in the bor-
derlands. At various times in his career, Ostrozky was a contender
for both the Polish and the Muscovite thrones. The lesser nobles
were in no position to defy the powerful magnate, on whom they
depended economically and politically. Thus, Ostrozky continued
to preside over an extensive network of noble clients who did his
bidding in the local and Commonwealth Diets. Not only the local
nobility but even the king and the Diet did not dare to challenge
the authority of this uncrowned king of Rus´.
The Ostrozkys were the richest Ukrainian princes who main-
tained and increased their wealth and influence after the Union of
Lublin, but they were not alone. Another highly influential Vol-
hynian princely family was the Vyshnevetskys. Prince Mykhailo
Vyshnevetsky branched out of his Volhynian possessions, which
were quite insignificant in comparison with Ostrozky’s, into the
lands east of the Dnieper. Those lands were either uncolonized or
had been abandoned by settlers in the times of Mongol rule and
were now open to attack by the Noghay and Crimean Tatars. The
Vyshnevetsky family expanded into the steppe lands, creating new
24
settlements, establishing towns, and funding monasteries. The

possessions of the Vyshnevetskys in Left-Bank (eastern) Ukraine
soon began to rival those of the Ostrozkys in Volhynia. These two
princely families were the largest landowners in Ukraine.
In the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the
Ukrainian steppes underwent a major political, economic, and
cultural transformation. For the first time since the days of Ky-
ivan Rus´, the line of frontier settlement stopped retreating to-
ward the Prypiat marshes and the Carpathian Mountains and
began advancing toward the east and south. Linguistic research
indicates that two major groups of Ukrainian dialects, Polisian
and Carpatho-Volhynian, began to converge from the north and
west, respectively, shifting east and south to create a third group
of steppe dialects that now cover Ukrainian territory from Zhy-
tomyr and Kyiv in the northwest to Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk, and
Donetsk in the east, extending as far southeast as Krasnodar and
Stavropol in today’s Russia. This movement and mixing of dialects
reflected the movement of the population at large.
The major obstacle to the movement of the sedentary pop-
ulation in the Pontic steppes was presented by the slave-seeking
expeditions of the Crimean Tatars and Noghays, subjects of the
Ottomans. The Ottoman Empire, whose Islamic laws allowed the
enslavement of non-Muslims only and encouraged the emanci-
pation of slaves, was always in need of free labor. The Noghays
and the Crimean Tatars responded to the demand, expanding
their slave-seeking expeditions to the lands north of the Pontic
steppes and often going much deeper into Ukraine and southern
Muscovy than the frontier areas. The slave trade supplemented
the earnings that the Noghays obtained from animal husbandry
and the Crimeans from both husbandry and settled forms of
agriculture. Bad harvests generally translated into more raids to
the north and more slaves shipped back to the Crimea.
All five routes that the Tatars followed to the settled areas
passed through Ukraine. The two routes east of the Dniester led
to western Podilia and then to Galicia; the two on the other side
of the Boh (Southern Buh) River led to western Podilia and Vol-
hynia, and then again to Galicia; and the last passed through what
would become the Sloboda Ukraine region around Kharkiv, going
on to southern Muscovy. If the Ukrainian lands of the sixteenth
25
century were incorporated into the Baltic trade because of the

demand for cereals, their connection to the Mediterranean trade
was due largely to Tatar raiding for slaves. Ukrainians became
the main targets and victims of the Ottoman Empire’s slave-
dependent economy.
Michalon the Lithuanian, a mid-sixteenth-century Ruthe-
nian author who visited the Crimea, described the scope of the
slave trade by quoting from his conversation with a local Jew:
“One Jew there in Tavria beside its only gate, which stands at the
head of the customs office, seeing that our people were constantly
being shipped there as captives in numbers too large to count,
asked us whether our lands also teemed with people, and whence
such innumerable mortals had come.” Estimates of the numbers
of Ukrainians and Russians brought to the Crimean slave markets
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries vary from one and
a half to three million. Children and adolescents brought the
highest prices.8
The colonization of the steppe areas, marked by numerous
settlements on Radvila’s map, was spearheaded by the Volhynian
princes and assisted by changes introduced in the region in the
aftermath of the Union of Lublin. The Polish crown’s creation
of a small but mobile standing army, funded from the profits
of the royal domains, helped repel Tatar raids and promote the
continuing movement of population into the steppe. Another
major incentive for the colonization of the steppe borderlands
came from their inclusion in the Baltic trade. With increasing
demand for grain on the European markets, Ukraine began to
earn its future reputation as the breadbasket of Europe. This was
the first time that Ukrainian grain had appeared in these markets
since the days of Herodotus.
Unexpectedly, colonization was also aided by the introduction
of Polish laws and regulations intended to prevent the influx of
people into the borderlands, not to increase it. The European
demand for grain turned cereal cultivation into a profitable busi-
ness, leading to the revival of serfdom. A number of Polish laws
introduced in Ukraine by the Third Lithuanian Statute of 1588
deprived peasants of the right to own land or move from one ma-
norial estate to another. But the peasants—or, at least, significant
numbers of them—refused to obey those laws. They simply fled to
26
the steppe borderlands of Ukraine, where princes and nobles were

establishing duty-free settlements that allowed the new arrivals
not to perform corvée labor or pay duties for a substantial period
of time. In exchange, they had to settle the land and develop it.
As serfdom took stronger hold in the central provinces of the
Kingdom and the Grand Duchy, more peasants fled to the east
and south. Once their duty-free years expired, some stayed, while
others moved deeper into the steppe, where they joined the Cos-
sacks, the new borderland segment of the population that was
growing in numbers and importance.9
The Cossacks are not shown as inhabitants of Ukraine and
do not appear on the main Radvila map of the Grand Duchy
of Lithuania. Ukraine seems to be reserved for the Volhynian
princes alone. The Cossack settlements located along the Dnieper
between Kyiv and Cherkasy, including the town of Trakhtemyriv,
known to Polish chroniclers of the time as the Cossack head-
quarters, are not marked on the map as belonging to or settled
by the Cossacks. The Cossacks do, however, receive considerable
attention on the map of the Dnieper, which depicts the riverbed
south of Cherkasy and is richer in specially inserted inscriptions
than the main map.
The insert at the very bottom of the Dnieper map explains
why the mapmakers decided to produce it. They allegedly did
so for three reasons. The first was geographic: the Dnieper is
presented as one of the two largest European rivers, the second
being the Danube; the Volga is excluded as an Asian river. The
second reason was historical: Grand Duke Vytautas, say the map-
makers, used to control the Dnieper estuary in days of old. The
third reason was military and political: the Dnieper region, rich
in natural resources, served as a point of origin for Tatar attacks
on Volhynia and was home to the Cossacks, who disrupted Ta-
tar slave-hunting expeditions. The Dnieper is shown on the map
as the Borysthenes, and there are numerous other references to
the ancient Greeks; the Tatars, for example, are called Scythians.
But despite repeated allusions to ancient times, the mapmakers’
attention to Cossacks and Tatars indicates their current rather
than historical concerns.
The origins and activities of the Cossacks are described in
a text box that appears on the Right Bank of the Dnieper. It reads
27
as follows: “The Cossacks are a martial people, mixed with private

[individuals], either deprived of nobility or avoiding corvée la-
bor. . . . They live near the Rapids or cataracts on Dnieper islands
fitted with roofs against storms of any kind. They are subject to the
command of the chief of the Polish army. They choose their chief
from among themselves and easily relieve him of his functions
if he proves unsuccessful in subsequent affairs; sometimes they
kill him. If they suffer from lack of pay, they customarily make
sneak attacks on neighboring towns, and, having razed them, re-
turn weighed down with booty, as when, under [Ivan] Pidkova’s
command, they plundered and razed the Turkish sultan’s town of
Tighina in Moldavia. If one of their raids proves less than suc-
cessful, they plunder their homelands so greedily that sometimes
their fierce attacks are repelled, and they are defeated.” 10
Judging by the location of the text box with information on
the origins and activities of the Cossacks, they occupied lands on
the Right Bank of the Dnieper and settled islands along the river
from the estuary of the Vorskla (on the Left Bank) to the rapids
and the Tomakivka (Tomakówka) settlement beyond the rapids.
But the Cossacks are not depicted as the first or only actors in the
region. One of the text boxes tells of the construction of a castle
on the island of Khortytsia by Prince Dmytro Vyshnevetsky in
1556. The only clearly defined Cossack settlement on the map is
that of Tomakivka, which “was once a fortified town, as attested
by its remains, and is now an island on the Dnieper rejoicing in
the same name, on which the Lower [Dnieper] Cossacks live
securely, as if in a well-reinforced fortress.” Like other settlements
on the Right Bank, it is marked with a cross, indicating that it is
a Christian settlement. (With reference to the town of Cherkasy,
the mapmakers explain that, despite unsubstantiated claims that
its inhabitants were descendants of the Cimmerians of Homer’s
day, or professed Islam, it is in fact settled by Ruthenians of the
Greek faith.) The map clearly puts the Cossacks on the Christian
side of the divide, marking Tatar settlements on the Left Bank
with crescents.
In general, this description of the Cossacks fits a much more
detailed discussion of their history and way of life provided by
the Polish historian Joachim Bielski in Kronika Polska, a history
of the Kingdom of Poland written largely by his father, Marcin
28
Bielski, and first published in Cracow in 1597. There the Cossacks

are represented as fishermen, trappers, and warriors who live on
the Dnieper islands beyond the rapids. Bielski mentions Prince
Vyshnevetsky and his settlement on Khortytsia Island, providing
a detailed description of Cossack campaigns against the Otto-
mans and the Tatars, including the one led to Moldavia by Ivan
Pidkova. Like the makers of the Radvila map, Bielski refers in
his description of the Cossacks to Greek authors (he mentions
the twelfth-century Byzantine chronicler Joannes Zonaras) but
is silent on the ethnic origins of the Cossacks and their religious
affiliation.11
How does the map’s representation of the Cossacks relate to
what we know today about their early history and way of life? The
first Cossacks indeed lived on and off the rivers, relying not only
on fishing but also on banditry, preying on merchants who trav-
eled without sufficient guards. In 1492, the Ukrainian Cossacks
made their first appearance in the international arena with such
an attack on merchants. According to a complaint sent that year
to the grand duke of Lithuania by the Crimean khan, subjects
of the duke from the cities of Kyiv and Cherkasy had captured
and pillaged a Tatar ship in what appear to have been the lower
reaches of the Dnieper. The duke ordered his borderland (the
term he used was “Ukrainian”) officials to investigate the Cos-
sacks who might have been involved in the raid. He also ordered
that the perpetrators be executed and that their belongings, which
apparently had to include the stolen merchandise, be given to
a representative of the khan.
The khan’s complaints to the grand duke were actually of lit-
tle avail. The Lithuanian borderland officials, who happened to
be members of Volhynian princely families, were trying to stop
Cossack raids with one hand while using the Cossacks to defend
the frontier from the Tatars with the other. In 1553, the grand duke
sent the captain of Cherkasy and Kaniv, Prince Dmytro Vyshne-
vetsky, beyond the Dnieper rapids to build a fortress in order to
stop Cossack expeditions from proceeding farther down the river.
Vyshnevetsky employed his Cossack servants to accomplish the
task. Not surprisingly, the Crimean khan saw the Cossack fortress
as an encroachment on his realm, and four years later he sent an
army to expel Vyshnevetsky from his redoubt. In folk tradition,
29
Prince Vyshnevetsky became a popular hero as the first Cossack

hetman—the title that the Polish army reserved for its supreme
commanders—and a fearless fighter against the Tatars and Ot-
tomans. He also made it into the Radvila map, whose inscription
provides information about the construction of the Vyshnevetsky
castle on the island of Khortytsia.
By the mid-sixteenth century, the lands south of Kyiv were
full of new or revived settlements, many of which were depicted
on the Radvila map, including those of Cherkasy, Kaniv, Korsun,
Trakhtemyriv, Moshny, and Olshanka. “And the Kyiv region, for-
tunate and thriving, is also rich in population, for on the Borys-
thenes and other rivers that flow into it there are plenty of pop-
ulous towns and many villages,” wrote Michalon the Lithuanian.
He also explained the origins of the settlers: “Some are hiding
from paternal authority, or from slavery, or from service, or from
[punishment for] crimes, or from debts, or from something else;
others are attracted to it, especially in the spring, by richer game
and more plentiful places. And, having tried their luck in its for-
tresses, they never come back from there.” Judging by Michalon’s
description, the Cossacks were supplementing their gains from
hunting and fishing with robbery. He wrote that some poor and
dirty Cossack huts were “full of expensive silks, precious stones,
sables and other furs, and spices.” There he found “silk cheaper
than in Vilnius, and pepper cheaper than salt.” These were delica-
cies and luxury items that merchants had been transporting from
the Ottoman Empire to Muscovy or the Kingdom of Poland.12
The Cossacks became the direct responsibility of Kostian-
tyn Ostrozky, the most powerful Volhynian prince, in 1559, when
he was appointed palatine of Kyiv. His jurisdiction expanded to
Kaniv and Cherkasy, and his responsibilities included the Cos-
sacks, who continued to cause problems at home and іn the in-
ternational arena. In 1577, a Cossack detachment led by a certain
Ivan Pidkova captured the city of Iaşi, the capital of the Otto-
man protectorate of Moldavia. Pidkova was later seized with the
help of one of the royal borderland governors, Janusz Zbaraski
(Zbarazky), and executed on the orders of King Stefan Batory.
Under Batory, the first efforts to recruit the Cossacks into mili-
tary service began, not so much to use them as a fighting force as
to remove them from the lands beyond the rapids and establish
30
some form of control over that unruly crowd. The Livonian War
increased the demand for fighting men on the Lithuanian border
with Muscovy, and a number of Cossack units were formed in
the 1570s, one of them numbering as many as five hundred men.
The reorganization of the Cossacks from militias in the service
of local border officials into military units under the command of
army officers inaugurated a new era in the history of Cossackdom.
For the first time, the term “registered Cossacks” came into use.
Cossacks taken into military service and thus included in the
“register” were exempted from paying taxes and not subject to the
jurisdiction of local officials. They also received a salary. There was,
of course, no shortage of those wanting to be registered, but the
Polish crown recruited only limited numbers, and salary was paid
and privileges recognized only during active service. But those
not included in the register to begin with or excluded from it at
the end of a given war or military campaign refused to give up
their status, giving rise to endless disputes between Cossacks and
border officials. The creation of the register solved one problem
for the government, only to breed another.
In 1590 the Commonwealth Diet decreed the creation
of a force of one thousand registered Cossacks to protect the
Ukrainian borderlands from the Tatars and the Tatars from the
unregistered Cossacks. Although the king issued the requisite
ordinance, little came of it. By 1591, Ukraine was engulfed by the
first Cossack uprising. The Cossacks, who until then had been ha-
rassing Ottoman possessions—the Crimean Khanate, the Prin-
cipality of Moldavia (an Ottoman dependency), and the Black
Sea coast—now turned their energies inward. They were rebelling
not against the state but against their own “godfathers”—the Vol-
hynian princes, in particular Prince Janusz Ostrogski (Ostrozky)
and his father, Kostiantyn. Janusz was the captain of Bila Tserkva,
a castle and a Cossack stronghold south of Kyiv, while Kostiantyn,
the palatine of Kyiv, “supervised” his son’s activities. The Ostroz-
kys, father and son, had full control of the region. No one from
the local nobility dared to defy the powerful princes, who were
busy extending their possessions by taking over the lands of the
petty nobility.
One of the noble victims of the Ostrozkys, Kryshtof Kosyn-
sky (Krzysztof Kosiński), turned out to be a Cossack chieftain as
31
well. When Janusz Ostrogski seized his land, which he held on

the basis of a royal grant, Kosynsky did not waste time on a futile
complaint to the king but gathered his Cossacks and attacked the
Bila Tserkva castle, the headquarters of the younger Ostrozky. An
attack by one noble on the holdings of another to resolve a con-
flict over land was nothing unusual for the Commonwealth. It
was unheard of, however, for a petty noble to assault a prince, and
the Ostrozkys were caught by surprise. Soon the Cossacks were in
control of another major fortress, this time on the Left Bank of
the Dnieper—the city of Pereiaslav, whose princes had once ruled
lands as far away as Moscow. Emboldened by these victories,
Kosynsky marched westward to Volhynia, where he was finally
defeated by a private army assembled by the Ostrozkys. Kosynsky
suffered another defeat near Cherkasy, this time at the hands of
another scion of Volhynia, Prince Oleksandr Vyshnevetsky.
The princes managed to put down the revolt without asking
for help from the royal authorities. Ironically, the godfathers of
the Cossacks punished their unruly children with the help of
other Cossacks who were in their private service. By far the best
known of Ostrozky’s Cossack chieftains was Severyn Nalyvaiko.
He came to Ostrih as a youth together with his brother, Demian,
who became a member of Ostrozky’s learned circle and a pub-
lished author. Severyn, for his part, served the prince with his
saber. He led the Ostrozky Cossacks into battle against Kosyn-
sky’s army and then gathered dispersed Cossacks in the steppes
of Podilia to lead them as far away as possible from the Ostroz-
kys’ possessions. The destination to which Nalyvaiko took them
was the Ottoman vassal state of Moldavia. Once the Cossacks
returned from their Moldavian expedition, Ostrozky tried to use
them to pillage the estates of his opponents in the struggle over
the church union. Nalyvaiko’s Cossacks were spotted attacking
the estates of the two Orthodox bishops who had traveled to
Rome to petition for union with the Catholic Church. Attacks
on other estates took the Cossacks to places as distant from the
Ukrainian steppes as the lands of today’s Belarus.
There was, however, a limit to what the Ostrozkys could con-
trol by manipulating the Cossack rebellion. The Cossacks elected
their own commander, whom they followed into battle, but once
the expedition was over, they were free to remove or even execute
32
him if he acted against their interests. Then there were major divi-
sions among the Cossacks themselves, which were not limited to
registered versus unregistered men. The registered Cossacks were
recruited from the landowning Cossack class, whose members
resided in towns and settlements between Kyiv and Cherkasy.
They had a chance to obtain special rights associated with roy-
al service. But there was also another group, the Zaporozhian
Cossacks, who had a fortified settlement called the Sich (after
the wooden palisade that protected it) on the islands beyond the
rapids. They were beyond the reach of royal officials, caused most
of the trouble with the Crimean Tatars, and, in turbulent times,
served as a magnet for the dissatisfied townsmen and peasants
who fled to the steppes.
Nalyvaiko, charged by Ostrozky with managing the Cossack
riffraff, soon found himself in an uneasy alliance with the unruly
Zaporozhians. By 1596 he was no longer doing Ostrozky’s bid-
ding but acting on his own, leading a revolt greater than the one
initiated by Kosynsky. The early 1590s saw a number of years of
bad harvest, which caused famine. Starvation drove more peas-
ants out of the noble estates and into Cossack ranks. This time
the princely retinues were insufficient to suppress the uprising:
the royal army was called in, headed by the commander of the
Polish armed forces. In May 1596, the Polish army surrounded the
Cossack encampment on the Left Bank of the Dnieper. The “old”
or town Cossacks turned against the “new” ones and surrendered
Nalyvaiko to the Poles in exchange for an amnesty. The princely
servant turned Cossack rebel was executed in Warsaw, becoming
a martyr for the Cossack and Orthodox causes in the eyes of the
Cossack chroniclers.13
In the 1590s, the Cossacks entered into the foreign-policy
calculations not only of the Commonwealth and the Ottoman
Empire but also of Central and West European powers. In 1594,
Erich von Lassota, an emissary of the Holy Roman emperor,
Rudolf II, visited the Zaporozhian Cossacks with a proposal to
join his master’s war against the Ottomans. In the same year
Aleksandar Komulović (Alessandro Comuleo) delivered letters
to the Cossacks from Pope Clement VIII urging them to join the
European powers in the war against the Ottomans. Little came
of those missions, apart from Komulović’s letters and Lassota’s
33
diary, which described the democratic order that prevailed in the

Zaporozhian Host and enriched our knowledge of early Cossack
history.14
Some scholars have suggested that Lassota or a member of his
mission supplied Radvila and his cartographers with information
on the Dnieper and the Cossacks. While this supposition seems
far-fetched, there is little doubt that, with regard to the religious
affiliation of the Cossacks, the makers of the Radvila map, Lasso-
ta, and Komulović shared the same position. They turned a blind
eye to the division between Orthodox Cossacks and Catholic
nobles, which was exacerbated by battles over the Union of Brest
(1596). Instead, they treated the Cossacks as part of the common
Christian bulwark against the Islamic threat presented by the
Ottomans and their Crimean and Noghay subjects.
At the turn of the seventeenth century, Cossackdom was a rel-
atively new political, cultural, and military phenomenon. Miracu-
lously, it found its way onto a map that presented a princely view
of Eastern Europe, oriented as much backward as forward. How
did it happen? The answer lies in the political and economic in-
terests of the Volhynian princes, who were busy expanding their
possessions in the Dnieper region after the Union of Lublin. The
princes and the Cossacks emerged as both partners and rivals in
the colonization of the steppelands, defined on the Radvila map
as “Volynia Ulterior,” “Ukraine,” or the “Lower Dnieper” area. The
close relations between the two groups are reflected in the map
references to Vyshnevetsky’s expedition to Khortytsia, while their
conflict finds reflection in the mention of Pidkova’s campaign
against Moldavia and occasional Cossack attacks on their own
homeland, which may be understood as indirect references to the
revolts of Kryshtof Kosynsky and Severyn Nalyvaiko against the
Ostrozky princes.
The Cossacks are presented on the map as warriors protecting
the borderlands of the Commonwealth and claimed as members
of the Polish state and the Christian world. The latter claim re-
flects not so much the religious and ideological loyalties of the
Cossacks as it does the hopes that the outside world invested in
them in the face of growing confrontation with the Ottomans
and their Crimean Tatar subjects. The Ottoman threat increased
dramatically in the 1590s, as did the activities and revolts of the
34
Cossacks, making them attractive allies in the eyes of Europe-

an rulers involved in military confrontations with the Ottomans
during the rise of Ahmed I (r. 1590–1617). As Lassota and Komu-
lović tried to recruit the Cossacks into the service of Catholic
rulers, the Catholic bishop of Kyiv, Józef Wereszczyński, penned
a treatise arguing for the formation of Cossack regiments in the
lands south of Ukraine to protect the Kingdom of Poland from
Tatar attacks (1596). The rapid transformation of the Cossacks
from Cimmerian or Muslim Circassians into Christian warriors,
which took place in the imagination of European rulers and dip-
lomats of the 1590s, found its visual reflection on the Radvila map
created at the turn of the seventeenth century.
35
3.
Russia and Ukraine: Did
They Reunite in 1654?
In 1920, the prominent Ukrainian historian and political activist

Viacheslav Lypynsky (Wacław Lipiński) published a book enti-
tled Ukraine at the Turning Point. In it he discussed the dramatic
changes brought about in mid-seventeenth century Ukraine by
the Khmelnytsky Uprising, the rise of the Cossack state known
in historiography as the Hetmanate, and the ensuing military
confrontations, first with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
and then with Muscovy. The book was later treated as a manifesto
of the “statist” school of Ukrainian historiography.
Among Lypynsky’s contributions to the study of the period
was the introduction into historiographic discourse of the concept
of the Pereiaslav Legend—a body of historical myths that devel-
oped in the eighteenth century around the Cossack-Muscovite
agreement proclaimed in the town of Pereiaslav in January 1654.
The agreement, formalized during the Cossack delegation’s vis-
it to Moscow in March of the same year, established the tsar’s
protectorate over the Cossack polity led by Hetman Bohdan
Khmelnytsky. Lypynsky argued that by presenting the Pereiaslav
Agreement as an act of voluntary union between the Little Rus-
sian (Ukrainian) nation and the Muscovite state, whose Orthodox
religion it shared, the eighteenth-century Cossack elites eased the
process of integration into the Russian Empire for themselves but
compromised the interests of their state and opened the door to
the creation of the concept of an all-Russian nation.1
What Lypynsky left out of his analysis were the ever-chang-
ing political circumstances under which the Pereiaslav Legend
37
functioned in Ukraine after the defeat of Hetman Ivan Mazepa’s

revolt against Tsar Peter I. Twenty years after the Battle of Pol-
tava (1709), the Pereiaslav myth provided historical ammunition
for Cossack attempts to restore the “rights and privileges” guaran-
teed by the “Articles of Bohdan Khmelnytsky.” That myth helped
the Cossack elites restore not only some of their own rights and
privileges but also the institution of the hetmancy, abolished
by Peter I after the death of Mazepa’s successor, Hetman Ivan
Skoropadsky (1722).2
Another element of the Pereiaslav mythology that escaped
Lypynsky’s attention was the development of the “reunification of
Ukraine with Russia” paradigm—the official formula that defined
the purpose of the Pereiaslav Agreement in Russian imperial and
Soviet historiography. The origins of the reunification paradigm,
which dominated the Soviet historiography of Russo-Ukrainian
relations for decades, can be traced back at least to the end of
the eighteenth century. After the second partition of Poland in
1793, Empress Catherine II struck a medal welcoming Polish and
Lithuanian Rus´ into the empire. The inscription read: “I have
recovered what was torn away.” 3 The same statist approach was
reflected in the writings of the nineteenth-century Russian his-
torian Mikhail Pogodin, a leader of the Pan-Slav movement. He
claimed that the leitmotif of Russian history was the reclamation
of those parts of the Russian land that had been lost to western
neighbors since the times of Yaroslav the Wise. The first scholar
to fully merge the statist and nation-based elements of the reuni-
fication paradigm in his historical survey of Russia was Nikolai
Ustrialov, who maintained that all Eastern Slavs constituted one
Russian nation and that the various parts of Rus´ professed a “de-
sire for union.”
Ustrialov’s ideas shaped the interpretation of Russia’s relations
with its East Slavic neighbors for generations of Russian histo-
rians. At the turn of the twentieth century, a modified version
of the Ustrialov thesis made up the core of Vasilii Kliuchevsky’s
argument.4 Even some Ukrainian historians, such as Pantelei-
mon Kulish, the author of the History of the Reunification of Rus´,
bought into the idea. The same is true of nineteenth-century Rus-
sophile historiography in Galicia, but most Ukrainian historians,
led by Mykhailo Hrushevsky, rejected the reunification paradigm.
38
Russia and Ukraine: Did They Reunite in 1654?
They regarded Ukraine as a separate nation whose origins reached

back to Kyivan Rus´: it had not been torn away from any other
nation and thus had no need to be reunited with its other parts.5
Early Soviet historians concurred with Hrushevsky in re-
garding Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus as separate nations and
kept their historical narratives apart in every period except that
of Kyivan Rus´. But in the 1930s, as Russian nationalism (in its
Great Russian form) returned to the political scene, that view
was revised and elements of the old imperial approach reintro-
duced into the interpretation of the Pereiaslav Agreement. The
view of the agreement as a continuation of Russian imperial pol-
icy was abandoned in favor of the “lesser evil” formula, whereby
the annexation of Cossack Ukraine by Muscovy was viewed as
a better alternative than its subordination to the Ottomans or
to the Kingdom of Poland. After the Second World War, when
class-based discourse declined and the Russocentric nation-based
approach reemerged in Soviet historical works, the concept of
“annexation” was dropped altogether and that of “reunification”
reintroduced into historical discourse. A new formula was invent-
ed to describe the Pereiaslav Agreement, which was now to be
called the “reunification of Ukraine and Russia.” 6
After the Second World War, there were two commemo-
rations of the event in the Soviet period. The first, in 1954, was
a large-scale event held with great fanfare and accompanied by
the transfer of sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula from
Russia to Ukraine. The Central Committee of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union approved a collection of “Theses on the
Three-Hundredth Anniversary of the Reunification of Ukraine
with Russia” that shaped the interpretation of Russo-Ukrainian
relations until the end of Soviet rule. In 1979, when the 325th an-
niversary of the Pereiaslav Council rolled around, only the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine issued a reso-
lution outlining the commemoration program and restating the
interpretation established in 1954.7
This new/old reunification paradigm took into account the
Soviet treatment of Ukrainian history as a distinct subject and
accepted the view that by the mid-seventeenth century there
existed two separate East Slavic nations. But the attempt to
merge pre‑1917 and post-revolutionary historiographic concepts
39
produced a contradiction. How could Ukraine reunite with Rus-

sia when, according to the official line, there had been no Rus-
sians, Ukrainians, or Belarusians in Kyivan Rus´? Soviet histo-
rians were discouraged from asking questions of that kind. The
reunification concept became official doctrine in 1954, when the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
approved the “Theses on the Three-Hundredth Anniversary of
the Reunification of Ukraine with Russia.”
Scholarly discussion of the meaning and historical impor-
tance of the Pereiaslav Agreement resumed only in the late 1980s,
following the advent of glasnost. Ukrainian historians overwhelm-
ingly rejected the reunification paradigm, replacing the imperial-
and Soviet-era “reunification” with the terms “Ukrainian Revolu-
tion” and “National-Liberation War” to denote the Khmelnytsky
Uprising and its aftermath. Both terms stressed the national
characteristics of the uprising. No less decisive in rejecting the
term and the concept symbolized by it were Belarusian specialists
in the early modern history of Eastern Europe. Their Russian
colleagues remained much more loyal to the old imperial and
Soviet interpretations of the Pereiaslav Agreement. One of them,
a specialist in Russian diplomatic history named Lev Zaborovsky,
supported the continued use of the reunification terminology by
arguing that the desire of the Ukrainian population for union
with Muscovy was apparent from the historical sources of the
period. Yet Zaborovsky had no objection to calling the Khmel-
nytsky Uprising a “war of national liberation” as long as it was
considered to have been anti-Polish.8
The reunification terminology seems to have made a come-
back in Russian historiography after the fall of the Soviet Union.
But was there indeed a reunification in Pereiaslav? And if there
was, who reunited with whom? These are the questions I shall
address, approaching them through a study of the construction
and evolution of East Slavic group identities in the first half of the
seventeenth century. An answer to this question must be based on
a long view of Muscovite-Ruthenian relations and the Pereiaslav
Agreement, going back at least to the turn of the seventeenth
century.
40
The Origins
It was at the turn of the seventeenth century that a number of
Orthodox intellectuals began to develop a view that prepared the
way for what nineteenth-century historiography would call the
“reunification of Rus´.” That view was based on the notion of the
dynastic, religious, and ethnic affinity of the two Rus´ nations.
The origin of all three elements in the Ruthenian discourse of
the time can be traced back to a letter of 1592 from the Lviv
Orthodox brotherhood requesting alms from the tsar. The let-
ter reintroduced Great Russian/Little Russian terminology into
contemporary discourse. Its argument capitalized on the idea of
religious unity between Muscovy and Polish-Lithuanian Rus´,
employing the notion of one “Rusian stock” (rod Rossiiskii)—a
community of peoples/nations (plemia) led by the Muscovite tsar,
the heir of St. Volodymyr.9 Thereafter, the Ruthenian Orthodox
constantly employed all three themes in letters to Moscow as they
sought ways to strengthen their case for alms and other forms of
support from the tsar and the patriarch.
The idea of the ethnic affinity of the two Rus´ nations took on
special importance in the writings of the new Orthodox hierarchy
consecrated by Patriarch Theophanes in 1620. The hierarchs, who
were not merely denied recognition but actually outlawed by the
Polish authorities, could not take office in their eparchies and
found themselves confined to Dnieper Ukraine. They needed all
the support they could get, including support from Muscovy, and
even contemplated emigration to the Orthodox tsardom—a plan
later implemented by Bishop Iosyf Kurtsevych. Thus the famous
Protestation of the Orthodox hierarchy (1621) asserted that the
Ruthenians shared “one faith and worship, one origin, language
and customs” with Muscovy.10 The author of the Hustynia Chron-
icle (written in Kyiv in the 1620s, possibly by the archimandrite of
the Kyivan Cave Monastery, Zakhariia Kopystensky) established
a biblical genealogy for the Slavic nations that listed the Musco-
vites next to the Rus´ and called them Rus´-Moskva.11
The most compelling case for the ethnic affinity of the two
Rus´ nations was made by the newly consecrated metropolitan
himself. In a letter of August 1624 to Mikhail Romanov, Iov Bo-
retsky compared the fate of the two Rus´ nations to that of the
41
biblical brothers Benjamin and Joseph. Boretsky called upon the

Muscovite tsar ( Joseph) to help his persecuted brethren. “Take
thought for us as well, people of the same birth as your Rus´
(rosyiskyi) tribe,” wrote the metropolitan, using the latter term to
denote both Ruthenians and Muscovites. A close reading of the
texts indicates that the ethnic motif was a supplementary one in
letters from the Ruthenian Orthodox hierarchs to Moscow, but it
is of special interest for our discussion as one of the first instanc-
es of the use of early modern national terminology in relations
between the two Ruses.12
How did the Muscovite elites react to the ideas put forward
by the Ruthenian seekers of the tsar’s alms? As might be expected,
given the experience of the Time of Troubles, continuing military
conflicts with the Commonwealth, and the general tendency of
Muscovite society toward self-righteous isolation, the response
was by no means enthusiastic. Patriarch Filaret was reluctant to
accept and use in his correspondence the title of Patriarch of
Great and Little Rus´ attributed to him by the Ruthenian bishop
Isaia Kopynsky in 1622. In letters to the Orthodox in the Com-
monwealth, he would carefully style himself Patriarch of Great
Rus´ (instead of all Rus´), apparently to avoid provoking a neg-
ative reaction from the Commonwealth authorities. The tsar did
likewise. In 1634, Muscovite envoys assured Polish diplomats that
the reference to “all Rus´” in his title had nothing to do with the
Polish-Lithuanian “Little Rus´.”13 There was more understanding
between the two parties on the issue of the Kyivan origins of the
Muscovite ruling dynasty.
The Religious Schism

The attitude of the Muscovites toward Kyivan Orthodoxy is fully
apparent in their insistence on the rebaptism of the Ruthenian
Orthodox in their state. The Orthodox council of 1620 issued
a pastoral letter entitled “Ukase on How to Investigate and on
the Belarusians Themselves,” which ordained the rebaptism not
only of non-Orthodox but also of Orthodox Ruthenians in Mus-
covy. According to the “Ukase,” those Ruthenian Orthodox who
had been baptized by infusion (the pouring of water) and not
by triple immersion, as was the custom in Muscovy, were to be
42
rebaptized along with Catholics, Protestants, and Uniates. The

policy was extended to cover those who did not know how they
had been baptized or had received communion in non-Orthodox
(including Uniate) churches. Only those who had been baptized
by triple immersion (excluding confirmation) could be admitted
to Orthodoxy by confirmation.
The “Ukase” led to the mass rebaptism of Orthodox Ruthe-
nians who crossed the Muscovite border and entered the tsar’s
service between the 1620s and 1640s. Before rebaptism the con-
verts were ordered to read (or have read to them, if they were
illiterate) the text of an oath very similar to the one administered
to those who entered the tsar’s service. The convert promised
to sacrifice his life, if necessary, for the Orthodox faith and the
health of the tsar. He also swore not to leave the Muscovite state,
not to return to his former faith, and not to instigate any treason
in his new country.14
The “Ukase” and the policy promoted by it treated Orthodox
Ruthenians not only as foreigners (inozemtsy) but also as either
non-Christians or not entirely Orthodox (even those whose bap-
tism was considered impeccable were allowed to join the Musco-
vite church only after making an act of contrition). But what was
the reaction of those who accepted a second baptism, contrary to
the laws of the church? Did they protest or call upon their fellow
Christians and Eastern Slavs to come to their senses? We know
of no such instances. The award given by the tsarist authorities to
the new converts apparently silenced the Christian conscience of
those who knew that there was something wrong with the prac-
tice. This, at least, is the impression given by the sources on the
mass rebaptism of almost seven hundred Cossacks who entered
the Muscovite service in 1618–19.
The vast majority of them were registered by Muscovite
scribes as “Cherkasians” (meaning “Cossacks”) in the Muscovite
“table of ranks” and received a stipend commensurate with their
status. But once they realized that non-Orthodox converts were
getting a stipend twice as large for full rebaptism as the one paid
to the Orthodox joining the Muscovite church by confirmation,
more than half the Cossacks declared themselves non-Orthodox
“Poles.” Since the Muscovite scribes did not distinguish between
Catholics and Uniates, the Cossack declarations, claiming either
43
real or only imagined connection to the Union, were readily

accepted. Moreover, declaring oneself a “Pole” entailed a larger
salary for joining the tsar’s service, because nobles, whom the
Muscovite scribes usually treated as ethnic Poles, were paid better
than rank-and-file Cossacks.
One of the former “Cherkasians” even proclaimed himself
a noble of Jewish faith and descent and was registered as such
by the Muscovite authorities upon his baptism. It would appear
that the Cossacks (because of whom the ukase of 1620 had been
adopted—it was also known as the “Ukase on the Baptism of
Latins and Cherkasians”) did not mind rebaptism as long as they
were well paid for it. Besides, quite a few of them were joining the
Muscovite service because they were married to Russian wom-
en whom they had met during the war, and ratification of their
Orthodoxy by the local church also meant the recognition of
their marriages, followed by integration into Muscovite society,
sometimes with noble rank.15
The rebaptism of the Ukrainian Cossacks in Muscovy shows
vividly that, while the Ruthenian Orthodox hierarchs could ob-
tain alms by stressing religious affinity in their letters to the tsar
and the patriarch of Moscow, the Muscovite authorities were by
no means persuaded that they belonged to the same faith. Even
if properly baptized, the Ruthenian Orthodox were tainted in
the eyes of the Muscovites by their allegiance to a non-Orthodox
ruler and everyday contact with the non-Orthodox. (Certainly
they did not call upon their priests to reconsecrate the icons in
their homes after every visit by non-Orthodox, as was the case
with the Muscovite peasant described by Olearius).
What about the argument of ethnic affinity advanced by
the Lviv brotherhood and its biblical interpretation presented
by Metropolitan Boretsky in his story of Joseph and Benjamin?
Here it would appear that the Ruthenian Orthodox had even less
chance of being heard, or, if heard, of being understood. With
regard to Orthodoxy, while they disagreed, at least they spoke the
same language and used the same vocabulary. When it came to
nationality, the Muscovites apparently lacked the language and
vocabulary to deal with the issue. The Muscovite language of
the time lacked terms not only for such Ruthenian phenomena
as “church brotherhood” and “Uniates” but also for “nation.” As
44
noted above, the term narod, which served to render that concept
in Ruthenian, meant just a group of people in Russian. Thus we
know of no Ruthenian letter touching upon the national theme
that was mentioned or acknowledged by the Muscovite side in
any way.
In official correspondence, reference to the Ruthenians was
made predominantly in political rather than national or religious
terms, and they figured either as Poles or as Lithuanians. The
Muscovite scribes who conducted negotiations and disputes with
Lavrentii Zyzanii referred to his Ruthenian language as “Lithu-
anian.” An exception was made only for the Cossacks, who were
called “Cherkasians,” but, as noted, this was a social rather than
an ethnic or national designation. The situation was somewhat
better with regard to ecclesiastical texts. There, as the title of the
ukase of 1620 makes apparent, the term “Belarusians” was used
to denote the Ruthenian population of the Commonwealth. But
was it an ethnonational or an ethnoconfessional term? Its use in
combination with the term “Cherkasian” indicates that it was not
a marker of social status or identity.
The context in which it appears in ecclesiastical documents
indicates that it was used to designate the Orthodox population
of the Commonwealth. It could also be applied to Uniates, but
Uniates often fell into the category of “Poles,” the term used to
denote either nobles or Catholics and Protestants of the Com-
monwealth irrespective of national background. Thus “Belaru-
sian” was primarily an ethnonational term. It served an import-
ant purpose in distinguishing the East Slavic population of the
Commonwealth from its Polish and Lithuanian neighbors. At the
same time, it distinguished that population from the East Slavic
inhabitants of Muscovy. The invention of a special term for the
Ruthenian population of the Commonwealth, the treatment of
that population as not entirely Christian, and the reservation of
the term “Rusians” for subjects of the Muscovite tsar indicate
that although the Muscovite elites recognized the Ruthenians as
a group distinct from the Poles and Lithuanians, they also made
a very clear political, religious, and ethnic distinction between
themselves and their relatives to the west.
45
The Orthodox Alliance

A new stage in relations between Kyiv and Moscow began in the
summer of 1648 at the initiative of the Cossack hetman Bohdan
Khmelnytsky when he asked Muscovy to join forces with the
Cossacks in the war against the Commonwealth. The situation of
1632 was repeating itself, with the difference that it was now the
Cossacks, not the tsar, who were eager to obtain support. After
the defeat of 1634, Muscovy was more than cautious. Besides,
the specter of a new Cossack-led uprising that might spread to
Muscovy and provoke a new Time of Troubles discouraged the
Muscovites from becoming openly involved in the conflict. They
adopted a compromise tactic: those of the Cossacks and reb-
els who wanted to cross the border were welcomed in Muscovy
(on one occasion, Cossack troops were even allowed to launch
a surprise attack on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from Mus-
covite territory), but the tsar would not start a new war with the
Commonwealth.
Not until 1651 was Muscovy finally prepared to change its
policy of noninterference in Commonwealth affairs. Preparations
were even made to convene an Assembly of the Land to sanction
the war, but the Commonwealth army’s defeat of the Cossacks
at Berestechko put an end to the plan. By 1653, unable to obtain
military assistance from the Ottomans and losing the cooperation
of the khan, Khmelnytsky demanded that the Muscovite rulers
finally make up their mind. That autumn, a special convocation
of the Assembly of the Land decided to take Khmelnytsky and
the Cossacks “with their towns” (meaning the territory of the
Hetmanate) under the tsar’s “high hand.” An embassy led by the
boyar Vasilii Buturlin was sent to Ukraine to administer an oath
to the Cossack leadership and the rank-and-file Cossacks. In
January 1654 the embassy met with Khmelnytsky in the town of
Pereiaslav. After brief negotiations that were not very satisfactory
to the Cossack side, a council was convened to formally approve
Cossack submission to the tsar.
Historians still differ on what the Pereiaslav Agreement
amounted to. Was it indeed an agreement? After all, no doc-
ument was signed in Pereiaslav, and the tsar’s approval of the
conditions of submission was given much later in Moscow. If it
46
was an agreement, was it a personal union, real union, alliance,

federation, confederation, vassalage, protectorate, or outright in-
corporation? How did that arrangement compare with previous
ones, such as the Zboriv Agreement of 1649 with the king, or
agreements concluded by Muscovy with previously incorporated
territories and peoples? 16
Of greatest interest to us is not the legal status of the Pere-
iaslav Agreement but the discourse that accompanied its prepara-
tion and legitimized its conclusion. If Muscovy’s involvement in
the war with the Commonwealth was the main goal of Cossack
diplomacy, what ideological arguments did Khmelnytsky and
his associates use to convince the tsar to send his troops against
Poland-Lithuania? Khmelnytsky’s letters to the tsar and to his
courtiers and voevodas provide sufficient information to answer
this question. They indicate that, from the very beginning of that
correspondence in the summer of 1648, the religious motif had
a prominent place.
The tsar emerges from the hetman’s letters as first and fore-
most an Orthodox Christian ruler duty-bound to assist fellow
Orthodox Christians rebelling against Catholic persecution of
their church. Khmelnytsky sought to lure the tsar into the con-
flict by invoking the mirage of a vast Orthodox empire including
not only Cossack Ukraine and Polish-Lithuanian Rus´ but also
the Orthodox Balkans and Greece. All the Orthodox—Greeks,
Serbs, Bulgarians, Moldavians, and Wallachians—argued Khmel-
nytsky in his conversation with Arsenii Sukhanov, a Muscovite
monk and one-time secretary of Patriarch Filaret, wanted to be
united under the rule of the Muscovite tsar.17
Khmelnytsky also promised the tsar a rebellion in Belarus: as
soon as Muscovy dispatched its troops to the front, the hetman
intended to send letters to “the Belarusian people (liudi) living
under Lithuania” in Orsha, Mahilioŭ, and other towns, setting
off a revolt of forces two hundred thousand strong.18 If the tsar
refused to take the Zaporozhian Host “under his high hand,”
Khmelnytsky threatened to ally himself of necessity with the
Muslim Turks and Tatars. Since the prospective alliance with the
“infidels” would be directed first and foremost against Muscovy,
such threats prompted the Muscovite authorities to reach a final
decision in the autumn of 1653.19
47
How did the Muscovite authorities react to claims of con-

fessional solidarity from people whom they regarded after the
Time of Troubles not only as not entirely Orthodox but also as
not entirely Christian, and whose representatives continued to be
rebaptized once they crossed the Muscovite border? Surprisingly,
given what we know about Muscovite religious attitudes of the
earlier period, those appeals were heard, understood, and even
welcomed. In fact, it was the common Orthodox discourse that
created the ideological foundation for the Pereiaslav Agreement.
How did that happen?
First of all, even after the Time of Troubles, Orthodoxy re-
mained a potent weapon in the Muscovite foreign-policy arsenal.
As noted earlier, Orthodox connections and rhetoric were put to
use by Moscow during the Smolensk War of 1632–34 between
Muscovy and Poland-Lithuania to attract Zaporozhian Cossacks
to the tsar’s side. Secondly, Muscovy entered into the union with
Cossack Ukraine with very different views on Orthodoxy than
those it had held in the aftermath of the Time of Troubles. Led by
the new and energetic Patriarch Nikon, it was trying to open itself
to the Orthodox world: the Kyivan Christianity once condemned
by Patriarch Filaret could now serve as a much-needed bridge to
that world. Nikon, bombarded by letters from Khmelnytsky, was
in favor of extending a Muscovite protectorate to the Cossacks.
But changes in the Muscovite attitude toward fellow Orthodox
outside the tsar’s realm had begun even before Nikon assumed
the patriarchal throne in 1652.
An important stimulus for change was the debate over the
marriage of Prince Waldemar of the Netherlands to Grand Prin-
cess Irina Mikhailovna. The event that ended the career of that
admirer of Kyivan learning, Prince Semen Shakhovskoi, also
prompted the Muscovite church to reach out to fellow Ortho-
dox abroad. The debates with Lutheran pastors showed a lack of
training, skills, and sophistication on the part of the Muscovite
intellectuals. The church was in need of reform, and calls for it
were coming not only from the capital but also from the regions.
The movement of the Zealots of Piety was gathering strength
in the provinces, and the ascension of Aleksei Mikhailovich to
the throne in 1645 made its adherents influential at court as well.
These new conditions called for a complete overhaul of Orthodox
48
doctrine, and the formerly rejected Greek learning was now re-
garded as the solution to the problem. But where could one find
enough polyglots to translate from the Greek? The eyes of the
Muscovite reformers turned to the learned monks of Kyiv.
In the autumn of 1648 the tsar wrote to the Orthodox bishop
of Chernihiv, asking him to send to Moscow monks who could
translate the Bible into Slavonic. In the summer of the following
year, with the blessing of Metropolitan Sylvestr Kosov of Kyiv,
the learned monks Arsenii Satanovsky (it would be interesting to
know what the Muscovites made of his “Satanic” surname) and
Iepifanii Slavynetsky arrived in Moscow, becoming the founders
of the Ruthenian colony there. (It later counted such luminaries
as Simeon Polatsky among its prominent members.) The years
1648–49 also saw the publication or reprinting in Moscow of
a number of earlier Kyivan works, including the Orthodox con-
fession of faith (Brief Compendium of Teachings about the Articles
of the Faith) composed under the supervision of Petro Mohyla
and approved by the council of Eastern patriarchs. The Muscovite
Orthodox were clearly trying to catch up with their coreligionists
abroad, who were moving quickly toward the confessional reform
of their church. They hoped for enlightenment from Greece, but
what they got was the beginning of the Ruthenization of Mus-
covite Orthodoxy.20
The elevation to the patriarchal throne of Metropolitan Nikon,
who was close to reformist circles in Moscow, strengthened the
hand of those in the Muscovite church who were prepared to
look to Kyiv for inspiration. At the last prewar negotiations with
Commonwealth diplomats, the Poles maintained that the Mus-
covites and the Orthodox Ruthenians were not in fact coreligion-
ists, for the Muscovite faith was as far removed from Ruthenian
Orthodoxy as it was from the Union and Roman Catholicism.
The Muscovite envoys rejected their argument. They also ignored
Polish accusations that Khmelnytsky had abandoned Orthodoxy
and accepted Islam. Indeed, they turned the issue of the tsar’s
right to protect the liberties of his coreligionists into the main jus-
tification for his intervention in Commonwealth affairs.21 When
the Assembly of the Land finally approved the decision to enter
the war with the Commonwealth in the autumn of 1653, it did
so not only to defend the honor of the Muscovite tsar, allegedly
49
besmirched by Commonwealth officials’ errors in citing his title

(one of them consisted in calling the tsar Mikhail Filaretovich
instead of Mikhail Fedorovich, as the secretaries used the monas-
tic name of the tsar’s father instead of his Christian name), but
also “for the sake of the Orthodox Christian faith and the holy
churches of God.” 22
The Muscovite embassy dispatched to Khmelnytsky scarcely
missed an opportunity to visit a Ruthenian Orthodox church or
take part in a religious procession along its way. It was met not
only by Cossacks but also by burghers solemnly led by priests,
who welcomed the embassy with long baroque-style speeches
and sermons. The conclusion of the Pereiaslav Agreement itself
was accompanied by a solemn church service. In his speech at
Pereiaslav the tsar’s envoy, Vasilii Buturlin, mentioned not only
the Muscovite saints to whose support he attributed the success
of the whole enterprise but also SS. Antonii and Feodosii of the
Kyivan Cave Monastery and St. Barbara, highly venerated in the
Kyiv metropolitanate, whose relics were preserved in one of the
Kyivan monasteries.23
Together and Apart in Pereiaslav

What about ethnic motives for the “reunification”? Were they en-
tirely absent from Cossack negotiations with the tsar? Although
Khmelnytsky defined certain elements of the uprising in ethnic
terms in his letters to Muscovy, it appears that the hetman and
his scribes never made the seemingly natural link between the two
Rus´ nations. In a letter to the voevoda Semen Bolkhovsky in the
summer of 1648, Khmelnytsky complained about the persecution
of “our Rus´ Orthodox Christians,” but in his attempt to involve
the tsar in the Cossack-Polish conflict he made no use of the
theme of ethnic affinity between the two parts of Rus´; instead,
he invited the tsar to seek the Polish throne, which was vacant
at the time.24
That did not change in Khmelnytsky’s subsequent letters to
Moscow.25 What changed was the way in which he referred to his
homeland. If at first he called it Rus´ (the name he also used in
his letters to the Polish king), from the spring of 1653 he began to
refer to it as Little Rus´, thereby distinguishing between Ruthenia
50
and Muscovy. In January 1654 he even introduced a corresponding

change into the tsar’s official title, addressing him not as “sover-
eign of all Rus´” but as “sovereign of Great and Little Rus´.” 26
The tsar accepted this change in his title.27 The beginning of the
new war with the Commonwealth clearly freed him from the
Muscovite envoys’ claim of 1634 that the Polish Little Rus´ had
nothing to do with the tsar’s “all Rus´.” Now the tsar claimed
Little Rus´ as well, and his title was changed accordingly to avoid
the ambiguity of 1634.
In accepting the formula “Great and Little Rus´,” did the tsar
and his Muscovite entourage also accept the ethnic affinity of the
two Ruses as an important element in their conceptualization of
events? Available sources indicate that this is extremely unlikely.
The tsar’s ideologists continued to think not just primarily but al-
most exclusively in dynastic terms. They saw the Cossack territo-
ries as just another part of the tsar’s patrimony. In December 1653,
the tsar’s chancellery addressed the voevodas dispatched to Kyiv
as “boyars and voevodas of the patrimony of his tsarist majesty,
the Grand Principality of Kyiv.” In April 1654, Aleksei Mikhai-
lovich referred to Kyiv as his patrimony in a letter to Bohdan
Khmelnytsky himself. His full title now included references to
the principalities of Kyiv and Chernihiv.28 We do not know how
Khmelnytsky reacted to these manifestations of the tsar’s patri-
monial thinking. Nor are we certain of the meaning with which
the hetman himself invested the terms Little and Great Rus´, for
even after Pereiaslav he occasionally referred to his homeland as
Rus´ (Rosiia) when writing to the tsar.29
A further complication is that most of Khmelnytsky’s letters
to Moscow are not available in the original but only in Musco-
vite translations “from the Belarusian.” What strikes one about
those translations is that they contain no references to the “Rus´
nation,” whose rights Khmelnytsky was eager to defend in his
Polish-language letters to the king. We know that Ruthenian
authors of the period freely used the term “nation” (narod), which
had the same meaning in Ruthenian as in Polish. Did Khmel-
nytsky consciously avoid such references in his letters to Muscovy,
replacing them with such formulae as “Rus´ Orthodox Christians”
or “the whole Rus´ Orthodox community of Little Rus´,” which
were contrary to Ukrainian practice at the time? 30 Or was the
51
term lost in translation? Both possibilities suggest a breakdown

of communication between the two parties.
Thus a nation-based dialogue was hardly possible, not least
because of the lack of an appropriate vocabulary on the Muscovite
side. If there was a reunion in Pereiaslav, it was an Orthodox one,
declared but not yet implemented in numerous religious services,
speeches, and pronouncements. In fact, it was not even a reunion
(that did not happen in institutional, liturgical or other terms
until the last decade of the seventeenth century and the first de-
cades of the eighteenth) but an avowal of reconciliation. After
the tumultuous struggle against the Union in the Kyiv metro-
politanate and the shock of the Time of Troubles in Muscovy,
the two sides had agreed to reestablish relations. The churchmen
thereby provided the political elites with the common language
required to begin a dialogue between the two nations, which by
now were very different. It appears that lack of understanding in
that regard was not the only disconnection between the two sides,
as events in Pereiaslav demonstrated.
A major crisis was provoked by Buturlin’s refusal to swear
in the name of the tsar to the preservation of Cossack freedoms
and liberties. Buturlin did his best to assure the Cossack officers
that the tsar would not only preserve but actually increase their
liberties, even though he refused to swear an oath in the name
of his sovereign. Khmelnytsky left the envoy in church to await
the results of his negotiations with the colonels. When it was
conveyed to Buturlin that the Polish kings swore oaths to their
subjects, the boyar stood his ground. He told his interlocutors
that he represented the Orthodox tsar and autocrat, while the
Polish king was neither; hence the two monarchs could not be
compared.31
Khmelnytsky and the colonels were eventually obliged to con-
sent. The Cossacks swore allegiance to the tsar without extracting
an oath from the representative of their new sovereign. This was
unprecedented in Cossack practice. Although the Polish king
had indeed refused to sign agreements with them and recognize
them as equals in negotiations, Polish commissioners took an
oath in the name of the Commonwealth on whatever agreement
they reached with the Cossacks, as was the case at Bila Tserkva
in the autumn of 1651. The Cossacks would not swear their own
52
oath otherwise. At Pereiaslav, they did. It was their introduction

to the world of Muscovite politics.
Buturlin did not lie: tsars indeed never swore oaths to their
subjects. At Pereiaslav the tsar’s representative applied to his
sovereign’s new subjects the rules of steppe diplomacy—a set of
principles inherited by Muscovy from the Golden Horde and
practiced with regard to its eastern neighbors and vassals. As An-
dreas Kappeler has shown, those principles entailed “a loose pro-
tectorate, which was concluded by means of an oath, by installing
a loyal ruler. From the Russian point of view that established
a client status to which it could always refer in the future, whereas
the other side saw it at the most as a personal and temporary act
of submission.” 32
Indeed, if the Cossack elite viewed the oath and service to the
tsar as conditional (“voluntary” [povolńe], in their language) sub-
ordination to the ruler, with subsequent relations depending on
the willingness of each party to keep its side of the bargain, Mus-
covite diplomacy regarded the oath as proof of eternal subjection.
After all, the text of the standard oath included the following
words: “And not to leave the Muscovite tsardom in treasonable
fashion, and not to engage in double-dealing or treason.” 33 Sub-
sequent events showed quite conclusively that neither side in the
Pereiaslav negotiations fully understood what it was getting into.
53
4.
Hadiach 1658: The Origins
of a Myth
Few events in Ukrainian and Polish history have provoked as

many “what ifs” as the agreement concluded between the Cos-
sack hetman Ivan Vyhovsky and representatives of the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth near the city of Hadiach in the au-
tumn of 1658. Long before the rise of virtual and counterfactual
history, historians in Poland and Ukraine defied the maxim of
positivist historiography that history has no subjunctive mood and
plunged into speculation on how differently the history of both
countries would have turned out if, instead of fighting prolonged
and exhausting wars, Poland-Lithuania and the Hetmanate had
reunited in a new and reformed Commonwealth. Would this have
stopped the decline of Poland, the ruin of Ukraine, the interven-
tions of the Ottomans, and the rise of Muscovy as the dominant
force in the region?
The Union of Hadiach, as the agreement became known in
historiography, had the potential to influence all those processes.
It envisioned the creation of a tripartite Commonwealth—the
Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as well
as a Principality of Rus´, with the Cossack hetman as its official
head. The Union was the culmination of the activities of moderate
forces among the Polish and Ukrainian elites and the embodi-
ment of the hopes and dreams of the Ruthenian (Ukrainian and
Belarusian) nobility of the first half of the seventeenth century.
Nevertheless, the compromise embodied in the Union was re-
jected by mainstream forces on both sides. The Commonwealth
Diet ratified the text of the treaty with a number of important
55
omissions, but even in that form it was viewed with suspicion and
rejected by the Polish nobiliary establishment, which could not
reconcile itself to the prospect of Orthodox Cossacks enjoying
equal rights with Catholic nobles. On the Ukrainian side, the
Cossack rank and file rejected a treaty that proposed to give all
rights in the new Principality of Rus´ to a limited number of
representatives of the Ukrainian nobiliary and Cossack elite at
the expense of the Cossack masses and the rebel peasantry, which
would have to submit once again to the noble landlords’ juris-
diction and control.1 The Union was a disaster for its Ukrainian
sponsor, Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky, who succeeded Bohdan Khmel-
nytsky in 1657 and was forced to resign in 1659. Vyhovsky was
well aware that the Hadiach Agreement in the truncated form
approved by the Diet was a virtual death sentence for him and his
supporters. “You have come with death and brought me death,”
said Vyhovsky to the Polish envoy who delivered the text of the
agreement to him. He himself survived the events that followed
the ratification of the treaty, but his closest adviser and initiator
of the Union, the general chancellor of the Cossack Host, Iurii
Nemyrych, was captured and killed by insurgents who rebelled
against the presence of the Polish troops brought to the Het-
manate by Vyhovsky’s administration.2
Needless to say, the Union had its fair share of critics among
Ukrainian scholars. The critical assessment of the Union by Via-
cheslav Lypynsky and Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the two most influ-
ential Ukrainian historians of the period, had a profound influence
on the interpretation of the events of 1658–59 in twentieth-century
Ukrainian historiography.3 Nevertheless, it had to compete with
the well-established tradition of treating Hadiach as a largely pos-
itive development in Ukrainian history. Quite a few Ukrainian
political thinkers and historians of the second half of the nine-
teenth century tended to see the Union of Hadiach as a mani-
festation of Ukrainian autonomist and federalist aspirations. For
example, the leaders of the Ukrainian movement in the Russian
Empire, Mykhailo Drahomanov and Volodymyr Antonovych,
were generally positive in their assessment of the Union. And
scholars of the younger generation were particularly enthusias-
tic. Hrushevsky’s student Vasyl Herasymchuk saw the Union not
only as a major achievement of Ukrainian political thought but
56
Hadiach 1658: The Origins of a Myth
also as a step toward Ukrainian independence—a position shared

by Ivan Franko, Ukraine’s leading literary figure of the period.4
Indeed, since its inception in the early nineteenth century,
modern Ukrainian historiography has been largely positive in
its assessment of the Union of Hadiach and the actions and in-
tentions of its authors. This applies particularly to the views of
twentieth-century Ukrainian historians not subject to Soviet con-
trol. The revival of interest in Hadiach has been promoted, inter
alia, by increasing attention to Polish historiography, which has
traditionally been friendly to Hadiach. For many Polish histo-
rians, Hadiach remains a symbol of Poland’s civilizing mission
in the East, religious toleration, and ability to solve nationality
problems within the context of a multiethnic state.5
After the fall of the USSR and the collapse of Soviet histo-
riography, whose practitioners condemned Vyhovsky as a “traitor
to the Ukrainian people” and cited the Hadiach Agreement as
proof of that treason, positive assessments not only of Vyhovsky
but also of the Union of Hadiach made their way into histori-
cal writing. One of the deans of contemporary Ukrainian histo-
riography, Nataliia Iakovenko, sees the Hadiach Agreement as
“a striking monument of the political and legal thought of its time,
which, had it been realized, would indeed have had a chance of
laying firm foundations for the future of the Polish-Lithuanian-
Belarusian-Ukrainian community and renewing the Common-
wealth by establishing new forms of coexistence for its peoples.
This in turn would have guaranteed the protection of what had
already been achieved—recognition of the right to freedom of the
individual, property, and political expression.” 6
There are a number of reasons, both scholarly and political, for
the persistence of the positive image of the Union of Hadiach in
Ukrainian historiography. The goal of the present study, however,
is not to examine those reasons but to look into the origins of the
Ukrainian myth of Hadiach. When did it come into existence?
What functions did it perform in the historical thinking of the
Cossack elites and their Ukrainian heirs? These are the questions
I propose to address.
57
⁂
In the second half of the seventeenth century, memories of the
Union of Hadiach continued to flourish in Polish-controlled
Right-Bank Ukraine. Just as the hetmans of Russian-ruled Left-
Bank Ukraine always referred in their negotiations with the Mus-
covite court to the rights granted to the Cossacks at Pereiaslav in
1654, so every Right-Bank hetman tried to negotiate a deal rem-
iniscent of the Union of Hadiach with his Polish counterparts.7
One can only speculate on the role that the Union of Hadiach
might have played in Cossack historical writing if it had devel-
oped in Right-Bank Ukraine, but Poland suppressed Ukrainian
Cossackdom in the Commonwealth before such a tradition had
been established there. Instead, the myth of Hadiach took shape
in the works of the Left-Bank Cossack chroniclers, who had
a generally negative attitude toward the pro-Polish hetmans and
their political and diplomatic dealings with Poland.
Roman Rakushka-Romanovsky, a prominent Cossack officer,
served both Left-Bank and Right-Bank hetmans. After becom-
ing an Orthodox priest, he wrote the Eyewitness Chronicle—the
first major monument of Cossack historical writing. Rakushka-
Romanovsky, the first Cossack author to address the Hadiach
Agreement as a historical subject, listed some of its prominent
conditions in his chronicle but gave neither a positive nor a nega-
tive assessment of it. His summary of the conditions of the Union
is useful for understanding how it was assessed by the Cossack
officer elite of the period. Rakushka mentioned the granting of
the office of Kyivan palatine to the hetman, the ennoblement
of a few hundred Cossack officers in every regiment, and the
creation of special courts for the Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Bratslav
palatinates, which made it unnecessary to go to Lublin or at-
tend Diet sessions in Warsaw in order to settle legal disputes. It
would appear that the Cossack officers expected more from the
agreement than it actually delivered, given that the number of
Cossacks eligible for ennoblement was limited to one hundred
in each regiment. It is also possible that these conditions were
exaggerated in retrospect—after all, Rakushka wrote his account
of the agreement many years after the event.8
58
By the turn of the eighteenth century, when Rakushka was

completing his chronicle, the myth of Hadiach was already in
the making. The Union’s provisions were half-forgotten and
half-exaggerated. The neutral or even positive attitude toward
the Union was outweighed by the prevalent negative assessment
of the hetmancy of one of its authors, Ivan Vyhovsky. Rakushka-
Romanovsky himself treated Vyhovsky as a pro-Polish politician
and a traitor to the tsar. For the author of the Eyewitness Chronicle,
Vyhovsky symbolized “Liakh deceit and Latin depravity,” man-
ifested by his takeover of the hetmancy from Bohdan Khmel-
nytsky’s son Iurii.9 From Rakushka-Romanovsky on, Cossack
historiography portrayed Vyhovsky and his alleged Polonophi-
lism in an extremely negative light. The two contradictory aspects
of the Hadiach myth—a positive attitude toward the Union and
a negative one toward Vyhovsky—coexisted peacefully, demon-
strating the complexity of the world in which the Cossack elites
of the Left-Bank Ukraine reinvented their history and identity.
Rakushka-Romanovsky completed the Eyewitness Chronicle
at the beginning of the eighteenth century, before Ivan Mazepa’s
revolt against Tsar Peter I in 1708 and the Battle of Poltava (1709).
Mazepa’s revolt dramatically changed the political atmosphere in
the Hetmanate and, by all accounts, promoted the development of
the Hadiach myth. The revolt raised the question of an alternative
to the tsar’s rule in Ukraine. It was approximately at this time that
the Cossack officers rediscovered the text of the Hadiach Agree-
ment and began a careful study of its provisions. Mazepa allied
himself with Charles XII of Sweden and Stanisław Leszczyński
of Poland. Whatever the shortcomings of the Union of Hadiach
as compared with the Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654, it looked
clearly superior to the limited Cossack autonomy that survived
under Russian suzerainty in the first decade of the eighteenth
century. Once again, the Treaty of Hadiach became attractive to
the Hetmanate’s elites, which had undergone “gentrification” in
the ensuing half century and were dreaming of the noble status
and rights associated with that process.
This new interest in the Union of Hadiach was short-lived
but found its way into the Cossack chronicles written in the
Hetmanate after the Battle of Poltava. Peter’s encroachment on
Cossack rights and the anti-Polish propaganda that he conducted
59
from his new capital of St. Petersburg placed clear restrictions on

the chroniclers’ ability to express their thoughts on the subject.
Nevertheless, it is clearly apparent that the post-Poltava chroni-
clers paid much more attention to the Union of Hadiach than did
Rakushka-Romanovsky prior to Mazepa’s revolt. Inspiration for
the further development of the Hadiach myth came, not surpris-
ingly, from Polish sources. Particularly influential in this regard
was Samuel Twardowski’s rhymed chronicle, The Civil War, four
parts of which appeared in print in 1681.10
Twardowski discussed the Union in connection with the de-
cisions of the Diet of 1659, which approved the agreement for
the Polish side. He believed that the Union had resulted in the
creation of a “third Commonwealth” in Ukraine (along with the
Polish Kingdom and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania). For his
narrative, Twardowski used the agreement as negotiated at Ha-
diach, not the final draft of the treaty approved by the Diet. Thus
he referred to a Cossack Host of sixty thousand, not the thirty
thousand stipulated by the Diet’s decision. He also listed a pro-
vision on the liquidation of the church union, although it was
reformulated in the final draft of the agreement to save the Uniate
Church. Twardowski’s characterization of the Cossacks was high-
ly favorable for the most part. He regarded the creation of a “Cos-
sack Commonwealth” in Ukraine as the fulfillment of a predic-
tion allegedly made by the sixteenth-century Polish king Stefan
Batory. Twardowski also compared the Cossacks’ humble origins
with those of the Macedonian Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, and
even Polish nobles. He was clearly prepared to accept the Cossack
officer elite as an equal partner in the Commonwealth.11
It was only to be expected that Twardowski’s interpretation of
the Hadiach Agreement would appeal to the Cossack chroniclers
of the eighteenth century. Samiilo Velychko, a former secretary
in the General Chancellery of the Hetmanate and the most pro-
lific chronicler of the period, used Twardowski’s account in his
Relation of the Cossack War with the Poles, probably written in the
1720s. He translated Twardowski’s verses from the Polish and
used them almost verbatim, making reference to specific pages
of Twardowski’s work. Velychko’s own contribution to the sto-
ry consisted of a recontextualization of the Union of Hadiach,
presenting it not as the outcome of the work of the Polish Diet
60
of 1659 (as had Twardowski) but of negotiations conducted at

Hadiach in September 1658. Velychko also supplied a lengthy
commentary on the first provision of the agreement about the
liquidation of the church union, arguing that it was an important
measure intended to stop desertions from the Orthodox Church
in Polish Ukraine. Finally, Velychko completely excluded from
his account the speech delivered at the Diet by the Cossack rep-
resentative Iurii Nemyrych.
When speaking of the Cossacks returning to the fold of the
Polish king, Nemyrych had invoked the story of the prodigal
son returning to his father. The first of Velychko’s changes put
the agreement into a Ukrainian rather than a Polish historical
context, the second strengthened the Union’s legitimacy from
the viewpoint of the interests of the Orthodox Church, and the
third helped deflect accusations that the Union was a mere sur-
render of Cossack Ukraine to the king. All these changes not-
withstanding, Velychko’s portrayal of Hadiach was inspired and
heavily influenced by Twardowski’s favorable treatment of the
agreement. Like Rakushka-Romanovsky’s account, Velychko’s
positive assessment of Hadiach coexisted peacefully with his
largely negative characterization of Vyhovsky, whom he depicted
as a Ruthenian noble “of one spirit with the Poles for the sake of
passing vanity and well-being in this world.” 12
Especially interesting (and important for the present discus-
sion) is the impact of Twardowski’s interpretation of the Union
of Hadiach on another major Cossack chronicle of the period,
Hryhorii Hrabianka’s The Great War of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, ap-
parently written in the 1720s.13 If Velychko’s chronicle survived in
a single copy, Hrabianka’s circulated widely in eighteenth-century
Ukraine and became the most influential historical work of the
period. Hrabianka, who was well acquainted with the Eyewitness
Chronicle and used it in his work, shared Rakushka-Romanovsky’s
negative attitude to Vyhovsky, calling him “an enemy and a bla-
tant traitor.” 14
But in his discussion of the Union of Hadiach Hrabianka por-
trayed Vyhovsky as a victim of the Poles, who had made enticing
promises to him. Thus, like Rakushka-Romanovsky and Velychko,
Hrabianka did not extend his negative characterization of Vy-
hovsky to the latter’s major diplomatic undertaking, the Union
61
of Hadiach. He clearly liked the main ideas of the agreement and

supplied additional details that enhanced his positive assessment
of the Union. Some of those details were mere figments of the
rich imagination of the Cossack elites, which were prepared to
see much more in the Union than it had actually offered their
forefathers.
Twardowski’s work influenced Hrabianka’s chronicle no less
profoundly than it had affected Velychko’s Relation. In some cas-
es, Hrabianka was even less critical of his source than Velychko.
For example, he failed to reconceptualize the history of the Union
of Hadiach, introducing it to the reader in connection with the
proceedings of the Warsaw Diet of 1659, exactly as Twardowski
had done. Not unlike Velychko, Hrabianka used Twardowski’s
account of the conditions of the Union as the basis for his own
account of the agreement. He also quoted from Twardowski’s
praise of the Cossacks, comparing their background to that of
the ancient Greeks, Romans, Turks, and Poles.
Unlike Velychko, however, Hrabianka never named his source.
He also introduced many more changes into Twardowski’s ac-
count than had Velychko. Hrabianka dropped not only the ac-
count of Nemyrych’s speech to the Diet but also the provision of
the agreement that obliged the Cossacks to conduct a defensive
war against Muscovy, as well as the amnesty to the Cossacks who
had sided with the Swedes during their invasion of the Common-
wealth. If Hrabianka’s failure to mention Nemyrych can be ex-
plained by the same reasons as Velychko’s, the other two changes
reflect the new political sensitivities of post-Poltava Ukraine. In
the wake of the defeat at Poltava, Hrabianka did not want to draw
attention to the history of Cossack-Muscovite antagonisms or to
past Cossack alliances with the Swedish king.15
If Hrabianka altered Twardowski’s version of the treaty to
eliminate items that he did not want his readers to know or re-
member, his additions to the text of the agreement give a good
indication of what he wanted the Union of Hadiach to repre-
sent. First of all, Hrabianka introduced the concept of the Grand
Principality of Rus´—a notion absent from Twardowski’s work
and probably borrowed from another Polish source, Wespazjan
Kochowski’s Climacters.16 Thus Hrabianka referred to the Cossack
hetman of the agreement (that is, Ivan Vyhovsky) variously in his
62
text as hetman of the Grand Principality of Rus´-Ukraine, hetman

of the Ruthenian nation, and Ukrainian or Little Russian hetman.
Hrabianka also added to Twardowski’s text of the agree-
ment the ideologically important statement that the Cossacks
were joining the Commonwealth as “free men with free men
and equals with equals,” a formula that had entered Ruthenian
political discourse in the first half of the seventeenth century and
remained important in the eighteenth. Now, however, it was rein-
troduced to establish that the Cossack elites had enjoyed special
rights under the Polish kings and to claim those rights from the
Russian tsars. The same purpose underlay another of Hrabian-
ka’s additions to Twardowski’s text—the statement that the king
himself had signed the conditions of the Union, and then, as was
the custom among monarchs, both sides had sworn to the agree-
ment. Given the controversy over the refusal of the tsar’s envoys
at Pereiaslav to swear an oath in the name of the sovereign, this
addition was also politically significant.17
The addition of Hrabianka’s that had the most lasting impact
on subsequent historiography and led to confusion in nineteenth-
century historical writing pertained to the origins of the Hadiach
Agreement. In his chronicle, Hrabianka claimed that the agree-
ment had originally been submitted to the Poles by none other
than Bohdan Khmelnytsky (the hetman’s first name was not given
in the chronicle, but “Khmelnytsky” was Hrabianka’s standard
form of reference to him).18 Whether this was taken from a writ-
ten source, garbled, or invented outright, it helped Hrabianka
argue his case that the Union indicated the Poles’ acceptance
of a treaty originally proposed by the Cossacks. That could well
explain why the Cossacks ultimately fell for a Polish trap.
However, in Hrabianka’s scheme of things, neither the canni-
ness of the Poles nor Cossack naïveté nor even treason on the part
of Vyhovsky could undermine the good ideas put into agreement
by Bohdan Khmelnytsky. The reference to Khmelnytsky, whose
cult as hero and savior of Little Russia reached its peak in the
1720s, could not but add legitimacy to the Union of Hadiach.19 An-
other factor that bolstered the reputation of the Hadiach Agree-
ment in post-Poltava Ukraine was the opposition to the Union
on the part of the Catholic hierarchy, registered by Twardowski
and duly repeated by Hrabianka. In general, Hrabianka portrayed
63
the Hadiach Agreement in a way that shielded it from accusations

of disloyalty to the tsar or betrayal of the Orthodox Church.20
This was especially important, given that Hrabianka presented
the Union of Hadiach as a viable alternative—and, one might
conclude after comparing his texts of the Pereiaslav and Ha-
diach treaties, a more attractive one—to the Pereiaslav Agree-
ment. The elites of the Hetmanate were fed up with Muscovite
encroachment on their rights and privileges, which culminated
in the abolition of the hetmancy in 1722 and the introduction of
direct rule by the Little Russian College. They looked to histo-
ry for alternatives to Russian rule, and the Union of Hadiach
certainly fit the bill. Hrabianka’s interpretation of Hadiach had
a strong impact on the formation of Ukrainian historical identity
in the Hetmanate. His chronicle was extremely popular among
the Cossack elites, but even more popular were different variants
of its condensed version, known as the Brief Description of Little
Russia.21 Together they contributed to the formation of a Hadiach
myth that represented the Polish-Cossack agreement of 1658 as
an alternative to Pereiaslav and helped form an identity rooted
not only in Little Russia’s experience under the tsars but also in
its long tradition of existence under Polish kings.
This interpretation of Hadiach had little to do with the ac-
tual text of the treaty, which curtailed the Hetmanate’s rights
and Cossack liberties—a reality so obvious to Vyhovsky and his
contemporaries. The popularity of the Hadiach myth can be prop-
erly understood only in the context of historical writing and the
politics of memory. That myth was created and kept alive by gen-
erations of chroniclers and historians who desperately searched
the past for an alternative to Russian rule. Despite the numerous
flaws of the Hadiach Agreement, which were particularly glaring
when compared with the Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654, it even-
tually began to be seen as a viable alternative to Pereiaslav and,
even more importantly, to the subsequent Cossack-Muscovite
treaties, which further curtailed the fragile autonomy of Ukraine.
64
5.
The Return of Ivan Mazepa
On the morning of 27 June 1709, two armies faced each other

in the fields near the Ukrainian city of Poltava. One was led
by the young and ambitious king of Sweden, Charles XII, the
other by the not so young but no less ambitious tsar of Mus-
covy, Peter I. Both were backed by detachments of Ukrainian
Cossacks—one led by Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who had rebelled
against Peter and joined Charles, the other by Hetman Ivan
Skoropadsky, appointed by the Russians to replace Mazepa. The
ensuing battle has often been regarded as a significant turning
point in Russian and, indeed, European history. Peter won, de-
feating his archenemy, saving his country, securing his hold over
the Hetmanate (a Cossack polity subordinated to Moscow), and
turning the tide of the long Northern War. Charles lost and had
to seek refuge on the territory of the Ottoman Empire.
The Battle of Poltava is often perceived as a turning point in
European history. At the end of the war Peter proclaimed himself
emperor of Russia, and his country became a major European
power. In time, Russia not only put an end to Swedish dominance
in the Baltic region and Northern Europe but also embarked on
a prolonged course of westward expansion that took its troops
all the way to Paris during the Napoleonic Wars of the next cen-
tury. Few scholars disagree with the conventional wisdom that
Mazepa’s revolt and the subsequent defeat of Charles had major
negative consequences for the Hetmanate—the polity in which
the battle was fought. While Mazepa had hoped to increase the
autonomy of the Cossack state under the nominal rule of a distant
65
sovereign, his defeat led to its severe curtailment. The hetman’s

right to appoint colonels was taken away by the tsar, who later
availed himself of Hetman Skoropadsky’s death to abolish the
office altogether and place the Hetmanate under the rule of the
Little Russian College.
The Battle of Poltava remains an important component of
Russian and Ukrainian historical mythology. It also continues to
generate interest among scholars, writers, and the public at large.
If one understands myth in the broadest terms as a phenomenon
that helps large collectivities define the foundations of their iden-
tity and system of values, then the term is clearly applicable to the
verbal and visual presentation of the Battle of Poltava over the
last three hundred years.1 It can even be argued that the “Myth of
Poltava” is one of the founding myths of the Russian Empire. Its
origins can be traced back to the months, if not weeks, following
the battle. Many elements of the imperial myth of Poltava were
first laid down by Feofan Prokopovych in his sermon delivered
before Peter I at St. Sophia’s Cathedral in Kyiv on 22 July 1709,
less than a month after the tsar’s victory. Prokopovych’s sermon
includes themes that later became standard: the role of the tsar
not only as a great military victor but also as the savior of Russia
and father of his fatherland, and a portrayal of his enemy, Hetman
Ivan Mazepa, as a traitor and instrument in the hands of foreign
powers.
An essential element of the imperial myth of Poltava is the
image of the “second Judas,” the Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa,
first denounced with that epithet by Peter himself. The tsar or-
dered that Mazepa be anathematized after he learned that the
hetman had sided with Charles XII in the fall of 1708, in the
midst of the Northern War. This anathema, repeated every year
in the churches of the vast empire, turned Mazepa into the most
hated figure of the Russian political and historical imagination.
The tsar even had an Order of Judas made, intending to bestow it
on the elderly hetman once he was captured. Peter won the Battle
of Poltava in June 1709, but the hetman was never caught. Instead,
he became a symbol of treason to the ruler and the state; an ob-
ject of government-sponsored hatred, association with whom was
tantamount to sacrilege—a betrayal not only of secular authority
but also of the Christian faith. Admiring Mazepa under such
66
circumstances was extremely dangerous, but not everyone was

prepared to cast aside the memory of the old hetman.2
Condemned by the tsar, abandoned by many of his follow-
ers, and anathematized by church hierarchs he had patronized in
churches he had helped build, Mazepa was turned into a symbol
of treason whose infamy outlasted that of the primary villain of
Poltava, King Charles XII. But the power of imperial mythology
had its limits. Simultaneously with the formation of the imperial
myth of Poltava, its countermyth was born in Ukraine, presenting
Mazepa not only as a protector of the Orthodox Church but also
as a defender of the rights and freedoms of his people. Like the
imperial myth, this countermyth of Mazepa began its life in the
war of manifestos between Peter, Charles, and Mazepa on the
eve of Poltava. It survived the most difficult post-Poltava years
and took on new characteristics in nineteenth-century Ukraine.
In 1810, just over a century after the Battle of Poltava, Oleksii
Martos, a young officer in the Russian military and a descendant
of an old Cossack family, visited Mazepa’s grave in the Moldavian
town of Galaţi. Two years later his father, the celebrated sculptor
Ivan Martos, best known for his statue of Kuzma Minin and
Dmitrii Pozharsky in Moscow’s Red Square, unveiled a monu-
ment to Catherine II at the Column Hall in the same city. While
the father celebrated the empress who had put an end to the ex-
istence of the Cossack polity in Ukraine, his St. Petersburg-born
son took a different attitude to the imperial past and its heroes.
A few years after visiting Mazepa’s grave, most probably around
1819, the year that Byron’s Mazeppa was published, Oleksii Martos
left the following record in his memoirs:
Mazepa died far from his fatherland, whose independence he

defended; he was a friend of liberty, and for this he deserves
the respect of generations to come. . . . He is gone, and the
name of Little Russia and its brave Cossacks has been erased
from the list of nations not great in numbers but known for
their existence and their constitutions. Besides other virtues,
Mazepa was a friend of learning: he enlarged the Academy of
the Brotherhood Monastery in Kyiv, which he renovated and
embellished; he supplied it with a library and rare manuscripts.
Yet the founder of the academy and of many churches and
67
philanthropic institutions is anathematized every year on the

Sunday of the first week of Great Lent along with Stenka Razin
and other thieves and robbers. But what a difference! The latter
was a robber and a blasphemer. Mazepa was a most enlightened
and philanthropic individual, a skillful military leader, and the
ruler of a free nation. 3
The Puzzle
Martos was not the only “dissident” who questioned the official
line toward Mazepa and regarded him as a protector of the rights
and freedoms of his homeland. On 3 June 1822, Mikhail Pogodin
(1800–1875), then a twenty-one-year-old student at Moscow Uni-
versity, later a prominent Russian historian and one of the leaders
of the Slavophile movement, recorded in his diary a conversation
he had that day about the prevailing moods in “Little Russia”—
the former Cossack lands of Ukraine. “Not a shadow of their
former rights remains among them now. The Little Russians call
themselves the true Russians and the others moskali. They do not
entirely like them. Muscovy was thus something apart. They also
call the Old Believers moskali. They love Mazeppa [sic]. Earlier
they did not supply recruits but [Cossack] regiments. Thus, there
were regiments from Chernihiv, [Novhorod]-Siverskyi, and so on.
That was much better: they were all from one region and therefore
more comradely, more in agreement. But now, someone from
Irkutsk stands next to a Kyivan; a man from Arkhangelsk—next
to one from Astrakhan. What is the sense of it?” 4
What exactly did Pogodin have in mind when he referred to
the Ukrainians’ “love of Mazepa?” We shall answer this question
by taking a close look at his Ukrainian acquaintances and the
views of history to which they subscribed. We know that Pogo-
din discussed Ukrainian grievances and aspirations with Aleksei
Kubarev, his older friend and mentor at Moscow University, and
with Kubarev’s close friend Mykhailo Shyrai, the son of Stepan
Shyrai (1761–1841), a retired general, wealthy landowner, and mar-
shal of the nobility of Chernihiv gubernia. It was from the young-
er Shyrai, also a student at Moscow University and Pogodin’s rival
in the dissertation competition for the university’s gold medal,
that Pogodin obtained the information on Ukrainian moods and
68
their “love” for Mazepa. The rest of the conversation, as summa-

rized by Pogodin, focused on “a certain Sudiienko, who, holding
no civic office, governed the whole town merely by the respect
that he commanded,” and “Metropolitan Mikhail [of St. Peters-
burg],” who was “idolized in Chernihiv.”
The impressions recorded by Pogodin came from Shyrai’s
family circle in Ukraine. The Sudiienkos were related to the Shy-
rais, and Mykhailo Shyrai’s father, Stepan, was closely associated
with Metropolitan Mikhail Desnitsky of St. Petersburg, formerly
archbishop of Chernihiv, who had visited his family estate in
Solova near Starodub on several occasions.5
Stepan Shyrai was an important figure in Ukrainian political
circles of the first decades of the nineteenth century. A retired
major general who had taken an active part in the Russo-Turkish
wars under Aleksandr Suvorov, Shyrai was elected marshal of the
Chernihiv nobility in 1818 and spent a decade leading the struggle
for its rights and privileges. He became a strong critic of the high
quotas of recruits whom the serf-owning landlords were required
to contribute to the imperial army. Shyrai was also well known
for his stories of the good old days. Around 1828, when he was
about to leave office or had just left it, the sixty-seven-year-old
Shyrai, at odds with Governor General Nikolai Repnin of Little
Russia, took it upon himself to disseminate to the wider world
arguably the most subversive text produced in nineteenth-century
Ukraine, a history of the Cossacks entitled Istoriia Rusov (History
of the Rus´).6
Although the manuscript is attributed to the long-deceased
archbishop of Mahilioǔ, Heorhii Konysky (1717–95), and is sup-
posed to have been completed in the late 1760s, its main ideas
correspond closely to the list of Ukrainian grievances recorded by
Pogodin. The author, whoever he was, and whenever he wrote his
text, believed that the Cossacks, or the “Little Russians”—not the
“Great Russians” or “Muscovites”—were indeed the true heirs of
Rus´ and bona fide Rusians. He believed that Rus´ and Muscovy
were different entities, disliked the Muscovites, and was a sworn
enemy of the Old Believers. The unknown author argues that the
Cossacks had not received due recognition for the services they
had rendered to the empire. There seems to be almost a perfect
match between the views of the Ukrainian elites of the 1820s
69
and the historical manuscript that popped up in the libraries of

local notables around that time. Whether the History influenced
the mood of the Chernihiv nobility or simply reflected it, there
is little doubt that the work offers unparalleled insight into the
historical views held by descendants of the Cossack officers of
the Hetmanate at a time when Ukrainian culture was entering
the all-important stage of “heritage gathering,” which led to the
rise of the Ukrainian national movement in the mid-nineteenth
century.7
There is, however, an important problem to be addressed be-
fore the thesis of a close correlation between the views of the
Ukrainian nobility of the 1820s and those of the author of the His-
tory can be accepted without major reservations. This problem is
expressed in Pogodin’s phrase about the Ukrainian elites’ “love of
Mazeppa.” Unlike Pogodin’s Ukrainian landowners, the author of
the History of the Rus´ has an ambivalent attitude toward Ivan Ma-
zepa and his actions, and his feelings for the old hetman would be
hard to characterize as “love” or admiration. Could Pogodin have
misunderstood his fellow student back in June 1822 or exaggerated
what he had heard from him? Or did Mykhailo Shyrai accurately
express the views of his father’s circle, and does the problem lie
with the author of the History? A first reading of the History offers
no immediate answer to these questions. Depending on the na-
ture and circumstances of the episodes described in the book, its
author can be either critical or supportive of Mazepa, judgmental
or forgiving. He appears to be seeking a balance between a frankly
negative assessment of the hetman and an apology for him. In the
process, he creates quite a contradictory figure who embarks on
a dangerous path, “along which he was led by excessive courage
and extreme bitterness into an immeasurable abyss.” 8
Reading Voltaire
On the surface, the overall assessment of Mazepa and his actions
in the pages of the History is more negative than positive. To
begin with, the anonymous author considers Mazepa an ethnic
Pole (a nationality that he vehemently despises) whose actions
are guided by wounded honor. This is the leitmotif of the au-
thor’s treatment of the two Mazepa legends, one recorded by
70
Voltaire in his 1731 bestseller, History of Charles XII, and the other
preserved as part of Ukrainian lore. According to both legends,
Peter I provoked Mazepa’s animosity by publicly humiliating him
at one of his receptions. “The Czar, who began to be over-heated
with wine, and had not, when sober, always the command of his
passions, called him a traitor, and threatened to have him impaled.
Mazeppa, on his return to Ukraine, formed the design of a revolt,”
wrote Voltaire.
Another version of this legend, apparently known to the
author of the History of the Rus´ from local sources, placed the
same episode at a dinner hosted by Peter’s close associate Alek-
sandr Menshikov, whom the author considered a sworn enemy of
Ukraine. According to this version, Peter slapped Mazepa in the
face as a result of the conflict. “Both these stories, taken together,
show the same thing—that Mazeppa had a most harmful intent,
inspired by his own malice and vengefulness, and not at all by
national interests, which, naturally, ought in that case to have
moved the troops and the people to support him, but instead the
people fought the Swedes with all their might as enemies who
had invaded their land in hostile fashion.” 9
Thus, the anonymous author basically accepted Voltaire’s in-
terpretation of Mazepa’s actions as motivated by a personal desire
for revenge. Writing after the French Revolution, the author was
prepared to judge his protagonist’s actions by the level of public
support that they generated. Did he, however, approve not only
the actions of the Cossack elites but also those of the popular
masses? Throughout the History of the Rus´, its author shows very
little regard for the masses as such, and his assessment of their
behavior toward the Swedish army in the months leading up to
the Battle of Poltava is no exception.
“The local people,” he declares, making little effort to hide his
contempt for the unenlightened and savage plebs, “then resem-
bled savage Americans or wayward Asians. Coming out of their
abatis and shelters, they were surprised by the mild behavior of
the Swedes, but, because the latter did not speak Rusian among
themselves or make the sign of the cross, they considered them
non-Christians and infidels, and, on seeing them consuming milk
and meat on Fridays, concluded that they were godless infidels
and killed them wherever they could be found in small parties
71
or individually.” The masses emerge from this description as xe-

nophobic, superstitious, and uncivilized, while the account itself
exhibits all the characteristics of enlightened Orientalism.10
The anonymous author’s characterization of Mazepa as an
irresponsible leader driven to avenge a personal insult is certainly
full of contradictions. On the one hand, he denounces Maze-
pa’s actions in light of their reception by the Cossack elites (the
Cossack Host) and ordinary people. On the other hand, he con-
siders this reaction, especially on the part of the Cossacks, to be
ill-informed, if not completely ridiculous. One way of explaining
this contradictory attitude is to posit that the anonymous author
inwardly sympathized with Mazepa and his cause, or, in Pogodin’s
words, “loved Mazeppa” but found it difficult to reconcile his
feelings with the image of the hetman projected by official propa-
ganda, which had an influence on him. For a variety of historical
and political reasons, the author may also have been reluctant to
manifest his true thoughts and feelings in the matter. If that was
indeed the case, what was the source of his “love of Mazeppa”?
It would be futile to seek the answer to this question in those
parts of the History where the author assumes the role of narrator.
Speaking in his own voice, the author is more critical than sup-
portive of the old hetman. His attitude changes when he allows
his characters to speak on their own behalf, shielding the author
from direct responsibility for what he has written; after all, he
is only quoting existing sources without endorsing their views.
More often than not, however, those sources are of the author’s
own invention, or at least a product of his heavy editing. This is
particularly true of the speech allegedly delivered by Mazepa to
his troops at the beginning of the revolt and cited at length in
the History.
Letting Mazepa Speak

It is in this speech that the author of the History gives Mazepa
an opportunity to present his case. The long speech was allegedly
delivered at the moment, decisive for Mazepa and his homeland,
when the hetman decided to switch sides and join Charles XII. In
order to maintain the loyalty of his men, Mazepa had to convince
the Cossack Host of the justice of his cause. Mazepa (or, rather,
72
the anonymous author) makes the fullest use of this opportunity

to explain his view not only of the revolt but of Ukrainian history
in general. In his speech to the Cossack Host, Mazepa emerges as
a protector of Ukrainian independence—the role ascribed to him
by Oleksii Martos circa 1819. He also raises his voice in defense of
the ancient rights and freedoms violated by the Muscovites, who
allegedly deprived the Cossacks of their prior claim to the Rus´
land, of their government, and of the very name of Rus´—themes
that, if one trusts the Pogodin diary, were dear to the hearts of the
Ukrainian elites in the early decades of the nineteenth century.
Mazepa’s call to arms is based on the dire circumstances in
which his fatherland and the Cossack nation find themselves.
“We stand now, Brethren, between two abysses prepared to con-
sume us if we do not choose a reliable path for ourselves to avoid
them,” begins Mazepa’s apocryphal speech, referring to the fact
that two imperial armies are approaching the borders of Ukraine
and that a clash between them is all but inevitable. The hetman
tars Peter I and Charles XII with the same brush, depicting them
as tyrants who rule arbitrarily over conquered peoples: “Both of
them, given their willfulness and appropriation of unlimited pow-
er, resemble the most terrible despots, such as all Asia and Africa
have hardly ever produced.”
The hetman claims that the victory of either despot would
bring nothing but destruction to Ukraine. The Swedish king
would reestablish Polish rule over Ukraine, while the Russian
tsar, who refused to confirm the rights and privileges guaran-
teed to Ukraine in the times of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, has treated
the Cossack nation and its representatives in autocratic fashion.
“If the Russian tsar is allowed to become the victor,” argues the
apocryphal Mazepa, “then threatening calamities have been pre-
pared for us by that tsar himself, for you see that, although he
comes from a line elected by the people from among its nobility,
yet, having appropriated unlimited power for himself, he punishes
that people according to his arbitrary will, and not only the peo-
ple’s will and property but their very lives have been subjugated
to the will and whim of the tsar alone.”
Mazepa’s solution to the seemingly insoluble problem of
choosing between the two despots is most unusual. He proposes
to remain neutral in the conflict between them, but that neutrality
73
is of a particular kind. Ukraine would accept the protectorate

of the Swedish king and fight only against those forces that at-
tacked its territory, which under these circumstances could only
be Russian forces. The Swedish king, along with other European
powers, would guarantee the restoration of Ukrainian indepen-
dence. Mazepa’s speech, at once passionate and highly rational,
leaves no doubt that he is acting in defense of his nation (natsiia),
which he wants to save from destruction and lead to freedom,
restoring its independence and placing it on a par with other
European nations.
Parts of his speech specifically counter the arguments of his
critics, including the anonymous author’s own claim that Mazepa
betrayed the tsar for personal advantage. “And so it remains to us,
Brethren,” says the apocryphal Mazepa to his troops, “to choose
the lesser of the visible evils that have beset us, so that our descen-
dants, condemned to slavery by our incompetence, do not burden
us with their complaints and imprecations. I do not have them
[descendants] and, of course, cannot have them; consequently,
I am not involved in the interests of our descendants and seek
nothing but the welfare of the nation that has honored me with
my current post and, with it, has entrusted me with its fate.” 11
The text of Mazepa’s speech in the History of the Rus´ is a prod-
uct of historical imagination, but it is not completely divorced
from the realities of Mazepa’s era. The references in the speech
to the Swedish-Ukrainian alliance of the Khmelnytsky era find
clear parallels in the preamble to Pylyp Orlyk’s Constitution of
1711. The passage in Mazepa’s speech in which he argues the need
for secrecy and denies any personal motive for switching from
one ruler to another corresponds fully to the episode described by
Orlyk in a letter to Metropolitan Stefan Iavorsky in 1721.
According to Orlyk, Mazepa told him in 1707: “Before God
the Omniscient I protest and swear that it is not for my private
gain, not for higher honors, not for greater enrichment, nor for
other whims of any kind, but for all of you who remain under my
rule and command, for your wives and children, for the general
good of my mother, my fatherland, poor unfortunate Ukraine,
for the whole Zaporozhian Host and the Little Russian people,
as well as for the promotion and expansion of the rights and
freedoms of the Host, that I wish to act, with God’s help, in such
74
a way that you, with your wives and children and our native land,
along with the Zaporozhian Host, do not perish because of the
Muscovite or the Swedish side.” 12
Mazepa’s speech in the History of the Rus´ presents an image of
the hetman that not only directly contradicts the imperial depic-
tion of him as a Judas, a traitor to the tsar and his own people, but
also departs significantly from the image of him presented by most
eighteenth-century Ukrainian chroniclers. Writers of the first half
of the century, including the author of the Hrabianka Chronicle,
preferred to steer clear of a detailed discussion of the politically
dangerous age of Mazepa, limiting themselves to a few short,
dispassionate entries on the events of 1708 and 1709. Authors of
the second half of the century, including Petro Symonovsky and
especially Aleksandr Rigelman, did not shy away from the con-
troversial topic but accepted and promoted the official viewpoint
in their treatment of Mazepa. Even so, the image of Mazepa
as a defender of Ukrainian rights, which emerges—though not
without difficulty—from the History of the Rus´, was not entirely
without precedent in Ukrainian historical writing.
We know that a text of Mazepa’s speech circulated in Ukraine
in the first decades of the nineteenth century, but we do not have
the text itself: Dmitrii Bantysh-Kamensky was promised a copy
but never received it. Nevertheless, Mazepa’s speech in the His-
tory of the Rus´ finds parallels in certain extant sources. The main
points of the speech correspond closely to the hetman’s arguments
as summarized in the Brief Historical Description of Little Russia.
This narrative—written, according to a date on its title page, in
1789—is known today in a copy dated 1814. Its author claims that
“Hetman Mazepa undertook to make use of the continuing war
in Russia with the Swedish king in such a way as to renounce
his subjection to the Russian sovereign and establish himself as
an autocratic prince in the Little Russian regions with the help
of Charles XII.” The hetman “suggested to the Little Russian
officers, first, that Little Russia had been subjected to destruc-
tion owing to the war with the Swedes, not for the sake of any
interests of its own, but, in his opinion, even with impairment of
its liberty; second, that the sovereign, exhausting it with taxes,
would freely abrogate the treaties whereby it still prospered; third,
that the present time offered a chance to think of the future; and,
75
fourth, how difficult it was, having become accustomed to liberty,

to endure never-ending bondage.” 13
What was certainly new in Mazepa’s speech as rendered by
the author of the History of the Rus´ was the eloquence and persua-
siveness with which the hetman presented his argument. Among
the first to be persuaded was the anonymous author himself—as-
suming, of course, that he was not the author of the speech but
the person who cited or edited an existing text. One can hardly
imagine that he would have included such a text in his work if
he were not at least partly sympathetic to Mazepa’s argument
and, by extension, to the hetman himself. Through the medium
of Mazepa’s speech, the anonymous author gave voice to many of
his own ideas that he could not express on his own behalf. Despite
the author’s general verdict that Mazepa acted in his own interest,
many of the prominent themes in the hetman’s speech are picked
up and further developed in those parts of the History where the
narrator does not have to hide behind Mazepa in order to express
his own views and ideas. The theme of Ukraine’s neutrality in the
Muscovite-Swedish conflict became a touchstone of the author’s
own reinterpretation of the Mazepa era, as well as the basis for
his rejection of the anathema imposed on the old hetman.
Still, the strongest support for Mazepa’s argument is not ex-
pressed by the author directly but through the medium of speech-
es by other characters, including the proclamation issued by Maz-
epa’s ally, Charles XII. The king corroborates everything declared
by Mazepa in his own speech and sounds the same themes of
struggle against tyranny and the restoration of Rus´/Cossack
independence (samoderzhavie) as does the apocryphal Mazepa.
According to the History, Charles declares in his proclamation
to the people of Ukraine:
The Muscovite tsar, being an intransigent foe of all the nations

on earth and desiring to make them bend to his yoke, having
subjected the Cossacks as well to his dishonorable bondage;
despising, revoking, and annulling all your rights and freedoms
established by solemn agreements and treaties with you, has
forgotten and shamelessly contemned gratitude itself, held sa-
cred by all nations, which is owed to you Cossacks and the
Rus´ nation by Muscovy, reduced to a nullity and almost to
76
nonbeing by its internal conflicts, by pretenders, and by the

Poles, but maintained and strengthened by you. For the whole
world knows that the Rus´ nation with its Cossacks was orig-
inally an autocratic nation—that is, dependent on itself alone,
under the rule of its princes or autocrats. . . . 14
The author of the History of the Rus´ also gives voice to the
other side, that of Tsar Peter I. Unlike Mazepa’s speech and the
proclamation of Charles XII, Peter’s manifesto was not a product
of the author’s (or of a predecessor’s) imagination but an actual
document well known in Ukraine. But the extract quoted from it
in the History is much shorter than the one from Charles’s alleged
proclamation, to say nothing of Mazepa’s speech. The author
quotes those parts of Peter’s manifesto in which the tsar guaran-
tees the rights and freedoms of Ukraine, not those in which he
presents his main accusations against Mazepa. In the History of
the Rus´ Peter merely defends himself against accusations that he
violated the rights of Little Russia and promises to protect those
rights in the future: “One may say without flattery that no people
under the sun can boast of such privilege and liberty as our Little
Russian people, for we have ordained that not one peniaz´ [small
silver coin] be taken from it for our treasury, and we have made
this a testament for our successors.”
If Mazepa’s statements are corroborated in the History of the
Rus´ by those of Charles XII, and vice versa, Peter’s declarations
are left with no narrative support or corroborating evidence, and
what the author of the History says about the behavior of Russian
troops in Ukraine raises serious doubt about the validity of the
tsar’s statements. Judging by the space allotted to Mazepa and
Charles on the one hand, and Peter on the other, to present their
cases, there is little doubt that the author’s sympathies lay with
the former, not the latter.15
Between Tsar and Nation

If the author of the History of the Rus´ preferred to express his
support for Mazepa’s cause through speeches and texts attributed
to others, he used his own voice to express his (and, by extension,
his readers’) loyalty to the Russian ruler and to declare his support
77
for Peter. Where the author speaks on his own behalf, he takes
a position that, unlike Mazepa’s speech, does not tar both rulers
with the same brush by depicting them as tyrants but differenti-
ates them, favoring Peter at the expense of Charles. It is not that
the author is uncritical of Peter’s actions, but he certainly prefers
him to Charles, whom he considers a frivolous adventurer.16
This becomes especially clear in the author’s treatment of Pe-
ter’s attempts to reach agreement with Charles on the eve of the
Battle of Poltava by sacrificing Russian territorial acquisitions
and claims, which the Swedish king brushes aside in humiliating
fashion. The following passage leaves no doubt about the author’s
sympathies in this particular case:
The Swedish king, drunk with the glory of a conqueror and with
his constant victories, having rejected those offers [of peace],
told those envoys of the tsar and foreign intermediaries striving
to incline him toward peace that ‘he would make peace with
the tsar in his capital city, Moscow, where he would force the
Muscovites to pay him 30 million talers for the costs of the
war and show the tsar how and over what to rule.’ Losing hope
of achieving anything by peaceful means after such a brutal
refusal, the sovereign began to rally his troops to the outskirts
of Poltava, and at the council of war that was held there, the
whole general staff decided to give resolute battle to the Swedes,
come what may. 17
Sympathizing with Charles and Mazepa on the strength of

their arguments while remaining loyal to the ruler was no easy
task, partly because the anonymous author disapproved of many
of the tsar’s actions and those of his Great Russian troops. He
assuaged this dilemma by shifting responsibility to the tsar’s ad-
visers for those of Peter’s actions of which he did not approve. To
judge by the text of the History, Aleksandr Menshikov was the
main culprit. He is depicted as the embodiment of absolute evil,
especially in the vivid description of the Russian massacre of the
defenders and peaceful inhabitants of Mazepa’s capital, Baturyn.
The author goes out of his way to describe the atrocities carried
out by Menshikov’s troops and to stress their commander’s low
78
social origins, apparently seeking not only to explain his cruelty

but also to distance him as much as possible from the tsar.
Menshikov assaulted the unarmed burghers, who were in their

homes and had no part whatsoever in Mazepa’s designs; he
slaughtered them to a man, sparing neither sex nor age, nor even
suckling infants. This was followed by the troops’ plundering of
the town, while their commanders and torturers executed the
bandaged Serdiuk officers and civil authorities. 18
The loyalty to the ruler expressed by the author of the History

did not automatically translate into loyalty either to the tsar’s
satraps or—an especially important point for our argument—to
his Great Russian army and, by extension, his Great Russian na-
tion. This distinction between the ruler and Great Russia was
not the anonymous author’s invention. It had already been made
very clearly in Semen Divovych’s Conversation between Great and
Little Russia, written in 1762, shortly after Catherine II’s ascent
to the throne. The Great Russia of Divovych’s poem was forced
to admit that Little Russia was not subject to her (Great Russia)
but to the ruler who governed both polities. Great Russia says to
Little Russia in that regard:
I acknowledge that I myself am not your sovereign,

But our autocrat is our common master.
I do not dispute that he accepted you with honors;
I see that he often made his own equal to yours.
But say in peace, of which there was question above,
Do you win the war, supposedly, without my forces? 19
The distinction between Great Russia and Little Russia al-

lowed the author of the History to take another contentious step
and distinguish his loyalty to the ruler from loyalty to the ruler’s
troops. This distinction becomes particularly apparent in episodes
where the anonymous author not only adopts a much more favor-
able attitude to the Swedish troops in Ukraine than to the tsar’s
army but also contrasts the benevolence of the Swedes toward
the local population with the harsh treatment meted out by the
Great Russians:
79
The incursion of the Swedes into Little Russia by no means

resembled that of an enemy invasion and had nothing hostile
in it, but they passed through the inhabitants’ settlements and
plowed fields as friends and humble travelers, touching no one’s
property and committing none of the misdeeds, licentious acts,
and excesses of every kind that are usually perpetrated by our
troops in the villages on the grounds that “I am a servant of
the tsar! I serve God and the sovereign on behalf of the whole
Christian community! Chickens and geese, young women and
girls belong to us by military right and by order of His High-
ness!” The Swedes, on the contrary, demanded nothing of the
inhabitants and took nothing by force, but wherever they en-
countered them, they bought goods from them by voluntary
trade and for cash. 20
In one case, referring to the massacres of Mazepa’s supporters

by the tsar’s troops, the anonymous author even puts Russian per-
secution of the Little Russian (Rus´) nation on a par with its past
persecution by the Poles. His attribution of the cruelty of those
massacres to Menshikov does little to hide the fact that, in his
mind, the Great Russian regime has proved as oppressive toward
his nation as was the Polish one, which created the first Rus´
martyr, Severyn Nalyvaiko. Describing the massacre of Mazepa’s
supporters in Lebedyn, the anonymous author writes:
That punitive action was Menshikov’s usual employment:

breaking on the wheel, quartering, and impaling; the lightest,
considered mere play, was hanging and decapitation. . . . It now
remains to consider and judge—if, according to the words of the
Savior himself, written in the Gospel, which are immutable and
not to be ignored, “all blood spilled on earth will be required of
this generation”—what requirement awaits for the blood of the
Rus´ nation shed from the blood of Hetman Nalyvaiko to the
present day, and shed in great streams for the sole reason that it
sought liberty or a better life in its own land and had intentions
in that regard common to all humanity. 21
The figure of Mazepa, traitor to the tsar and defender of

Ukrainian rights, presented the author of the History of the Rus´
80
with one more difficulty when it came to the anathema declared

against him by the official church. Mazepa’s relationship to Chris-
tianity was a significant problem that had to be dealt with one
way or another, as it constituted a major obstacle to the hetman’s
historical rehabilitation. The author of the History coped with the
anathema in a number of ways. Some of his methods exemplify
his Enlightenment-era tolerance of other religions, while oth-
ers display his romantic readiness to bend the facts and invent
stories if they fit his paradigm. The anonymous author rejects as
a form of superstition the popular conception of the Swedes as
non-Christians. He also brands as fables stories about Mazepa
joining the Swedes in rejecting Orthodoxy and desecrating Or-
thodox icons. Furthermore, he claims that Mazepa never spilled
Christian—more precisely, Orthodox—blood.
In all these cases, the anonymous author is prepared to stand
up for Mazepa, speaking now in his own voice and not hiding
behind one of his characters. With regard to the spilling of Chris-
tian blood, the author first makes the apocryphal Mazepa declare
neutrality in his speech to the Cossack Host, and then states that
Mazepa maintained his neutrality during the Battle of Poltava,
refusing to send his troops against the tsar’s army. If Mazepa’s
declaration of neutrality was sheer invention on the part of the
author, his troops’ non-participation in the battle was not. They
were too insignificant in number and too unreliable in military
training and political loyalty to be used in combat.
This historical fact is interpreted by the anonymous author in
a way that allows him to advance the thesis of Mazepa’s neutrality,
thereby undermining official accusations of political treason and
betrayal of the Orthodox religion. According to the author of the
History, Mazepa and his troops
remained at their camps and the Swedish ones at all times,

constantly avoiding engagements with the Russians and main-
taining the strictest neutrality toward them, stipulated by Ma-
zepa with the Swedish king and announced in his declarations
throughout Little Russia. For Mazepa, as everyone knows, was
a Christian, deeply pious, having built many monasteries and
churches at his expense, and he considered it a mortal sin to
81
shed the blood of his compatriots and coreligionists, and he held

to this with resolute firmness, yielding to no persuasions. 22
The History’s emphasis on Mazepa’s support of the Ortho-

dox Church and the construction of Orthodox monasteries and
shrines corresponds closely to the treatment of Mazepa by Oleksii
Martos in his memoirs and was probably an important element of
the Mazepa myth in early nineteenth-century Ukraine. Martos,
who was close to the author of the History of the Rus´ not only in
his assessment of Mazepa but also in his treatment of the Pere-
iaslav Agreement of 1654 and other episodes of Ukrainian histo-
ry,23 may have had an opportunity to acquaint himself with the
History between 1818 and 1821, when he was actively working on
his own history of Ukraine. It is much more likely, however, that
both authors utilized the same sources or reflected the same at-
titudes of the Ukrainian nobility (the Martos family, the Shyrais,
and the anonymous author of the History of the Rus´ either came
from the Chernihiv region or had strong connections with it).
In any case, both Martos and the author of the History of the
Rus´ are highly critical of the anathema declared against Mazepa
by the Russian Orthodox Church. The anonymous author charac-
terizes the ritual declaration of anathema as “something new that
had never yet existed in Little Russia; something terrible that was
called ‘Mazepa’s companion to Hades.’” There can be little doubt
that the author disapproved of Peter’s presence at the ceremony,
but, as always, he was prepared to shift the blame to one of the
tsar’s advisers, this time Feofan Prokopovych: “The numerous Lit-
tle Russian clergy and the Great Russian clergy closest to these
borders, deliberately summoned to Hlukhiv, under the leadership
and inspection of the well-known bishop Prokopovych, having
constituted itself as a so-called local synod, consigned Mazepa to
eternal damnation, or anathema, on the ninth day of that same
November. This dismal ceremony took place in the brick Church
of Saint Nicholas in the presence of the sovereign, with a large
assembly of officials and members of the public.” 24
In both the History of the Rus´ and Martos’s memoirs, Mazepa
emerges not only as a defender of the interests of the Little Rus-
sian (Rus´) nation but also as a proponent of its independence.
The vision of an independent Ukraine, admittedly harking back
82
to the past, is presented in the History as one of the goals of

Mazepa and his ally, Charles XII. It must have been highly con-
sonant with attitudes dominant in some segments of Ukrainian
society, if Martos’s memoirs are any indication. Given that the
anonymous author’s main strategy was to convince the imperial
government to treat the Ukrainians as equals, Mazepa’s references
to independence should be regarded more as a threat than as
a real political program.
⁂
The author of the History of the Rus´ was caught between two con-
tradictory imperatives: his loyalty to the ruler and the Romanov
dynasty conflicted with his clear admiration for Mazepa as an
embodiment of the Enlightenment ideals of struggle against tyr-
anny, defense of human dignity, and protection of national rights.
The solution to this seemingly insoluble problem was found in
the concept of the nation, deeply rooted in Ukrainian historical
writing of the previous era. While the anonymous author of the
History remained loyal to the tsar in his description of the Polta-
va episode and shifted responsibility for Peter’s ruthlessness and
cruelty to his advisers, he found no difficulty in denouncing the
tsar’s Great Russian nation. If revolt against the tsar remained
illegitimate for the author, the struggle of one nation against an-
other in defense of its freedom and liberties certainly did not.
The anonymous author was still faithful to Jean Bodin’s notion
that only God could judge and punish a ruler, but he was no less
attuned to the ideal of national sovereignty as promoted by the
leaders of the American and French revolutions.
In its interpretation of the Ukrainian past the History places
the nation on a par with the ruler. The Rus´ nation of the Histo-
ry was first and foremost that of the Cossack officers and their
descendants, but on occasion it could include the popular masses
as well. The author of the History was dismissive of people of low
social status and critical of the actions of uneducated peasants, but
he had no qualms about using their deeds as an argument in his
exposition when it suited his purpose. In his treatment of Little
Russians and Great Russians, the anonymous author was unques-
tionably following in the footsteps of Semen Divovych and his
83
Conversation between Great and Little Russia, but he was prepared

to go even further and treat their relations as those between sep-
arate nations, not just distinct historical and legal entities.
The anonymous author also emerges from the pages of his
History as the first Ukrainian intellectual to struggle with the
notion of the religious and ethnic closeness of Russians and
Ukrainians. He recognizes the depth of the cultural association
between the two nations but rejects the actions of the popular
masses informed by that affinity. Instead, he turns the affinity
into his principal weapon, claiming Ukraine’s historical primacy
as the Rus´ nation, attributing the Rus´ name almost exclusively
to his compatriots, and trying to shame the Russian state and
society into granting equal rights to their Little Russian brethren.
If one judges by the History of the Rus´, the Ukrainian elites
of the early nineteenth century could not help admiring Mazepa
despite their best efforts to remain loyal to the monarchy. Mazepa,
however, never became an unambiguously positive character in
Ukraine. Unable to resolve the problem of Mazepa’s disloyalty to
Peter, the elites had to conceal and qualify their admiration for
the hetman. After all, according to Pogodin’s diary, the Chernihiv
nobility not only “loved Mazeppa” but also admired Osyp Su-
diienko, a descendant of a prominent Cossack officer family who
in 1811 donated one hundred thousand rubles to build a church
commemorating Peter’s victory at Poltava.
84
II
The Red Century
6.
How Russian Was the
Russian Revolution?
There is probably no more important, though convoluted and

often confusing, term for understanding Russian history than
“Russian Revolution.” The most confusing aspect of the term
“Russian Revolution” is that it often obscures what actually took
place in the multiethnic Russian Empire—a revolution of nations,
of which the Russians were only one. The Russian Revolution
understood as a multiethnic phenomenon fundamentally changed
not only the economic, social, and cultural life of the former sub-
jects of the Romanovs but also relations among the nationalities.
Nowhere were those revolutionary changes more dramatic
than in the realm of imperial Russian national identity. From
the mid-seventeenth century Russia was imagined by its elites as
an entity composed of three Russias: Great, Little, and White.
Since the mid-nineteenth century, Russian ethnographers and
geographers had imagined the Russian nation itself as composed
of three branches: Great Russian, Little Russian (Ukrainian), and
White Russian (Belarusian). The emphasis was on unity, not di-
versity, and the imperial authorities were doing their best to ban
the development of separate literary languages in Ukraine and
Belarus, as well as to promote the Russian literary language as all-
Russian or pan-Russian. But the concept of the pan-Russian na-
tion and culture suffered a hard landing in the Revolution of 1917.
While Russia lost only part of its empire, the all-Russian
nation fell apart completely, splitting into three separate nations:
Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. More than any other sin-
gle event, the Russian Revolution set the Russians as a people on
87
the path to modern nationhood, changing the geopolitics of the

region for generations to come.
Vasilii Kliuchevsky treated the reunification of the Rus´ land
as one of the driving forces of Russian history. The Russian Em-
pire was never closer to the goal of reunifying those lands and
forming one Russian nation than in April 1915, when Nicholas II
visited Lviv and Przemyśl (Peremyshl). But the successful of-
fensive of the Central Powers in May 1915 precipitated the rapid
decline and subsequent disintegration of the Russian Empire. The
Revolution of February 1917 made Poland and Finland free and
began to split the core of the big Russian nation as well.
A key role in that process was played by Ukraine. Mykhailo
Hrushevsky and the Central Rada unilaterally declared the terri-
torial autonomy of Ukraine in June 1917. The genie of the federal
restructuring of the Russian Empire and the concomitant parti-
tioning of the big Russian nation was out of the bottle. The Pro-
visional Government tried to put it back by sending its ministers
to Kyiv, hoping to convince the Rada to withdraw its declaration
of autonomy. Faced with the Rada’s refusal, which was backed by
Ukraine’s minorities, including Jewish and Polish socialists, the
ministers negotiated a deal in which they recognized the Rada
and its government, the General Secretariat, as representatives of
the Provisional Government in Ukraine. Thus Ukrainian autono-
my, in curtailed form, survived its first encounter with the central
government in Petrograd.
The Russian nationalists were outraged by what they inter-
preted as a surrender of Russian national interests by the socialist
ministers of the Provisional Government. Vasilii Shulgin led the
charge. He regarded the Provisional Government’s recognition
of curtailed Ukrainian autonomy as a betrayal of the Russian
nation, of which Ukraine (Little Russia) and its inhabitants were
an integral part. Shulgin insisted that Russians constituted the
majority of the population in Ukraine. He defined Russianness
on the basis of the written rather than the spoken language, and
if one judged by the number of readers of the Kyivan press, it was
the Ukrainians, not the Russians, who were in the minority. For
Shulgin, the most important question was not the future structure
of the Russian state but the “reclassification” of Little Russians as
Ukrainians and Little Russia as Ukraine. In January 1918, Ukraine
88
How Russian Was the Russian Revolution?
declared its independence from Russia, soon to be backed by the

advancing German and Austrian armies.
The Central Powers not only backed the Ukrainians but also
promoted Belarusian statehood. After German forces took Minsk
in late February 1918, two groups of Belarusian activists, one as-
sembled in Vilnius under the German occupation, the other
formed in Minsk under Russian control, got together and decid-
ed, after heated debates, on the formation not of a Lithuanian-
Belarusian but a separate Belarusian state independent of Russia.
Their declaration of 25 March 1918 read as follows: “Today we, the
Rada of the Belarusian National Republic, cast off our country
the last chains of political servitude imposed by Russian tsarism
upon our free and independent land.” 1 The decision to declare
Belarusian independence was passed by a slim majority of the
assembly, and its significance was more symbolic than practical.
The Belarusians were no longer claiming national and cultural
autonomy or federal status in a future Russian state but outright
independence.
It was in this period that Belarus acquired its insignia of state-
hood: a national flag with white stripes at the top and bottom
and a red one in between, and a coat of arms featuring a mounted
knight with a sword and shield—a symbol dating from the times
of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Rada established diplo-
matic representations in Vilnius, Kyiv, Berlin and other European
capitals, issued Belarusian postage stamps, and supported cul-
tural and publishing projects. In the course of just one year, from
March 1917 to March 1918, the Belarusian national movement,
like the Ukrainian, made a huge leap from demands for cultural
autonomy to full independence.
The Whites under General Anton Denikin tried to put the
genie of East Slavic independence back into the imperial bottle.
When Denikin took Kyiv in August 1919, Shulgin got an oppor-
tunity to apply his solution of the Ukrainian question to the rest of
Ukraine. He was the principal drafter of Denikin’s programmatic
appeal “To the Inhabitants of Little Russia,” made public on the
eve of his entrance into Kyiv. The appeal proclaimed Russian as
the language of state institutions and the educational system but
did not outlaw the “Little Russian language.” It was to be allowed
only in elementary schools to help students master Russian, as
89
well as in private secondary schools. Its use in the court system

was also permitted. This was very much in line with the program
advocated by the Constitutional Democrats before the war and,
in particular, with the thinking of Petr Struve, who opposed the
prohibition of the Ukrainian language and culture but envisioned
them as serving the lower classes of society, reserving the higher
cultural spheres for the Russian language alone. But the Whites
did not deliver even on those promises and attempted to suppress
Ukrainian political and cultural activities completely.
The Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin were much more flex-
ible and opportunistic. Lenin’s thinking was rooted in his ideas
on dominant and oppressed nationalities, first formulated on the
eve and in the course of World War I, very much in response to
Russian imperial mobilization under the banners of the Union
of the Russian People and other nationalist organizations. Le-
nin, never a believer in the all-Russian nation, was prepared to
treat the Great Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians as separate
nations. According to him, the Great Russians were dominant,
while the Ukrainians and Belarusians, former members of the
privileged big Russian nation, were among the oppressed. In the
summer of 1917, Lenin raised his voice in support of the Central
Rada against what he perceived as the great-power chauvinism
of the Provisional Government. But Lenin’s stand on the nation-
alities was nothing if not contradictory.
As Terry Martin has noted, Lenin’s nationality policies and
pronouncements before October 1917 were designed with an eye
to rallying support from the non-Russian nationalities for the
overthrow of the existing regime, not for running the multiethnic
country of which the Bolsheviks took control in the fall of 1917.
The party that spoke Bolshevik now had to speak Ukrainian as
well. Lenin spelled out the new policy in early December 1919 in
a special resolution of the party’s Central Committee on Soviet
rule in Ukraine. He reminded his comrades that the Ukrainian
language and culture had been persecuted and discriminated
against under the tsarist regime and called on them to make it
possible for the peasantry to speak Ukrainian in all governmental
institutions, with no further discrimination. “Measures should be
taken immediately to ensure that there is a sufficient number of
Ukrainian-speaking personnel in all Soviet institutions, and that
90
in future all personnel are able to make themselves understood

in Ukrainian,” wrote Lenin.2
What to do with the three East Slavic nations and their pro
forma independence not only in cultural but also in political
terms was decided in the fall and winter of 1922. As far as Lenin
was concerned, Joseph Stalin’s plan to include the republics in
the Russian Federation, especially against the will of their lead-
ers, put the Russians in the position of imperial masters, thereby
undermining the idea of the voluntary union of nations. Lenin’s
thinking about the future of the republics was influenced by his
concern for world-wide unity of the working classes of all na-
tionalities. The survival of Soviet rule was closely linked in his
mind with the success of world revolution, which depended on
risings of the workers of Germany, France, and Britain, and then
on nationalist movements in China, India, and Western colonies
in Asia. The desire of those peoples for self-rule would have to
be satisfied if the revolution were to triumph on a global scale.
Instead of an enlarged Russian Federation, Lenin proposed
the creation of a Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia.
It was supposed to unite Russia and the existing formally inde-
pendent republics as equals and establish all-Union government
bodies. Stalin, recognizing that an enlarged Russian Federation
would create a poor image for the multiethnic communist state
as a community of equals, proposed simply to turn the Russian
government bodies into all-Union ones. As he saw it, there was
no need for another level of bureaucracy. But Lenin would not
back down: for him, the Union was a matter of principle, not of
expediency. Some way had to be found to accommodate rising
non-Russian nationalism, but Stalin’s model proposed a return to
the ethnic inequality of the past, which had already brought down
the Russian Empire and might topple the Soviet state as well.
Stalin was enforcing his control over the rebellious Geor-
gian communists not only with party resolutions but also with
fists. His point man in the Caucasus, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, had
beaten up one of his Georgian opponents. When the Georgians
complained, Stalin appointed a commission headed by his client
Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the head of the secret police, which exon-
erated Ordzhonikidze. After a long talk with Dzerzhinsky on
12 December 1922, the highly agitated Lenin suffered a stroke that
91
led to his partial paralysis a few days later. He was now lying in
bed, trying to explain to the party leadership what was wrong with
Stalin’s policies and how they could be neutralized by reforming
the Union that he had proposed, which had just been approved
by the First All-Union Congress.
This was the leitmotif of the notes on the nationality question
that the half-paralyzed Lenin dictated to his secretaries on 30 and
31 December. In Lenin’s view, the main threat to the unity of his
state was coming not from local nationalists, whom he hoped to
accommodate by creating a federal façade for the future Union,
but from the Great Russian nationalism that threatened to derail
his plans. Dictating his thoughts, he argued for positive discrim-
ination in favor of the non-Russian republics: “Internationalism
on the part of the oppressor or so-called ‘great’ nation (although it
is great only in its coercion, great only in the sense of being a great
bully) should consist not only in observing the formal equality of
nations but also in the kind of inequality that would redress, on
the part of the oppressor nation, the great nation, the inequality
that develops in actual practice.” 3
Lenin attacked the government apparatus, largely controlled
by Stalin, claiming that it was mainly inherited from the old re-
gime and permeated with Russian great-power chauvinism. The
way to keep it in check was to take powers from the center and
transfer them to the republics. Lenin was prepared to replace the
Union he proposed and the model approved by the party congress
with a looser union in which the powers of the center might be
limited to defense and international relations alone. He felt that
the republics’ right of secession, guaranteed by the Union treaty,
might be an insufficient counterweight to Russian nationalism
and proposed that at the next congress the Union be reformed
to leave the center with the aforementioned functions alone. The
Union just approved by the congress gave the central government
control over the economy, finance, and communications on top of
military and international affairs.
Lenin did not get his way on the issue of confederation, and
it is not clear whether he really wanted that model or simply
used it as an argument in his polemics with Stalin. Nevertheless,
he prevailed on the issue of the structure of the Union—a victo-
ry that had even larger consequences for the Russians than for
92
the non-Russians of the former empire. Lenin’s victory created

a separate republic within the Union for the Russians, endowing
them with a territory, institutions, population, and identity dis-
tinct from those of the Union as a whole. In the state planned
by Stalin, the Russians would have continued to share all those
features with the empire renamed as a union. In Lenin’s state, they
had no choice but to start acquiring an identity separate from the
imperial one. Almost by default, Lenin became the father of the
modern Russian nation, while the Soviet Union became its first
cradle. Lenin’s victory did much to fragment the prerevolutionary
model of one big Russian nation. The result was a major shift in
Russian self-perception and their perception by others, Ukraini-
ans in particular.
93
7.
Killing by Hunger
On 14 December 1932, Joseph Stalin and Viacheslav Molotov, the

former as head of the Communist Party, the latter as premier of
the Soviet government, signed a decree “On the Procurement of
Grain in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Western Region.”
The country was in the midst of a food crisis that had already
caused widespread hunger, but the decree was not concerned with
the fate of the peasantry and the impending famine. Its purpose
was to mobilize party cadres to continue extracting grain from
the countryside so that, among other things, it could be sold
abroad to pay for Soviet industrialization. Procurement quotas
were not being fulfilled, and the collectivization of agriculture
itself was in trouble, as was the reputation of Stalin and his team
and, ultimately, their chances of staying in power.
The Soviet leaders demanded that their underlings in Ukraine
and the North Caucasus—two of the three main grain-producing
areas of the USSR—fulfill the grain-procurement plans for 1932
by January–February 1933. The decree of 14 December ordered
the arrest and, if necessary, the execution of collective-farm heads
and local officials who failed to fulfill the quotas. Some of the
“saboteurs” were mentioned by name: fifteen regional officials
were to be sentenced to hard labor for periods between five and
ten years—the decree gave the Soviet judiciary a modicum of
flexibility in that regard. In the Kuban region of the North Cau-
casus, the inhabitants of the Poltavskaia settlement were accused
of sabotaging the procurement campaign, and the secret police
was ordered to deport its entire population to the Soviet North.
95
The village would be resettled by Red Army veterans from central

Russia.
But Stalin was not after bread alone. The decree of 14 Decem-
ber also dealt with the politics of culture. All “saboteurs” listed by
name were Soviet cadres from Ukraine, and the population of the
Poltavskaia village happened to be overwhelmingly Ukrainian as
well. The decree ordered local officials in the Kuban to change the
language of their official correspondence and of public education
immediately from Ukrainian to Russian and to stop publishing
Ukrainian-language newspapers and journals. In Ukraine, the de-
cree demanded that the republic’s leaders establish strict control
over the “Ukrainization” policy instituted in the 1920s to promote
the development of Ukrainian culture, and that they purge so-
called nationalists and agents of foreign powers.
The December 1932 decree turned Stalin’s all-Union “grain-
extraction” campaign into a direct assault on the Ukrainian po-
litical elite and the cultural foundations of Ukrainian nation-
building, thereby distinguishing the famine in Ukraine from that
in other parts of the USSR. Now known in Ukraine as the Great
Famine or Holodomor (killing by hunger), the famine of 1932–33
claimed the lives of close to four million people, more than half
of those who starved to death in the Soviet Union during that
period. The famine dramatically changed Ukrainian society and
culture, leaving deep scars in the national memory. It also pro-
duced a vast literature on the subject and generated numerous
debates in Ukraine and beyond. As the Soviet regime refused to
admit the very existence of the famine, its recognition was hotly
contested in the last decades of the Cold War. Subsequently it
became a bone of contention between Ukraine and Russia, with
the government of the former defining the famine as an act of
genocide against the Ukrainian people and the latter stressing the
all-Union character of the disaster.
⁂
With Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine (2017), Anne Apple-
baum walks into the minefields of memory left by Stalin’s policies
in Ukraine and multiple attempts to conceal, uncover, interpret
and reinterpret the Holodomor with new determination to set
96
Killing by Hunger
the record straight and new evidence that has become accessible
since the fall of the Soviet Union. Her book is the most important
English-language study of the famine since Robert Conquest’s
Harvest of Sorrow, published in 1986. She also uses a different
set of lenses to evaluate the evidence provided by government
documents and survivor testimonies.
Red Famine stands out from the existing English-language
literature on the subject by its persistent focus on Ukraine as
the place where the famine story not only takes on its salient
characteristics and concludes but also where it begins. Apple-
baum recognizes and states repeatedly that the famine was not
limited to Ukraine and was caused by policies that grew out of
considerations and circumstances broader than what she defines
as Moscow’s “Ukrainian Question.” But she is no less persistent
in pointing out the uniqueness of the Ukrainian situation and the
political and cultural factors—the strength of Ukrainian nation-
alism, the stubborn peasant resistance to the communist regime
in Moscow and, last but not least, the fertility of the soil—that
made the Ukrainian famine the deadliest of the Soviet famines
of the time.
The time frame of the book is unusually broad for histories
of the Great Famine. While the events of 1932–33 are central,
Applebaum presents a brief survey of Ukraine’s history before the
twentieth century that illuminates her approach to the “Ukrainian
Question.” She also covers in detail the prehistory of the famine,
starting with the Revolution of 1917, and her epilogue brings the
interpretation of the Holodomor up to the present. This contex-
tualization of the famine helps to explain its importance for the
perennial historical debate on the Russian Revolution, under-
stood in the book as comprising a number of national revolutions,
the Ukrainian one in particular, and for the history of Russo-
Ukrainian relations, so hostile today.
Ukraine’s rich black soil has produced grain for international
markets since the days of Herodotus, and the country became
known as the “breadbasket of Europe” long before Germany oc-
cupied it in 1918 to feed its army and home front. In particular,
the Bolsheviks were there before the Germans came. Applebaum
documents the Bolshevik obsession with Ukrainian grain in strik-
ing detail. “For God’s sake, use all energy and all revolutionary
97
measures to send grain, grain, and more grain!” wrote Vladimir

Lenin to his commanders in Ukraine in January 1918. “Otherwise
Petrograd may starve to death. Use special trains and special de-
tachments. Collect and store. Escort the trains. Inform us every
day. For God’s sake!” Lenin’s troops were waging war against the
socialist government of the Ukrainian Central Rada allegedly
to crush counterrevolution, but at the top of Lenin’s agenda was
grain, without which the Bolshevik regime was doomed. The vil-
lage, especially the Ukrainian village, was there to be robbed and
exploited: communist colonialism was taking shape.
The Bolshevik regime survived civil war and economic col-
lapse not only by being ruthless but also by making concessions
to forces that its leaders were initially unprepared to tolerate, in-
cluding Ukrainian nationalism and the Ukrainian peasantry. The
first was appeased by the policy of Ukrainization, which offered
support for the Ukrainian language and culture in exchange for
giving up aspirations to political sovereignty. The second was pac-
ified by the New Economic Policy, which allowed the peasants to
hold the land they had acquired in the revolution and put an end
to requisitions, introducing elements of the market.
Ukraine, or rather eastern and central parts of today’s Ukraine
that comprised the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic during
the interwar period, benefited from both policies, but the Bolshe-
viks considered them temporary. Their long-term objective was
the elimination of both the peasantry and the nationalities. “The
national question is purely a peasant question,” declared Mikhail
Kalinin, the formal head of the Soviet state and one of the very
few Bolshevik leaders with a peasant background. “[T]he best
way to eliminate nationality is a massive factory with thousands
of workers.” The connection established by the Bolshevik rulers
between the peasant and nationality questions created a convic-
tion that cost Ukraine millions of lives.
⁂
The Soviet Union entered the 1930s with a new sense of insecurity
that prompted a drive to accelerate the revolutionary transforma-
tion of the economy and society. The Soviet leaders’ hopes of using
the Russian Revolution as a spark to ignite world revolution,
98
Killing by Hunger
first in Europe and then in the colonial East, never materialized

and were replaced by the ruling elite’s determination to build
socialism in one country. The survival of the regime in a hostile
capitalist environment necessitated a strong military-industrial
complex to arm and mechanize the military, while mobilizing the
population in defense of the “socialist motherland” required an
ideology with deeper local roots than Marxist internationalism.
The regime looked to the village to provide human and agricul-
tural resources for industrialization and to Russian nationalism as
a source of legitimization—policies that promised nothing good
for Ukraine.
The first to feel pressure from the center was the village. Sta-
lin’s policy of forced collectivization, implemented in the fall of
1929, singled out Ukraine for especially rapid conversion to the
supposedly more efficient model of agriculture. The collectivized
farms were to produce more grain and sell it to the state for
rock-bottom prices, providing resources for building the military-
industrial complex. Those who questioned the new policy were
declared to be kulaks (in Russian) or kurkuls (in Ukrainian)—a
term that delegitimized the most entrepreneurial peasants, who
had everything to lose from collectivization, as agents of counter-
revolution. In March 1930, Moscow ordered the arrest of 15,000
kurkuls and the deportation to the North of more than 35,000
kurkul families from Ukraine alone.
The Ukrainian village, with its record of armed resistance to
the Bolsheviks, rebelled. Two thousand “mass protests” were reg-
istered in Ukraine in March 1930 alone. Peasants in the Pavlohrad
and Kryvyi Rih areas—the home base of the strongest warlord of
the revolutionary era, Nestor Makhno—formed detachments but
were soon outnumbered and outgunned by the regime’s security
forces. In areas neighboring on Poland, whole villages marched to
the border in a futile attempt to cross it and leave the collectiviza-
tion nightmare behind. Stalin sounded a retreat, blaming excesses
in collectivization on overzealous local cadres. Peasants forcibly
enrolled in the collective farms were allowed to leave them. That
gave the peasants an incentive to work on their plots and, coupled
with good weather, helped produce a record harvest in Ukraine
in the summer and fall of 1930. It was a victory for the peasantry
99
and a defeat for collectivization, but Stalin interpreted the good

harvest differently.
With the harvest in the silos, Stalin moved his shock troops
of party and Young Communist League activists and secret-police
officers back into the countryside to push once again for collec-
tivization and collect the grain. With rebel leaders of the previous
year imprisoned or exiled and villages cleansed of kurkuls, the
peasants returned to the collective farms, but they did not change
their attitude toward the government and its policies. They were
not eager to grow more than was needed for themselves and their
families. The record harvest of 1930 would never be equaled again.
Stalin and his aides in the Kremlin decided that peasants were
simply hiding the grain they had grown. In the fall of 1931, they
ordered requisitions that brought new famine to Ukraine in the
spring of 1932. Hardest hit were the sugar beet-producing areas
south of Kyiv, where the authorities tried to collect grain that was
not there in the first place. The famine, limited at that point to
Ukraine alone, had begun.
As people began dying en masse in central Ukraine in the late
spring and early summer of 1932, the government in Moscow sent
the republic new quotas for grain procurement in the fall of that
year. As there was no sowing in regions already affected by famine,
and the rest of the collective farms were in disarray, Ukrainian
party officials sounded the alarm, pleading with Stalin for the
reduction of quotas. He refused. Keeping the 1932 quotas in place
and maintaining pressure on the peasantry, Stalin opened a new
front in his war on Ukraine. His enemies were the Ukrainian
party and government officials who were trying to defend the
peasantry instead of toeing the party line and extracting grain
no matter what.
The attack on the Ukrainian political leadership, allegedly
colluding with the kurkuls in the countryside, was first conceived
in the summer of 1932. Doubting the loyalty of the cadres in
Ukraine, Stalin accused them of sympathizing with Ukrainian
nationalism, a trend that he associated with Symon Petliura,
a Ukrainian leader of the revolutionary era. He also suspected
them of leanings toward Petliura’s former ally, the leader of Po-
land, Marshal Józef Piłsudski. “If we don’t make an effort now to
improve the situation in Ukraine, we may lose Ukraine,” wrote
100
Killing by Hunger
Stalin to his right-hand man, Lazar Kaganovich. “Keep in mind

that Piłsudski is not daydreaming. . . . Keep in mind that the
Communist Party of Ukraine includes more than a few rotten
elements, conscious and unconscious Petliurites as well as direct
agents of Piłsudski. As soon as things get worse, these elements
will not be slow in opening a front within and outside the party
against the party.”
Stalin wanted to purge the party leadership and top echelons
of the Ukrainian secret police not only to facilitate increased grain
requisitions but also to cleanse the party and government appa-
ratus of cadres more loyal to their people than to their boss in
Moscow. In November 1932 Stalin appointed a new chief of the
Ukrainian secret police, Vsevolod Balytsky, who was experienced
in combating Ukrainian nationalism. In the following month he
opened one more front in his Ukrainian war, this time against the
cultural elite. The decree signed on 14 December 1932 signaled the
start of Stalin’s offensive on all three fronts: against the peasantry,
the local party elite, and the Ukrainian intelligentsia. It linked the
failure to fulfill grain-requisition plans with kulak resistance to
the regime, the alleged nationalism of the elites, the subversive
activities of foreign governments, and policies to promote the
Ukrainian language and culture. The political stage on which the
Great Famine of 1932–33 would occur was now fully in place.
On New Year’s Day 1933, Stalin sent a telegram to the
Ukrainian party bosses ordering them to apply a recently adopted
law on the theft of collective-farm property in order to prosecute
those who did not fulfill grain quotas. From now on, every grain
found in a peasant household could be considered stolen from
the collective farm and thus from the state. As the procurement
brigades, composed of party cadres from the cities, police officials,
and local activists moved from one peasant household to another,
confiscating grain and often taking all available food supplies as
“fines” from the starving peasants, they left in their wake a dev-
astated countryside bracing itself for the now inevitable famine.
The first cases of mass death from starvation were recorded
that same January. Especially hard hit were regions of central
Ukraine that had not recovered from the famine of 1932. Peas-
ants there died at a higher rate than anywhere else, with Kyiv
and Kharkiv Oblasts accounting for losses of over 1 million each.
101
Altogether close to 4 million people would die in Ukraine, most

of them between March and June 1933, when food supplies were
exhausted and early crops turned out to be too difficult for starv-
ing stomachs to digest. Government assistance arrived too late
and was insufficient to stop the death spiral. It was distributed
exclusively to the collective farms and shipped predominantly to
the main grain-producing areas in southern Ukraine. People in
the most severely afflicted areas of central Ukraine were left to
die. As in the Gulag, the subject of Applebaum’s earlier book, the
regime was prepared to feed those still able to work.
As the peasants died of hunger, Stalin intensified his war on
Ukraine on two other fronts: against the party elite and the cul-
tural intelligentsia. The charge was led by Stalin’s plenipotentiary
Pavel Postyshev, who arrived in Ukraine in January 1933. Tens of
thousands of Ukrainian communists were purged from the party
during Postyshev’s first year in Ukraine. In the commissariat of
education close to 4,000 teachers were dismissed, and repres-
sive measures were taken against most school administrators.
Ukrainian writers were targeted for especially severe persecution.
In May 1933, on hearing of the arrest of his friend, the writer
Mykhailo Ialovy, Ukraine’s leading communist author, Mykola
Khvyliovy, committed suicide. “The arrest of Ialovy—this is the
murder of an entire generation. . . . For what? Because we were
the most sincere communists?” wrote Khvyliovy in his death note.
In July 1933, Mykola Skrypnyk, an old Bolshevik and architect
of cultural policies in Ukraine, committed suicide to avoid immi-
nent arrest. By that time, teaching and publishing in Ukrainian
not only in the Kuban but also in other regions of the Russian
Federation settled by Ukrainians was already banned. The largest
ethnic minority in Russia was wiped out in cultural terms. In
Ukraine itself, the promotion of Ukrainian culture among non-
Ukrainians was stopped in its tracks, ensuring the dominance of
Russian culture in the Ukrainian cities. Stalin’s three-pronged
assault on the Ukrainian peasantry and the country’s political and
intellectual elite produced a new Ukraine—subdued and silent
but refusing to forget.
102
Killing by Hunger
⁂
Anne Applebaum tells the story of the Great Famine not only
with compassion but also with precision, using a wealth of offi-
cial documents and oral testimony to reconstruct the events and
reveal the thoughts, concerns, and feelings of those involved, both
perpetrators and victims. Analyzing the famine in multiple polit-
ical, economic, ethnic, and cultural contexts, she avoids reducing
it to a chronicle of ethnic suffering or turning it into something
that it was not.
“Stalin did not seek to kill all Ukrainians, nor did all Ukraini-
ans resist,” writes Applebaum in her conclusions. The Holodomor,
she suggests, does not conform to the definition of genocide set
forth in the United Nations convention of 1948, but it readily
fits the definition produced by no less a figure than the father of
the concept, the lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who emphasizes the
Soviet attack on the Ukrainian political and cultural elite in his
article of 1952, “Soviet Genocide in Ukraine.” The UN convention,
explains Applebaum, was shaped in large part by the Soviet dele-
gates to that organization, who were eager to limit the definition
of genocide to acts committed by proponents of fascist and racist
ideologies. Applebaum leaves it to the reader to draw his or her
own conclusions on the issue.
Red Famine, a book about an enormous tragedy, ends on
a positive note. Applebaum suggests that Stalin, who succeed-
ed in forcing the Ukrainian peasantry into collective farms and
crushed the Ukrainian national renaissance of the 1920s, lost in
the long term. People were killed, but their legacy lived on, as did
the Ukrainian language, culture, and idea of independence. So did
the memory of the Holodomor. “As a nation Ukrainians know
what happened in the twentieth century,” reads the last sentence
of the book. Red Famine helps not only Ukrainians but the world
at large to gain a better understanding of what the twentieth
century brought to the world.
103
8.
Mapping the Great Famine
One of the most insightful and moving eyewitness accounts of

the Holodomor, or the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33, was
written by Oleksandra Radchenko, a teacher in the Kharkiv re-
gion of Ukraine. In her diary, which was confiscated by Stalin’s
secret police and landed the author in the Gulag for ten long
years, the thirty-six-year-old teacher recorded not only what she
saw around her but also what she thought about the tragedy un-
folding before her eyes.
“I am so afraid of hunger; I’m afraid for the children,” wrote
Radchenko, who had three young daughters, in February 1932.
“May God protect us and have mercy on us. It would not be so
offensive if it were due to a bad harvest, but they have taken away
the grain and created an artificial famine.” That year she wrote
about the starvation and suffering of her neighbors and acquain-
tances but recorded no deaths from starvation. That all changed
in January 1933, when she encountered the first corpse of a famine
victim on the road leading to her home. By the spring of 1933, she
was regularly reporting mass deaths from starvation. “People are
dying,” wrote Radchenko in her entry for 16 May 1933: “People
are saying that whole villages have died in southern Ukraine.” 1
Was Radchenko’s story unique? Did people all over Ukraine
indeed suffer from starvation in 1932 and then start dying en
masse in 1933? Which areas of Ukraine were most affected? Was
there a north-south divide, as the diary suggests, and, if so, did
people suffer (and die) more in the south than in the north?
Were there more deaths in villages than in towns and cities? Were
105
small towns affected? Did ethnicity matter? These are the core
questions that the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute’s Digital
Map of Ukraine Project is attempting to answer by developing
the Geographic Information System (GIS)-based Digital Atlas
of the Holodomor. The maps included in the atlas are based on
a newly created and growing database that makes it possible to
link different levels of spatial analysis from the raion to the repub-
lic level and to compare demographic, economic, environmental,
and political indicators in relation to a given administrative unit.
Most of the questions we try to answer with the help of the
GIS database have been informed by the vast literature on the
Great Famine, with its focus on the causes of mass deaths from
starvation, including environmental factors, levels of collectiviza-
tion and, last but not least, nationality policy. By measuring the
“footprint” of the Great Famine, we also seek to understand its
dynamics, the intentions of the authorities, the fate of the survi-
vors, and the consequences of mass starvation.2
The scope of our research has been determined by the avail-
ability of geo-referenced maps and “mappable” data. We have
been working with a variety of maps of the Ukrainian Soviet
Socialist Republic in its interwar borders prepared with the as-
sistance of cartographers of Kartohrafiia Publishers in Ukraine,
led by Rostyslav Sossa. Those maps served as a basis for the maps
prepared specifically for this website by the chief cartographer
of the Digital Atlas of Ukraine, Gennadi Poberezny, and its IT
coordinator, Kostyantyn Bondarenko. They reflect administrative
changes in Ukraine’s external and internal borders, allowing us to
compare the results of the 1926 and 1939 population censuses with
data from the famine years of 1932–33. These maps help us answer
many important questions, but they also impose limitations on
our research, as most do not go beyond the raion level. They also
stop at the boundaries of Soviet Ukraine and do not include
the neighboring areas of Russia, Belarus, Poland, and Romania,
thereby restricting our focus to questions that could be answered
within the boundaries of interwar Soviet Ukraine.
Another set of limitations we had to face was the absence
of reliable data on population losses in Ukraine at the oblast
and raion levels. Such data were produced specifically for the
purposes of this project by a group of demographers, including
106
Oleh Wolowyna (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill),

Omelian Rudnytsky, Nataliia Levchuk, Pavlo Shevchuk, and Alla
Savchuk (all four from the Institute for Demography and So-
cial Studies in Kyiv). Not all the results of our research to date
have materialized in the form of GIS-based maps. Work is still
continuing on many of the projects mentioned above. The maps
that are currently available on the website, presented in the Map
Gallery, reflect the first results of our research. All these maps are
also available as parts of the interactive map of the Great Famine,
which offers everyone using the website an opportunity not only
to check the accuracy of our hypotheses but also to formulate
his or her own questions and conduct independent research by
comparing different layers of the map.3
What follows is the first attempt to make sense of the data
we have collected and of the maps we produced on its basis. It is
presented in the form of a chronologically based narrative that
includes reference to the individual maps but is not and should
not be viewed as an attempt at a comprehensive interpretation of
the history of the Great Famine. Most of the archival documents
used to discuss the meaning of the maps come from the most
comprehensive collection of documents on the Great Famine,
published in 2007 by Ruslan Pyrih.4
Where Did They Die?

Contemporary accounts indicate that Oleksandra Radchen-
ko, whose diary was cited above, lived in one of the regions of
Ukraine most severely affected by the Famine of 1932–33. Not-
withstanding that, the rumor she recorded in her diary designat-
ed southern Ukraine as a region that suffered even more than
her own. The rumor made perfect sense, given the experience of
people who had lived through the revolution and the first years
of Soviet rule. Southern Ukraine, administratively divided in the
early 1930s into the Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, and Donetsk (Stali-
no) Oblasts, had been the breadbasket of the Russian Empire
and, subsequently, of the Soviet Union. Black earth made those
lands especially fertile for growing grain in general and wheat in
particular. But the Ukrainian steppe was also known for its oc-
casionally harsh winters and, most of all, for the severe droughts
107
that often afflicted the region, causing poor harvests, starvation,

and sometimes famine.5
The famine of 1921–23 affected the southern parts of the re-
public, as did the famine of 1928, which was caused by a severe
winter, massive loss of winter crops, and Soviet agricultural mis-
management.6 Decades later, the famine of 1946–47 also ravaged
the south more than any other part of Ukraine. While conditions
of revolution and civil war and, later, government policies contrib-
uted to all three famines, the underlying factors were poor weath-
er conditions and the resulting poor harvests in the black-earth
steppe regions of Ukraine. For those who had lived through or
knew of the famines of 1921–23 and 1928, it would be only natural
to assume in 1932–33 that, whatever was happening in Kharkiv
and other central regions of Ukraine, the situation was much
worse in the south.7
This is not the picture that emerges from the maps produced
by our project. According to the estimates of direct losses provid-
ed by the demographic group led by Oleh Wolowyna, the direct
losses of the famine amounted to 3.9 million, with 0.6 million
unborn children, bringing the overall toll of the famine to 4.5
million people.8 The oblasts of Ukraine that suffered most were
not the steppe regions, traditionally affected by drought, but the
boreal-steppe zones of central Ukraine encompassing Kharkiv
and Kyiv Oblasts. Traditional views on the geographic spread of
the Famine of 1932–33, suggesting the south as the most affected
area of Ukraine, have also been challenged recently by Stephen
G. Wheatcroft and require reevaluation in light of the new de-
mographic data.9
Let us start with a summary of the demographic data pro-
vided by Wolowyna and his group. Direct losses or total excess
deaths, estimated as the difference between actual deaths and
“regular” deaths during the non-crisis years, in Kyiv Oblast for
1932–34 have been estimated at 1.1 million; in Kharkiv Oblast,
the estimate is 1.0 million. In southern Ukraine, by contrast, the
estimates are considerably lower: 368,000 in Dnipropetrovsk
Oblast and 327,000 in Odesa Oblast. The same applies if we look
at direct losses calculated per thousand of population during all
three years in which the effects of the Great Famine were felt.
In 1933, the year that accounts for more than 90 percent of all
108
losses, there were approximately 184 deaths per thousand in Kyiv

Oblast and 176 per thousand in Kharkiv Oblast, while in Dnipro-
petrovsk and Odesa Oblasts the death toll was roughly half that
level: 96 per thousand in Odesa Oblast and 90 per thousand in
Dnipropetrovsk.
A comparison of the maps of the 1921–23, 1928, and 1932–33
famines suggests that the Great Famine had a different “foot-
print” than the two previous famines and cannot be considered to
have been caused primarily by environmental factors or, at least,
the same set of environmental factors. This cautious conclusion
is supported by the prevailing trend in the historiography of the
Great Famine, which emphasizes the human factor, especially
government policies, as having caused the famine. It also puts the
Famine into the category of “man-made” or, to use Oleksandra
Radchenko’s term, “artificial” famines.
Does this mean that environmental factors should be dis-
missed altogether in explaining the causes of the Great Famine?
Our research demonstrates that it would be premature to do so.
It also shows that environment did matter, but not in the same
way as in the famines of the 1920s. On the eve of and during the
Holodomor, environmental factors influenced human actions,
particularly government policies that eventually contributed to
the death toll of the famine.
Collectivization
The first in the long list of those policies was the collectivization
drive, the centerpiece of the Soviet agricultural policy launched
by the central authorities in the fall of 1928. The map of levels of
collectivization shows significant differences among individual
regions of the republic belonging to different ecological zones.
By the autumn of 1932, 85 percent of peasant households in the
steppe oblasts of Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, and Donetsk had been
collectivized, while the rest of the country lagged significantly
behind—from 47 percent of households collectivized in Cherni-
hiv Oblast to 72 percent in Kharkiv Oblast. In Kyiv Oblast, 67
percent of households had been collectivized.
What accounts for that difference? The main reason for the
higher level of collectivization in the steppe oblasts was a policy
109
designed and introduced by Joseph Stalin and his advisers in

Moscow and implemented by the Ukrainian party authorities in
Kharkiv. As shown on the map of ecological zones of Ukraine,
the country is divided into four zones: two steppe and two boreal
zones. It was the dividing line between the boreal and steppe
zones that turned out to be the most important one in the eyes
of the Moscow authorities as they produced plans for the collec-
tivization drive.
For purposes of official reporting on the progress of col-
lectivization, Ukraine was divided into four areas: Steppe, Left
Bank, Right Bank, and Polissia. With the introduction of oblast
administrative divisions in February 1932, the Steppe region en-
compassed the Moldavian Autonomous Republic and Odesa,
Dnipropetrovsk, and Donetsk Oblasts; the Left Bank included
Kharkiv Oblast and parts of Kyiv Oblast; and the Right Bank
encompassed most of Kyiv Oblast and all of Vinnytsia Oblast.
Polissia was originally divided between Kyiv and Kharkiv Oblasts,
but in October 1932 most of it was included in the newly created
Chernihiv Oblast. In July 1932 Donetsk Oblast was created, and
it included the Donbas industrial region and the eastern parts of
Kharkiv Oblast. Thus, while in the eyes of the central planners
there was no clear oblast-based boundary between the boreal
and boreal-steppe regions, there was one between the steppe and
boreal-steppe areas.10
In the summer of 1930, the Central Committee of the Com-
munist Party in Moscow decreed that the level of collectivization
in the steppe areas of Ukraine was to reach the 65–75 percent
mark by the end of the 1930/31 agricultural year. In other regions
of Ukraine, a collectivization level of 35–45 percent was to be
attained during the same period of time. The black-earth zones
of the southern Ukrainian steppe were considered the princi-
pal grain-growing areas of the Soviet Union and were therefore
supposed to be collectivized sooner and faster than the others in
order to increase the grain yield for the government. As shown
on the map of levels of collectivization, by the fall of 1932, accord-
ing to official statistics, the Ukrainian authorities overshot the 75
percent target introduced for the previous year and reached the
85 percent mark in some of the southern areas. The other regions
lagged behind by at least 10 percent.11
110
Stalin and his advisers in Moscow continually focused their

attention on southern Ukraine. In March 1932, additional trac-
tors were sent specifically to the Ukrainian steppelands to meet
the quotas originally allocated by the Moscow authorities to
Russia and Belarus. In April of that year, the general secretary
of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine,
Stanislav Kosior, and other Kharkiv officials visited the southern
regions of the Ukrainian steppe oblasts to oversee the sowing
campaign firsthand. After the trip Kosior reported on his findings
to Stalin. He was glad to note favorable weather conditions and
a good crop of winter cereals in Odesa Oblast; he also predicted
better sowing than in the previous year.12
Thus, by the spring of 1932 the Moscow government had cre-
ated a new political, social, and technological situation in the
southern oblasts of Ukraine. Those areas were more collectivized
than the rest of Ukraine, had higher numbers of tractors and
agricultural machinery, and, because of their ability to produce
significantly more grain than areas to the north, were closer to
the central concerns of the Moscow authorities than the rest of
Ukraine.
The Advent of Famine

While the south was at the center of Moscow’s attention, the
Ukrainian government in Kharkiv had to deal with the entire
republic. In the late spring of 1932 the attention of the Ukrainian
leadership was focused on Kyiv, Vinnytsia, and Kharkiv Oblasts,
which encompassed the boreal and boreal-steppe areas of Ukraine.
What concerned them was the famine that engulfed the region
in the first months of 1932.
Famine began to claim lives in central Ukraine and in the
tiny Moldavian Autonomous Republic in the winter of 1931–32,
about the same time as Oleksandra Radchenko recorded her first
mention of famine in her diary. In 1932, there were 13.9 excess
deaths per thousand of population in Kyiv Oblast, 9.4 in the Mol-
davian Republic, and 7.8 in Kharkiv Oblast. Judging by available
official correspondence, the areas hardest hit were in southern
Kyiv Oblast, around the cities of Bila Tserkva and Uman. Stan-
islav Kosior singled out those regions in his April letter to Stalin.
111
“What they now mainly expect from those regions is reports that
there is nothing to eat; that they will not do any sowing,” wrote
Kosior, referring to the expectations of his underlings in Kharkiv.
Judging by the tone and content of the letter, Kosior found him-
self between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, he sub-
scribed to the official line established in Moscow that there was
no famine in Ukraine; on the other, he was sending clear signals
that famine was already there.13
What were the causes of the 1932 famine in the southwestern
parts of Kyiv Oblast? This area was known as a prime sugar-beet
region and often referred to as such in official correspondence,
with officials paying special attention not only to the grain harvest
but also to the yield of beets and potatoes. In the late 1920s and
early 1930s, in southern Kyiv Oblast, wheat—the main object
of desire of the authorities in Moscow and Kharkiv—accounted
for anywhere between 20 and 40 percent of the land allocated
for growing grain. Still, the wheat and grain harvest was the top
official concern, as in any other part of Ukraine. Moscow regard-
ed the entire republic as a grain-producing region and assigned
plan targets to the Ukrainian SSR as a whole, not to any group
of oblasts belonging to a particular ecological zone of Ukraine.
Kyiv Oblast came close to fulfilling its grain-procurement quota
in 1931 but did so at a prohibitive cost.
In June 1932, the Ukrainian premier, Vlas Chubar, sent Stalin
a letter in which he presented his understanding of the causes of
famine in southern Kyiv Oblast. “The failure of legume and spring
crops in those raions, above all, was not taken into account, and
the insufficiency of those crops was made up with foodstuffs in
order to fulfill the grain-requisition plans. Given the overall im-
possibility of fulfilling the grain-requisition plan, the basic reason
for which was the lesser harvest in Ukraine as a whole and the
colossal losses incurred during the harvest (a result of the weak
economic organization of the collective farms and their utterly
inadequate management from the raions and from the center),
a system was put in place of confiscating all grain produced by
individual farmers, including seed stocks, and almost wholesale
confiscation of all produce from the collective farms.” 14
112
What that meant in practice was described in the private dia-

ry of Dmytro Zavoloka, a party official in Kyiv Oblast. “Grain was
requisitioned right up to the top,” wrote Zavoloka in May 1932.
What they found in the granaries and the houses was taken,
almost to the last pound (not everywhere, of course). And the
poor or middle peasant or collective farmer often had his last
pood [of grain] taken away because someone said that he was
hiding kulak grain. In certain places grain requisition…turned
into cruel treatment of the inhabitants, bordering on usurpa-
tion. Also, very often, they dekulakized “kulaks” who were never
kulaks at all. But they came up with any odd reason and sold
[the farm].15
At the time Zavoloka wrote his assessment of the grain-

requisition campaign and its consequences, the famine was reap-
ing its deadly harvest in the boreal-steppe oblasts of Ukraine.
According to Chubar, those most severely affected by the famine
were individual non-collectivized peasants whose property was
requisitioned by the state for their failure to fulfill the procure-
ment quotas. Next on the list were members of collective farms
with large families. By March and April 1932, most villages had
hundreds of people either starving or dying of hunger. In May
1932, a representative of the Kyiv Central Committee of the
Communist Party picked seven villages in the Uman district at
random. There were 216 registered deaths from starvation, and
686 individuals were expected to die in the next few days. In one
of those villages, Horodnytsia, wrote the party official to Kosior,
“up to 100 have died; the daily death toll is 8–12; people are swol-
len from starvation on 100 of 600 homesteads.” 16
The situation in neighboring Kharkiv Oblast was little better.
The Ukrainian party official Hryhorii Petrovsky wrote to Stalin
in June 1932, after his tour of Kharkiv Oblast, that “famine has
engulfed a good part of the countryside.” He requested assistance
in the amount of two million poods of grain. “It will take a month
or a month and a half for new grain to appear,” wrote Petrovsky.
“This means that the famine will intensify.” A month earlier, offi-
cials in Moscow and Kharkiv had received a letter whose authors
claimed to represent 5,000 peasants, mostly from Kharkiv Oblast,
113
who were trying to board trains heading out of Ukraine in order

to get bread and feed their families. “We can sign this declaration
with our own blood,” wrote the authors of the letter, “but we are
not certain that there is any point in doing so. We inform you in
all honesty that until the fruits and vegetables ripen, we are living
on the refuse not needed as feed for the chickens, pigs, and dogs
of Leningrad, Minsk, Homiel, and other oblasts in the vicinity
of Moscow. . . .” 17
In June 1932, when party officials in Kharkiv put together a list
of raions most affected by the famine, Kyiv Oblast led with ten
raions, followed by two other boreal-steppe oblasts, Vinnytsia
with eleven raions and Kharkiv with seven. The steppe oblast of
Dnipropetrovsk had five such raions, while Odesa Oblast did
not make the list.18 In the same month Chubar asked Moscow to
send 1.5 million poods of grain to deal with famine in the central
regions of Ukraine. Stalin was opposed. “As I see it, Ukraine has
been given more than its due,” he wrote to his right-hand man,
Lazar Kaganovich. “There is no reason to give more grain and
nowhere to get it from.” 19 Eventually, Ukraine got 300,000 poods
of grain from the all-Union reserves—one-fifth of the request-
ed amount. That happened only because Chubar made a strong
case that without such relief, the sugar-beet harvest in Kyiv and
Vinnytsia Oblasts would be jeopardized. It worked, but only to
a degree.20
Why did the boreal-steppe areas of Ukraine suffer more from
the famine of 1932 than the steppe areas to the south and the
boreal areas to the north? If one trusts official assessments (in par-
ticular, Chubar’s letter to Stalin), those areas suffered as a result
of a poor harvest of certain crops in 1931, official efforts to make
up those losses by increasing grain-procurement quotas, and, last
but not least, poor organization of labor on newly established
collective farms. It should be noted that the famine was taking
place in areas that usually did not lack food supplies. In an aver-
age year the stored quantity of grain and potatoes in that part of
Ukraine amounted to anywhere between 500 and 750 kilograms
per person. Both figures (of wheat production and storage of food
supplies) were close to average for Ukraine.
114
Procurement Quotas
The famine in the boreal-steppe area of Ukraine in the spring of
1932 could not but impair the capacity of collective farms and in-
dividual peasants to carry out sowing for the next harvest. People
who survived the famine did not have the seed stock, strength,
or incentive to do what the authorities wanted them to do. Men,
unable to feed their families at home, were going elsewhere in
search of bread.
“There are almost no male collective farmers,” wrote M. Dem-
chenko, secretary of the Kyiv Oblast party committee, about his
visit to a village. “People say that they have gone to get food,
heading for Belarus and Leningrad Oblast.” Dmytro Zavolo-
ka recorded the same situation in his diary. “It’s clear that after
grain requisitions on that scale and such methods of work, the
consequences have taken their toll,” he wrote in May 1932. “Large
numbers of peasants, including a good part of those on collective
farms, have been left without grain. People have begun to flee
en masse from their villages wherever their legs will carry them.
Entire families are making their way to the farthest reaches of
the republic just to avoid staying in their own villages. They avoid
work, abandon the land, kill the livestock, and let the farms go
to waste.” 21
There was little sowing in the regions most affected by the
famine of 1932. By early May, only 18 percent of the planned
sowing had been carried out in the Uman region of Kyiv Oblast.
In early June Zavoloka recorded the results of sowing in Kyiv
Oblast as a whole: only 51 percent of the fields had been sown,
and potatoes had been planted only on 56.7 percent of the land
allocated for them. “The right time has passed,” wrote Zavoloka.
“Sowing after 10 June is hopeless for growing and even more so
for harvesting. This means that in Kyiv Oblast alone, almost two
million hectares, perhaps more, have been left unsown.” Zavoloka
also wrote that with people going hungry, so were the animals.
Between 40 and 50 percent of horses in the region did not survive
the winter and spring of 1932. “The results of the spring sowing
are more than catastrophic,” wrote this party functionary, who
tried to reconcile his communist beliefs with party policies in the
pages of his diary but ultimately found it impossible to do so.22
115
The Kharkiv authorities tried to deal with the situation by

sending their plenipotentiaries, emergency food supplies, and
seed stocks to the raions and villages that had been hardest hit.
They also tried to reduce the sowing plan assigned to Ukraine by
the Moscow authorities. They failed on all counts. The plenipo-
tentiaries could do little without food supplies, available assis-
tance proved insufficient, and Moscow would not reduce the plan
targets. On 5 May, the Soviet deputy premier, Valerian Kuibyshev,
demanded that Premier Vlas Chubar of the Ukrainian SSR fulfill
the centrally imposed plan and ensure the sowing of 11.331 million
hectares instead of the 10.64 million hectares proposed by the
Ukrainian authorities. While seed stocks for Kyiv and Vinnytsia
Oblasts were at the top of the agenda in Kharkiv, Moscow was
concerned with sowing in the south. On 29 May, Stalin person-
ally intervened in the process of delivering seed stocks to Odesa
Oblast. “Take steps to ensure that the corn dispatched from Ros-
tov is used as directed. We await your reply,” read Stalin’s telegram
to Kosior and Chubar.23
The failure of the sowing campaign in Kyiv and other oblasts
located in the boreal-steppe region forced the Kharkiv author-
ities to ask Moscow to reduce the grain-procurement plan for
the summer and autumn of 1932. They argued that 2.2 million
hectares of land had been left unsown and that winter crops had
perished on 0.8 million hectares. Moscow wanted Ukraine to
deliver 356 million poods of grain that year. This constituted ap-
proximately 81 percent of the plan target assigned the previous
year and 90 percent of the grain actually collected in 1931. As seen
from Moscow, this probably seemed a reasonable reduction, but
it took no account of the consequences of the famine of 1932 and
the disruption of the regular agricultural process by the forcible
establishment of collective farms.24
Stalin’s aides, Viacheslav Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich,
who visited Kharkiv in July, refused any further reductions. In
the same month the party authorities in Moscow imposed a fur-
ther increase of 4–5 percent to the plan at the raion level in order
to make up for potential losses caused by planning errors. It was
up to the authorities in Kharkiv to distribute grain-procurement
quotas among the Ukrainian regions. They decided to shield the
116
areas most affected by the famine of 1932 and shift the burden of
the plan more to the south.25
The major beneficiaries of the new scheme were Kyiv and
Kharkiv Oblasts, as well as the small Moldavian Autonomous
Republic in the south. Moldavia, which had been hit as hard as
Kyiv Oblast by the famine of the previous year, had its quota re-
duced to 46 percent of the grain turned over to the state in 1932. In
Kyiv Oblast the new quota constituted 65 percent and, in Kharkiv
Oblast, 74 percent of the grain delivered the previous year. The
major loser was Odesa Oblast, whose quota was increased, prob-
ably because of good prospects for the new harvest, by 34 percent
over that of 1931. In Dnipropetrovsk, Vinnytsia, and Donetsk
Oblasts the reductions amounted to anywhere between 5 and
12 percent, in keeping with the average for Ukraine as a whole.
Given the shift of grain-procurement quotas toward the south,
the Kharkiv authorities had to change their original plans for
collective farms and individual peasants by increasing targets for
the former and decreasing them for the latter. Southern Ukraine
was much more collectivized than the boreal-steppe region, and
the increase in procurement quotas for the south meant that col-
lective farms would have to deliver more grain.26
The Ukrainian government kept lobbying for reduced quotas
for the areas affected by the famine of 1932 throughout the sum-
mer. In August, when Stalin agreed to reduce the procurement
target for Ukraine by 40 million poods (a reduction of approx-
imately 11 percent), Kyiv Oblast got a reduction of 11 million
poods (close to 35 percent of its original plan); Vinnytsia Oblast,
9 million poods (23 percent); and Kharkiv Oblast, 8 million poods
(11 percent). The quota for Dnipropetrovsk Oblast was reduced
by 4 million poods (4.5 percent) and for Odesa Oblast by 2 mil-
lion poods (2.3 percent). The south was now expected to bear an
even heavier burden. The exception to that general rule was the
highly industrialized Donetsk Oblast, where the plan target was
reduced by 5 million poods, or 14 percent of the original plan.
That decision was made in consultation between the Moscow
and Kharkiv authorities.27
However, there were limits to how long the Kharkiv author-
ities could keep Kyiv Oblast at the top of their concerns. In Oc-
tober 1932, when, in the face of the failure to meet quota targets,
117
Molotov and then Stalin were forced to reduce the procurement

plan for Ukraine by another 70 million poods (close to 20 percent
of the original plan), Kharkiv Oblast was the first in line, asking
for a reduction of its quota by 26.9 million poods (37 percent of
the original plan). Kyiv Oblast asked for a cut of 5.7 million poods
(18 percent), and Vinnytsia Oblast requested a reduction of 3.5
million poods (9 percent). It appeared that Kyiv Oblast was still
very much in trouble, while Kharkiv Oblast had become a new
leading disaster area. The major difference from August was that
the southern oblasts began to ask for substantial reductions as
well. Dnipropetrovsk Oblast wanted its quota cut by 16.4 million
poods (19 percent), and Odesa Oblast by 14 million poods (16.6
percent).
There can be little doubt that the Kharkiv authorities were
doing their best to reduce the procurement burden of the regions
most affected by the famine of 1932, all of them in the boreal-
steppe region of Ukraine. Through their efforts, they eventually
succeeded in reducing the plan quotas—a measure that most af-
fected the central oblasts of Ukraine. It soon turned out, however,
that the regions affected by the famine of 1932 needed relief and
reduced quotas of grain production.28
Grain Requisitions
In the fall of 1932, Kharkiv and Kyiv Oblasts, which were lo-
cated in Ukraine’s boreal-steppe belt, were leading among the
Ukrainian regions in fulfilling their quotas for delivering grain to
government depositories. In early November 1932, Mendel Kha-
taevich, secretary of the Kharkiv Central Committee and also first
secretary of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, asked his Kharkiv and Mos-
cow bosses to allocate 10 percent of all manufactured goods to
reward collective farms and individual peasants in Kyiv, Kharkiv,
and Donetsk Oblasts.
Khataevich was prepared to give to some areas and locali-
ties of Ukraine while taking from others. In the same telegram
he proposed that there be no further deliveries of manufactured
goods to those raions of Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts that
were lagging behind in the fulfillment of their quotas. Soon, the
policy of blacklisting whole communities—collective farms and
118
raions—was extended to all oblasts of Ukraine. It called for cut-

ting off supplies of manufactured goods to settlements that failed
to fulfill their quotas. Kyiv Oblast led in terms of blacklisted
villages, while Dnipropetrovsk Oblast was in first place when it
came to blacklisted collective farms. Among other things, this
disparity reflected different levels of collectivization in the steppe
and boreal-steppe regions of Ukraine.29
The lead taken by the boreal-steppe oblasts continued in the
new year. By 1 January 1933, the collective farms of Kharkiv, Kyiv,
and Vinnytsia Oblasts were ahead of their southern neighbors in
fulfilling their plans, showing results from 85 percent and high-
er, with 100 percent fulfillment in Kyiv and Vinnytsia Oblasts.30
The collective farms of the steppe oblasts and the newly created
Chernihiv Oblast in the Polissia region lagged behind in plan
fulfillment by a margin of at least 10 percent. In the steppe regions
the failure to fulfill plan targets led eventually to their further re-
duction. In January 1933, their plan quotas were reduced by 12 mil-
lion poods for Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa Oblasts. For Kharkiv
Oblast, the quota was further reduced by 3.4 million poods; for
Kyiv and Vinnytsia Oblasts, it remained the same.31
There are several factors that might account for the “leader-
ship” of the boreal-steppe oblasts in fulfilling plan targets. One
such factor is that those oblasts benefited from major reductions
to their procurement quotas. The final plan for Kyiv Oblast re-
duced the quota by roughly half of the original amount of 31.2
million poods, while the original plan target itself constituted
only 65 percent of the grain collected in 1931. The overall reduc-
tion was a whopping 68 percent. But the reduction of quotas is
only one possible explanation of the “stellar” performance of Kyiv
Oblast in fulfilling its plan.
Another is the ruthless efficiency of the local party machine
in requisitioning grain from the peasantry. By the first months
of 1933, when the party sent its people back to the villages in the
boreal-steppe areas to collect grain for sowing, there was nothing
to collect. If in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, which was lagging behind
in the fulfillment of its procurement plan, party workers collected
40 percent of what was required, in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Vinnytsia
Oblasts that number was between 13.4 and 20.5 percent.
119
For those peasants in the boreal-steppe zones who had sur-

vived the requisitions of 1931 and the famine of 1932, the new req-
uisition campaign brought new suffering and claimed more lives.
In her diary entry for 30 September 1932, Oleksandra Radchenko
recorded the story of a peasant from the village of Piatnytske in
Kharkiv Oblast who was detained by the authorities. They de-
manded grain, holding him captive the entire day, and released
him only late at night. “They held me for grain procurement,” the
peasant told Radchenko, who met him as he returned home after
nightfall. “Give, they say, but what is there to give? There are four
sacks left; I have to do my sowing; I have to feed my children
through the winter.” The peasant was clearly distressed. “His voice
shook; he might have burst into tears at any minute,” wrote Rad-
chenko in her diary. “Oh, poor, poor, tormented people.”
The authorities were not only going after grain. They confis-
cated everything, treating all food supplies as potential “fines in
kind” for unfulfilled procurement quotas. “[The] old man, who
works on a rabbit farm, was ‘robbed by the authorities,’ as he re-
ported,” recorded Radchenko in her entry for 20 November 1932.
That means they took all the cereal grains and fruit available.
He has been dekulakized for two years and is almost indigent,
just short of begging. He is 70 years old; the old woman is 65,
and their crippled daughter lives in their apartment. And al-
though they are destitute, everything they might have used to
live on until February has been taken from them. The servant
returned from leave…and cried out in despair, “What a horror
this is! They are completely ruining individual farmers, taking
everything away, going through trunks; cries and weeping ev-
erywhere. They shout, ‘Take the children, too,’ and there are five
of them in the house.” 32
The hypothesis that it was pressure from above, not just re-
duced quotas that accounted for the exceptional performance of
the boreal-steppe areas in meeting plan targets, finds corrobora-
tion in secret-police statistics. According to GPU (Main Political
Directorate) data, in the first ten months of 1932, 300 cases of
peasant “terrorism,” a term used to denote violent resistance to
the authorities, were registered in Kyiv Oblast, 255 in Kharkiv
120
Oblast, and 197 in Vinnytsia Oblast. Much larger oblasts in the

south had rather modest totals: 58 cases in Donetsk Oblast, 80
in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, and 170 in Odesa Oblast. If one also
counts the 80 cases registered on territories controlled by border
guard detachments, then the numbers for Vinnytsia and Kyiv
Oblasts, bordering on Poland and Romania, should be increased
even further. That tendency continued in the remaining months
of 1932 and early 1933. Vinnytsia Oblast had 98 cases of “terror-
ism”; Kharkiv Oblast, 84; Chernihiv Oblast, 87; and Kyiv Oblast,
63. During the same months there were only 16 cases registered
in Donetsk Oblast, 26 in Odesa Oblast, and 47 in Dnipropetrovsk
Oblast.33
The Kharkiv authorities’ efforts to deal with the situation by
reducing quotas and shifting the main burden to the south did
not change the situation on the ground. The central government
demanded grain deliveries from the region whether or not the
peasants had anything to eat. By early 1933, it was Kyiv, Kharkiv,
and Vinnytsia Oblasts, the areas most affected by the famine
of 1932, that seemed most vulnerable to the new wave of fam-
ine—one that threatened Ukraine as a whole on a much larger
scale than that of the previous year.
Loans to the Dead

On 30 January 1933, Oleksandra Radchenko recorded the first
death from starvation that she saw with her own eyes. “On the
way to Zadorizhne, right next to the road, we saw a dead old man,
ragged and thin. There were no boots on him. Obviously, he had
fallen and frozen to death or died immediately, and somebody
took the boots. On the way back we saw the same old man again.
Nobody needs him.” The famine soon decimated the population
of Babanka. In a mere three days, between 24 and 26 April, 22
people starved to death in that village.34
The first official reports on the spread of the new famine be-
gan to arrive in Kharkiv in early February 1933. Most of them per-
tained to the boreal-steppe oblasts, especially Kyiv and Vinnytsia.
But the first quantities of grain that Ukraine was allowed to take in
order to cope with widespread starvation and growing famine did
not go to Kyiv and Vinnytsia but to Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk
121
Oblasts. Kyiv and the boreal-steppe areas were overlooked by the

center, which had control over grain depositories and supplies
and, in the conditions of growing crisis, decided who or, rather,
where people would live or die. Moscow needed peasants to live,
or at least die at a slower rate in the areas that produced most
of the grain—a policy that benefited the Ukrainian south. On
7 February 1933, the Politburo in Moscow decreed that Odesa and
Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts could use 200,000 poods of rye each to
deal with the food shortages. On 17 February, the party authorities
in Kharkiv decreed that additional supplies of grain and flour be
sent to the industrial Donetsk Oblast.35
The same “south first” policy continued in the second half
of February. On 18 February, the Moscow Politburo decreed the
release of a million poods of grain to Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, 0.8
million to Odesa Oblast, and 0.3 million to Kharkiv Oblast. As
regards Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, the resolution corresponded to
GPU statistics for March 1933, which indicated that 1,700 people
had starved to death there—more than in all other oblasts of
Ukraine combined. In Kyiv Oblast, according to GPU statistics,
only 417 people had died by that time. While the clearly inaccu-
rate GPU statistics can explain Moscow’s particular attention to
Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, they cannot do so in the cases of Ode-
sa and Kharkiv Oblasts. According to the same GPU reports,
37 people starved to death in Kharkiv Oblast and 11 in Odesa
Oblast.36
As the Union government focused on the south, it was left
to the Kharkiv authorities to take care of the rest of the repub-
lic. The problem was that the resources at the disposition of the
Ukrainian government were minuscule compared to those avail-
able in the center. By mid-March the party authorities in Kharkiv
were swamped with reports of the skyrocketing mortality rate in
Kyiv Oblast. “We have starvation and its consequences in 32–34
raions. In 16 raions we have 123 registered cases of cannibalism
and eating of corpses (including 64 cases of cannibalism),” read
one of the reports received by the Kharkiv Central Committee.
“On the streets of Kyiv, the following numbers of corpses were
picked up: January, 400; February, 518; in the first ten days of
March, 249. In the most recent days, an average of 100 children
[per day] have been left [in the city] by their parents.” In February
122
1933, the Kharkiv authorities gave Kyiv Oblast 60,000 poods of

grain, followed by 80,000 in early March.37
On 17 March 1933, the Central Committee in Kharkiv is-
sued a special resolution on means of combating the famine cri-
sis in Kyiv Oblast. An appeal was made to Moscow. This time
the Moscow authorities reacted and allowed six million poods
of grain to be taken from the central depositories to deal with
the crisis. This famine relief measure had its effect. According to
Oleh Wolowyna’s research, the relative excess death factor (the
number of excess deaths in an area or population divided by the
relative total population) for Kyiv Oblast fell between mid-March
and mid-May 1933 by roughly 30 points, from 80 to 53. But the
impact was temporary. In May, the relative excess death factor
began to rise again, exceeded the March peak by mid-June 1933,
and reached 85 points.38 In assessing the impact that the govern-
ment’s assistance, often offered in the form of loans with interest,
had on the situation on the ground in the early spring of 1933, it
is important to keep in mind that the rural population of Kyiv
Oblast was almost twice as large as that of Dnipropetrovsk. There
were close to 5 million people living in rural areas of Kyiv Oblast
and 2.8 million in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.39
The Kyiv crisis of March 1933 did not change the Union gov-
ernment’s policy of offering assistance first and foremost to the
main grain-producing oblasts in the south. On 28 May 1933, the
Moscow Politburo adopted a resolution allowing the release of 0.3
million poods of grain each to Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa Oblasts.
Donetsk Oblast received 0.1 million; the others—nothing at all.
It was only after the Ukrainian leadership sent a special appeal to
Stalin that Moscow agreed to give a fraction of the assistance it
had provided to the steppe oblasts to those located in the boreal-
steppe zone. Moscow allowed the provision of 200,000 poods
of rye to alleviate famine in Kharkiv Oblast, 130,000 poods each
in Kyiv and Vinnytsia Oblasts, and 30,000 poods in Chernihiv
Oblast. For Kyiv and Vinnytsia Oblasts, Moscow cut the amount
requested by the Kharkiv authorities by 15,000 poods.
This could not but have a direct impact on the worsening
situation on the ground. In the following month the relative ex-
cess death factor reached its peak in the boreal-steppe oblasts,
approaching 90 in Kyiv and Vinnytsia Oblasts, reaching 100 in
123
Kharkiv Oblast, and exceeding the 100 mark in Chernihiv—the

oblast that received less assistance than any other in Ukraine.
The difference between the boreal-steppe oblasts and those in
the steppe zone could not have been more profound. The relative
excess death factor in Odesa Oblast at that time was 50, while
Dnipropetrovsk Oblast had a factor of 30, and Donetsk Oblast
a factor of 15.40
The central government’s policies favoring the steppe oblasts
continued in the aftermath of the famine. In 1933, the Moscow
authorities decreed the resettlement of the famine-ravaged areas
of Ukraine by peasant families from Russia and Belarus. They
wanted 6,679 households to go to Dnipropetrovsk Oblast; 6,750
to Odesa; 4,800 to Kharkiv; and 3,527 to Donetsk. The southern
oblasts of Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa got the most attention from
the center. The same pattern applied to horses shipped to Ukraine
from other parts of the Soviet Union. Dnipropetrovsk Oblast
received 5,719 head of livestock; Odesa, 6,812; and Kharkiv, 2,329.
Moscow’s neglect of the non-grain-producing areas of Ukraine
during the spring and early summer of 1933 was among the fac-
tors that contributed to the higher than average death rate in the
forest-steppe regions of the republic.41
Beyond Ecology
The dividing line between the boreal and steppe areas of Ukraine
played an important role in defining the Moscow authorities’ ap-
proach to planning their agricultural policies in Ukraine. As has
been argued above, those policies contributed to the significantly
higher death rate in the two boreal-steppe oblasts of Ukraine,
Kyiv and Kharkiv. What that line does not explain is the differ-
ence in the death rate between those two oblasts and the boreal
regions of Ukraine, which included the area north of Kyiv Oblast
and all of Chernihiv Oblast, where the death rate was significant-
ly lower than in the boreal-steppe areas. In Chernihiv Oblast in
1933 the death rate was 75.8 per thousand of population, compared
with 183.5 deaths per thousand of population in Kyiv Oblast.
The map of losses by raion in 1933 leaves no doubt that while
the sources we consulted give no indication that the line between
the boreal and boreal-steppe areas mattered in the formulation
124
of government policy, it clearly affected the inhabitants’ chances

of survival. Here we are dealing with a situation in which envi-
ronment could have a direct impact, without the intermediacy of
the political factor. One possible explanation of that fact could
be the inhabitants’ ability to feed and maintain domestic animals
in wooded areas at the time of the famine, as well as their ability
to survive on forest products that could not be confiscated by the
authorities. Further research is needed to test these hypotheses.
The boreal-steppe divide also does not suffice to explain the
lower death rate in Vinnytsia Oblast as compared with Kyiv and
Kharkiv Oblasts, which lay within the boundaries of the same
ecological zone. The raion data indicates that some raions of
Vinnytsia Oblast suffered the same level of excess deaths as the
boreal-steppe raions of Kyiv and Kharkiv Oblasts, but all those
raions were in the central and eastern parts of the oblast. The
western and southwestern parts, which happened to be closest
to the Soviet-Polish and Soviet-Romanian borders, suffered sig-
nificantly less.
An answer to this puzzle has been suggested by recent re-
search on the history of Soviet border areas, which indicates that
Moscow paid special attention to border regions, supplying them
with larger quantities of consumer products than other regions
of the Soviet Union. Back in 1930, entire villages in border areas
had attempted to cross the Soviet-Polish border and find refuge
from the horror of collectivization in neighboring Poland. Fur-
ther research into government policies and strategies of survival
in the border regions of Ukraine would be required, but there is
little doubt that the death rate in those areas was lower than in
the central and eastern parts of Vinnytsia Oblast—a factor that
influenced the overall death rate in the oblast during the famine.42
Last but not least, the boreal-steppe divide does not explain
differences in the death rate between the three steppe oblasts:
Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, and Odesa. Donetsk Oblast suffered
least, Odesa Oblast most. The high level of industrialization of
Donetsk Oblast as compared with Odesa Oblast can partly ex-
plain this phenomenon: starving peasants could find employment
and survive in major industrial centers that had centralized food
supplies. Nor should one discount the Moscow authorities’ differ-
ential treatment of individual oblasts with regard to famine relief.
125
This factor becomes especially apparent if one compares Dni-

propetrovsk and Odesa Oblasts, the two main grain-producing
areas of Ukraine. Throughout the spring of 1933 Dnipropetrovsk
Oblast emerged as the main recipient of Moscow’s assistance
in the south, obtaining one million poods in February. Odesa
Oblast received 0.8 million poods of grain. Between mid-March
and mid-July the excess death factor in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast
was significantly lower than in Odesa Oblast. In mid-May, for
example, it reached 33 points, while that of Odesa Oblast stood
at 60. The greater quantity of government relief undoubtedly in-
fluenced this major discrepancy between the two oblasts, which
were quite similar in size of population, level of collectivization,
and grain-producing capacity.43
In explaining the differences in the amount of aid received
from the center, it is hard to overlook the role played by individual
party officials in the history of the famine. Mendel Khataevich,
who was appointed first secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk party
committee in January 1933, maintained his position as secretary
of the Central Committee in Kharkiv and had direct access not
only to Stanislav Kosior and Vlas Chubar but also to Stalin’s
right-hand man in Moscow, Lazar Kaganovich. The personali-
ties of oblast and raion party leaders mattered during the Great
Famine, and in the spring and summer of 1933 the position taken
by a senior party official and his ability to reduce plan targets and
receive government assistance could make the difference between
life and death for hundreds of thousands of starving people in the
Ukrainian countryside.
There were limits, however, to what local officials could do
independently of the Moscow and Kyiv authorities. Wheatcroft
has suggested recently that Kyiv Oblast’s higher death rate can be
attributed to the actions of local officials, who imposed additional
quotas on the peasantry in order to feed the cities of the oblast,
which, unlike the industrial centers in the east and south of the
republic, received few or no shipments from the central deposito-
ries. Thus far, this hypothesis has not been substantiated by docu-
mentary evidence with regard to special policies adopted by Kyiv
officials. It also does not take into account that not all areas of
Kyiv Oblast suffered equally, and many raions of Kharkiv Oblast
suffered as much as the most affected areas of Kyiv Oblast.44
126
Let us now turn to the factors that apparently did not matter
in the history of the Great Famine. A comparison of the maps
of excess death rates with those of Ukraine’s ethnic composi-
tion suggests that, while place of residence, defined in terms of
ecological zones and border versus central location, influenced
chances of survival, ethnicity did not. There is, however, one ca-
veat pertaining to this general thesis. The maps indicate that the
boreal-steppe regions hardest hit by the famine also happened
to be those with the highest percentage of Ukrainians among
the rural population. But we have no documentary confirmation
that these areas were specifically targeted by the government or
left without assistance because of their ethnic composition. Also
severely affected were northeastern Kharkiv Oblast and concen-
trations of Jews and Poles outside the border regions of Vinnytsia
Oblast. Furthermore, the map of urban losses indicates that small
towns in Kyiv and Kharkiv Oblasts with significant Jewish pop-
ulations were among the localities worst hit by the famine: this
data is confirmed by official correspondence.45
Finally, one should address the impact on death rates of the
official policy of denying supplies to villages and agricultural en-
terprises that failed to fulfill their grain-procurement quotas, oth-
erwise known as blacklisted communities. Even though clusters
of blacklisted villages can be found on the map within or close to
areas with the highest rates of excess deaths, current data do not
allow one to conclude or even suggest that blacklisting actually
led to higher death rates. There can be a number of explanations
for this phenomenon; lack of comprehensive data is one of them.
The authorities’ inability to enforce blacklisting of communities
located near those that were not blacklisted—a “problem” ad-
dressed in official reports for December 1932—may be another.46
⁂
While GIS mapping of the Great Famine is only in its initial
stages, and this essay is one of the first attempts to interpret the
new data and the maps on which it has been plotted, we can
already formulate some preliminary conclusions. Given the early
stage of research, most of the conclusions are hypothetical and
should be regarded more as an agenda for research than as the
127
definitive word on the subject. In this context, it is important to

bear in mind that GIS mapping is not only a way of presenting
research results but also a way of posing new questions for re-
search. For clarity’s sake, I am presenting the preliminary results
of the research discussed in this essay in point form.
--* The geography of losses suffered by the population of
Ukraine in the course of the Great Famine of 1932–33 sets it
apart from the earlier famines of the 1920s, which occurred in
the southern parts of the republic. During the Great Famine the
death rate was highest in central Ukraine.
--* An explanation for the distinct geography of the Great
Famine should be sought in the different treatment of Ukraine’s
regions, first by the Soviet government in Moscow, and then by
the Ukrainian leadership in Kharkiv. While Stalin and the mem-
bers of his inner circle treated Ukraine as an entity with regard
to grain procurement, they also distinguished the main grain-
producing areas in the steppe zone of southern Ukraine from
the boreal zones of central and northern Ukraine, which grew
less grain or none at all.
--* The steppe regions of Ukraine were more highly collectiv-
ized and supplied with tractors and other agricultural machinery
on a priority basis. They were also the first to receive famine relief
assistance and were the main beneficiaries of resettlement policy
after the famine. The boreal-steppe regions of Ukraine, which
included Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Vinnytsia Oblasts, had a lower level
of collectivization and mechanization of agriculture.
--* The central government’s policy of forcing peasants to
join collective farms by imposing higher procurement quotas on
non-collectivized peasantry further disadvantaged the central and
northern areas of Ukraine, which had a lower level of collectivized
households than the steppe regions in the south.
--* The famine began in the winter and early spring of 1932 in
central Ukraine, particularly in the beet-producing areas of Kyiv
Oblast, where, according to one version of events, local officials,
forced by the central and republican governments to fulfill unreal-
istically high procurement quotas, took more grain than specified
in plan quotas in order to make up for losses in the harvests of
produce other than grain.
128
--* The famine of 1933 hit hardest those areas that had never
fully recovered from the famine of the previous year. The fam-
ine of 1932, which affected Kyiv, Vinnytsia, and Kharkiv Oblasts,
weakened and demoralized the peasants, who were unable or
unwilling to stay on the collective farms or conduct the sowing
campaign on their own. This resulted in the poor harvest of 1932
and the new and much more severe famine of 1933.
--* During the height of the famine in 1933, the central gov-
ernment in Moscow and the republican authorities in Kharkiv
adopted different approaches to relief efforts. The Kharkiv gov-
ernment’s priority was to provide support for the boreal-steppe
regions of Ukraine hardest hit by famine, while Moscow’s efforts
were focused on the main grain-producing areas in the south.
--* Given that Moscow had more resources and overall control
over the distribution of aid and grain loans, the central govern-
ment’s focus on the main grain-producing regions of Ukraine led
to the neglect of the needs of the starving population in boreal-
steppe areas. The central government was prepared to lower quo-
tas for boreal-steppe areas on a number of occasions, but it was
reluctant to provide those regions of Ukraine with food assistance,
given their low standing in the pecking order of grain-producing
regions.
--* The severity of the famine in the rural areas of Kyiv and
Kharkiv Oblasts translated into an exceptionally high death rate
among the urban population of those oblasts. Most of the urban
dwellers who died in 1932–33 lived in small towns that had no cen-
tralized food supply and suffered the same fate as the countryside.
--* While Kyiv and Kharkiv Oblasts were hardest hit by the
Great Famine, the losses in other parts of Ukraine were also in
the millions, totaling 3.9 million deaths according to the latest es-
timates. This death toll set the Holodomor apart from the earlier
famines not only in terms of geography but also in the absolute
number of victims.
129
9.
The Call of Blood
On Thursday, 7 September 1939, as the shell-shocked Major Hen-

ryk Sucharski, commander of the Polish garrison of Westerplatte,
surrendered the embattled fortress to numerically superior Ger-
man forces, and Hitler’s mechanized divisions rushed eastward,
encircling Łódź, approaching Warsaw, and crossing the Narew
River, Joseph Stalin summoned his military commanders to the
Kremlin. On the agenda was Soviet entry into the war, which
had already become global. Among its declared participants
were Germany, Poland, Britain, France, and South Africa. The
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed only two weeks earlier with
Stalin’s active participation, assigned parts of Poland east of the
Narew to the Soviet sphere of influence, but the Soviet leaders
were more than cautious about claiming their prospective booty.
On 5 September Viacheslav Molotov, chairman of the USSR
Council of People’s Commissars and people’s commissar for in-
ternational relations, had responded evasively to the German ap-
peal of two days earlier to send the Red Army into Poland, saying
that the time was not yet ripe. Now, with the Germans advancing,
the Poles retreating, and the British and French doing little more
than formally declaring war, Stalin wanted his military brass to
speed up preparations for hostilities. The partial mobilization of
reserves ordered the previous day was already taking effect. Soviet
forces would cross the Polish border and seize the USSR’s portion
of war booty. But how to justify an act of open aggression against
a neighboring state?
131
Stalin had his answer ready. Immediately after meeting with

his commanders, he received in his Kremlin office the leader of
the Communist International (Comintern), the Bulgarian com-
munist Georgi Dimitrov. Also present were Viacheslav Molotov;
the chief party propagandist, Andrei Zhdanov; and the chief So-
viet representative in the Comintern, the Ukrainian communist
Dmytro Manuilsky. Stalin told his visitors that the Soviet Union
would take advantage of the world conflict to help the capitalist
countries exhaust one another. He shared none of the admira-
tion lavished by earlier generations of revolutionaries on Poland,
which he characterized as a fascist state that was oppressing fel-
low Ukrainians and Belarusians. “The annihilation of that state
under current conditions would mean one less bourgeois fascist
state to contend with!” asserted Stalin. “What harm would result
from the rout of Poland if we were to extend the socialist system
to new territories and populations?” he asked his visitors, accord-
ing to Dimitrov’s diary.
One part of Stalin’s argument was based on a Bolshevik-style
class analysis and the logic of world revolution that had failed to
materialize in the 1920s. Another had to do with national minori-
ties—the non-Polish inhabitants of eastern Poland, which had
been “allocated” to the USSR by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Indeed, it was the Ukrainian-Belarusian nationality card that
would be used most broadly both at home and abroad as catchall
justification for Soviet aggression. It would outlive the early days
of the conflict, serving as the basis of the Soviet authorities’ claim
to their newly acquired territories until the end of the war.1
This essay looks into the development of the ethnic justifica-
tion of Soviet aggression against Poland on three levels: diplo-
matic, propagandistic, and popular. It examines how the theme
of ethnic minorities developed in Soviet-German negotiations
in the weeks leading up to Soviet entry into the war and the
signing of the Soviet-German Boundary and Friendship Treaty
of 28 September 1939; discusses the use of the nationality card in
Soviet domestic propaganda; and, finally, takes a close look at the
impact of the nationality theme on Soviet public opinion. There
are two questions of broader significance that I seek to engage
in this essay. The first deals with the relationship between Soviet
foreign and domestic policy, especially with the formulation and
132
The Call of Blood
articulation of nationality policy. The second concerns the variety

of responses to government policy available to the Soviet public
under Stalinism.
I shall argue that 1) Stalin’s vacillation on the new Soviet bor-
ders and the propaganda effort accompanying the Soviet invasion
of Poland demonstrate that the Soviet leader and his advisers were
surprised by the German offer of 23 August 1939 to divide Poland
into spheres of influence, or occupation, and did not fully formu-
late their position on the scope of their territorial expansion until
a month later, when the military campaign was all but over; 2) The
Soviet authorities’ view of the world not only as a community of
states but also as a conglomerate of nationalities, as well as their
understanding of the principle of national self-determination as
possessing broad international legitimacy, had a profound impact
on the formulation of Soviet foreign policy and defined the extent
of Soviet territorial expansion in September 1939; 3) In the first
weeks of the war, changes in Soviet foreign policy led to a change
in government rhetoric on the nationality question, also open-
ing the door to subsequent changes in nationality policy; 4) The
change of nationality rhetoric helped the regime co-opt a sector
of public opinion previously hostile to its policies both at home
and abroad and prompted some segments of the Soviet public
to formulate their relation to government policy in a way that
does not fit the categories of resistance and compliance, which
have received considerable attention in the recent literature on
the subject.
The Geopolitical Crossword

Three days after Stalin’s conversation with the Comintern leaders,
one of the participants in the meeting, Viacheslav Molotov, was
ordered to try the nationality argument for Soviet entry into the
war on none other than the German ambassador to the Soviet
Union, Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg. On 10 Sep-
tember 1939, after telling Schulenburg that “the Soviet Govern-
ment was taken completely by surprise by the unexpectedly rapid
German military successes” and needed more time to prepare its
own army for the invasion, Molotov mentioned to him a possible
justification for the Soviet Union’s prospective invasion of Poland.
133
“The Soviet Government,” wrote Schulenburg, reporting the

words of the Soviet foreign commissar to Berlin, “had intended
to take the occasion of the further advance of German troops to
declare that Poland was falling apart and that it was necessary
for the Soviet Union, in consequence, to come to the aid of the
Ukrainians and the White Russians ‘threatened’ by Germany. This
argument was to make the intervention of the Soviet Union plau-
sible to the masses and at the same time avoid giving the Soviet
Union the appearance of an aggressor.” 2
The class analysis and export-of-revolution argument given by
Stalin to Dimitrov had been dropped in Molotov’s presentation
to Schulenburg, while the nationality justification had survived,
admittedly in somewhat different form. It was no longer the Pol-
ish state’s poor treatment of the Ukrainians and Belarusians but
their possible mistreatment by the Germans that was supposed
to justify the Soviet invasion. On 14 September, Schulenburg re-
ported to Berlin about his next meeting with Molotov. The So-
viet foreign commissar was again preoccupied with the question
of legitimacy. “For the political motivation of Soviet action (the
collapse of Poland and protection of Russian ‘minorities’) it was
of the greatest importance not to take action until the govern-
mental center of Poland, the city of Warsaw, had fallen,” report-
ed Schulenburg on the new Soviet position. “Molotov therefore
asked that he be informed as nearly as possible as to when the
capture of Warsaw could be counted on.”
To be sure, the Soviets were not simply awaiting the fall of
Warsaw. They began to prepare their own population for war,
and the ethnic explanation of the impending invasion played an
important role. On 8 September, the day after Stalin’s meeting
with his military commanders and Dimitrov, the Polish military
attaché in Moscow attended a public lecture in Gorky Park on
the German-Polish war. The speaker asked whether his audience
was prepared to observe impassively the sufferings inflicted by
nobiliary Poland on Ukrainians and Belarusians. The audience
responded with cries of “March, march on the evil Germans!”
On 11 September, the Red Army formed two fronts tasked with
the invasion of Poland. They were based on the Kyiv and Minsk
military districts but received “nationalized” names—Ukrainian
and Belarusian. They also introduced the minorities theme in
134
The Call of Blood
public propaganda. A few days later it appeared in the print me-

dia. Schulenburg concluded his report of 14 September by stating:
“I would direct your attention to today’s article in Pravda, carried
by DNB [Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro—German Press Agency],
which will be followed by a similar article in Izvestiia tomorrow.
The articles serve [to prepare] the political motivation mentioned
by Molotov for Soviet intervention.” 3
The two articles mentioned by Schulenburg ascribed the de-
feat of Poland to its mistreatment of its ethnic minorities and
provided detailed information on the sorry status of Ukrainians
and Belarusians in the prewar Polish state. The potential Ger-
man threat was not mentioned, but Hitler’s foreign minister, Joa-
chim von Ribbentrop, finally became alert to the problem that
might arise as a result of Molotov’s desire to explain Soviet action
against Poland by pointing a finger at the Germans. To forestall
it, Ribbentrop wanted a joint Soviet-German statement stressing
the desire of the two powers to “restore peace” in Poland.
On 15 September, the Reichskommissar cabled his ambassa-
dor in Moscow:
We assume…that the Soviet Government has already given up

the idea, expressed by Molotov in an earlier conversation with
you, of taking the threat to the Ukrainian and White Russian
populations by Germany as a ground for Soviet action. The as-
signment of a motive of that sort would be out of the question
in practice. It would be directly contrary to the true German
intentions, which are confined exclusively to the realization of
well-known German spheres of interest. It would also be in
contradiction to the arrangements made in Moscow and, finally,
would—in opposition to the desire for friendly relations ex-
pressed on both sides—expose the two States before the whole
world as enemies. 4
When Schulenburg presented these arguments to Molotov at

their meeting on 16 September, the day before the Soviet invasion
of Poland, the Soviet commissar found himself on the defensive.
Despite Ribbentrop’s warning, he insisted on including a state-
ment in the Soviet declaration on the causes of intervention argu-
ing that “the Soviet Union considered itself obligated to intervene
135
to protect its Ukrainian and White Russian brothers and make it

possible for these unfortunate people to work in peace.”
According to Schulenburg’s report, Molotov
conceded that the projected argument of the Soviet Govern-

ment contained a note that was jarring to German sensibilities
but asked that in view of the difficult situation of the Sovi-
et Government we not let a trifle like this stand in our way.
The Soviet Government unfortunately saw no possibility of
any other motivation, since the Soviet Union had thus far not
concerned itself about the plight of its minorities in Poland
and had to justify abroad, in some way or other, its present
intervention. 5
As always, Molotov was acting on Stalin’s instructions and

was not at liberty to change anything in the declared position of
the Soviet government. His superior, however, took Schulenburg’s
warning very seriously. At 2:00 a. m. on 17 September, Stalin sum-
moned the German ambassador to the Kremlin not only to tell
him that the Red Army was about to attack Poland but also to
read him the note to the same effect that would be given to the
Polish ambassador. “The draft read to me contained three points
unacceptable to us,” reported Schulenburg to Berlin. “In answer
to my objections, Stalin with the utmost readiness so altered the
text that the note now seems satisfactory for us.” The note, which
appeared in Soviet newspapers the next day, presented the defense
of the Ukrainians and Belarusians as the main reason for the
Soviet intervention, with no mention of a German threat. The
relevant parts of the note were included almost verbatim in Mo-
lotov’s address to the Soviet people, which was broadcast by radio
a few hours after the invasion. In both cases, the Ukrainians and
Belarusians were simply declared to have been left unprotected
by the collapse of the Polish state.6
The main problem with their explanation of the invasion as
an act of fraternal assistance to the Ukrainians and Belarusians
was that, according to the secret protocol signed by Molotov and
Ribbentrop in Moscow on the morning of 24 August 1939 (and
dated the previous day), the Soviet sphere of influence extend-
ed beyond territories settled predominantly by Ukrainians and
136
The Call of Blood
Belarusians. The Soviet catch also included millions of Jews and

Poles. If Jews were dispersed all over Polish territory, nowhere
constituting a majority and consequently unable to claim a home-
land of their own, the Poles had such a claim. They constituted
an absolute majority of the inhabitants of lands between the Bug
and Wisła Rivers who were to be brought forcibly into the Soviet
sphere. Well aware of this, Stalin made preparations for dealing
with the Polish question.
On the eve of the invasion, the commander of the newly
formed Ukrainian front, Semen Tymoshenko, received instruc-
tions on how to facilitate the election of deputies to three popu-
lar assemblies—those of Western Ukraine, Western Belarus, and
Polish regions east of the Wisła. These assemblies were to adopt
resolutions requesting the incorporation of their territories into
the USSR. Western Belarus and Western Ukraine would thereby
join the existing Belarusian and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Re-
publics, while the Polish territories would join the USSR as a sep-
arate Polish Soviet Socialist Republic. On 15 September, Lavrentii
Beriia, the people’s commissar of internal affairs (NKVD), includ-
ed a reference to the Polish assembly in the order he sent to his
subordinates in Ukraine and Belarus. The order reflected current
thinking at the very top of the Soviet pyramid of power.7
Beriia's instructions to NKVD officers in Ukraine and Be-
larus and the instructions to Tymoshenko show that on the eve
of the Soviet invasion Stalin had no plans for creating a Polish
buffer state between Germany and the USSR, an idea earlier
entertained by the Soviet leadership. On 19 September, Molotov
said as much to Schulenburg, who reported to Berlin on his con-
versation with the Soviet foreign commissar: “Molotov hinted
that the original inclination entertained by the Soviet Govern-
ment and Stalin personally to permit the existence of a residual
Poland had given way to the inclination to partition Poland along
the Neisse–Narew–Wisła–San Line.”
That was the line defined by the secret protocol of the Molotov-
Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August. Within the next few days, Stalin
further developed his thinking on the issue. On 25 September, he
told Schulenburg that he wanted to avoid “anything that in the
future might create friction between Germany and the Soviet
Union” and “considered it wrong to leave an independent Polish
137
rump state.” According to Schulenburg, Stalin proposed the fol-

lowing: “From the territory to the east of the demarcation line,
all the Province of Lublin and that portion of the Province of
Warsaw which extends to the Bug should be added to our share.
In return, we should waive our claim to Lithuania.” 8
What was the logic of Stalin’s new proposal? His desire to
claim Lithuania might suggest that he wanted to regain a former
Romanov possession. Besides, by swapping Polish territories for
Lithuanian ones, Stalin straightened the line of his future defens-
es, moving the border farther away from Leningrad and elimi-
nating the bulge in the south along the future western borders of
Ukraine and Belarus. That is as far as the Lithuanian argument
takes us, but Stalin’s offer of the Lublin and Warsaw provinces to
Germany clearly does not fit such an explanation, as those terri-
tories had largely belonged to the Russian Empire prior to 1917.
Besides, Stalin was not willing to pass on the former Habsburg
Galicia, which fell into the Soviet sphere of influence even though
German representatives had expressed interest in the region in
unofficial talks with the Soviet ambassador in Berlin in July 1939.
If the proposal was not solely an attempt to reclaim tsarist
possessions or improve military defenses, what was it? A close
reading indicates that the Soviet desire to recover lost territory
and improve the geostrategic position of the state were adjusted
to take into account ethnic boundaries and national identities of
borderland populations. By getting rid of the ethnic Polish ter-
ritories, Stalin was also bringing the new Soviet-German border
into line with his propaganda thesis that Soviet forces had entered
Poland primarily in order to liberate their fellow Ukrainians and
Belarusians. He could thus explain the new border to the Soviet
and foreign public much more effectively than the original one.9
There is also no reason to doubt the sincerity of Stalin’s claim
that he wanted to avoid anything in the new territorial arrange-
ment that might make future German-Soviet relations more
difficult. Getting rid of the Polish buffer state was one step in
that direction. Getting rid of the Lublin and Warsaw provinces,
settled largely by Poles, was another. Stalin had good reason for
concern that Germany might use the cause of Polish reunifi-
cation as a pretext to interfere in Soviet affairs and eventually
go to war against the Soviet Union. A few months earlier, the
138
The Call of Blood
world press had been full of suggestions that Hitler was going
to use Transcarpathian Ukraine—the Czechoslovak province of
Ruthenia—as a base for starting a war with Stalin for control of
Soviet Ukraine.
In March 1939, Stalin declared from the podium of the Eigh-
teenth Party Congress that he did not trust Western insinuations
in that regard. Many regard Stalin’s assertion as a signal to Hitler
and Ribbentrop that he was prepared to make a deal. The deal he
was negotiating now precluded the creation of a new “Transcar-
pathia,” either Ukrainian or Polish. The proposed new Soviet-
German boundary was to follow the San and Bug Rivers, roughly
corresponding to the ethnic boundary in the region as defined
by the Allied Supreme Council in Paris in December 1918, later
known as the Curzon Line.10
On 28 September, Ribbentrop, who had flown to Moscow the
previous day, signed the German-Soviet border agreement, which
recognized the new line proposed by Stalin. In the course of ne-
gotiations, Ribbentrop tried to acquire the oil-rich Drohobych
region of Ukrainian Galicia for Germany, but Stalin stood firm,
agreeing to ship oil to Germany but not to give up the territory.
He emerged from the negotiations not only as a protector of
Ukrainian territory but also as a leader concerned about Ukraini-
ans and Belarusians beyond the lands that were about to become
part of the USSR. Molotov and Ribbentrop signed a confiden-
tial protocol that committed the Soviet government to raise no
obstacle to the voluntary transfer of German inhabitants from
the Soviet sector of partitioned Poland to the German sector.
The German government promised to reciprocate with regard
to Ukrainians and Belarusians. This privilege was not extended
to Poles or Jews. Another protocol obliged each government to
suppress Polish propaganda directed against the other party. In
transferring Polish territories to Hitler, Stalin wanted to ensure
that his new partner would not use the Polish card against the
USSR.11
If the map accompanying the secret protocol of the Molotov-
Ribbentrop Pact (23 August 1939) was largely the result of propos-
als made by Ribbentrop, the amendments made to it on 28 Sep-
tember originated with Stalin. Ribbentrop’s proposal was based
mainly on historical precedent and on the assumption that Stalin
139
wanted to restore the old imperial borders in Eastern Europe.

Stalin’s amendments, by contrast, were based on ethnic criteria
that dominated the thinking of the post-World War I era. In
a mere three weeks—a brief period extremely rich in events and
decisions—Stalin’s nationality argument, which was first formu-
lated, as far as we know, at his meeting of 7 September with
Molotov, Zhdanov, Dimitrov, and Manuilsky, had developed from
a theme intended to undermine the legitimacy of the Polish state
into a propaganda tool and, finally, an important principle for
determining the extent of Soviet territorial expansion and estab-
lishing the border with the Soviets’ new German neighbor.
Stalin’s uncertainty with regard to that border and his vacil-
lation between creating a Polish buffer state, setting up a Polish
Soviet Socialist Republic as part of the USSR, and transferring
Polish territory to Germany indicate that he and his advisers
were caught unprepared, first by the conclusion of the Molotov-
Ribbentrop Pact and then by the rapid advance of the German
panzer divisions into Poland. It was in the process of the Sep-
tember consultations and negotiations with Germany that they
found a way not only to sort out their messy territorial relations
with Germany but also to work out a language in which they
could explain their actions both at home and abroad. The word
“nationality” proved highly compatible with the words “borders,”
“security,” “legitimacy,” and “propaganda,” linking them in a dip-
lomatic crossword that preoccupied Stalin in the weeks leading
up to the Soviet entry into World War II.
Soviet Propaganda
Of the two partners who signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in
August 1939, it was the Soviets who were most concerned about
its possible impact on public opinion in their country. When on
the morning of 24 August Ribbentrop became too enthusiastic
about the prospects of German-Soviet friendship, Stalin cau-
tioned his guest with reference to public opinion. “Do you not
think we have to pay a little more attention to public opinion in
our two countries?” he asked the Nazi visitor. “For many years now
we have been pouring buckets of shit over each other’s heads and
our propaganda boys could not do enough in that direction. Now
140
The Call of Blood
all of a sudden, are we to make our peoples believe all is forgotten

and forgiven? Things do not work so fast.”
Stalin knew what he was talking about. When news of the
pact broke in Germany, many in the Nazi leadership blamed Rib-
bentrop for betraying party principles by making common cause
with the Bolsheviks. While most ordinary Germans eventually
overcame the original shock and accepted the pact as a means
of avoiding war on two fronts, many Nazi Party members found
their deeply held anti-communist beliefs traduced. Some ex-
pressed their concerns to Hitler; others resigned from the party
in protest.12
News of the sudden about-face in Soviet-German relations
left the population of the USSR no less bewildered than that of
Germany. People did not dare to resign from the Communist Par-
ty or voice their dissatisfaction publicly, but the NKVD registered
mass disillusionment among the population, which had been fed
for years on anti-fascist propaganda. Nikita Khrushchev, then first
secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of
Ukraine, later remembered the embarrassment caused by the pact:
We could not even discuss the treaty at party meetings. For us

to have explained our reasons for signing the treaty in straight-
forward newspaper language would have been offensive, and
besides nobody would believe us. It was very hard for us—as
communists, as anti-fascists, as people unalterably opposed to
the philosophical and political position of the fascists—to ac-
cept the idea of joining forces with Germany. It was difficult
enough for us to accept this paradox ourselves. It would have
been impossible to explain it to the man on the street.
Molotov admitted the problem caused by the Soviet public’s

reception of the pact in his speech to the Supreme Soviet on
31 August. Now the regime was faced with the task of explaining
an even more treacherous move—the invasion of a neighboring
state that had resisted a fascist attack.13
The Soviet use of the nationality issue to justify the inva-
sion of Poland began in earnest with a publication in Pravda for
14 September that attracted the attention of Schulenburg and
was picked up by the German Press Agency (DNB). It was in
141
fact an editorial entitled “On the Internal Reasons for the Defeat
of Poland.” With regard to the fresh German victories on the
Polish front, the editorial said: “It is hard to explain such a swift
defeat of Poland solely by the superiority of Germany’s military
technology and military organization and the absence of effective
assistance to Poland on the part of England and France.” This was
an implicit reference to an article that had appeared in Pravda
only three days earlier.
On 11 September, in an essay entitled “The German-Polish
War: A Survey of Military Operations,” E. Sosnin enumerated
four reasons for the collapse of Polish defenses: lack of fortifica-
tions on the country’s western borders, German superiority in
air power, the Wehrmacht’s superiority in artillery, and lack of
support from Poland’s Western allies. Now the Soviet leaders
were making an important corrective to Sosnin’s assessment. The
editorial stressed the “internal weaknesses and contradictions of
the Polish state.” It stated that “Poland is a multiethnic state. In
the composition of the population of Poland, Poles make up only
60 percent, while the other 40 percent are made up of national
minorities, mainly Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews. It suffices
to note that there are no fewer than eight million Ukrainians in
Poland, and about three million Belarusians.” The Jews were thus
relegated to secondary status. The editorial was really about the
Ukrainians and Belarusians.14
The problem with the Polish state, according to the Pravda
editorial, was not simply its multiethnic character but the way in
which the Polish ruling circles treated their minorities—the sub-
ject broached by Stalin in his conversation with Dimitrov a week
earlier. “Western Ukraine and Western Belarus,” wrote Pravda,
“regions of predominantly Ukrainian and Belarusian population,
are the objects of the most flagrant, shameless exploitation on
the part of the Polish landlords. The situation of the Ukrainians
and Belarusians is characterized by a regime of ethnic oppression
and lack of rights. The ruling circles of Poland, flaunting their
supposed love of liberty, have done all they could to turn West-
ern Ukraine and Western Belarus into a colony without rights,
consigned for plunder to the Polish lords.” The authors of the edi-
torial went on to describe in detail the discrimination of the non-
Polish nationalities on the legal and administrative levels. Special
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The Call of Blood
attention was paid to the sorry state of Ukrainian and Belarusian

culture and the Polonization of the minorities. While the editorial
allegedly dealt with the reasons for Poland’s defeat, its implicit
message was hard to miss: the Ukrainians and Belarusians were
suffering under Polish rule and needed Soviet protection.15
The political significance of the editorial was not lost on for-
eign observers, and Schulenburg was not the only one to take note
of it. With the benefit of hindsight, Time magazine (25 Septem-
ber) linked the Pravda editorial with the panic that Stalin and
Molotov must have felt as they watched the German advance into
Poland. In an article entitled “Dizziness from Success,” which
reminded the reader of Stalin’s piece of 1930 about excesses in
the collectivization of agriculture, the Time magazine writer ar-
gued that the editorial had been drafted by Stalin himself. “As the
Germans reached Bialystok last week Comrade Stalin came out
with his answer,” went the article. The Time magazine author
quoted liberally from the Pravda editorial on the mistreatment
of Ukrainians and Belarusians and concluded with the following
statement: “Thus with great circumspection the Dictator told the
people what part of Poland Russia intended to get—i. e., the Pol-
ish Ukraine, the northeast area south of Lithuania.”
In general terms, the argument used by the Pravda edito-
rial was already familiar to observers of the European scene.
Czechoslovakia had been dismembered in 1938–39, ostensibly to
guarantee the rights and freedoms of minorities. The mistreat-
ment of the German minority in Poland had served as a pretext
for Hitler’s attack on Poland only two weeks earlier, and Hitler
had no qualms about exploiting Ukrainian nationalists either in
Carpatho-Ukraine or in Poland to destabilize the situation and
achieve his goals. If anything, Stalin was now taking a leaf from
Hitler’s book.16
When Viacheslav Molotov addressed the Soviet people on
the radio in the late morning of 17 September, explaining why
the country had entered the war, the nationality question was
front and center in his argument. The Soviet foreign commissar
began by claiming that the Polish state had collapsed, rendering
existing treaties between Moscow and Warsaw invalid. The col-
lapse of Poland had also created a vacuum on the borders of the
USSR, threatening the security of the Soviet state. “The Soviet
143
government,” continued Molotov, “also cannot be expected to

take an indifferent attitude to the fate of its blood relatives, Ukrai-
nians and Belarusians residing in Poland who previously found
themselves in the position of nations without rights and have now
been completely abandoned to the vagaries of fate. The Soviet
government regards it as a sacred obligation to extend a helping
hand to its brethren Ukrainians and brethren Belarusians residing
in Poland.”
The importance of this ethnic justification of the invasion was
further stressed in a statement later in the speech: “The Soviet
government has directed the General Staff of the Red Army to
order its troops to cross the border and take the lives and prop-
erty of the population of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus
under its protection.” The “blood brothers,” it seemed, had to be
saved from the Polish government, even though it allegedly did
not exist. There was no mention of the German threat or, for that
matter, of the Jewish minority in Poland. The former had been
edited out of the text of the Soviet note to the Poles by Schulen-
burg. Reference to the latter was probably omitted by the Soviets
themselves.17
While lamenting the fate of national minorities was noth-
ing new in European politics of the day, the Pravda editorial
of 14 September and Molotov’s speech of 17 September marked
a major change in the Soviet use of nationality rhetoric at home
and abroad. It was a shift from treating cross-border national
minorities as a threat to the security of the Soviet Union to a rhet-
oric that allowed the regime to take advantage of those communi-
ties not only to advance Soviet interests in the international arena
but also to extend Soviet borders at the expense of neighboring
states. In a certain way it was a return to the policies of the 1920s,
marked by the original optimism of the new communist regime,
which had not yet abandoned its dreams of world revolution.
The policies of the 1920s, defined by Terry Martin as the
“Piedmont principle,” were designed to “exploit cross-border eth-
nic ties to project political influence into neighboring states.” They
were first formulated and promoted by the Ukrainian national
communists who wanted Soviet Ukraine to serve as a beacon of
hope for Ukrainians in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania.
Ukrainians abroad, went the argument, would be attracted to
144
The Call of Blood
socialism and the USSR by the flowering of Ukrainian culture

and society in Soviet Ukraine. This policy was ended during the
Great Famine of 1932–33, which resulted in millions of innocent
deaths. The beacon was extinguished. Ukrainian communists were
accused of nationalist deviation and instigation of peasant resis-
tance to the Soviet regime. The policy of cultural Ukrainization
was curtailed and the “Piedmont principle” nullified.18
The new era became known for a different set of foreign-
policy priorities and a different rhetoric that reflected a “besieged
fortress” mentality. Ukraine and Belarus were now viewed as bul-
warks of the Soviet state that were threatened by the capitalist
West. The imperialists, argued the regime, were trying to exploit
cross-border ethnic ties to spur non-Russian nationalism in the
Soviet borderlands and create a fifth column in the USSR so as
to prepare for a future invasion. The task of turning Ukraine into
a “true fortress of the USSR” was formulated by Stalin himself
in the months leading up to the Great Famine. Moscow’s rep-
resentatives in Ukraine were eager to oblige. “Comrades,” said
the newly appointed first secretary of the Communist Party of
Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, to delegates at the party congress in
June 1938, “we shall bend every effort to ensure that the task and
directive of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist
Party (Bolshevik) and Comrade Stalin—to make Ukraine a for-
tress impregnable to enemies—is fulfilled with honor.”
Khrushchev blamed the “difficulties that Ukraine underwent
in the course of collectivization”—an indirect reference to the
Great Famine—on the intrigues of the foreign enemies of the
USSR, including Józef Piłsudski of Poland. Khrushchev’s other
references to Poland were intended to illustrate Soviet achieve-
ments in education and assert that the Ukrainian toiling masses
would never tolerate the rule of the Polish lords. The rhetoric
was defensive rather than offensive. The “Piedmont principle” was
long gone. The “besieged fortress” mentality remained dominant
until the appearance of the Pravda editorial on 14 September and
Molotov’s speech three days later.19
Molotov’s speech was broadcast on Soviet radio at 11:30 a. m.
on 17 September, less than seven hours after the two Red Army
fronts crossed the Polish-Soviet border and began their offen-
sive against dispersed and disoriented Polish troops. Since the
145
broadcast was scheduled to coincide with the lunch break at gov-

ernment institutions, factories, and collective farms, hundreds of
thousands of industrial and office workers, peasants, and students
all over the Soviet Union gathered around radio transmitters
to listen to the speech. They then participated in government-
sponsored meetings featuring speakers who recapitulated Molo-
tov’s statements made a few minutes earlier and called on those
present to give their full support to the newest party policy and
the war effort. The next day, Pravda published a photo of a meet-
ing attended by thousands at the Red Proletarian machine-tool
factory in Moscow. It also ran an article on a gathering of profes-
sors and students of Moscow State University, reportedly with an
attendance of six thousand, who welcomed the address delivered
by a professor of party history, Vladimir Iudovsky. The profes-
sor characterized the invasion as “a sage act of world-historical
significance.” 20
In Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, Pravda correspondents regis-
tered an especially high level of political activity and rising pop-
ular enthusiasm. “Thousands of Kyivans crowded around trans-
mitters on streets and squares,” reported Pravda from the capital
of a republic directly affected by the invasion and the change in
the party’s nationality rhetoric.
With strained attention, they listen everywhere to the speech

of Comrade V. M. Molotov. When Comrade Molotov speaks of
the Soviet government’s decision to offer assistance to Ukrainian
and Belarusian brethren, stormy applause and shouts of “hurrah”
resound. Comrade Molotov’s words are lost in cries of “Long
live Stalin!” “Long live the Party!” “Long live the Red Army!”
Someone intones the proletarian hymn, and its sound carries
far along the streets. In those minutes, two hundred draftees at
the Stalin quarter recruitment office raised a fervent ovation in
honor of the party and government. A meeting sprang up spon-
taneously. Someone took a red towel from a table, and in the
hands of a draftee it turns into a scarlet banner under which the
draftees swear to do their duty with honor to their homeland
and to the proletariat of the whole world. 21
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The Call of Blood
Pravda and other Soviet newspapers were full of reports on

public meetings at which workers, peasants, and representatives
of the Soviet intelligentsia were encouraged by the regime to
express their support for the intervention. Given the official na-
ture of these meetings, it is not surprising that the language used
by speakers and authors of resolutions was taken directly from
Molotov’s speech and other official pronouncements. Emphasis
was placed on the national liberation of Ukrainians and Belaru-
sians and the social liberation of the entire population of Poland’s
eastern provinces. Rhetoric that had characterized the “besieged
fortress” mentality was abandoned almost overnight in favor of
the language of national (and social) liberation. Not only was the
fortress no longer besieged, but its walls were extended west-
ward, necessitating a new terminology. The “national liberation”
paradigm fit the bill. The Soviet authorities’ claim that they had
entered the war on behalf of their Slavic blood brothers, aban-
doned by their erstwhile Polish rulers, had limited impact on
world opinion at best.
If one judges by Soviet media reports, Stalin and Molotov
scored a major public-relations coup. But should one trust report-
ing in the Soviet media? The London Times wrote on 18 Septem-
ber regarding the events of the previous day in Moscow: “At 8
o’clock the Russian wireless broadcast a summary of the contents
of the Note [to the Polish government], which stated that So-
viet action was necessary to safeguard her own interests and to
protect the White Russian and Ukrainian minorities in Eastern
Poland. . . . It has been noted that the Soviet arguments bear
a family resemblance to those invariably adopted by Hitler and
as often demolished by the Soviet Press as pretexts for aggression.
Accordingly, it was a bewildered Soviet population which listened
to M. Molotoff ’s broadcast this morning.” G. E. R. Gedye, the
New York Times Moscow correspondent, reported on 17 Septem-
ber from the Soviet capital: “The Moscow population, recalling
the reiterated declarations of leaders headed by Joseph Stalin that
they did not desire a foot of anyone else’s territory, went about
today asking: ‘What has happened now?’ ‘Are we at war; with
whom and why?’ ‘What do we want in Poland?’ ‘What has gone
wrong with the neutrality pact signed with the express purpose
of keeping us from war?’” 22
147
In the West, the Red Army’s invasion of Poland was consid-

ered a stab in the back of a victim of Nazi aggression. Even pol-
iticians such as Winston Churchill in Britain, who gave limited
support to the Soviet action, did so on the basis of arguments
different from those invoked by Stalin and Molotov. But what
was the impact of national-liberation rhetoric at home? Did it
work, or did it fail? To answer this question, one has to deal with
the difficult task of assessing Soviet public opinion. In the last few
decades, popular attitudes toward international politics and, in
particular, questions of war and peace have attracted a fair amount
of attention from scholars of the Second World War.
Public opinion was an important factor in the formulation of
foreign policy by democratic governments and an important con-
sideration in the efforts of dictatorial regimes to mobilize public
support for warfare. The Soviet Union certainly falls into the latter
category, which creates additional problems in the acquisition
and assessment of relevant data. It is difficult but not impossible
to track major trends in the mood of the population under dic-
tatorial regimes, partly because the regimes themselves allocated
significant resources to monitoring those trends and changes.23
The NKVD Pollsters

Throughout Soviet history, the Communist Party leadership reg-
ularly received top-secret reports assessing the attitudes of the
Soviet public to party policies. The reports came from two sources:
party organs and the secret police. Whatever the circumstances,
both types of reports always stated that the vast majority of the
Soviet people welcomed, accepted, and endorsed the latest initia-
tives, thereby echoing newspaper coverage of those events. They
then turned to the opinions of those who were doubtful of party
policies or expressed opinions characterized as blatantly anti-
Soviet. In that regard, both types of reports differed profoundly
from the Soviet media.
The party reports tended to give less coverage of anti-Soviet
activities, while the secret-police reports largely focused on just
such activities. There was good reason for the difference. Empha-
sizing negative responses would not be in the interest of party
officials preparing the reports, since it could be interpreted as
148
The Call of Blood
an indication of deficiencies in their own propaganda efforts.

Secret-police officials, on the other hand, could only benefit from
focusing on negative responses. Dealing with existing or imag-
ined opposition to the regime was the raison d’être of the secret
police, and the reports provided, among other things, additional
justification for maintaining an extensive and costly secret-police
apparatus.24
The credibility of secret-police reports was at the core of the
discussion about compliance and resistance under Stalinism in
the first issue of Kritika (2000).25 There is good reason to ques-
tion the reliability of the information included in the reports,
especially when they are mined exclusively for manifestations of
opposition to the regime. There seems to be general agreement,
however, that when it comes to “negative” statements—those crit-
ical of government policy—they certainly cannot be regarded as
expressions of the only authentic feelings of the population but
can be used to assess the range of responses offered by the Soviet
public to a given initiative on the part of the Soviet state. But
what about expressions of support for the regime and its actions?
Should they be taken at face value or ignored?
One way to deal with this question is to distinguish two kinds
of endorsements of official policy—those expressed in Bolshevik
parlance of the period and those that did not mirror official pro-
nouncements. Expressions of approval for Soviet entry into the
war that used a vocabulary different from that of party declara-
tions and media reports are of special interest. An added benefit
of focusing on such expressions is the possibility of identifying
sources of support for government policy beyond the party’s own
organizational base. The unexpected change of rhetoric in the
Soviet media’s justification of the coming military campaign is
a case in which such a strategy may be applied to good effect.
I shall try to reconstruct the variety of positive and negative
responses to the Soviet invasion of Poland on the basis of thirty-
three reports about the reaction of the Soviet public to the out-
break of the war filed by officials of the People’s Commissariat
of Internal Affairs of Ukraine between 27 August and 15 October
1939. These reports have only recently become available to scholars
as part of a publication project undertaken by historians from
the Institute of Ukrainian Archaeography in Kyiv in cooperation
149
with archivists of the Security Service of Ukraine, and with the

support of a number of German governmental and public insti-
tutions. Most of the reports were prepared for Nikita Khrushchev,
then first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of Ukraine, and for Lavrentii Beriia, people’s commissar of
internal affairs of the USSR, by the people’s commissar of inter-
nal affairs, Ivan Serov, and his deputy, Mykola Horlynsky. They
were based in part on reports that Serov and his assistants were
receiving from the various regions of Ukraine and from NKVD
officials in Red Army units posted in Ukraine. These, too, are
included in my analysis.26
On 17 September, the date of the Soviet invasion of Poland
and Molotov’s speech to the Soviet people, Mykola Horlynsky
sent an urgent request to his subordinates: “I propose that all
heads of operational sections of the NKVD of the USSR with
a secret service and intelligence in Kyiv present secret-service
reports on the reaction of the population to Comrade Molotov’s
speech on the entry of our forces into Poland to the head of the
Second Department of the NKVD of the USSR by 2:00 p. m.
today. Thereafter draft versions of such reports are to be present-
ed to Comrade Pavlychev every three hours.” By the end of the
day, Horlynsky had filed two reports assessing the mood of the
Ukrainian population for Nikita Khrushchev. The first was based
on the reactions of Kyivans, while the second was a follow-up
memo including data telephoned to Kyiv from NKVD offices
in the regions. Two more reports followed on the next day, and
reporting continued on a regular basis until the very end of the
campaign.27
What did the people of Soviet Ukraine think about the war?
To begin answering this question, I shall present a spectrum of
both “positive” and “negative” responses without trying to establish
how widespread they may have been among the Soviet Ukrainian
public in September 1939. In general, the NKVD reports agreed
with the Soviet media, claiming that official efforts to convince
the population of the legitimacy of government action had been
largely successful. “A number of passages of Comrade Molotov’s
speech were accompanied by applause,” wrote Mykola Horlynsky
on 17 September.
150
The Call of Blood
The reaction of students was particularly enthusiastic.

“At Kyiv University, Comrade Molotov’s speech was met with
shouts of ‘hurrah’ by students,” reads the report. The following
report suggested that young people in the provinces were just as
enthusiastic: “A number of incidents have been noted of volun-
tary reporting to military recruitment offices, with requests for
enlistment in the ranks of the RKKA [Workers’ and Peasants’
Red Army]. A group of students of the Mykolaïv Pedagogical
Institute made a collective appeal to be enlisted as volunteers in
the Red Army.” While rank-and-file NKVD agents and their
superiors were under pressure not only to find and record but also
to fabricate positive responses to Communist Party initiatives,
the episodes described above could hardly have been fabricated,
as they were easily verifiable.28
What aroused such enthusiasm on the part of students? The
information about Mykolaïv students volunteering for the Red
Army was preceded in Horlynsky’s report by the statement that
“The action of the USSR is being assessed as a step in the direc-
tion of starting a world revolution and active struggle against the
fascist aggressors.” A student of the Vinnytsia Medical Institute
named Benadsky allegedly told an NKVD informer that “our
Soviet government will have to bear the red banner of revolution
farther west. The defeat of Poland shows that one of the links of
fascism has been broken.” One might assume that the new crop of
Soviet youth, born after 1917 and raised on notions of revolution-
ary romanticism, was welcoming an opportunity to follow in the
footsteps of participants in the October Revolution and heroes
of the Spanish Civil War, lionized by Soviet propaganda, in order
to carry the torch of revolution to Central and Western Europe.
The references to “fascist aggressors” and the breaking of “one of
the links of fascism” echo Soviet anti-fascist propaganda of the
years leading up to the conclusion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact, which disappointed and disheartened idealistically inclined
Soviet students. It appears that the students were prepared to see
the Soviet invasion of Poland as a reversal of the policy initiated
by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.29
The report forwarded by Horlynsky to Lavrentii Beriia on
19 September included information from the regions indicating
that not only students but also young workers and peasants were
151
eager to take part in the war. In the city of Osypenko (pres-

ent-day Berdiansk), “immediately after Comrade Molotov’s radio
address, eighty men presented themselves, twenty of them with
their wives, and asked that they be directed to the Red Army to
take part in military operations.” Recruits in the Chernihivka
region of Zaporizhzhia Oblast “began to demand their speedy
enlistment in the army so that they might be in time to take part
in military operations together with the whole Red Army.”
It was not entirely clear to the population whether the Soviet
troops would simply occupy Western Ukraine and Belarus with-
out military action, fight the Poles, or engage the German army
as well. R. P. Sheiner, the author of a letter intercepted by the
NKVD, anticipated a war with Germany. “We had to take this
action,” he wrote about the invasion of Poland, “for the Germans
would have attacked us in any event, so it is better to strike them
on Polish territory than on ours.” Some Red Army officers cross-
ing the Polish border on the morning of 17 September believed
that they were going to fight the Germans. “I thought that this
was the beginning of war with Germany,” remembered one of
them later, “and many other officers thought the same.” 30
Most of the initial criticism of the Soviet invasion of Poland
recorded by NKVD agents came from the ranks of the intel-
ligentsia. Svitozor Drahomanov, the son of Ukraine’s most in-
fluential political thinker of the nineteenth century, Mykhailo
Drahomanov, and a translator at the Art Publishing House in
Kyiv, allegedly stated in the presence of an NKVD informer:
“In essence, this is the fourth partition of Poland, carried out by
arrangement between Stalin and Hitler. . . . All that is going on
may be called the victory of Hitlerism, which is the highest stage
of the development of capitalist society.” Drahomanov expressed
his critique of official actions in language borrowed from recent
Soviet propaganda and Vladimir Lenin’s writings on the nature
of imperialism. He was not the only one to attack the regime
from the standpoint of Marxist orthodoxy and anti-fascism.
A graduate student at the Institute of Folklore of the Ukrainian
Academy of Sciences named Lanovy reportedly declared in the
presence of a government informer: “And what will the whole
world say? They will say that we are dividing Poland together
with fascist Germany. England and France will declare war on
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The Call of Blood
us, which means that we will be fighting them together with

Germany. What will the Western communists and the workers
of the world say then?” 31
The sudden U-turn embodied in the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact certainly undermined the Soviet regime’s credibility among
many of its international and domestic supporters. For years the
regime had attacked fascist Germany as the main threat to peace,
prepared the population for a possible alliance with the Western
democracies, and placed heavy propaganda emphasis on com-
munist and proletarian solidarity in the world-wide fight against
fascism. The USSR was at the forefront of that struggle—the
greatest hope of all peace-loving peoples. Now all that was sud-
denly over. In the eyes of those Soviet citizens who linked the
pact with the invasion of Poland, the regime stood condemned
of complete disregard for its own political and ideological com-
mitments. The Soviet Union was now making a mockery of its
peace-loving rhetoric, becoming an aggressor, and betraying
not only Britain and France but also its communist allies in the
West—such were the themes of “negative” responses recorded
by NKVD agents. There was also a good deal of criticism of the
government’s action from the viewpoint of realpolitik. Quite a few
people from a variety of social backgrounds believed that Hitler
would outsmart the Soviet leadership and eventually start a war
with the USSR. These sentiments, widespread in Ukraine, were
shared by many inhabitants of Leningrad, as indicated by the
research of Sarah Davies.32
The apparent hypocrisy of the Soviet regime also drew strong
criticism from students, who were the most enthusiastic support-
ers of the regime. “The shift in our policy has been too abrupt,”
said a student from Kyiv named Rybchynsky. “Only a month ago
we were offering assistance to Poland against the aggressor, and
now we are condemning it at every turn and have even taken
over part of its territory.” Some students resorted to irony. “Our
papers cast fascism and Hitler in the darkest colors. Now it turns
out that those were all lies. Hitler is conducting the war in most
humane fashion; he is not devastating the population or cultur-
al treasures,” said a student of the Kyiv Construction Institute
named Velednytsky.
153
Also questioned was the social component of the Soviet lib-

eration paradigm. “It would have been better not to liberate the
people of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus from the lords’
oppression, for things are no better among us. They will feel that
in a while,” opined the medical student Gomerbarg. Even the
least controversial claim, that of fraternal ties with the peoples of
the newly occupied territories, was ridiculed. “It is very strange
to hear assertions about our brethren in the West,” said the Kyiv
student Zalizniak. “Now we call them brothers, but if that broth-
er had written you a letter earlier, you would have suffered for
it.” True believers from the ranks of the Red Army could also
be quite critical. They were dissatisfied that their commanders
had canceled a sharpshooting exercise known as “Shooting the
Fascist.” 33
During the first few days of the invasion, Horlynsky reported
to his superiors that there were no negative responses recorded
among workers. Nor were there any reactions, either positive or
critical, attributed to peasants in the reports. But soon reports be-
gan to arrive from the regions, and while they also focused largely
on critical opinions attributed to the intelligentsia, there were
growing references to critical statements by workers and peasants
alike. Some of these repeated arguments noted in reports on the
mood of the intelligentsia, but there were also new themes and ar-
guments. Their underlying motives were protest against economic
hardship, refusal to fight for Soviet rule in case of a German-
Soviet conflict, and readiness to exploit the war in order to settle
scores with the regime. A worker from Odesa named Tsukanov
allegedly said in the presence of an NKVD informer: “Hitler is
attacking Poland and will go on to attack our communists. The
war is only a few days old, and we already have nothing.”
A peasant named Hustovydyn in Sumy province allegedly
tried to disrupt a meeting on the occasion of Molotov’s speech,
saying, “The Soviet government has stripped me bare and reduced
me to poverty. Not a single idiot will go to the front.” Kalynychen-
ko, a peasant from Kirovohrad Oblast, told his fellow collective
farmers: “The war will solve everything. We suffered for a long
time; now there is less time to wait. Soon we will live without
collectives.” His attitude was shared by another peasant named
Krosalo, who stated: “Even if the Germans take us over, we will
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The Call of Blood
be none the worse for that. On the collective farm, you are still
hungry and threadbare. In 1933, Soviet power was guilty of starv-
ing many people to death.” 34
We cannot assess the popularity of either positive or critical
opinions among the Soviet public presented in the NKVD re-
ports. Many objects of NKVD surveillance managed to survive
into the late 1930s precisely because they were able to keep their
mouths shut or make neutral or pro-Soviet pronouncements
when they suspected that they were dealing with an NKVD
informer. A forty-eight-year-old Ukrainian woman who came
from a dekulakized family and worked on the Soviet railroads
commented as follows to interviewers of the Harvard Refugee
Interview Project: “Generally, people in the Soviet Union worked
hard and were silent; they were afraid to talk too much or to ask
for some information because of the common terror and because
many Soviet agents and spies were among the people. Especially
former ‘kulaks,’ people like my husband and me, were silent and
worked hard.” Whether genuine or not, both positive and nega-
tive statements contained elements of people’s real thinking, not
constructed for the sake of the informer.35
What we do know, both from the reports and from other
sources, is that resentment among the peasantry based on the out-
comes of collectivization and the Great Famine of 1932–33 was an
ongoing concern, and that the urban population, including that of
Moscow, Leningrad, and capitals of the republics, suffered from
shortages of food and manufactured goods that grew worse in
August and September 1939. The public was generally confused by
the recently signed Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, not understanding
on which side, if any, the Soviet Union was entering the war.
Some of the people “polled” by the NKVD were concerned about
what Britain and France would say regarding the Soviet invasion
of an independent and embattled state.
The Nationality Card

The NKVD reports divided Soviet citizens into a number of cate-
gories, most notably by class, or social status, status and national-
ity. Judging by these reports, the strongest anti-Soviet statements
were expressed by peasants and members of “other nationalities,”
155
which, according to the NKVD, generally meant Poles and Ger-

mans. Among the social groups, it was the intelligentsia, not the
peasants or workers, that received most attention. If workers and
collective farmers were allotted one category each, the intelligen-
tsia had two: many reports included separate sections on “office
workers and intelligentsia” and “academic circles.” The special
interest of NKVD officials in the opinions of the intelligentsia
was also reflected in the number of statements quoted in NKVD
reports.
The sections on the intelligentsia were two to four times lon-
ger than those on the working class or collective farmers. Some
members of the intelligentsia quoted in the reports were under
surveillance as part of ongoing investigations into the activities of
illegal political organizations. Such people were already surround-
ed by informants, and it was relatively easy for NKVD agents to
obtain information about their attitudes. Judging by the reports,
it was the intelligentsia that provided the most sophisticated ap-
praisal of changes in Soviet foreign policy, and it was the same
group that reacted most actively to the dramatic change in Soviet
nationality discourse on the eve and in the course of the Soviet
invasion of Poland.
What was the intelligentsia’s reaction to the changes in party
rhetoric? If one trusts the NKVD reports, it was overwhelmingly
positive. If one looks at statements and comments that did not
reflect Molotov’s address and media pronouncements, it appears
that the national-liberation theme did indeed strike a chord with
the intelligentsia. It was interpreted in two ways. The first was
the old imperial view that regarded Ukrainians and Belarusians
as part of a greater Russian nation and thus as Russians; their
liberation meant the reunification of the Russian people and
the return of the imperial borderlands to Russian control. The
second approach was closer to the official government line, as
it postulated the liberation and unification not of the Russian
people but of the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands and peoples.
Both approaches, the old imperial and the new national one, were
reinforced by the class interpretation expressed in the official
pronouncements: the Russians (alternatively, the Ukrainians and
Belarusians) were to be liberated not only from national but also
from social oppression.
156
The Call of Blood
The sentiments of those who subscribed to the old imperial

vision of the Russian state and nation but were prepared to adapt
it to the new official terminology were expressed by a professor
of the Kyiv medical school named Romankevych, who allegedly
stated in the presence of an NKVD informer: “The Soviet Union
should restore the Russian lands—the Kholm region, Western
Ukraine, and Western Belarus.” A worker from Odesa named
Liubchenko went even further in his claim to the lost imperial
territories. “The Soviet government has acted properly,” he said
to an informer. “Western Ukraine and Belarus are settled by our
people and constitute our territory. We should restore Bessara-
bia—it is ours too, after all.” The treatment of Western Ukraine
and Western Belarus as lands settled by “our people” was quite
common in statements recorded by the NKVD, as were calls for
the annexation of Bessarabia, the former imperial province that
was annexed by Romania in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution
and allocated to the Soviet sphere of influence by the Molotov-
Ribbentrop Pact.
Interestingly enough, all these statements were quoted in
the sections of reports devoted to positive responses. They were
certainly in keeping with the notions of ethnicity held by the
authors of the reports, who assigned the responses of Ukrainians
and Russians to the sections on social categories but dealt with
the reactions of “Galicians”—that is, Ukrainians who came from
Galicia, formerly under the rule of Austria-Hungary—in the sec-
tions entitled “Among other nationalities.” 36
The old imperial interpretation of the invasion of Poland re-
corded in NKVD reports from Ukraine was apparently popular
in Russia as well. G. E. R. Gedye reported for New York Times
from Moscow on 18 September: “Privately, some confess con-
fusion as to how the invasion is to be reconciled with Joseph
Stalin’s declaration that he did not want a foot of others’ territory.
Others again rationalize this casuistically, saying, ‘But, of course,
this was ours, inhabited by our kin, and torn from us by Poland
in 1920.’” The academician Vladimir Vernadsky, one of the leaders
of the Constitutional Democratic Party in the Russian Empire,
the first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1918,
and a major figure in the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow
at the start of World War II, belonged to the latter group.
157
In his diary entry for 3 October, Vernadsky wrote that “The

seizure of (Western) Ukraine and Belarus is approved by all. The
course of history is amazingly spontaneous. The Poles are crazy.
And the Czechs (incomparably milder in that regard) have also
suffered because of it. But the policy of Stalin and Molotov is
realistic and, it seems to me, correct—a Russian policy of state.
In Poland, social revolution is a military force.” Vernadsky con-
sidered the takeover of Western Ukraine and Belarus a mani-
festation of Russian policy and apparently had no problem with
Stalin’s export of revolution to Poland. His views were shared
by other members of the all-Union Academy. On 18 October
Vernadsky wrote that his colleague, the geochemist Aleksandr
Fersman, was “constantly under the influence of the takeover of
Ukr[aine]—a Russian policy.” 37
If intellectuals in Moscow saw the Soviet invasion of Poland
as a manifestation of Russian policy, most of their colleagues
in Ukraine interpreted it as evidence of the regime’s Ukrainian
policy. On 19 October, Vernadsky recorded in his diary a summa-
ry of his discussions with Leonid Iasnopolsky, a member of the
Ukrainian Academy of Sciences who had moved to Moscow in
1931. “Iasnopolsky,” wrote Vernadsky, “apparently like the over-
whelming majority of those who find themselves here, sympa-
thizes with Stalin’s policy. Not so much because of the Germans
as because of the restoration of the country’s political significance
and the ‘liberation’ of the Ukrainians and Belarusians from Po-
land.” Vernadsky’s observations on Iasnopolsky's views are echoed
by the NKVD reports sent to Nikita Khrushchev and Lavrentii
Beriia from Ukraine in September–October 1939. If one trusts
those reports, most Kyiv academics subscribed to the modern,
“Ukrainian” interpretation of the national- and social-liberation
paradigm.38
Very few leading Ukrainian intellectuals refused to be swayed
by official propaganda about benefits to the Ukrainian nation.
Among the most critical was the renowned Ukrainian poet
Maksym Rylsky, who was regarded by the NKVD as a Ukrainian
nationalist. Rylsky argued that the invasion of Poland “runs
counter to the humanity and justice about which we have always
made so much noise.” He continued: “And so I write verses ev-
ery day praising the valiant Soviet forces and the wisdom of our
158
The Call of Blood
policy, but there is no enthusiasm in my heart. We attacked the

weak, after all, and it is very hard for an honest poet to justify such
an action.” The authorities refused to grant Rylsky permission to
visit Western Ukraine in the fall of 1939. His opinion was shared
by other Ukrainian writers. Semen Skliarenko told an NKVD
informer: “In our time, you cannot believe anyone or anything.
The strong falls upon the weak—that is an eternal law of life. Just
yesterday we shouted that the Germans were barbarians, plunder-
ers, and scoundrels, but now we are almost trading kisses with
them. Such striking hypocrisy.” 39
If Ukrainian writers and poets were troubled by the injustice
of the invasion and the duplicity of Soviet foreign policy and pro-
paganda, academics took a much more forgiving attitude toward
the regime. Some of them were genuinely excited about the new
turn of events. Professor Mykola Hrinchenko of the Institute of
Folklore at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences allegedly told his
colleagues: “I do not know whether there is any other foreign-
policy measure of the Soviet authorities capable of arousing such
joy among Ukrainians as this one. Ukrainians have reason to re-
joice.” Hrinchenko explained his excitement by noting that, with
the Soviet takeover of eastern Poland, “the age-old hopes of the
people of Western Ukraine, starving and suffering under the Pol-
ish yoke, have come true.” It was a politically correct explanation
of the enthusiasm generated by the realization of the principal
goal of Ukrainian irredentism—the unification of the Ukrainian
lands, to which the Ukrainian national movement had aspired
since the latter half of the nineteenth century. Similar ideas were
expressed by other Ukrainian intellectuals.
An analysis of responses to the Soviet invasion of Poland re-
corded by NKVD agents in Ukraine allows one to conclude that
the regime’s use of national-liberation rhetoric to justify its entry
into World War II succeeded in extending its power base and
co-opting dissenting views by appropriating nationalist discourse
and presenting itself to society as a benefactor of the national
cause. By and large, the Ukrainian intelligentsia was prepared
to follow the government’s lead in regarding the Red Army’s
invasion of Poland as a campaign of national liberation and uni-
fication of their native land, and not as their country’s entry into
global military conflict.40
159
⁂
The Soviet leadership’s decision to justify its attack on Poland by
invoking the liberation of that country’s Ukrainian and Belaru-
sian minorities helped mobilize support for the Soviet entry into
World War II not only among those of its citizens who consid-
ered the Red Army’s invasion of Poland justified in geostrategic
and military terms, or were eager to promote world revolution,
but also among those who considered it a just restoration of the
old Russian imperial boundaries, a step toward the reunification
of the Russian people and, last but not least, the unification of
the Ukrainian and Belarusian nations. The broadening of popular
support for Soviet foreign policy thus benefited the regime at
a time when deteriorating economic conditions and a falling stan-
dard of living coincided with a sharp turn of Soviet propaganda
away from its established anti-fascist attitude, which increased
the number of critics of the regime.
An examination of the NKVD reports makes it quite clear
that the Soviet people were not limited to clear-cut compliance or
resistance in their dealings with the Soviet state under Stalinism.
They were not merely “objects” of state policy but “subjects” in
their own right who used their “subjectivity” not only to embrace
the regime or learn how to “speak Bolshevik” in order to survive
but also to lend or withdraw support from the state, depending
on its policies. That was certainly true in the 1920s, and it appears
to have been true for the late 1930s as well. The dictatorial state
remained concerned about the attitudes of the population, classi-
fied along social and national lines. As the reaction of Ukrainian
intellectuals to the Soviet invasion of Poland demonstrates, rep-
resentatives of individual peoples were prepared to lend condi-
tional support to the regime if it offered the realization of their
objectives in return.
The initiative came from the state, but it was ultimately up
to the particular group to accept or reject the government’s of-
fer. Besides, it was members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia who
prepared historical, demographic, and other data on the newly
acquired territories for the Soviet government and were thus in
a position to influence the official position on a variety of issues.
It is easy to assume that lengthy presentations to NKVD agents
160
The Call of Blood
by the intellectuals under their surveillance were intended not

only as manifestations of loyalty but also as attempts to influence
party policy.
The Soviet regime had co-opted national-liberation discourse
and policies in the 1920s. It embarked on a policy of co-opting
Russian public opinion in the 1930s. Now it used similar tac-
tics to co-opt those battered by its policies of the 1930s—the
Ukrainian and Belarusian intellectual elites. Unlike in the 1920s,
the government was prepared to offer them not only concessions
at home but also opportunities abroad. The introduction of the
ethnic theme into Soviet foreign-policy pronouncements initi-
ated a change in Soviet nationality policy, documented in the
Ukrainian case by the studies of Serhy Yekelchyk and Vladyslav
Hrynevych. It was an obvious case in which foreign-policy con-
siderations led to a shift in nationality policy at home.
If the “Piedmont principle,” as Terry Martin has argued, was
seen by the authorities as “an exploitable benefit of a domestical-
ly driven policy,” and the “besieged fortress” mentality arguably
reflected the regime’s domestic and foreign-policy concerns alike,
the “national-liberation” paradigm was formulated and imple-
mented first and foremost in response to foreign-policy consid-
erations. We see no attempt on the part of Soviet officials to
employ national-liberation rhetoric or implement related policies
either at home or abroad before the Stalin-Dimitrov meeting of
7 September 1939.41
Adopted quite unexpectedly in a desperate attempt to find jus-
tification for the coming aggression, the new national-liberation
paradigm turned out to be a useful tool for the Soviet government
in the course of World War II. It helped mobilize support for So-
viet entry into the war in September 1939. For the next two years,
it helped promote the Sovietization of Western Ukraine, Western
Belarus and, in 1940–41, Bessarabia and Bukovyna. It also helped
the Soviet leadership reclaim those territories in 1944–45. At the
Yalta Conference in February 1945, neither President Roosevelt
nor Prime Minister Churchill was able to refute Stalin’s claims
to Lviv and Drohobych, which were presented in ethnonational
terms.
It was only with the start of the Cold War that the Sovi-
et authorities were forced to abandon the national-liberation
161
paradigm. Once again, as in the 1930s, ethnic contacts began to be

regarded not as an opportunity to export Soviet influence abroad
but as a channel through which the imperialist powers could cor-
rupt the Soviet nationalities. From the late 1940s on, campaigns
were launched against local nationalism, and contacts with cross-
border ethnic communities and diasporas were severely curtailed.
Once again, as in the 1930s, diasporas and compatriots abroad
were condemned as enemies of the Soviet state and people.42
162
10.
The Battle for Eastern
Europe
“The combination of Russian revolutionary sweep with American

efficiency is the essence of Leninism,” declared Joseph Stalin in
1924, the year of Lenin’s death.1 Stalin’s fascination with American
culture and business ethic was shared by many Bolsheviks of the
1920s. The last words read by Lenin’s wife to her dying husband
came from a short novel by the American author Jack London.
While the United States was among the last countries to establish
diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, American companies
were open for business with the Soviets earlier than their Euro-
pean competitors, supplying expertise and equipment for Soviet
construction sites from Magnitogorsk in the Urals to the Dnieper
Hydroelectric Station in Ukraine.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speedy recognition of Stalin’s
government in Moscow soon after his inauguration, along with
his New Deal policies, helped create in the Soviet media an
image of the American president as the kind of capitalist with
whom one could do business. With Stalin fearing encirclement
by Germany and Japan and mistrusting Britain and France, the
United States emerged in Soviet public discourse of the 1930s
as the least hostile, if not the friendliest, capitalist country in
the world. US military intervention in the Far East during the
Russian Civil War was largely forgotten, if not forgiven, by the
Europe-obsessed Bolshevik leadership in the Kremlin.
When Hitler turned against Stalin in 1941, the Soviet lead-
er found it much easier in historical, political, and psycholog-
ical terms to ally himself with Roosevelt than with Winston
163
Churchill—in Bolshevik eyes, the embodiment of British impe-

rialism since the 1917 revolution. Until Roosevelt’s death in April
1945, he remained Stalin’s favorite capitalist leader. The United
States was not only the country on which the Soviet Union most
relied during the war with Germany but also the one with which
it was most comfortable when it came to building the postwar
future: unlike the British, the Americans were not going to stay in
Europe. In the Far East they were willing to accommodate Soviet
territorial claims, and in the newly created United Nations Or-
ganization they treated the Soviets as equals, extending to them
the right of veto reserved for major powers.
What went wrong in Soviet-American relations after 1945?
This question, central to the debate on the causes of the Cold
War, has been answered in various ways. Without dismissing the
historical, cultural, and personal factors that led to the dramatic
change in Soviet-American relations after World War II, I put
the main emphasis on geopolitical factors. In the summary that
follows I propose that it was Soviet expansion, or rather the return
of Russia to Eastern and Central Europe, and direct American
involvement in that part of the European subcontinent with the
goal of protecting Western Europe and British positions in the
region that spelled the end not only of the Grand Alliance but
also of the relative friendliness of the interwar years and eventu-
ally led to the Cold War.
Interwar Eastern Europe was comprised of a number of young
states that emerged on the ruins of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and
(in part) Russian empires. The new states aspired to be national
but grabbed more territory settled by minorities than they could
assimilate to their titular nationalities. France and then Britain
saw the region as a cordon sanitaire against the spread of com-
munism. Stalin viewed it as a launch pad for capitalist attack not
unlike that of 1920, when Polish and Ukrainian troops supported
by the Entente captured Kyiv.
When in 1939 the French and British refused to allow Sta-
lin to enter Eastern Europe militarily to deal with the German
threat, the Soviet leader did so on the basis of the Molotov-
Ribbentrop Pact. At the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam meetings
with his new Western allies, Stalin insisted on keeping his gains
of 1939 and claimed an East European sphere of influence that
164
The Battle for Eastern Europe
went beyond the one arranged with Churchill in 1944. At the

Yalta conference, Roosevelt refused to recognize Stalin’s claim
to determine the political future of Eastern Europe, shifting the
problem of spheres of influence to the arena of diplomatic negoti-
ations, but at Potsdam Truman bowed to the seemingly inevitable
Soviet control of the region.
Stalin had no clear idea of what to do with his new sphere
of influence—whether to Sovietize it completely or leave some
elements of democracy and free enterprise in place. He insisted,
however, that it had to be part of the Soviet “sphere of security,”
as he called it in negotiations with Roosevelt and Churchill. He
once went on record saying that the Russians knew how to fight
but not how to negotiate. Stalin was determined to maintain
Soviet political control over the territory taken by the Red Army
during the war. He would compromise on Iran and Turkey, or
even retreat from them, but dig in his heels on Eastern Europe.
After Britain’s unexpected postwar implosion as a world su-
perpower, American involvement in European affairs threatened
Stalin’s position in Eastern Europe. The threat, however, came not
from US military power but from its economic potential, embod-
ied in the Marshall Plan. Stalin could not compete economically.
He responded militarily, as in the Berlin blockade, and politically,
as in the communist coup in Czechoslovakia. One way or anoth-
er, he sealed off Eastern Europe from the West to maintain his
control over the region. The Cold War would eventually become
global, but its beginnings and official end in Central and Eastern
Europe in 1989 attest to the paramount importance of that region
in Soviet-American Cold War rivalry.
Presuming that this reading of the fall of the Grand Alliance
and the start of the Cold War correctly reflects Stalin’s attitudes
toward Eastern Europe and American involvement there, what
lessons, if any, can be drawn for the current round of Moscow-
Washington rivalry, often called Cold War II?
There are numerous parallels with the events of seventy years
ago. Although the new rivalry seems to be global in scope, once
again involving the Middle East, the eye of the new international
relations hurricane is in the area known today as the “new East-
ern Europe.” It covers some former Soviet republics and extends
from the Baltics through Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova to the
165
Transcaucasus. Like most of the states that emerged on the ruins

of the old empires in 1918, most of the newly independent states
of extended Eastern Europe are economically and militarily weak,
have major problems with democracy, and include significant eth-
nic minorities. Like their interwar predecessors, they are viewed
in Moscow as a launch pad for Western aggression but are per-
ceived in the West as the antemurale where Russian expansion
into Europe can and should be stopped.
Putin’s Russia is staging a return to its “near abroad” in a way
that parallels the “return” of Stalin’s Soviet Union to the lands
that had been part of the Russian Empire or its sphere of inter-
est. Some territories are being annexed outright, while others are
being claimed as part of the Moscow-run economic and military
union. As at the beginning of the Cold War, the main threat to
Moscow’s ambitions in the region is American economic power
and the appeal of its democratic institutions rather than its mili-
tary might. And, as before, Moscow’s response to that economic
and ideological challenge usually comes in military form. The
Russians want a “new Yalta”—a division of Europe into spheres
of influence. The Americans are resisting, as they did at Yalta.
There are differences as well. The most obvious one is that
with the exception of parts of Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova,
the rest of the new Eastern Europe is not occupied or controlled
by Russian troops, as most of Eastern Europe was seventy years
ago. The countries in question are basically free to make their
own choices with regard to form of government and participation
in economic and even military alliances. This “openness” of the
region creates both opportunities and challenges for the devel-
opment of US-Russian relations, but challenges prevail as the
dangers of open confrontation and proxy wars increase.
Can the history of the early Cold War help us understand
the present-day problems of Russo-American relations? Yes, it
can. The American political establishment spent a good part of
the Cold War trying to answer the question of whether Presi-
dent Roosevelt sold out Eastern Europe to Stalin at Yalta. But
however one answered that not very productive question, there
was general agreement that “losing” Eastern Europe was a bad
idea, and that ceding it to the Soviet sphere of influence did not
prevent the Cold War. Another lesson drawn from those events
166
was that the great powers could not decide the fate of the East
European nations without inviting them to the negotiating table.
These valuable takeaways from the past can be very useful today
as the United States and Russia face new tensions in the part of
the world that sparked the Cold War seventy-five years ago.
167
11.
The American Dream
On 15 February 1947, the Soviet Politburo approved a law “On the

Prohibition of Marriage between Citizens of the USSR and
Foreigners.” Those found in violation of the new law were to
be charged with anti-Soviet agitation and prosecuted according
to article 58 of the Soviet penal code. In theory, a Soviet citizen
could still marry a foreigner, but only after renouncing Soviet
citizenship for that of a foreign country—an even greater crime,
defined as “betrayal of the motherland” and punishable by exe-
cution, according to the same article 58.
The Iron Curtain was coming down between the Soviet
Union and the outside world, breaking links established during
the war and preventing the establishment of new ones. The state
was laying exclusive claim to the loyalty of Soviet men and, more
particularly, women, but the justification offered for the adoption
of the law was as benign and humanitarian as it could possibly be.
“Our women who have married foreigners and found themselves
abroad in unaccustomed conditions feel bad and are subject to
discrimination,” read the text of the law adopted by the Supreme
Soviet in March 1947.1
It has been argued that the reasons for the introduction of
the new law included the dire demographic situation in the So-
viet Union, which had lost tens of millions of its citizens in the
war. Scholars also point to the regime’s apparent desire to avoid
recognition of dual citizenship and thus conflicting loyalties in
families created during the war by Soviet citizens on German-
occupied territories or in Germany itself, as well as to prevent the
169
formation of such families in Eastern Europe, where there was

now a significant Soviet military contingent. Finally, the Soviet
law was adopted in the context of World War II laws and reg-
ulations prohibiting relationships between German soldiers and
East European slave laborers and between American soldiers and
German and Austrian women.2
In this essay, I consider the Soviet prohibition on marriag-
es with foreigners in the context of growing Cold War tensions
between the Soviet Union and its former World War II allies,
Americans in particular. My focus is on one particular relationship
produced by the presence of American airmen on the Poltava air
base between April 1944 and June 1945. In the final year of the war,
the US Air Force established three air bases in Ukraine behind the
Soviet lines. The Poltava base (the other two were at Myrhorod and
Pyriatyn) played an important role in American shuttle-bombing
operations against targets in Eastern Europe. Thousands of pilots,
airplane mechanics, and rank-and-file soldiers participated in the
shuttle operations. Moreover, tens of thousands of citizens of the
three Ukrainian towns were able to meet the Americans and,
in some cases, establish close personal relations with US airmen
stationed there for the duration of the war.
I discuss the story of the three airbases in my book Forgotten
Bastards of the Eastern Front (2019), where I document Soviet
efforts to break up relationships between American airmen and
Soviet women. In this essay, I continue that story into the early
Cold War era. The research presented in my book leaves little
doubt that the Soviet practice of disrupting relations and pro-
hibiting marriages between American and Soviet citizens, driven
by ideological zeal, xenophobic distrust of the West, and cul-
tural inferiority, began while the USSR and the United States
were still allies. The story told in this essay, that of the Ukrainian
woman Zinaida Tkachenko and the American airman John Ba-
zan, demonstrates in great detail the extent to which the Soviet
government and its secret police were prepared to go in order to
deny Soviet citizens not only the right but also the opportunity
to marry Americans. Although there were no basic changes of
policy in that regard between 1944 and 1947, the Soviet attitude
toward marriages with foreigners hardened significantly with the
start of the Cold War.3
170
The American Dream
The love story of the thirty-three-year-old American airplane

mechanic John J. Bazan and the twenty-four-year-old Ukrainian
woman Zinaida Tkachenko began on a summer day in Poltava
in 1944.
Zinaida Tkachenko had been born there in 1921 to the family
of a blue-collar worker. Before the outbreak of the Soviet-German
war in 1941, she managed to complete seven classes of secondary
education, get married, and give birth to a baby girl named Liud-
myla. She was twenty-three years old when the first Americans
showed up in her native city. She soon met John. Born in New
York City, John Bazan belonged to a family that counted seven
sons and one daughter. Before the war the entire family lived at
867 Van Nest Avenue in the East Bronx. John was the oldest child,
born on 4 February 1911. He joined the US Army on 17 April 1942.
Army records identified him at the time as a single white male
with no dependents. He had completed two years of high school,
and his civilian occupation was listed as “technician.” John was of
medium height, 68 inches tall, and weighed 147 pounds.
A photo of John Bazan in military uniform that he gave Zin-
aida showed a man with an open face and a pleasant, somewhat
shy smile. The chevrons on his left shoulder indicated that he
held the rank of sergeant. Zinaida also kept another photo of
John, pictured in warm winter clothing next to the American
barracks at Poltava. Unlike many Ukrainian women who dated
Americans, she did not conceal her relations with John from her
friends or neighbors. They later recalled that he spoke fluent Rus-
sian. His family records indicate that Ukrainian was his mother
tongue—the 1940 US Census gave Austria as the birthplace of
John’s mother, Catherine, who probably came from either Galicia
or Bukovyna, two Ukrainian-speaking regions that belonged to
Austria-Hungary before 1918. The two lovebirds could obviously
communicate on a variety of topics, and their relations soon devel-
oped into something more than a chance sexual encounter. John
often showed up at her house on the outskirts of Poltava with
parcels of food and gifts. Zinaida spoke of John as her husband.4
Oddly, Sergeant Bazan’s liaison with Zinaida Tkachenko at-
tracted no attention from SMERSH officers in 1944–45. They
probably had their eyes on bigger fish. But the Ministry of State
Security (MGB) caught up with Zinaida Tkachenko in the
171
fall of 1946, and in the spring of 1947 they opened a file on her.
Three MGB informers, recruited from among women who dated
Americans in 1944–45, testified that “While American aviators
were based at the Poltava airfield in 1944, Tkachenko was widely
acquainted with American servicemen, led a dissolute life, and
had intimate relations with an American, John Bazan, whom she
considered her husband.” But no sooner had the Poltava MGB
opened a file on her than Zinaida Tkachenko packed her be-
longings and moved out of the city. Both events took place in
April 1947. The MGB soon learned that Tkachenko had moved
to Zhovkva in western Ukraine, newly acquired from Poland.
The local MGB there was busy fighting the Ukrainian nation-
alist underground that was active in the region and had no time
or resources to deal with Tkachenko. It appeared that she had
successfully escaped the attention of Soviet counterintelligence,
which, once again, had bigger fish to fry.5
But the MGB officers were spurred into action in the spring
of 1948, when John Bazan petitioned the American embassy in
Moscow for an entry visa to the United States for his fiancée,
Zinaida Tkachenko. He gave his old Bronx address. The MGB
bosses in Kyiv wrote to their Zhovkva underlings, giving them
three days to put together a plan to investigate Tkachenko. By the
end of March 1948 they had established her address in Zhovk-
va and were reading her correspondence. In June they recruited
a friend of Tkachenko’s with whom she had come to Zhovkva in
April 1947 and could report the first results of their work.6
Tkachenko had allegedly moved because she did not have
a permanent job in Poltava and, to make ends meet, had had to
sell all the dresses she got from Bazan. While in Zhovkva, she
continued to correspond with Bazan and kept receiving parcels
from him. She also tried to get an exit visa to the United States,
but her correspondence with John came to an end in February
1948. Ironically, it was just when Bazan made his request to the
American embassy that Tkachenko, having no news from him,
decided to marry another man.
When an MGB informer ran into Tkachenko in mid-June
1947, Zinaida informed her that she had married. Her husband,
a Red Army soldier who also came from Poltava, had been dis-
missed from the service earlier that year. “When I asked her how
172
The American Dream
John was,” reported the agent, “Zina cursed, saying that there was
no point in thinking of what could never be and that John had
not written her for five months.” According to the MGB report,
Zinaida still held an “anti-Soviet and pro-American attitude” but
“had become convinced that it was impossible to obtain an exit
visa to America.” In July, the Kyiv MGB sent their Lviv subor-
dinates a copy of a letter to Tkachenko from the US embassy in
Moscow. Two months later Tkachenko and her new husband
suddenly left Zhovkva without informing anyone of their desti-
nation or new address.7
The MGB officers believed that Tkachenko had never given
up hope of emigrating to the United States. She tried to vis-
it Kaliningrad, the former Königsberg in East Prussia, by then
under Soviet control, apparently in the hope of escaping to the
West on a Soviet ship. She also expressed a desire to move to
Sakhalin Island in the Far East, which had been divided between
the Soviet Union and Japan before the war. None of those plans
materialized, and by 1951 Tkachenko was back in Poltava, working
as a seamstress at the local garment factory. It seemed that she
had come full circle and that her saga was finally over. But the
period of tranquility did not last very long.8
The Poltava MGB was actually waiting for Tkachenko. They
were particularly interested in her visit to the American embassy
in September 1946, which she had confided to a girlfriend who
turned out to be a MGB informer.
The details of the visit sounded like an episode from a spy
novel and must have quickened the pulse of the MGB agents.
Tkachenko had a long conversation with one of the embassy
officials, who questioned her thoroughly. After the meeting,
instead of allowing Tkachenko to leave by the front door, they
changed her appearance, put her in an embassy car, and drove her
to a railway station outside Moscow, where she boarded a train
for Poltava. Why did the Americans go to such lengths to conceal
Tkachenko’s identity if they had not recruited her as an agent?
The question was anything but rhetorical to the Poltava MGB
officers.9 When investigating Tkachenko’s plans to marry John
Bazan and leave for the United States, they had not suspected
him of working for American intelligence. But now that she had
173
met secretly with an embassy official, she fell under suspicion as

a potential spy.
The Kyiv MGB offered its subordinates in Poltava one of
its own agents to help crack the case. The agent’s code name
was “Karenina,” as in Leo Tolstoy’s famous novel. She was in-
troduced to Tkachenko as another unfortunate woman trying
to get an exit visa to the United States to join her loved one.
Karenina’s main task was to find out what had happened to Tka-
chenko when she visited the embassy. What made the episode
particularly suspicious in the eyes of the Kyiv and Poltava officers
was that the MGB could not confirm through its informers in
the embassy—Soviet citizens employed by the Americans—that
Tkachenko had been there at all, as her name was absent from the
register of visitors. Karenina, star agent that she was, succeeded
where others had failed and provided an important new piece of
information. After meeting with Tkachenko in June 1951, Kare-
nina delivered the name of the US official who had interviewed
Tkachenko—Roger Taylor. The MGB soon confirmed that there
was indeed such a consular official at the embassy, but it was
anyone’s guess whether he had recruited Tkachenko to work for
US intelligence.10
What concerned the MGB officers was Tkachenko’s ability to
establish contacts with Red Army officers. Their reports charac-
terized her as a cunning individual who was good at establishing
relations, especially with men. In the postwar Soviet Union, where
so many men had died in the war, it was no easy task for women
of Tkachenko’s background to marry, but she seemed to have no
problem in arranging her personal affairs. She had clearly capti-
vated John Bazan, who was still trying to get her into the United
States three years after their parting at Poltava. She got married
within weeks after the correspondence with Bazan ended, and her
plans to move to East Prussia in the hope of escaping from the
USSR via the Baltic Sea were also associated with a man serving
there in the Soviet Army. The fact that she eventually returned
to Poltava made her an eligible bride to scores of Soviet military
pilots posted at the bases previously used by the Americans.
The MGB had to do something to crack the Tkachenko
case and establish whether she was spying for the Americans.
They eventually decided to turn Tkachenko’s alleged knack for
174
The American Dream
establishing relations with Soviet military men against her and

introduce her to “Romeo,” an agent of military counterintelligence
posing as an army officer. His code name was “Nikolaev.” They
designed a complex scheme whereby Nikolaev and Tkachenko
would meet at the Poltava theater frequented by the Americans
during their stay in the area. An MGB informer code-named
“Rozova,” who was closest to Tkachenko, would invite her to
a performance, using two of four tickets purchased by the MGB.
Rozova would explain that the tickets had been bought by her
husband, but they had quarreled, so she was now happy to invite
Tkachenko to come along.
Nikolaev, for his part, was to pretend that he had an extra tick-
et for a friend who had failed to show up. With one seat empty
and another occupied by the MGB informer Rozova, Nikolaev
would be free to exercise his talents as “Romeo” and establish
contact with Tkachenko. He was supposed to invite the two ladies
to a cafe after the performance and then “develop” his contact
with Tkachenko. Nikolaev read his instructions on the day of the
planned operation, 4 October 1952, and signed below the line that
said: “Read, absorbed, and accepted for implementation.” But the
plan fell apart when Rozova told her handlers that she was busy
that evening and refused to go to the theater. Then Nikolaev took
a vacation. Eventually the operation had to be postponed until
December 1952. With the “Romeo” scenario delayed, the MGB
decided to bring back agent Karenina in order to find out as soon
as possible whether Tkachenko was a spy. If not, they needed to
recruit her as an agent for themselves.11
The Poltava MGB had high hopes of recruiting Tkachenko
to help with the MGB’s most important assignment of the early
Cold War—uncovering an alleged Jewish plot against the Soviet
regime. The anti-Semitic campaign in the USSR had picked up
with the worsening of Soviet-American relations and the creation
of the state of Israel in May 1948. From then on, Soviet Jews
would be suspected of concealing their true loyalty to the new
Jewish homeland and its American allies. The campaign against
“cosmopolitans,” a euphemism for Soviet Jewry, reached its height
in 1952, with scores of luminaries of the Soviet medical profession,
most of them Jewish, arrested on charges of poisoning or con-
spiring to poison the leaders of the Soviet government, including
175
Stalin himself. Anything smacking of a Jewish conspiracy, espe-

cially ties between Jews in the USSR and their counterparts in
the West, particularly the United States, became the subject of
the MGB’s close attention and an absolute priority when it came
to the allocation of time and resources.12
To the MGB officers in Poltava, who were eager to respond
to signals from Moscow, it seemed that the Tkachenko case could
be adapted to fit the regime’s new priority. The Poltava MGB
learned that while visiting Moscow to petition for an exit visa
from the USSR, Zinaida Tkachenko had made the acquaintance
of a Jewish woman, Rakhil Borisovna Kapova-Kagan. The MGB’s
interest in Kapova-Kagan was much deeper than in Tkachenko.
Her husband had been arrested by the secret police back in 1931
and accused of dealing in foreign currency. He managed to leave
the USSR for the United States in 1933 and, as the relevant MGB
document expressed it, “betrayed the motherland” by refusing to
return. Ever since then he had been in correspondence with his
wife, and she had kept trying to get an exit visa to join him in
the United States.13
The MGB had information about Kapova-Kagan visiting the
American embassy back in 1935 and meeting informally around
the same time in a coffee shop with an American citizen sus-
pected of spying on the USSR. MGB officers in Moscow were
now concerned about Kapova-Kagan’s current activities, and their
Poltava underlings looked for ways to help answer that question
and advance their careers. The plan was to recruit Tkachenko
as an agent to spy on Kapova-Kagan. But what if Tkachenko
herself were an agent spying for the United States? The whole
thing could then backfire, ending the careers of the Poltava MGB
officers. Time was of the essence, and they finally decided to risk
inviting Tkachenko for questioning about her visit to the Amer-
ican embassy in September 1946. Depending on the results of the
interrogation and her willingness to cooperate, they would decide
whether or not to recruit her.
The head of the Poltava MGB approved a detailed plan of
recruitment. Lieutenant Panfilov was ordered to summon Tka-
chenko to the registration department of the local police, alleged-
ly to discuss her emigration to the United States. He would then
drive her to MGB headquarters in Poltava for interrogation and
176
The American Dream
possible recruitment. The meeting was scheduled for 10:00 a. m.

Since interrogation and recruitment might take up much of the
day, and Tkachenko’s long absence from home could alarm her
relatives, it was proposed to send her two invitations, one for
10:00 a. m. and the other for 4:00 p. m., the second invitation
allegedly to discuss the alimony case involving her daughter and
her former husband. Panfilov would have the whole day at his
disposal to complete the job.
Panfilov planned to start with questions about Tkachenko’s
contacts with the Americans and her ties with John Bazan. If
she denied such ties, he would confront her with a photograph
showing her together with Bazan. He would then discuss her
visit to the US embassy in 1946. Panfilov had at his disposal the
testimony of D. K. Gershanovich, a former Soviet employee of the
US embassy, who had been arrested and sentenced on charges of
anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation and betrayal of the moth-
erland. Under interrogation, Gershanovich had testified that she
remembered a girl from Poltava visiting the embassy in 1946.
The problem was that she did not remember the girl’s name and
could not recognize Tkachenko from a photo provided by the
MGB. But that was where Panfilov’s interrogation skills would
come into play. The recruitment plan was finalized by the end of
February 1953 and approved for action on 3 March. But the next
few days brought confusion into the ranks of the MGB.14
On 4 March, the day after the approval of the recruitment
plan, Soviet newspapers carried disturbing news: Stalin was se-
riously ill. He died on 5 March, having been in a semi-conscious
state since 1 March. Lavrentii Beriia, the Soviet security tsar,
now emerged as a leading figure and put the brakes on Stalin’s
anti-Semitic campaign. On 10 March, the day after Stalin’s fu-
neral, Beriia invited Viacheslav Molotov to his office. Molotov’s
Jewish wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, had been incarcerated since
December 1948: she was arrested a month after befriending the
Israeli ambassador to Moscow, Golda Meir. Molotov was in for
a surprise. There in Beriia's office was his wife, released from the
Gulag and free to go home. Times were changing.15
It is hard to tell what went wrong with the Poltava MGB
plan to recruit Tkachenko. Whether changes at the top of the
Soviet pyramid influenced the outcome or she was approached
177
and refused to cooperate with the MGB, they never recruited her
as an agent. They also did not believe that she was working for
the United States. But the MGB had no doubt that she harbored
anti-Soviet views inspired by the authorities’ refusal to grant her
an exit visa and exacerbated by the difficult financial situation
in which she found herself afterwards. They did not expect to
change her views but wanted her to abandon her plans to leave
the Soviet Union. In July, they asked their bosses to send agent
Karenina back to Poltava, as she had previously managed to elic-
it from Tkachenko the name of Roger Taylor, the US embassy
official whom she had met in Moscow in September 1946. Now
Karenina’s task was “to convince Tkachenko of the futility of her
efforts to leave for the USA.” 16
The task was carried out successfully, and in September 1954
the MGB, now called the KGB, archived its file on Tkachenko.
Agent Rozova assured her handlers that Tkachenko had “com-
pletely renounced plans to leave for America.” Rozova provided
two additional pieces of information that supported her judgment
and may have been partially responsible for Tkachenko’s change
of heart. Zinaida had found her first husband, whom she expected
to support their daughter. She had also married again and had
a child with her new husband.17
Zinaida Tkachenko’s American dream was over. By the time
the KGB archived her file, the 1947 law prohibiting Soviet citizens
to marry foreign nationals had been annulled. That was done in
November 1953, soon after Stalin’s death. On paper, marriage to
a foreigner ceased to be a crime, but that did not change the So-
viet policy of preventing not only marriage but any unsupervised
contact between Soviet citizens and foreigners. The authorities
still insisted on deciding whom their citizens had the right to
love. We do not know what happened to Zinaida Tkachenko
after 1954. John Bazan continued to live in the Bronx until his
death at the age of seventy in December 1981, with the Cold War
still far from over.18
178
III
FAREWELL
TO THE EMPIRE
12.
The Soviet Collapse
The twentieth century witnessed the end of the world built and
ruled by empires from Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Em-
pire, which fell in the final days of World War I, to the British and
French empires, which disintegrated in the aftermath of World
War II. This decades-long process concluded with the collapse
in 1991 of the Soviet Union, the mighty successor to the Russian
Empire, which was stitched back together by the Bolsheviks in
the early 1920s, only to fall apart 70 years later during the final
stage of the Cold War.
Although many factors contributed to the fall of the Soviet
Union, from the bankruptcy of communist ideology to the failure
of the Soviet economy, the wider context for its dissolution is
often overlooked. The collapse of the Soviet Union, like the dis-
integration of past empires, is a process rather than an event. And
the collapse of the last empire is still unfolding today. This process
did not end with Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation on Christmas
Day 1991, and its victims are not limited to the three people who
died defending the Moscow White House in August 1991 or the
thousands of casualties from the Chechen wars.
The rise of nation-states on the ruins of the Soviet Union, like
the rise of successor states on the remains of every other empire,
mobilized ethnicity, nationalism, and conflicting territorial claims.
This process at least partly explains the Russian annexation of the
Crimea, the war in Ukraine, and the burst of popular support for
those acts of aggression in the Russian Federation. As the victim
of a much more powerful neighbor’s attack, Ukraine found itself
181
in a situation similar to that of the new states of Eastern Europe

formed after World War I on the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian,
Ottoman, and Russian empires. Those states struggled with the
enormous tasks of nation-building while trying to accommodate
national minorities and defend themselves against revanchist
powers claiming the loyalty of those same minorities.
Although the historical context of the collapse of empires
helps us understand the developments of the last twenty-five
years in the former Soviet space, it also serves as a warning for
the future. The redrawing of post-imperial borders to reflect the
importance of nationality, language, and culture has generally
come about as a result of conflicts and wars, some of which went
on for decades, if not centuries. The Ottoman Empire began its
slow-motion collapse in 1783, a process that reached its conclusion
at the end of World War I. The ongoing war in eastern Ukraine is
not the only reminder that the process of Soviet disintegration is
still incomplete. Other such reminders are the frozen or semi-fro-
zen conflicts in Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-
Karabakh, and the semi-independent state of Chechnya.
A lesson that today’s policymakers can learn from the history
of imperial collapse is that the role of the international commu-
nity is paramount in sorting out relations between former rulers
and subjects. Few stable states have emerged from the ruins of
bygone empires without strong international support, whether it
is the French role in securing American independence, Russian
and British involvement in the struggle for Greek statehood, or
the US role in supporting the aspirations of former Warsaw Pact
countries in Eastern Europe. The role of outsiders has been and
will remain the key to any post-imperial settlement. Looking at
the current situation, it is difficult to overstate the role that the
United States and its NATO allies can play in solving the con-
flict in Ukraine and other parts of the volatile post-Soviet space.
The fall of the Soviet Union, which carried the legacy of the last
European empire, is still far from over.
182
13.
Chornobyl
In April 2016, as the world marked the thirtieth anniversary of

the worst nuclear disaster in its history—the explosion and partial
meltdown of the nuclear reactor at the Chornobyl (in Russian,
Chernobyl) power station in Ukraine—there was a temptation
to celebrate that date as well. The half-life of cesium‑137, one of
the most harmful nuclides released during the accident, is ap-
proximately 30 years. It is the longest “living” isotope of cesium
that can affect the human body through external exposure and
ingestion. The other deadly isotopes present in the disaster have
long passed their half-life stages: Iodine 131 after eight days and
cesium‑134 after two years. Cesium‑137 is the last of that deadly
trio of isotopes.
These days, European tour operators offer trips to Chor-
nobyl from Brussels, Amsterdam, or Berlin at the price of a mere
479.00 euros. Visitors are promised safety, comfort, and excite-
ment while visiting the place where, on 26 April 1986, the explo-
sion at Reactor No. 4 ended one historical era and started another.
This hastened the end not only of the early, often barbaric stage
in nuclear energy development but also of the political and social
system that turned out to be less economically effective and more
reckless with nuclear energy than its Cold War competitors.
That system was called communism, and the state that em-
bodied it was known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Repub-
lics. The Chornobyl disaster marked the beginning of the end of
a world nuclear superpower—a little more than five years later,
that superpower would fall apart, doomed by the inefficiency
183
of its managerial and economic system, as demonstrated by the

Chornobyl disaster and the political and ethnonational move-
ments that the disaster helped initiate. The Chornobyl accident
took place at the fourth reactor of the Chornobyl power station,
which exploded as a result of a turbine test that went wrong.
That was the immediate reason for the accident, but its deeper
causes should be sought in the confluence of two major flaws of
the Soviet system.
The first was the militarization of the country’s economy:
the Chornobyl-type reactors were adapted from reactors created
to produce nuclear bombs. Volatile under certain physical con-
ditions, the Chornobyl-type reactor was pronounced safe and
actively promoted by the leaders of the Soviet military-industrial
complex, who then refused to take responsibility for what hap-
pened in Chornobyl. The second flaw was the violation of pro-
cedures and safety rules on the part of the operational personnel,
who inherited the reckless “we can do it no matter what” attitude
that characterized the first decades of the Soviet nuclear program
and resulted in numerous accidents.
The Chornobyl accident was not the first major nuclear di-
saster in the Soviet Union. The first took place in the fall of 1957
at the nuclear plant near the town of Kyshtym in the Urals. This
plant was tasked with producing plutonium for Soviet nuclear
bombs. The explosion of the nuclear waste tank threw 160 tons
of concrete lead into the air and released 20 million curies of ra-
dioactive material, including cesium‑137. At least 80,000 square
kilometers were affected by the radioactive fallout, but because of
the secretive culture surrounding the program, the evacuation of
close to 10,000 civilians in the environs of the plant did not start
until one week after the accident. Information about the disaster
itself and its consequences was suppressed and hidden from the
Soviet public and the world. The suppression of that information
helped the Soviet military-industrial complex to keep producing
unsafe reactors and maintain the image of an absolutely safe in-
dustry not only among outsiders but also among the personnel
operating the reactors.
One of the creators of the Chornobyl-type reactors, the
then-president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Anatolii Alek-
sandrov, bragged that his reactors were safe enough to be installed
184
Chornobyl
on Red Square in Moscow. Instead, the Soviet government put

a reactor 140 kilometers away from Kyiv and then denied reliable
information about the accident to the city’s two million citizens
and the population of the country as a whole. But locating nuclear
reactors in the European part of the USSR rather than in the
Urals or Siberia meant that it was much more difficult to hide
the scope of the accident. Indeed, within days after the Chor-
nobyl explosion, winds brought the radioactive plume beyond the
borders of the Soviet Union. During the night of the accident,
the wind was blowing in a northwesterly direction, carrying the
plume across Ukraine’s border to Belarus, then to Lithuania, and
finally across the Baltic Sea to the countries of Northern Europe.
The first to notice the high radiation levels caused by the
Chornobyl explosion were nuclear experts in Sweden, 1,257 ki-
lometers from Chornobyl. At 7:00 a. m. on 28 April 1986, Cliff
Robinson, a twenty-nine-year-old chemist working at the Fors-
mark nuclear power plant near Uppsala, went to brush his teeth.
In order to get from the washroom to the locker room, he had to
pass through the radiation detector. The alarm went off. Soon the
Forsmark workers were evacuated: it was originally assumed that
something was wrong with the plant. In a few hours it became
clear that the plant was not the cause of contamination. Because
radioactivity was high at other nuclear power stations as well,
officials concluded that the radioactivity was coming from abroad.
Calculations and wind direction pointed to Soviet territory.
The Soviets first broke their silence fourteen hours after radi-
ation was detected in Sweden. Soviet television aired a short an-
nouncement about the Chornobyl accident as part of its evening
news program. The alarm in the West and the desire of the new
Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had assumed power in the
Kremlin only one year earlier, to establish some form of trust in
relations between state and society created the first breach in the
wall of secrecy surrounding the Soviet nuclear program. Still, the
Soviets were reluctant to disclose all the information they had
at the time and tried to hide the real state of affairs from their
people and the world.
European leaders sounded the alarm. Sweden registered gam-
ma radiation at levels 30 to 40 percent higher than normal. In
Oslo, radiation levels were 50 percent higher than normal and
185
in central and northern areas of Finland, six times the norm.

But radiation levels had risen in other European countries as
well, Austria being close to the top of the list. European political
leaders reacted differently to the danger posed by the radioac-
tive fallout. If German leaders (under pressure from the growing
Green movement) demanded the closure of nuclear reactors, the
French government (which was heavily dependent on nuclear
energy) refused to recognize that Chornobyl clouds were bringing
heightened radiation levels to their country as well.
Hans Blix, the head of the International Atomic Energy
Agency, visited the accident site on 8 May 1986. Instead of trav-
eling by car, in which case he would have detected high levels of
radiation, Blix took a helicopter and flew over the station. He as-
sured the world that the situation was under control and that the
rumors spread in the West about thousands of people killed by the
nuclear explosion were unfounded. As head of the organization
responsible for promoting the peaceful use of nuclear energy, Blix
was not interested in digging deeper into what had happened or
what was going on in Chornobyl. He took the Soviets at their
word. They in turn struggled to overcome their culture of se-
crecy, reinforced by fear that the truth about Chornobyl would
spread panic among the population. They were also unable to free
themselves from the legacy of anti-Westernism that saturated the
Soviet establishment during the Cold War.
It took Gorbachev a full eighteen days to address the distressed
Soviet people and the world, and even then almost half his address
was dedicated to attacks on the West. Western media criticized
the Soviet regime for continuing to withhold vital information,
without which it was difficult to protect the population of Cen-
tral and Western Europe from the Chornobyl fallout. But the
Chornobyl accident had broken the Soviet regime’s monopoly on
this information. Moscow had to adjust to the new circumstanc-
es. That summer the Soviet scientist Valerii Legasov, who was in
Chornobyl during the dangerous days following the accident and
already suffering from radiation sickness, delivered a four-hour re-
port at a conference organized by Hans Blix. Prepared despite ob-
jections from the leaders of the Soviet military-industrial complex,
this report demonstrated to the world that the Soviet government
was finally ready to lift the veil of secrecy from its nuclear program.
186
Chornobyl
Mikhail Gorbachev later claimed that Chornobyl had changed

him. More importantly, it changed Soviet society as a whole. The
policy of glasnost, or openness, which gave the media and citizens
the right to discuss political and social problems and criticize the
authorities, had its origins in the post-Chornobyl days. During
this time, the population demanded more and more information
from the government, and the government was slowly changing
its culture of secrecy. The Chornobyl disaster made the govern-
ment recognize ecological concerns as a legitimate reason for So-
viet citizens to create their own organizations and thereby broke
the monopoly of the Communist Party on political activity. The
first Soviet mass organizations and political parties began in the
ecological movement, which engulfed the heavily polluted indus-
trial centers of the Soviet Union.
While Belarus is by far the country most affected by the
Chornobyl fallout, nowhere else has the connection between
Chornobyl and political activism been more obvious than in
Ukraine. The country is the second-largest post-Soviet state in
terms of population and economic potential and was the site of
the Chornobyl disaster. For Ukraine, the Chornobyl accident
ended the love affair with nuclear power that began in the 1960s.
The idea of bringing nuclear energy to Ukraine belonged to
Ukrainian Communist Party leaders who wanted to create new
sources of electrical energy for the rapidly developing Ukrainian
economy. By the time the Chornobyl nuclear power station went
on line in 1977, Ukrainian intellectuals, including one of the coun-
try’s leading poets, Ivan Drach, were welcoming the arrival of
the nuclear age in their country. For Drach and other Ukrainian
patriots, Chornobyl meant a step toward the modernization of
Ukraine. He and other enthusiasts of nuclearization failed to
notice that the project was run from Moscow. The republic was
getting electrical energy but had little control over what went on
at the plant. The plant itself and the accident that occurred there
became known to the world under the Russian spelling of the
nearest city—Chernobyl, not Chornobyl.
In the days following the Chornobyl accident, Ukrainian cit-
izens suddenly realized how little control they had over their
own destiny and that of their republic. The limits of the republi-
can authorities’ power over Ukraine became crystal-clear on the
187
morning of 1 May 1986, when the winds changed direction and,

instead of blowing northwest, turned south, bringing radioactive
clouds to the capital of Ukraine. Given the quickly changing ra-
diological situation, Ukrainian authorities tried to convince Mos-
cow to cancel a planned parade marking International Workers’
Day. They failed. “He told me: You will put your party card on
the table if you bungle the parade,” said the distressed Ukrainian
party boss, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, to his aides, referring to
the telephone conversation he had had with Gorbachev. Despite
the rapidly increasing radiation level, Gorbachev ordered his
Ukrainian underlings to carry on as usual in order to show the
country and the world that the situation was under control and
that the Chornobyl explosion presented no danger to the health
of the population. The parade went on as scheduled.
The explosion and partial meltdown of Chornobyl’s fourth
reactor released an estimated 50 million curies of radiation into
the atmosphere—the equivalent of 500 Hiroshima bombs. In
Ukraine alone, more than 50,000 sq. km. of land were contam-
inated—a territory larger than Belgium. The exclusion zone
around the reactor alone accounted for 2,600 sq. km., from which
more than 90,000 inhabitants were evacuated in the first weeks
after the explosion. Most of them would never see their homes
again. In Ukraine, 2,300 settlements and more than 3 million
people were directly affected by the radiation fallout. Close to
30 million people who relied on the Dnieper and other rivers for
their water supply were affected by the explosion.
The Chornobyl accident sharply increased discontent with
Moscow and its policies across all party and social lines—radi-
ation affected everyone, from members of the party leadership
to ordinary citizens. As the Ukrainian party bosses mobilized
the population to deal with the consequences of the disaster and
clean up the mess created by the center, many asked themselves
why they were risking their own lives and those of their fami-
ly members. Around their kitchen tables, they grumbled about
the center’s failed policies but shared their frustration only with
people they trusted. The only group that would not remain silent
was that of the Ukrainian writers. In June 1986, at a meeting of
the Ukrainian Writers’ Union, many of those who had welcomed
the arrival of nuclear power a decade earlier now condemned it as
188
Chornobyl
an instrument of Moscow’s domination of their republic. Among

those leading the charge was Ivan Drach, whose son, a student
in a Kyiv medical school, had been sent to Chornobyl soon after
the accident without proper instructions or protective gear. He
was now suffering from radiation poisoning.
The Chornobyl disaster awakened Ukraine, raising funda-
mental questions about relations between the center and the re-
publics, the Communist Party and the people, and fueling the
first major public debate in a society struggling to regain its voice
after decades of communist control. The Ukrainian writer Iurii
Shcherbak not only wrote a book about the Chornobyl disaster
that was exceptionally candid by the standards of the time but also
organized an environmental group one year after accident. That
group evolved into the Green Party—Soviet Ukraine’s first legal
political party since the 1920s. The ecological movement, which
presented Ukraine as a victim of Moscow’s activities, became one
of the first forms of national mobilization in Ukraine during the
years of the Gorbachev reforms. The new man in the Kremlin not
only alienated the Ukrainian party leadership but also empowered
democratically minded intellectuals and the nationally conscious
intelligentsia to mobilize against that elite.
As things turned out, the two conflicting groups in
Ukraine—the communist establishment and the nascent dem-
ocratic opposition—discovered a common interest in opposing
Moscow in general and Gorbachev in particular. In December
1991, when Ukrainians went to the polls to vote for the indepen-
dence of their country, they also consigned the mighty Soviet
Union to the dustbin of history: it was officially dissolved a few
weeks after the Ukrainian referendum. While it would be wrong
to ascribe the rise of glasnost in the Soviet Union or the rise of
the national movement in Ukraine and other republics to the
Chornobyl accident alone, it is difficult to overestimate the impact
it had on those interrelated processes.
After the Maidan protests of 2013 and 2014, the Ukrainian
parliament set up a commission charged with the task of re-
moving any mention of communist leaders from the names of
Ukraine’s cities, towns, villages, and streets. The commission ad-
opted recommendations with regard to the entire internationally
recognized territory of the country, including the rebel regions
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in the east and the Crimean peninsula, which has been annexed
by Russia. The only exception was the Chornobyl exclusion zone,
which still remains a preserve of the Soviet past, captured by
radiation and never released.
The city of Prypiat, which housed close to 50,000 construction
workers and power-plant operational personnel, remains deserted
even today—a modern-day Pompeii memorializing what would
become the last days of the Soviet Union. Images of Vladimir
Lenin and the builders of communism, along with slogans cele-
brating the Communist Party, still remain on the walls of Prypiat.
The sarcophagus that European visitors can see on their trips
to the exclusion zone stands today as a monument to the failed
ideology and political system embodied in the Soviet Union. It
is also a warning to leaders and societies who put military or
economic objectives above environmental and health concerns.
While the thirty-year anniversary of the disaster marks the
half-life of one of the deadliest isotopes released by Chornobyl,
cesium‑137, the harmful impact of the accident is still far from
over. With tests revealing that the cesium‑137 around Chornobyl
is not decaying as quickly as predicted, scholars believe that
the isotope will keep harming the environment for at least 180
years—the time it will take for half the cesium to be removed
from the affected areas in Ukraine and beyond by natural means,
weathering, and migration. Other radionuclides will stay in the
region almost indefinitely. The half-life of plutonium‑239, traces
of which were found as far away as Sweden, is 24,000 years.
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14.
Truth in Our Times
“Did it really happen?” “Was it really so bad?” “Is it true that

they were so unprepared?” These are the questions I have been
receiving again and again in the last few months in connection
with the stunning success of the HBO/Sky miniseries Chernobyl
(the Ukrainian city of Chornobyl became known to the world
in its Russian spelling). The five-episode television drama took
the world of entertainment by storm, becoming history’s most
popular miniseries in a few short weeks. It brought to life the
tragedy of people who lived through, were affected by and, yes,
caused the world’s worst nuclear disaster.
My book Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe,
which was released in May 2018, one year before the airing of the
miniseries, tells the story of the disaster on the basis of recently
released archival documents, which I checked against people’s
diaries, memoirs, and interviews. Thus, on the factual level, both
the book and I as its author can provide answers to many ques-
tions about the accuracy of the miniseries. But the inquiries that
I have received in the last few months also made me think about
the bigger question of what is true in our current understanding
of the Chornobyl disaster, its causes, development, and conse-
quences. That big “truth” about Chornobyl is at the very center
of my current inquiry.1
On the one hand, we now know more than ever before about
the history of the Chornobyl accident. We are also aware as never
before of the dangers that nuclear energy poses to the world. But
we are also confused more than ever before about the meaning
191
of the Chornobyl experience and the closely related question of

whether we can rely on nuclear energy in our efforts to deal with
the challenges of economic growth and climate change. The an-
swer to that question requires the attainment of a consensus on
what happened in Chornobyl, the consequences of the disaster,
and the lessons to be learned from it.
Finding common ground on these issues becomes more diffi-
cult with every passing day. We feel overwhelmed by the constant
influx of information and find it hard to make sense of compet-
ing opinions. It is tempting to stop trusting anyone or limit the
circle of trust to a few friends or social-media gurus, creating an
echo chamber in which truth cannot be born and nurtured, let
alone survive. Meanwhile, the nuclear age meets the post-truth
era before our very eyes, testing our capacity to maintain life on
the planet.
As “truth” becomes ever more compartmentalized and in-
strumentalized in the service of individual politicians, regimes,
and countries, the threat of nuclear disaster remains global. Our
survival in the nuclear age is possible only as a world community
but, as noted, this requires a consensus on the facts and their
meaning. The “truth” of our time must transcend private, political,
and national compartments and become universal. Hiding the
truth about problems with Chornobyl-type reactors and ignoring
the truth about the flawed Soviet system of government led to the
Chornobyl catastrophe; concealing the truth about its scope made
the catastrophe much worse; inability to agree on the political and
social reasons for the disaster may very well lead to new disasters
in the future.
⁂
There are few places more suitable to start the search for uni-
versal truth than the Chornobyl exclusion zone. At its center is
a modern-day nuclear Pompeii, the city of Prypiat, devastated by
radiation and located only a few kilometers from the Chornobyl
nuclear power plant. The city, which had been home to 50,000
construction workers and operators of the plant before the acci-
dent, is now completely overgrown with vegetation and inhabited
by animals, offering a unique glimpse of what the planet would
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Truth in Our Times
look like without us. The destruction of Prypiat is a story of the

concealment of truth, first about science and technology, then
about the scope of the disaster and, finally, about its consequences.
There are good reasons to believe that Prypiat would still
be populated by humans and not animals if its inhabitants had
known about an accident that happened seven years earlier at
another Soviet nuclear plant in the settlement of Sosnovyi Bor,
located 50 kilometers from Leningrad, now St. Petersburg. In
the fall of 1975 the operators of the RBMK graphite-water reac-
tor—the kind that exploded in Chornobyl—almost lost control
of their nuclear “pot.” A meltdown of the reactor and a Chor-
nobyl-like catastrophe were avoided thanks only to pure luck and
the professionalism of the operators. The reactor became unsta-
ble after running for some time at a low power level, and once
the operators used control rods to shut down the reaction, they
got the opposite of the expected reaction: the power level kept
increasing. The operators managed to stop the reaction only by
adding control rods manually.
Although a major disaster was avoided, a smaller one oc-
curred. One of the fuel channels in the active zone of the reactor
burst, releasing radioactive uranium into the core of the reactor.
The management ordered the reactor to be “cleaned” with a re-
lease of 1.5 million curies of radionuclides into the environment.
One curie suffices to make 10 billion quarts of milk undrinkable,
but no one was informed about the release. The accident remained
secret and, more important in the long run, its cause—the defi-
ciencies of the reactor, which caused the emergency—remained
highly classified. The control rods used by the operators to slow
down the reaction were tipped with graphite, causing a spike in
the level of the reaction when they entered the active zone. Infor-
mation about the problem, known in the industry as a “positive
void effect,” was kept secret from the operators of similar reactors,
including those in Chornobyl.
Since the truth about the Leningrad accident of 1975 was hid-
den, its lessons remained unlearned. The operators at other Soviet
nuclear plants did not know and could not imagine that their
reactors were prone to such problems, which might cause them
to melt down and explode. When the next “positive void effect”
occurred on the night of 26 April 1986 at the Chornobyl nuclear
193
power plant, the Soviet nuclear industry ran out of luck. The com-
bination of factors such as the inexperienced crew on duty that
night at block no. 4 and the rush to complete the test program of
the reactor’s turbine before the start of the long weekend turned
the “positive void effect” into a disaster that forced the inhabitants
of Prypiat out of their city and left a good part of Europe to deal
with the consequences of nuclear fallout.
The officials, institutions, and services in charge of dealing
with the disaster were psychologically or physically unprepared
to do so because they lacked information about previous acci-
dents and were not trained to deal with new ones. The firefighters
assigned to the power plant were never told that such things
could happen and never trained to fight anything but regular
fires. Safety instructors were not equipped with radiation counters
that could accurately read the levels of radiation released by the
explosion, and when they were finally ready to report the actual
levels, their bosses were not psychologically prepared to accept
their reports.
The director of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant, Viktor
Briukhanov, was given two reports on the radiation level soon
after the explosion and chose the one that gave significantly low-
er readings, pushing aside the safety inspector who insisted on
the accuracy of his data. Briukhanov, who is somewhat unfairly
portrayed in the miniseries as the embodiment of heartless offi-
cial servility, was in fact a rather compassionate and competent
technocrat. Nevertheless, he preferred “alternative facts” to those
that turned out to be true, doing so for a variety of reasons, from
psychological unpreparedness to deal with the grim reality to
a desire to cover up his own mistakes or avoid the wrath of high-
er-ups about a situation for which he was not responsible and
could not directly control.
The Soviet culture of secrecy, which overrode the emerging
culture of safety, became a key factor not only in causing the
Chornobyl catastrophe but also in magnifying its scope by con-
cealing information about the accident from those most affected
by it. The first thing that the KGB did after learning of the explo-
sion was to cut the telephone lines and prevent all unauthorized
communication between the power plant and the outside world.
Even the members of the state commission sent to Prypiat by the
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Truth in Our Times
Kremlin to deal with the consequences of the disaster were not

allowed to communicate by phone with their families or tell them
where they had gone and what they were doing there.
The first terse information on the accident, which was al-
legedly under control, appeared in a Soviet television broadcast
three days after the explosion, and that bulletin was released only
because the Swedish authorities had expressed public concern
about a possible nuclear accident in the Soviet Union that had
sent clouds of radioactivity across Europe, causing safety alarms
to go off at Swedish nuclear power plants. It took another ten
days for health authorities to start issuing recommendations on
what the public at large was supposed to do in order to minimize
exposure to radiation.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who first addressed the country about the
Chornobyl disaster eighteen days after the accident and waited
almost three years to visit the site, explained the official silence
by claiming that it had taken a long time for him and others in
the leadership to learn what had actually happened and that they
were unaware of the true extent of the catastrophe. His second
in command, Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, was more open
in his explanation of the cover-up: the authorities were afraid of
causing panic. They were also concerned about losing face and
compromising the prestige of the Soviet regime and its nuclear
program. Those considerations turned out to be more important
to the authorities than saving human lives. The citizens of Prypiat,
who could see the exploded reactor building from the windows
of their apartments, were evacuated a day and a half after the
accident, but only after the decision to do so had been made at
the highest level in Moscow.
The most horrific example of official callousness in dealing
with the accident, coupled with criminal negligence with regard
to the lives of citizens, was the May Day parade in Kyiv, ordered
by the supreme authorities in Moscow (some sources suggest that
the decision was made by Gorbachev personally). They were con-
cerned, first and last, to create the impression that life was going
on as usual in the capital of Ukraine, and that Western media
claims to the effect that the Chornobyl explosion constituted
a real and present danger to Kyivans were groundless. Moscow ig-
nored the protests of local officials about rising levels of radiation
195
and ordered the parade to go on. Among those marching and

dancing in downtown Kyiv were folk ensembles and schoolchil-
dren. When the suits in which the schoolchildren trained for
their performance and then marched on 1 May were checked for
radiation, they turned out to be radioactive. We have learned of
this from recently released KGB reports: KGB officers oversaw
the decontamination of the suits while keeping information about
dangerous levels of radiation under wraps.
The truth about the causes and consequences of the Chor-
nobyl disaster was fairly well known to the authorities by early
July 1986, when Gorbachev convoked a session of the Politburo,
the highest decision-making body in the USSR, to discuss the
accident, punish the guilty, and decide what to do with the flawed
reactors. Gorbachev knew about the design problem with Chor-
nobyl-type reactors but remained silent about it, since an admis-
sion would have jeopardized the entire Soviet nuclear program,
a good part of which relied on Chornobyl-type reactors. Gor-
bachev believed that he simply lacked sufficient funds to replace
the dangerous reactors with safer ones. “Human error,” meaning
the managers and operators of the reactor, was declared the sole
reason for the explosion.
Publicly admitting mistakes did not seem to be an option
until Valerii Legasov, one of the key characters both in my book
and in the miniseries, began the process of unveiling the truth
about Chornobyl in his report to a conference called by the In-
ternational Atomic Energy Agency in August 1986. People in
Legasov’s industry treated his action as a betrayal, but in fact even
he was dealing in half-truths. He admitted the problems with
Soviet safety culture and pointed to mistakes and safety viola-
tions committed by the personnel of the power plant, especially
the operators in charge of the reactor during the explosion. Yet
he remained silent about the “positive void effect” and the design
problems with the reactors.
The real-life Legasov, unlike his character in the miniseries,
never visited the trial of Viktor Briukhanov and other managers
held responsible for the accident. It was a classic show trial de-
signed to hide a significant part of the truth about Chornobyl and
staged to reinforce the official party line: the managers and opera-
tors were solely responsible for the accident. Newly released KGB
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Truth in Our Times
documents suggest that the KGB placed its agents in the prison
cells of the accused to collect information on their mood and
defense strategies and convince them to adopt the line favored
by the authorities at their trial. This was especially important in
the case of Anatolii Diatlov, an intelligent but arrogant techno-
crat and one of the key characters in the miniseries, who based
his defense on the argument that, while he had indeed violated
some safety rules, the true culprits were the designers of the re-
actor. What Diatlov said about the design flaws of the reactor in
the Chornobyl courtroom remained secret from the public. The
so-called “open” trial was conducted in a “closed” zone. Back in
the summer of 1987, as is still the case today, one needed special
permission to visit the city of Chornobyl, where the accused were
put on trial.
Valerii Legasov committed suicide in April 1988, one day after
the second anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster, crushed psy-
chologically by the ire of his fellow scientists about his partial ex-
posure of industry secrets. The industry’s critical problems would
remain under wraps for another three years, to be revealed only
in the dying days of the Soviet Union, a country that was good
at keeping secrets and bad at learning from mistakes.
⁂
There is general agreement among historians of the Soviet Union
that the Chornobyl disaster contributed to profound change in
Soviet politics and society by encouraging, if not forcing, Mikhail
Gorbachev to launch his policy of glasnost or openness. The So-
viet media finally got the right to deliver bad news and discuss
economic, social and, eventually, ecological problems besetting
Soviet society in the last years of its life. It is indeed hard to
overestimate the role of the Chornobyl disaster in finally opening
public debate, first on ecology and then on politics, although it
would be more accurate to state that the change was caused and
promoted not so much by the disaster itself as by the govern-
ment’s mishandling of its consequences, its addiction to secrecy,
and its readiness to lie to its own people.
Glasnost began in 1987, the year after the accident, and was
directly related to it. As Gorbachev, bruised by the Chornobyl
197
debacle, began to introduce the first elements of glasnost into

the Soviet media and public debate, early ecological activists con-
cerned about the consequences of the disaster became the first to
take advantage of the new policy and push its boundaries. Discov-
ering the truth about Chornobyl became the life mission of the
first Soviet ecological activists, among whom was Iurii Shcherbak,
the author of the first oral history of the disaster. Shcherbak, who
worked on his collection of interviews in the Chornobyl exclusion
zone, could not publish it in his native Kyiv but managed to do so
in Moscow, where control over information about the disaster was
not as strict as in Ukraine and Belarus. Those were the republics
most affected by radiation, where the authorities believed they
had most to lose by initiating public debate on the disaster. The
publication of Shcherbak’s book in the liberal Moscow journal
Iunost´ (Youth) in 1987 was one of the first systematic attempts
to get at the truth of what had happened at the station before,
during, and after the explosion.
In 1988, Shcherbak founded Green World, an ecological as-
sociation that would become the first independent political party
in Ukraine in the following year. He and his friends turned their
attention to the plight of areas especially hard hit by the disas-
ter but officially pronounced safe for living and consumption of
crops. The decision to draw a circle of 30 kilometers around the
plant was made in early May 1986, long before the authorities
knew what areas had been affected by the Chornobyl fallout.
Meanwhile, radiation was spread by the wind and brought down
to earth by precipitation. This meant that while some parts of
the exclusion zone remained fairly clean, others, well outside the
zone—sometimes as distant as the Austrian Alps—were affected.
As the authorities ordered the evacuation of more than 100,000
people from the exclusion zone, some of the evacuees were settled
in places even more affected by radiation than their native villages.
One of the areas that suffered most but received little govern-
ment attention or assistance was the Narodychi district, located
west of the reactor and outside the exclusion zone. Its fate and
the future of its citizens became a concern of Alla Iaroshyns-
ka, a young journalist in the city of Zhytomyr, southwest of the
Chornobyl nuclear power plant. She accidentally came across
information suggesting that the authorities had built and were
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Truth in Our Times
continuing to build housing for refugees from the exclusion zone

in the Narodychi district. A kindergarten and school building
were constructed in one of the most polluted villages. Iaroshynska
wrote about her discovery, but her articles were never published,
and she was subjected to intimidation by party officials in her
city. Alerted by the disturbing news about Narodychi, Shcherbak
helped to produce a documentary film about the area, but it had
little chance of being shown—information about radiation fallout
was considered a state secret.
It took the first relatively free elections to the Soviet par-
liament in the spring of 1989 for Iaroshynska, Shcherbak and
others to make their concerns known to society at large. Both
were elected to parliament, where they pushed, along with dozens
of other activists-turned-politicians, to carry out their agenda of
truth about Chornobyl. To that end, they made use of Soviet
television channels broadcasting debates in the newly elected
parliament. The secret of Narodychi was revealed, becoming an
information bomb that destroyed what little trust the public still
had in the government. Appalled by this development, Soviet
officials maintained that the government was doing all it could to
protect people, while activists such as Iaroshynska and Shcherbak
were exploiting the tragedy to achieve their narrow political goals.
The anti-nuclear mobilization, powered by the demand for
the government to tell the truth about Chornobyl, created fertile
ground for the formation not only of the first political parties in
the Soviet Union but also broader movements, “popular fronts”
that raised the banner of political independence from the USSR
in the Soviet republics. In Lithuania, the home of the Ignalina
nuclear power plant—a twin station of Chornobyl where most of
the HBO/Sky miniseries was shot—20,000 people created a liv-
ing chain to protest the continuing operation of the power plant.
Out of that protest came Sajūdis, the movement for Lithuanian
independence. In March 1990, Lithuania became the first Soviet
republic to declare full independence from the USSR.
In Ukraine, the anti-nuclear mobilization produced not only
Iurii Shcherbak’s Green World but also Rukh, the Ukrainian
equivalent of Sajūdis, an organization that initially advocated
perestroika but then shifted gears to demand the independence
of Ukraine. Rukh was led by people who had cut their teeth in
199
politics as ecological activists. One of them, Volodymyr Iavorivsky,

became head of the newly created Chornobyl commission in
the Ukrainian parliament. He also happened to be the first to
read the declaration of Ukrainian independence from the floor
of that institution in August 1991. The subsequent referendum
on Ukrainian independence, held on 1 December 1991, produced
a majority of more than 90 percent in favor. That pretty much
finished the Soviet Union, which was dissolved on 8 December
1991 by the leaders of the three republics that had suffered most
from the Chornobyl disaster.
The anti-nuclear mobilization in Lithuania, the first republic
to officially leave the Soviet Union, and Ukraine, the republic
whose decision sounded the death knell of the USSR, indicate the
importance of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster not only in bring-
ing elements of democracy to the Soviet Union but also in putting
an end to that nuclear superpower. The Soviet Union collapsed
under the weight of its mismanaged economy and mounting so-
cial problems, but also under the weight of the secrecy and lies
surrounding Chornobyl. It was not the explosion of the reactor
itself that did in the USSR but official efforts to hide the truth
about the disaster and its consequences from the population.
The Soviet Union simply could not handle the truth about
Chornobyl. The country that had developed the reactor, let it
explode, and then dealt with the technological problems caused
by the disaster much better than with the environmental and,
most particularly, the human and social problems produced by
it is no longer to be found on the world map. But the legacy
produced by it will stay with us for generations to come. The new
sarcophagus over the damaged reactor no. 4, completed in 2019 by
an international consortium of companies at a cost of 1.5 billion
euros, is designed to stay in place for one hundred years. After
that a new solution and new investment will be required, as the
spent fuel in the reactor will present a danger for centuries if not
millennia to come.
⁂
What stands between us and the truth about Chornobyl today?
Let us begin by noting the positive developments in the debate
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Truth in Our Times
about the meaning of Chornobyl for the future of nuclear power.

There is no longer a Soviet Union to monopolize information.
Instead, we have as many parties and voices in the debate as one
can imagine, as well as freedom to discuss different versions of
the events and their possible consequences.
The debate on Chornobyl has become international on more
than one level. While Ukraine houses the damaged reactor, its
ownership is anything but absolute or exclusive, as even the
thirty-kilometer exclusion zone is now divided between two
sovereign states, Ukraine and Belarus. Besides, the money and
expertise that were mobilized to construct the new sarcophagus
and will be needed to run it for decades to come were supplied
from abroad. The consequences of the disaster have been felt by
many European countries, making them active participants in the
debate. And the debate itself ranges far beyond Europe, especially
after the Fukushima disaster. Almost anyone might be affected by
the next nuclear catastrophe, and everyone looks at Chornobyl to
grasp how that catastrophe might be avoided or, should that prove
impossible, how its consequences could be mitigated.
Does this mean that we are closer to the truth about Chor-
nobyl, meaning the understanding of its causes and consequences?
I would suggest that we are. The internationalization of the debate
and the progress of science allow us to better understand the caus-
es of the accident, which should help to avoid future catastrophes.
We also know more about the long-term impact of low doses of
radiation on human beings and the environment. But there is
still a long way to go, as the available data are quite fragmentary
and opinions on the number of people affected extremely diverse,
with estimates ranging anywhere between 4,000 and more than
90,000. The impact of the disaster on mental health, which in-
cludes emotional, psychological, and social well-being, is hard to
assess, although we know that in self-perception the Ukrainians
consider themselves the least healthy nation in Europe.
Thus, we are now better informed but want to know much
more, and theoretically the openness of the debate should help in
that regard. The irony is that technological progress creates un-
limited possibilities for tampering with today’s “openness,” mak-
ing it even more difficult to establish the “truth” about Chornobyl
and assess the benefits and drawbacks of nuclear power. What the
201
public thinks about Chornobyl and nuclear power is extremely

important, since it is the public that votes in elections and influ-
ences political decisions on matters of energy and ecology. But the
arrival of the age of “alternative facts” and so-called “post-truth,”
engendered by the explosion of social media and the resulting
crisis of the mainstream media, makes informed debate extremely
difficult. Uninformed opinion flourishes, as do conspiracy theo-
ries, with the result that science finds itself under attack, unable
to win a fight without rules in a world shaped by Twitter.
Let me present a couple of examples of the ease with which
conspiracy theories vitiate meaningful debate about Chornobyl
and the pros and cons of nuclear energy. In 2015, The Russian
Woodpecker, a documentary that promotes an “alternative” ver-
sion of the Chornobyl explosion, received the World Cinema
Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival,
lending international recognition and legitimacy to what is in
essence a conspiracy theory of the disaster. The film introduces
and promotes the view that the Chornobyl explosion had some-
thing to do with the super-secret Soviet Duga radar system, built
a few kilometers away from the plant and abandoned after the
disaster. I cannot count the number of questions raised about
the possibility that it was the Soviet military that blew up the
Chornobyl reactor.
If The Russian Woodpecker encourages the viewer to seek the
causes of the accident in a secret Soviet military program, a new
Chornobyl miniseries announced by the Russian television chan-
nel NTV points a finger at CIA operatives. The Russian produc-
tion is first and foremost a response to the enormous success of
the HBO/Sky Chernobyl drama, which received substantial but
mostly negative attention in Russia. Many are upset that it was
the British and Americans, not the Russians, who were the first
to tell the world a story that the Russians consider their own in
such epic fashion. Others saw the British-American production
as an attack on the prestige of the Russian state in its Soviet incar-
nation or as a Western plot to undermine Rosatom, the Russian
monopoly enterprise producing reactors and equipment for the
nuclear industry, and its prospects of obtaining lucrative contracts
outside Russia.
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Truth in Our Times
While the effort of the Russian miniseries to pin the blame

for the Chornobyl disaster on the CIA strikes one as bizarre,
there is little doubt that it will gain currency in Russia. The KGB
seriously considered such a possibility immediately after the ex-
plosion, and attacks on the West for political exploitation of the
disaster were commonplace in the Soviet media for weeks and
months afterwards. Ironically, Mikhail Gorbachev, the father of
glasnost himself, led the way in anti-Western propaganda at the
time. Almost two-thirds of his first address to the country on
the Chornobyl catastrophe, which he delivered in mid-May 1986,
consisted of attacks on the United States and its Western allies. It
would appear that when it comes to the nature of debate in Rus-
sia, we have come full circle to the beginning of our story about
the pursuit of truth concerning Chornobyl. In Moscow today, as
in 1986, before Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, the main
values to be promoted and defended are the prestige of the state
and its nuclear program, while the main enemy from whom those
values must be protected is once again the West.
Critics of the HBO/Sky miniseries point to the inaccura-
cies in the miniseries’ portrayals of the individual episodes and
characters as well as misrepresentation of some of the realities of
the Soviet life. They are often correct. But what is missed in that
critique of the television drama is that the creators of the HBO/
Sky Chernobyl did a much better job of accurately recreating and
visualizing that reality than any other Western and most post-
Soviet television productions. While making mistakes here and
there, they grasped the big truth about the political and social
conditions that caused Chornobyl better than any other film-
makers before them. That masterful and evocative presentation
of the big picture is the main contribution of the miniseries to
our common understanding not only of the Chornobyl story but
also of the challenges we face together as a world community in
dealing with nuclear energy.
Today we are witnessing a global revolt against globaliza-
tion and a revival of populism and nationalism reminiscent of
interwar Europe. The “America First” sentiment in the United
States, Brexit in the United Kingdom, and Putinism in Russia
are aspects of a major shift away from the universal and back to
the particular. Many look at the world around us from ever more
203
narrow vantage points, geographic, political, social, and cultural.

But nuclear disasters recognize no international, social, or cultural
borders. They affect people and countries that had nothing to
do with the construction of this or that nuclear plant, and their
consequences stay with the human race forever—after all, the
half-life of the plutonium‑239 released by Chornobyl and spotted
in Sweden is 24,000 years.
An essential truth about Chornobyl is that we cannot live
with conflicting “truths” about the same event created and dis-
seminated within isolated national, social, or cultural spaces. It
was just such “truths” that created the monstrous Chornobyl di-
saster: authoritarian control over economy and society, lack of free
discussion and distribution of scientific information, and disre-
gard for human life and health in the pursuit of allegedly higher
economic or political goals, to name a few. Improving reactors and
making them safer is important but not sufficient. We must reach
agreement on the political, economic, and social conditions that
produced disasters in the past if we are to prevent future catastro-
phes that may threaten the existence of humankind as a whole.
204
Maps
205
Figure 1. Fragment of Radvila map with depiction of Volhynia and area on

the right bank of Dnieper River referred to as “Vkraina.” Joan Bleau, Le The-
atre Du Mondou Novel Atlas (Amsterdam, 1649).
206
Maps
207
Figure 2. Fragments of Radvila map depicting part of the Dnieper River with
Cossack settlements. Joan Bleau, Le Theatre Du Mondou Novel Atlas (Amster-
dam, 1649).
208
Maps
209
Figure 2, cont.
210
Maps
211
Figure 2, cont.
212
Maps
213
Figure 2, cont.
214
Maps
215
216
Map 1. Presidential election in Ukraine, 2010. Map source: MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine. Ukrainian
Research Institute, Harvard University.
Map 2. Demolition of Lenin statues and results of presidential election. Data source: Den. Map source:
217
Maps
MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine. Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University.

218
Map 3. Support for the demolition of Lenin statues, March 2015. Map source: MAPA: Digital Atlas of
Ukraine. Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University.
Map 4. Demolition of Lenin statutes and the Holodomor as genocide. Map source: MAPA: Digital Atlas
219
Maps
of Ukraine. Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University.

220
Map 5. Demolition of Lenin statues and recognition of the UPA. Map source: MAPA: Digital Atlas of
Map 6. Demolition of Lenin statues and removal of monuments. Map source: MAPA: Digital Atlas of
221
Maps

222
Map 7. Parliamentary elections, 2014. Map source: MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine. Ukrainian Research
Institute, Harvard University.
Map 8. Stepan Bandera monuments, 1991–2016. Data source: Dyvys.Info. Map source: MAPA: Digital
223
Maps
Atlas of Ukraine. Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University.

224
Map 9. Support for Bandera and Lenin monuments. Map source: MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine.
Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University.
15.
The Empire Strikes Back
On 18 March 2014, President Vladimir Putin addressed the Rus-

sian Federal Assembly with a most unusual request, asking the
legislature to annex part of the territory of a neighboring state.
The territory was the Crimean Peninsula, the neighboring coun-
try Ukraine. He hailed the annexation of the Crimea—an act to
be undertaken in violation of the sovereignty of Ukraine, which
had been guaranteed by Russo-Ukrainian treaties and ensured by
the Budapest Memorandum of 1994—as a triumph of historical
justice.
Much of Putin’s argument was historical and cultural in na-
ture. Putin, who has never concealed his regret and even bit-
terness about the fall of the Soviet Union, referred specifically to
the Soviet collapse in a speech delivered on the occasion of the
Russian annexation of the Crimea in March 2014. “The Soviet
Union fell apart. Things developed so swiftly that few people
realized how truly dramatic those events and their consequences
would be,” said Putin, recalling the events of 1991. “It was only
when the Crimea ended up as part of a different country that
Russia realized that it had not only been robbed but plundered.”
He continued: “And what about the Russian state? What about
Russia? It humbly accepted the situation. This country was going
through such hard times then that, realistically, it was incapable
of defending its interests.” Putin’s speech was meant to remove all
doubt that the “hard times” were over and that Russia was back,
prepared to undo the “injustice” inflicted on it by the disintegra-
tion of the USSR.1
225
What exactly that would mean, and how far Russia was pre-
pared to go in order to undo perceived injustice, were the ques-
tions on the minds of many world leaders. After a telephone con-
versation with Putin, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said
in apparent disbelief that he was living “in another world.” The
former American president, Bill Clinton, provided clarification of
what world that was, suggesting that Putin wanted to reestablish
Russian greatness in nineteenth-century terms. Prime Minister
Arsenii Yatseniuk of Ukraine repeatedly accused Putin of wanting
to restore the Soviet Union. The Russian president denied the
charges, stating that he was not trying to bring back either the
empire or the USSR. Technically, he was right. During the past
decade, Russia has been waging open and hybrid wars, annexing
territories, and using its virtual monopoly on energy supplies to
the countries of Eastern Europe as a weapon, the goal being to
establish a much less costly and more flexible system of political
control over post-Soviet space than was available either to the
Russian Empire or to the Soviet Union. Yet many policies of the
present-day Russian leadership have their origins in the last years
and months of the existence of the USSR.2
By far the most important of those policies has been the Rus-
sian leadership’s early decision to maintain Moscow’s political,
economic, and military control over the “near abroad,” as the Rus-
sian political elite and media dubbed the former Soviet republics.
As early as the fall of 1991, advisers to Boris Yeltsin envisioned
Russia gathering in the republics on its borders within the sub-
sequent twenty years. Like many other former imperial powers,
Russia opted out of the empire because it lacked the resources to
keep the costly imperial project going. Unlike most of its coun-
terparts, however, it took along the rich oil and gas resources of
the empire—most of the Soviet oil and gas reserves were located
in Russian Siberia.
Thus Russia had more to gain economically than to lose from
the collapse of the USSR. Russian control over oil and gas re-
sources made the divorce with the empire in 1991 easier in eco-
nomic terms and prevented armed conflict between Russia and
the republics that declared independence. We now know that
such conflict was not eliminated but merely postponed. Over
the last decade, rising oil and gas prices have made it possible
226
for Russia to rebuild its economic potential and military might,

allowing it to reopen the question of disputed borders and terri-
tories and step up its efforts to gather back the Soviet republics
more than twenty years after the Soviet collapse.
Ukraine, the second-largest post-Soviet republic, has played
a crucial role in preventing successive Russian attempts to reinte-
grate the “near abroad” in economic, military, and political terms.
Back in 1991, Russo-Ukrainian relations were the key factor in
deciding the future of the Soviet Union. In August 1991, once
the Ukrainian parliament declared the republic’s independence,
the Russian government of Boris Yeltsin threatened Kyiv with
partitioning of its territory. Fingers were pointed specifically
at the Crimea and the Donbas (Donets Basin), which became
a battleground twenty-three years later. Despite threats from
Moscow, Ukraine pushed forward with its quest for indepen-
dence, and in December 1991 the Soviet Union was replaced by
the Commonwealth of Independent States, which was the result
of a Russo-Ukrainian compromise. In his speech on the annex-
ation of the Crimea, Putin claimed that many in Russia regarded
the Commonwealth as a new form of statehood. But that was
not the position of the Ukrainian leadership, which took its own
independence and that of the other former Soviet republics with
the utmost seriousness.3
In the 1990s, Ukraine turned the Commonwealth into an in-
strument for a “civilized divorce”—a term coined in Kyiv—as op-
posed to one for Russian control over the “near abroad.” Ukraine
worked hard to ensure recognition of its borders by Russia. In
1994, Kyiv gave up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for a guaran-
tee of territorial integrity and independence given by Russia, the
United States, and Great Britain. In 1997, the Ukrainian govern-
ment agreed to lease the naval base in Sevastopol to the Russian
fleet in exchange for a treaty that recognized the inviolability of
Ukrainian borders. It took the Russian parliament two years to
ratify the treaty that formally recognized the Crimea and Sevas-
topol as integral parts of Ukrainian territory. It seemed that the
two countries had finally resolved all outstanding issues in their
relations resulting from the Soviet collapse.4
The next decade demonstrated the limits of the Russo-
Ukrainian understanding and the degree to which Russia was
227
prepared to recognize Ukraine as an independent state. In the late

1990s, Ukraine began its drift toward the West, declaring inte-
gration into the European Union as the goal of its foreign policy
and refusing to join Russian-led economic, military, and political
institutions. Domestically, Ukraine managed to remain a much
more pluralistic society than Russia, with a strong parliament,
competitive politics, and an influential opposition.
In 2004, Ukrainian civil society refused to accept the results
of a rigged election and endorse the Russian-backed candidate,
Viktor Yanukovych, as the country’s new president. After a long
and peaceful protest that became known as the Orange Revolu-
tion, the outgoing president of Ukraine agreed to a new round of
elections that brought to power a pro-Western candidate, Viktor
Yushchenko. From that time on, Moscow treated Kyiv’s orienta-
tion toward the West not only as a growing external danger but
also as a threat to its own increasingly authoritarian regime. As
far as the Kremlin was concerned, Ukraine’s rejection of rigged
elections and resistance to a corrupt regime were setting an exam-
ple to Russia’s own struggling civil society and had to be stopped
at all costs.5
The current crisis in Russo-Ukrainian relations began on the
night of 21 November 2013 with a Facebook post by Mustafa
Nayyem, a Ukrainian journalist of Afghan descent. He was dis-
turbed by news that the government of Viktor Yanukovych, who
had come to power in 2010, had refused to sign a long-awaited
association agreement with the European Union that envisioned
the creation of a free economic zone including Ukraine and EU
and stipulated the reform of Ukrainian legislation, democratic
procedures, and business practices according to the standards of
the European Union. “Fine,” wrote Nayyem in his Facebook ac-
count, “Let’s be serious. Who is ready to show up on the Maidan
by midnight tonight? ‘Likes’ will be ignored. Only comments on
this post with the words ‘I’m ready.’” There were six hundred “I’m
ready” responses. At 9:30 p. m. Nayyem typed another post: “Dress
warmly, bring umbrellas, tea, coffee, a good mood, and friends.”
Shortly after 10:00 p. m., he was on Kyiv’s central square,
known in Ukrainian as the Maidan, where the Orange Revolu-
tion had begun ten years earlier. About thirty people had gath-
ered by the time he arrived. By midnight, there were more than
228
a thousand young, educated urbanites. For them, the expected as-

sociation agreement with the EU was the last hope that Ukraine
might finally embark on a European course of development, over-
come corruption, modernize its economy, and provide a decent
standard of living for its people. Those hopes were now being
crushed. Nayyem and his friends could not remain silent.6
The protest began like a festival, with singing and dancing to
brave the cold weather of late November. It soon became known
as the Euromaidan—the largest pro-European rally in history.
President Yanukovych, for his part, had learned from the Orange
Revolution of 2004 that the sooner one got rid of protesters, the
better. Thus, in the early hours of 30 November, riot police were
ordered to attack the students camping on the Maidan. They
did so with the utmost brutality under the pretext of clearing
the square to allow the construction of a huge Christmas tree in
preparation for New Year’s celebrations that were still one month
away. Once images of police beating unarmed students were post-
ed on the Internet, dormant Ukrainian civil society reacted sharp-
ly. The next day was Sunday, and close to 350,000 people showed
up in downtown Kyiv to protest police brutality. The Euromaidan,
which had begun with protests against the postponement of the
signing of the EU association agreement, turned into what be-
came known as the Revolution of Dignity. Hundreds of thou-
sands of people would join the protests that continued through
December 2013 into January and February 2014.
With the United States and EU countries applying pressure
on President Yanukovych for a peaceful resolution of the crisis,
Yanukovych turned to Russia. Ever since his election in 2010, the
Kremlin had wanted him to stop Ukraine’s drift toward the West,
refuse to sign the association agreement with the EU, and join the
Russian-led customs union whose members included Belarus and
Kazakhstan. Yanukovych was at first reluctant to do so, but the
Kremlin raised the stakes by starting a trade war with Ukraine
in the summer of 2013. In November, Yanukovych gave up. He
refused to sign the agreement with the EU and went to Russia
instead to negotiate a US $15 billion loan needed to keep his klep-
tocratic government afloat until the next presidential elections,
which were scheduled for 2015. The Russian government granted
the loan and delivered the first installment. The task now was to
229
keep Yanukovych in power, and the Kremlin thought it could best

be done by suppressing the Maidan protests—an option advo-
cated publicly by Putin’s adviser Sergei Glazev. In January 2014,
as protests continued, Yanukovych forced laws through parlia-
ment allowing him to do just that. But the new laws, condemned
by the opposition as draconian, only brought more people onto
the streets.
Clashes between protesters and police began in late January,
reaching their peak on 18 February 2014, when dozens of protest-
ers and policemen were killed by gunfire. That day the government
ordered snipers to shoot at the protesters, and fatalities among
them soon exceeded one hundred. Those killed by the police and
hired thugs became known as the “heavenly hundred.” The Eu-
ropean Union imposed sanctions, including travel bans and asset
freezes, on members of the Ukrainian government responsible for
the use of force against the protesters. The Ukrainian parliament,
dominated by big-business oligarchs who did not want to lose
access to money stashed in Western banks, passed a resolution
prohibiting the government from using force against citizens.
That was the end of the Yanukovych regime, which could not
survive without reliance on brute force. On 21 February 2014, EU
delegates led by the Polish minister of foreign affairs, Radosław
Sikorski, negotiated a deal between Yanukovych and the leaders
of the opposition. One of its conditions was a new presidential
election before the end of the year. But Yanukovych, who had no
illusions about its outcome, fled his mansion near Kyiv the same
night, reportedly taking hundreds of millions of dollars and leav-
ing behind a private zoo and a fleet of vintage cars. The next day
parliament voted to remove him from office. He drove with his
bodyguards to the Crimea, and then, by some accounts, boarded
a Russian ship to make his way to the Russian Federation, where
he was granted citizenship.7
The Russian government was extremely displeased with the
turn of events in Kyiv. On 21 February 2014, the Russian repre-
sentative at the negotiations conducted by Sikorski refused to sign
the agreement on behalf of his state, but after Yanukovych fled
Kyiv, Moscow accused the West and the Ukrainian opposition of
not honoring the agreement. It declared the Kyiv events a coup
and branded the new Ukrainian government unconstitutional.
230
As the world watched the closing ceremonies of the Sochi winter

Olympic Games on 23 February 2014, the corridors of European
foreign ministries were rife with speculation about what Russia
might do once the games were over. Vladimir Putin later admit-
ted that on that day he gave his subordinates an order to begin
the takeover of the Crimea. On 27 February, four days after the
end of the Olympics, Viktor Yanukovych, now safe on Russian
territory, issued a statement claiming to be the legitimate pres-
ident of Ukraine, and a detachment of heavily armed men in
unmarked uniforms seized the buildings of the Supreme Council
and government of the Crimea and flew Russian flags atop both
centers of power.
On the same day, with the “green men” firmly in control, the
Crimean parliament held a closed session that lacked a quorum,
according to numerous reports, and dissolved the Crimean gov-
ernment. As the new prime minister it appointed Sergei Aksenov,
the leader of the Russian Unity Party, which had obtained only
4 percent of the vote in the Crimean parliamentary elections.
On 1 March, Aksenov appealed to Vladimir Putin to help ensure
“peace and order” on the peninsula. The next day, Russian mil-
itary units moved out of their barracks in Sevastopol and, with
the support of troops brought from Russia, seized control of the
Crimea. They were assisted by specially trained groups of Russian
Cossacks and mercenaries from Russia, as well as local militias.
Vladimir Putin and the members of his government, who had
originally denied allegations of Russian military intervention in
the Crimea, eventually admitted the participation of the Russian
military in its takeover.
The Russian annexation of the Crimea was given a veneer of
legitimacy by a referendum hastily organized on 16 March 2014.
Officials declared that more than 83 percent of eligible voters had
taken part in the referendum, with close to 97 percent voting in
favor of joining Russia. Unofficial reports, including those from
the Human Rights Council subordinate to the Russian president,
cut both numbers almost in half, estimating the turnout at under
40 percent and the vote for joining Russia at under 60 percent.
Those figures find support in a poll conducted in the Crimea in
February 2014, when not many more than 40 percent of those
polled were in favor of joining Russia. But the new authorities
231
clearly did not want to take any risks and went for outright fal-
sification. In the city of Sevastopol, they reported a turnout that
amounted to 123 percent of registered voters. The referendum was
boycotted by the 250,000‑strong Crimean Tatar community and
declared illegal by the government of Ukraine. Its results were
not recognized by the international community. But on 18 March
2014, Russia officially annexed the peninsula. In his speech on the
occasion, Vladimir Putin claimed that the Crimean referendum
had been held “in full compliance with democratic procedures
and international norms.” 8
It turned out that the annexation of the Crimea was just the
beginning of Russian aggression against Ukraine. In April, vet-
erans of the Crimean campaign from the ranks of Russian Cos-
sacks, nationalist activists, and undercover intelligence officers
moved from the Crimea to the cities and towns of southern and
eastern Ukraine. Their targets were government administration
buildings, as well as headquarters of police and security services
in the cities of Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Mykolaïv, and Odesa,
as well as in the smaller towns of southeastern Ukraine. The goal,
many believe, was to proclaim a number of separatist republics
that would then unite as one Russian-backed state of Novorossiia,
or New Russia—the name originally used for one of the imperial
provinces in southern Ukraine after the Russian annexation of the
Crimea in the late eighteenth century. Participants in anti-gov-
ernment rallies were often bussed across the border from Russia
and the Russian-controlled Transnistria region of Moldova.
The new revolutionary government in Kyiv was completely
unprepared to deal with the Russian annexation of the Crimea
and the hybrid war that the Kremlin had begun in the eastern
Ukrainian Donbas. For months, the leaders of the new govern-
ment had led the opposition in its street war against the police
and now could not rely on the latter’s support in dealing with the
foreign-inspired insurgency. In fact, many policemen joined the
Russian mercenaries and the local rebels. The Ukrainian army
was virtually nonexistent. It was in transition from a conscript
army to a professional one, severely underfunded, with no combat
experience. The Russians had been fighting their war in Chechnya
since 1991, and the Ukrainians were no match for the well-trained
Russian regular troops and special forces. It soon turned out that
232
they had major problems in dealing even with Russian-trained

local militias. The troops initially could not bring themselves to
shoot at paramilitaries who were firing on them and taking over
their barracks and equipment.
Kyiv began to put its act together only in mid-April. It was
then that one of the leaders of the Maidan protests and the new
minister of the interior, Arsen Avakov, managed to reclaim the
regional administration building in his native Kharkiv, and Igor
Kolomoisky, a Ukrainian oligarch, returned from de facto exile in
Switzerland to lead the government of his native Dnipropetrovsk
region. Avakov, an ethnic Armenian, and Kolomoisky, an ethnic
Jew, emerged as the “saviors” of Ukraine from the Russian hy-
brid-war offensive, dispelling the myth of the nationalist or even
fascist leanings of the new government in Kyiv and its supporters
disseminated by Russian propaganda. By mid-May, it was clear
that the Russian attempt to raise a revolt throughout southeastern
Ukraine and create Novorossiia, a state that would divide Ukraine
in half and provide the Russian government with land access to
the Crimea and Transnistria, had failed.
The Russian strategists of the hybrid war were much more
successful in the Donbas industrial region on Ukraine’s eastern
border with Russia, where Russian-backed separatists declared
the formation of the Luhansk and Donetsk “People’s Repub-
lics.” On 12 April, armed men led by Igor Girkin (nom de guerre
Strelkov), a former colonel in Russian military intelligence and
a veteran of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, seized the government
and police headquarters in the city of Sloviansk in the northeast-
ern Donbas. By the end of the month, militias led by former Rus-
sian intelligence officers and reinforced by Cossacks, volunteers,
and Chechen fighters brought in from Russia and funded with
Russian money had seized administrative buildings in most cities
and towns of the region, including its two major centers, the cities
of Luhansk and Donetsk. They also seized radio and television
stations, cutting off Ukrainian channels and bombarding listen-
ers and viewers with misinformation about the new Kyiv gov-
ernment, which was called a “fascist junta,” and its plans, which
allegedly included the desire to ban the Russian language in the
region. Viewers and listeners were promised Russian salaries and
pensions, which were significantly higher than those in Ukraine,
233
and citizenship either in Russia or in the new state of Novorossiia,

which would include a good half of Ukraine.
The propaganda was effective: significant numbers of unem-
ployed and semi-employed youth joined the rebel militias, where
they were paid for their services. The resistance of the pro-Kyiv
activists was crushed, and some of them were kidnapped and
killed, while help from Kyiv failed to arrive. There were several
reasons why the covert Russian invasion met little resistance in
the Donbas. A major industrial powerhouse in Soviet times, it
had become an economically depressed area with the switch from
a command economy to the market after 1991. Like cities in rust
belts throughout the world, Donetsk became a criminal capital.
Many of its new elites had criminal backgrounds or connections,
with the region’s best-known politician, Viktor Yanukovych, hav-
ing served two prison sentences in his youth.
While dependent on subsidies from Kyiv, the region had
a strong sense of local pride and identity. Its ethnic composition
differed from that of neighboring regions of Ukraine, as eth-
nic Russians constituted majorities in Donetsk and some other
towns of the area. In 2001, only 24 percent of the inhabitants
of Donetsk Oblast and 30 percent of those in Luhansk Oblast
identified Ukrainian as their native language, as compared with 67
percent in neighboring Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Although ethnic
Ukrainians made up 47 percent of the population of Donetsk,
only 27 percent of the city’s children received their education in
Ukrainian. Russian was the dominant language on the streets
of the Donbas, and the local elites exploited that fact to mobi-
lize their electorate, claiming that the new Kyiv government was
a threat to the Russian language.
Despite their strong sense of local identity, in early April 2014,
85 percent of Donetsk residents were opposed to the seizure of
government buildings and installations by militias, and more than
60 percent favored the arrest of separatist activists. But the local
political and business elites refused to act against the Russia-led
insurgents. They either remained neutral or even tacitly supported
the protests in the hope that the new government in Kyiv would
be more willing to make a deal with them if the region was in
turmoil. It was a short-sighted tactic. They would soon lose con-
trol over the rapidly developing crisis.
234
As the leaders of the Russian-inspired and funded insurgency

took a page from the local elite’s playbook and used the theme
of protecting the allegedly threatened Russian language and
culture, the region’s political and business elites decided to go
with the flow. In the local referendum that took place on 11 May
2014 and was not recognized by Kyiv, voters were asked whether
they supported the samostoiatelńost´ of the republic—a term that
could mean either autonomy or independence. The leaders of the
Donetsk “republic” declared that 89 percent of voters favored in-
dependence, and the corresponding figure in Luhansk was 96
percent, but these figures were as fraudulent as the ones released
in the Crimean referendum, and many of those who voted later
claimed that they wanted broad autonomy, not independence. The
referendum took place without the presence of international ob-
servers and was not recognized by the international community.
The Ukrainian government launched a counteroffensive
against the separatist takeover of the Donbas in mid-April, with-
out apparent success until after the presidential election of 25 May
2014. It brought to power one of the leaders of the Euromaidan
protests, the Ukrainian business tycoon Petro Poroshenko, who
won more than half the vote in the first round. On 26 May, the
Ukrainian army recaptured the Donetsk international airport; on
13 June, it took control of the port city of Mariupol on the Sea
of Azov; and on 5 July, it took the city of Sloviansk, forcing the
units of Colonel Igor Girkin, who by then had declared himself
defense minister of the “Donetsk People’s Republic,” to retreat
to Donetsk. With the Ukrainian forces on the offensive, Russia
increased its support for the separatist insurgents, now led by two
Russian citizens with close links to the Russian government and
security services—Colonel Girkin and the self-proclaimed prime
minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, Aleksandr Borodai. In
the second half of June, the Ukrainian government claimed and
NATO intelligence confirmed the continuing influx from Russia
to Ukraine not only of trained militants but also of heavy military
equipment, including tanks and multiple-rocket launchers.
On 17 July 2014, the war in eastern Ukraine became truly
international as Russia-backed separatists shot down Malay-
sian Airlines Flight MH 17, killing all 298 people on board. The
destruction of a civilian airliner produced a flood of protests
235
throughout the world, forcing US and EU leaders to step up sanc-

tions against Russian political and business elites associated with
the undeclared war against Ukraine. But sanctions, which have an
impact over time, had no immediate effect on Russian behavior.
If anything, Russia increased its involvement in Ukraine. In July,
Russian artillery and missiles began bombarding Ukrainian ter-
ritory from the Russian side of the border, and in August regular
units of the Russian army crossed the border not just to reinforce
Russian mercenaries and local militias but also to take the lead
in fighting the Ukrainian armed forces and volunteer battalions.
Thousands of Russian regular troops took part in the offensive
launched by the separatists during the last week of August 2014.
Some of them were captured by the Ukrainian military and pa-
raded before television cameras as proof of Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine. By sending regular troops into a battle previously fought
under the command of Russian military officers and with Russian
equipment, Moscow stopped the Ukrainian advance and saved
the self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk “republics” from im-
minent defeat.
In early September 2014, with the participation of Russia
and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
(OSCE), the two sides signed an agreement that resulted in
a shaky ceasefire. In February 2015, a new ceasefire was nego-
tiated in Minsk (Minsk II) by the leaders of Germany, France,
Russia, and Ukraine, only to be violated in the next few weeks
when Russian-backed militants took over the strategic railway
centre of Debaltseve, previously held by the Ukrainian side. In
2015, despite the Minsk II agreement, Russia continued to provide
military support for its puppet regimes in the Donbas, sending
not only supplies and weapons but also its military personnel, and
causing the continuation of the sanctions introduced by the West
to discourage Russia from aggravating the conflict.9
The Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and then post-Soviet
Russia all associated international power and security with con-
trol over territories along their borders. If they could not control
such territories completely, they would partition them and control
what they could. This was the rationale behind the partitions of
Poland in the second half of the eighteenth century and the di-
vision of Germany after World War II. The “New Russia” project,
236
launched by the Russian government in 2014, had as its primary

goal the partitioning of Ukraine and the creation of a Russian-
controlled state in the southern and eastern parts of the country.
That project failed, as Russia managed to destabilize and control
only a small part of the projected state of New Russia. While
the Crimea was annexed right away, the covert Russian war in
the Donbas created conditions for the establishment of another
enclave of “frozen conflict” unrecognized by the rest of the world,
not unlike Transnistria on the territory of Moldova and Southern
Ossetia and Abkhazia on the territory of Georgia. These enclaves
are used to apply pressure to Western-leaning republics. Chances
are that this will be the primary function of the new frozen-
conflict area in eastern Ukraine.
Many in Russia and around the world believe that the crisis
is far from over, mainly because Vladimir Putin did not achieve
most of what he wanted when he began his aggression against
Ukraine. “Putin wanted to tie Ukraine to Russia, to encourage its
entry into the Customs Union. He got the exact opposite,” wrote
the Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in October 2014.
“He wanted Ukraine to maintain a neutral status. He failed mis-
erably. . . . He wanted to win the respect of the Ukrainian people.
He created a long-term enemy. . . . Putin wanted a ‘Novorossiia’
stretching from Donetsk to Odesa. He got a small section of
the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. . . . [H]e wanted a corridor
to the Crimea via Mariupol. He raised awareness and resistance
among the locals and spurred Russian residents in Mariupol to
dig trenches around the city. . . . He wanted to seize land without
firing a single shot, as in the Crimea. He got 4,000 people killed
on both sides. . . . Putin wanted to be recognized as a strong
leader in world politics. He became an outcast.” Indeed, short of
the annexation of the Crimea, few of the original goals set by the
Russian leadership in the winter and spring of 2014 were achieved
by the end of that year. And even that came at a huge cost to the
Russian economy and international prestige.10
In the wake of the Russian aggression against Ukraine, Vla-
dimir Putin’s (and, by extension, Russia’s) stock in the West fell
to an unprecedented low. Relatives of those who perished in the
shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH 17 held him re-
sponsible for the deaths of their loved ones. Many began speaking
237
of a return of Cold War relations between Russia and the West.

Some American politicians, including Hillary Clinton, compared
Russia’s readiness to use the rhetoric of protecting Russian-
speakers abroad as a pretext for the invasion and annexation of
foreign territories with the policies of Nazi Germany on the eve
of World War II. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and annex-
ation of the Crimea was indeed the first case of forcible takeover
of territory in Europe since the end of World War II. Parallels
were also drawn between the actions of Slobodan Milošević in
Yugoslavia in the 1990s and Vladimir Putin in 2014—both had
used the national minorities card as a pretext for war.11
Ukraine’s movement away from its former imperial master to-
ward an international center of gravity finds numerous parallels in
the history of the disintegration of empires and the emergence of
national states. The French helped the British colonies of North
America free themselves from London; the British, Russians, and
French helped the Greeks free themselves from Istanbul; and in
1918, the Germans backed the Ukrainian nation-building project
against Bolshevik Moscow. What makes the Ukrainian situa-
tion different is that the European Union, the pole that attracts
Ukraine most, is not a united polity or a state at all. The strength
and attractiveness of the EU lie in its values and in the mod-
els of political, economic, and social organization of its member
states. Its weaknesses are its cumbersome structure and difficulty
in formulating a coherent foreign policy. Nor is the EU equipped
to deal with military threats and war situations like the one in
Ukraine. The EU has the ability to attract but currently no politi-
cal will to accept new members and no military muscle to defend
those aspiring to join it.
The Ukrainian crisis reminded the world once again of the
importance of the United States as a major stakeholder in Euro-
pean security and prosperity—the role it played for most of the
twentieth century. The United States, whose involvement in East
European affairs diminished significantly in the wake of Second
Gulf War, began its return to the region’s political scene with the
start of the Euro-Revolution in Ukraine. Washington, whose rela-
tions with Moscow have been tarnished by tensions in the Middle
East in the wake of the Arab Spring of 2010 and suffered a further
setback with Putin’s return to the office of Russian president in
238
the spring of 2012, has provided leadership in formulating a joint

Western response to the crisis. That response, which included
diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions against Russia, as
well as financial and limited military assistance to Ukraine, helped
to stop Russian aggression in the fall of 2014.
With the United States and the European Union drawing
closer, and Russia on the other side of the divide, what we see
today is not a reenactment of the Cold War or a new version of
the Great Game, a superpower rivalry that played out in Cen-
tral Asia in the nineteenth century and in East-Central Europe
through most of the twentieth century. Both the United States
and the European Union are at best reluctant participants in the
current crisis. The Cold War years of trying to haul any Western-
leaning country out of Moscow’s net are long gone. Neither the
United States nor the EU is trying to gain control of Ukraine or
keep the country in its sphere of influence. The need to respond to
Russian aggression comes from the simple fact that such blatant
violation of bilateral and multilateral agreements signed by that
country has shaken and continues to threaten the foundations of
the post-World War II and post-Cold War political order, raising
the specter of arbitrary border revisions, regional conflicts, and
global instability.
The origins of the crisis that caught both Washington and
Brussels by surprise lie in Ukraine’s desire to transform itself by
choosing a Western model of development and Russia’s determi-
nation to stop that from happening and keep the former province
in its embrace. To be sure, what happens in Ukraine depends
mainly on the actions of the Ukrainians themselves. But historical
contextualization of the current crisis suggests that Ukraine’s des-
perate attempts to free itself from the suffocating embrace of its
former master have a much greater chance of success with strong
international support. The goal should not be to move Ukraine
from one sphere of influence to another but to reject imperial and
post-imperial forms of domination, which should be relegated
completely to the past, where they belong.
239
16.
When Stalin Lost His Head
A chain saw cut through a thin layer of aluminum alloy with

much whining but little difficulty—the monument’s neck was
hollow. Then someone hit the top of the monument with a metal
rod, and the head fell off, hitting the concrete floor. The rest of
the monument remained intact. It was the dark winter evening
of 28 December 2010. Several young men made their way into
the gated area around a three-story pink stucco office building
in downtown Zaporizhzhia. They blocked the doors, making it
impossible for the guard to get out. They then proceeded to the
monument next to the building entrance and started the chain
saw. Once the job was done, they left the severed head on the
stairs to the building and departed.
The young men belonged to Tryzub (Trident), a Ukrainian
nationalist organization named after Stepan Bandera, the leader
of a faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)
during World War II. The statue they beheaded was a monument
to Joseph Stalin. On the following day, 29 December, Tryzub
claimed responsibility for what had happened in Zaporizhzhia.
The statement released by the organization read: “On 28 Decem-
ber an unidentified mobile group belonging to the Stepan Bande-
ra Tryzub in Zaporizhzhia successfully carried out a national de-
fense action, liquidating the Stalin-Dzhugashvili illegally erected
on the territory of the Zaporizhzhia Oblast committee of the
CPU [Communist Party of Ukraine].” Although the communists
denied that anything of that nature had befallen the monument,
their bluff was soon called when a video appeared on YouTube
241
documenting the decapitation. The young men from Tryzub had

taped the whole procedure, which has now been viewed almost
sixty thousand times (including a few times by this author).1
This essay discusses the significance and broader implications
of events that happened in Zaporizhzhia on the night of 28 De-
cember 2010 and in the days and months preceding and following
the event. Its immediate goal is to explain why a monument to
Stalin appeared, of all places, in Ukraine, a recent poster child for
the Western democratic project in Eastern Europe; why it was
damaged by people associated with the name of Stepan Bandera,
the leader of the most radical group of Ukrainian nationalists
during World War II; and what this tells us about political and
memory wars in contemporary Ukraine. The essay’s ultimate goal
is to contribute to our understanding of the interrelation of pol-
itics and memory in post-communist societies.
The Post-Soviet Hero

The return of Joseph Stalin to the public sphere in post-Soviet
space began in Russia soon after the disintegration of the Soviet
Union. It was championed by two political forces, the Russian
communists and Russian nationalists, and came on the heels of
the liberal anti-Stalin campaign that was a hallmark of Gor-
bachev’s perestroika. Disillusioned with the liberal agenda in
the first post-Soviet decade, which witnessed economic collapse,
political chaos, and loss of the Soviet empire and superpower
status, Russian society embraced the values and symbols offered
by communists and nationalists. According to polling data col-
lected by the Levada Center, only 10 percent of those polled in
1989 considered Stalin a great leader. That figure increased to 20
percent in 1994 and 35 percent in 2000. Stalin’s popularity reached
its peak during Vladimir Putin’s first tenure as president of Russia,
crossing the 50 percent threshold in 2004, and hovering around
50 percent ever since.
While most Russians condemn Stalin-era terror and repres-
sions, many of them see in Stalin an effective economic manager
and a great leader who won the war and turned his country into
a superpower. As the Soviet victory in World War II developed
into a key historical myth in post-Soviet Russia, it gave special
242
prominence to Stalin, who, according to the myth created in his

lifetime, was most responsible for the victory. Nostalgia for the
lost Soviet past with its social stability and imperial grandeur
helped to propel Stalin to celebrity status in Russian media and
society. Some observers believe that by embracing Stalin, the Rus-
sian public also embraced authoritarianism as the only effective
way of governing their country.2
While the return of Joseph Stalin to prominence began in
Russia, it did not stop at its borders. Ukraine, sharing much of the
Soviet past with Russia, underwent similar political and economic
turmoil after the fall of the USSR, and on many levels it remains
part of the Moscow-centered informational space. It experienced
the spillover effect of Stalin’s rehabilitation in Russia. In Ukraine,
however, the return of Stalin was modest at best. In 2010, only 28
percent of the population considered him a positive figure, while
64 percent had negative attitudes toward him. Yet Stalin’s popu-
larity differed significantly from one region of Ukraine to another.
In western parts of the country only 7 percent viewed Stalin posi-
tively, but in its eastern oblasts, bordering on Russia, the number
of those with a positive attitude toward Stalin reached 44 percent,
which was comparable with the Russian numbers.3
If in Russia Stalin emerged as a hero for communists and
nationalists alike, in Ukraine, while communists, or some of their
leaders, embraced Stalin, Ukrainian nationalists rejected him as
a symbol of the suppression of Ukrainian statehood and culture
and a perpetrator of crimes against the Ukrainian nation. It is
not surprising that the monument was erected by communists in
eastern Ukraine, while the organization that destroyed the mon-
ument had its main backing in western Ukraine.
The Warlord
The Zaporizhzhia communists officially unveiled the bust of
Stalin on 5 May 2010, a few days before the 65th anniversary of
VE Day. On 9 May, in the eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk,
a monument was unveiled to the victims of atrocities commit-
ted by the Bandera faction of the OUN during and after World
War II. The two events were either initiated or supported by the
same political force—the Communist Party. They manifested
243
the arrival of Stalin as a new resource in Ukraine’s memories of

World War II and underlined the importance of those memories
as a battleground between different political forces in the country.
The Zaporizhzhia ceremony was attended by numerous Red
Army veterans. Some of them, wearing military uniforms decorat-
ed with combat awards, formed an honor guard next to the mon-
ument. “We built the monument at the request of our veterans,”
stated Aleksei Baburin, the first secretary of the Zaporizhzhia
regional committee of the CPU and a deputy of the Ukrainian
parliament. The inscription on the monument identified Stalin
not only as head of the Soviet state but also as a generalissimo.
The depiction of Stalin in a marshal’s uniform and epaulettes,
along with the date of the ceremony, the uniforms of the honor
guard, and the inscription on the monument left no doubt that
the communists were seeking to legitimize the monument to
a figure extremely controversial in Ukraine by linking him with
the well-established Soviet narrative of the victory of the Sovi-
et people in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45, as the Soviet-
German segment of World War II became known in the USSR.
The reference to Red Army veterans was a crucial element of that
legitimization. “Only those who do not honor their grandfathers
and fathers can get involved in a discussion of whether this is
needed or not,” asserted Baburin with regard to the monument.
“We are carrying out the will of our veterans.” 4
One of the main speakers at the event was Ivan Shekhovtsov,
who donated the largest sum for the construction of the monu-
ment: 50,000 hryvnias (close to US $7,000) out of the total cost
of 106,000 hryvnias. Shekhovtsov, a retired Soviet-era criminal
prosecutor from Kharkiv, first made a name for himself in the late
1980s when he initiated his first lawsuit in defense of the honor
and dignity of Joseph Stalin. Altogether Shekhovtsov filed close
to twenty suits defending his hero’s reputation against attacks on
him by such people as the Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich.
Even now, he continues to claim that it was the Germans, not
Stalin’s NKVD, who executed the Polish officers in Katyn Forest,
and that the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33 had nothing to
do with the policies of Stalin and his associates. His advocacy of
Stalin caused a breach in his family. Shekhovtsov’s wife of many
years and his two children, both lawyers, broke all relations with
244
him, but he continued his activities after the disintegration of

the USSR.
In 2004 Shekhovtsov published a four-volume study entitled
Delo Stalina-”prestupnika” i ego “zashchitnika” (The Case of Stalin
the “Criminal” and of His “Defender”). To publish the book he
turned for money to his wealthy children, but they refused to
support the project. Shekhovtsov eventually found a sponsor in
Russia to whom he promised to return the loan. It is not clear
who the sponsor was and what happened to the loan, but in
2012 Shekhovtsov unexpectedly came up with 50,000 hryvnias
for the construction of the Stalin monument. He claimed to have
made the donation out of his pension. Given that the average
pension in Ukraine does not exceed US $300.00, and most of
that money goes for food, Shekhovtsov’s donation was nothing
short of a miracle. But so was the installation of a monument to
Stalin in a country that had celebrated the victory of the Orange
Revolution five years earlier.5
Shekhovtsov welcomed those gathered at the ceremonial un-
veiling as citizens of the Soviet Union. He then praised Stalin
as a great leader and military commander. He emphasized the
link between Stalin and the Soviet-era myth of World War II
by making reference to the heroism of Zoia Kosmodemianskaia,
a member of the Communist Youth League who was sent by
the NKVD to burn villages behind the German lines during the
battle for Moscow in the winter of 1941. Russian peasants, who
were not partial to the idea of dying in the open fields, captured
Zoia and turned her over to the Germans, who executed the
young saboteur.
The Soviets, for their part, turned her into a war hero. Accord-
ing to the propaganda myth, before her execution Zoia allegedly
exclaimed: “Stalin is with us! Stalin will come!” It was the myth
of a life given in service to Stalin that captured the imagination
of the young Ivan Shekhovtsov, then a private in the Red Army.
Addressing the Zaporizhzhia gathering, Shekhovtsov added
another important element to the old myth: Stalin, it was said,
had personally visited the grave of Zoia Kosmodemianskaia. The
reference to Stalin paying tribute to one of his fallen soldiers
reinforced the connection between the Stalin monument and the
theme of the Great Patriotic War.6
245
That theme found its reflection in the comments that the

Zaporizhzhia communists began to collect in June 2010 in a spe-
cial book dedicated to the Stalin monument. At first, most of
the visitors who were asked to leave their comments in the book
were from outside Ukraine. A certain Afinogenov, a retired major
from the Arkhangelsk region of Russia, concluded his laudatory
comment on the brave Zaporozhians who had dared to put up
a monument to Stalin with the war-era slogan “For the Moth-
erland, for Stalin!” The retired Colonel A. Lugansky from Odesa
wrote that without Stalin there would have been no victory in
the war. He also concluded his comments with a war-era slogan:
“Victory will be ours!” Aleksandr Belenky from Israel stressed
Stalin’s role in the construction of socialism and in winning the
“Great Victory.” He also wrote that his grandfather, a Red Army
artillery soldier, had been killed in the “Great Patriotic War.”
Eventually, as locals were also invited to leave their comments
in the book, they indicated victory in the war as Stalin’s major
achievement. The Reverend Vasilii, a retired archbishop of the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the jurisdiction of the Moscow
Patriarchate, thanked the regional committee of the Communist
Party for keeping alive the memory of a “great person.” He was
especially moved by Stalin’s alleged order to take an icon of the
Kazan Mother of God into the skies over Moscow and Lenin-
grad in order to entreat divine protection of the capitals from
a German takeover. Many stressed in their comments that this
was a monument to Generalissimo Stalin.7
Stalin vs. Bandera

Not everyone in Zaporizhzhia was happy with the installation
of the monument to Stalin or accepted the notion that anyone
showing respect for veterans of World War II had to put up with
the monument. Among the most vocal opponents were mem-
bers of Ukrainian nationalist organizations. Their members were
not allowed to approach the monument at its unveiling, but they
promised that it would not last very long. On 28 December, it
looked as if they had delivered on their promise. But the com-
munists put on a brave face. Instead of turning to the police and
claiming that someone had destroyed the monument, which they
246
had installed without proper permission from the authorities,

they placed the head back on the metal bust, claiming that the
vandalism had resulted in the loss of a couple of letters of the
inscription. But the worst for the monument still lay ahead.8
Half an hour before midnight on 31 December 2010, a blast
shook the environs of the communist headquarters. It was the
time of night when people were opening bottles of champagne
and setting off fireworks, but the sound that came from the com-
pound had nothing to do with New Year’s celebrations. It accom-
panied a blast that destroyed the Stalin bust hastily repaired only
a few days earlier. Although the base survived, the bust itself was
blown to bits. The largest fragment was that of the generalissimo’s
left hand, holding a marshal’s epaulette. The glass was blown out
of the windows, and the hammer and sickle above the entrance
to the building hung at a crazy angle. Who had blown up the
monument? The opinions of readers of the Internet publication
Ukraïnska pravda, known for its liberal nationalist views, were
divided. It could either have been the nationalists finishing the
job or the authorities themselves, pursuing their own political
agenda. “Whatever it is, it’s a delight all the same! Happy New
Year, gentlemen!” remarked a reader in the discussion column.9
As had been the case a few days earlier, there was an or-
ganization prepared to claim responsibility for the attack. The
difference was that no one had ever heard of the “Movement of
1 January” that did so. The statement released in the name of that
organization read: “In honor of the 102nd anniversary of the birth
of the Leader of the Ukrainian people, Stepan Bandera, a special
combat unit of the Movement of 1 January blew up a shrine to the
butcher of Ukraine, Stalin (Dzhugashvili). This is only our first
action to destroy the enemies of the Ukrainian nation. Our next
targets will be anti-Ukrainian officials, policemen, bandits of the
‘SBU’ [Security Service of Ukraine], prosecutors, and judges who
persecute Ukrainian patriots. We shall destroy all Zionists and
their wretched synagogues on our sacred Ukrainian land; there
will be no mercy for them! We call on all patriots to band together
in autonomous combat units, undergo training, and study military
science and explosive materials. Our time has come: the National
Revolution is not far off ! Liberty or death!” 10
247
Although the statement used some of the language employed

by nationalists, its calls for terrorist acts and anti-Semitism had
no parallels in recent Ukrainian history. The authorities termed
the demolition of the Stalin monument an act of terrorism. The
search for the perpetrators began. It did not take very long to find
the members of Tryzub who had claimed responsibility for de-
capitating the monument—they were soon arrested, interrogated,
and put behind bars—but it was much more difficult to pick up
the trail of those who had blown up the monument a few days
later and issued a statement calling for violence and ethnic hatred.
Many in the nationalist and liberal camps believed that the task
was impossible, as the authorities themselves were behind the act.
Suspicions of that nature intensified as the authorities arrested
leaders of the largest nationalist party, Svoboda (Liberty), which
had its power base in western Ukraine but was gaining strength
in the center and east of the country. A regional governor declared
that the organization’s leaders were preparing a coup d’état and
planning to shoot down President Viktor Yanukovych’s airplane.
Many believed that the authorities had staged a provocation that
could lead to the declaration of a state of emergency and post-
ponement of parliamentary elections.11
Whoever was behind the explosion that destroyed the Stalin
monument in Zaporizhzhia, the fact that responsibility for its
previous decapitation was claimed by an organization named after
Stepan Bandera immediately placed the event into the context
of Ukrainian memory wars, which, ever since the Orange Rev-
olution, had pitted Red Army veterans against veterans of the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a World War II partisan formation
led by members of the OUN. The statement of the “Movement
of 1 January” highlighted the issue of anti-Semitism and violence
as a common feature of nationalist thinking and actions. The two
competing narratives of World War II—the Soviet-era myth of
the Great Patriotic War versus that of the Ukrainian nationalist
underground’s heroic resistance to both communists and Na-
zis—again came crashing into the Ukrainian public sphere. By
no coincidence whatever, the first narrative was embodied by the
figure of Stalin, the second by that of Bandera.
According to a poll taken in the fall of 2010, Bandera was the
second least popular figure in Ukraine after Stalin. If Stalin was
248
viewed negatively by 64 percent of those polled, Bandera scored 51

percent. Supporters of both historical figures were equal in num-
ber—28 percent of those polled. As in the case of Stalin, Bandera’s
supporters and opponents were divided along geographic lines.
While Bandera was favored by 58 percent in the west, his support
reached only 9 percent in the east of the country.12
The division of Ukrainian historical memory of World War II
along the Stalin-Bandera line found its most vivid representation
in two developments that took place in January 2010, the last full
month of President Viktor Yushchenko’s tenure. On 13 January,
a Kyiv court declared Stalin and other leading members of the
communist regime in Russia and Ukraine guilty of the crime of
genocide, as they had created conditions for the Great Ukrainian
Famine of 1932–33. The court’s finding became law on 21 January.
On the following day, in his speech marking a Ukrainian national
holiday, Unity Day, President Yushchenko announced that he
had a signed a decree bestowing the title of Hero of Ukraine
on Stepan Bandera. In a period of less than ten days, Stalin had
officially been pronounced a criminal and Bandera a hero. With
Yushchenko due to leave office within weeks, and Viktor Yanu-
kovych of the Party of Regions, which enjoyed the support of
communist voters, poised to take his place, everyone understood
that these last official actions of Yushchenko would be challenged
by the new administration.13
The Zaporizhzhia monument to Stalin was in many ways
a response to the erection of numerous monuments to Bandera
in the western regions of the country during the previous decade.
The largest of them, in the city of Lviv, was unveiled in 2007. After
Yanukovych’s victory, the communists believed that they could
get away with a monument to their anti-Bandera, Stalin. They
were not entirely alone in their desire to do so. Asked about the
monument to Stalin, Vasyl Khara, a member of parliament from
the ruling Party of Regions, called Bandera and the commander
of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Roman Shukhevych, “enemies
of our people, scoundrels and traitors who destroyed the people.”
He then asked a rhetorical question: “So why could they put up
monuments to those scoundrels, but there can be no monument
to Stalin?” 14
249
The destruction of the Stalin monument on New Year’s Eve

2010 led to a new escalation of memory wars in Ukraine and the
partition of Ukrainian memory space along the Stalin-Bandera
line. Petro Symonenko, the leader of the Communist Party of
Ukraine, called on his cadres to “show solidarity and unite for
struggle against neo-Nazi nationalist evil and oligarchs who
sponsor fascist organizations and parties.” He also called on Pres-
ident Yanukovych to revoke the awards bestowed on the war-era
nationalist leaders by his predecessor. “If the most decisive mea-
sures are not taken to end the terrorism of the Svobodaites, the
Tryzubites, and other nationalist bands and formations, it may
end in tragedy for the people of Ukraine,” intoned Symonenko.
“I address myself to the president of Ukraine: cancel immediate-
ly the illegal decrees of your predecessor, Yushchenko, awarding
the title of Hero of Ukraine to the traitors and Hitlerite lackeys
Shukhevych and Bandera.” 15
Symonenko was not the only communist to counterpose
a good Stalin to an evil Bandera. Quite a few of the communists
who wrote their comments in the book at the Stalin monument in
Zaporizhzhia did likewise. One of them claimed in the summer
of 2010 that Stalin was a true leader, not like Yushchenko, Tymo-
shenko, and Yatseniuk, then Ukraine’s political leaders, who had
allegedly betrayed their people as Bandera, Shukhevych, and the
eighteenth-century Ukrainian hetman Ivan Mazepa, who raised
a revolt against Peter I, had done before them. The communist
demands were eventually heard in Kyiv. The blast created the right
political atmosphere for taking the award of Hero of Ukraine
away from the nationalist leader. Eleven days after the destruction
of the Stalin monument, the Yanukovych administration declared
that the title of Hero of Ukraine awarded to Bandera had been
officially rescinded. The Ukrainian courts did so on a technical-
ity—by law, the award could not be given to a noncitizen of
Ukraine, and Bandera, who was killed on KGB orders in October
1959 while in exile in West Germany, had been a citizen of Poland
but never of Ukraine.16
250
The Liberal Dilemma

President Yushchenko’s decree bestowing the title of Hero of
Ukraine on Bandera took the Ukrainian liberal elite by surprise.
For years its most prominent representatives had been associ-
ated in one way or another with the national-liberal camp in
Ukrainian politics—the coalition of nationalist and liberal forces
that brought about Ukrainian independence in 1991 and fueled
the Orange Revolution of 2004 that brought Yushchenko to pow-
er. His Bandera decree indicated that the coalition was all but
dead. Yushchenko’s decree was treated with understanding by
intellectuals with nationalist leanings but rejected by their liberal
counterparts.
For one, argued the liberals, Bandera was too controversial
a figure to be treated as a national hero. He divided Ukraine
instead of uniting it. Politically, the decree allowed the Russian
leadership to claim that the Orange camp had pro-Nazi sympa-
thies; it also alienated the Polish elites, which until then had
been among the strongest supporters of Yushchenko’s attempt
to join the European Union. That was one reason for the liberal
rejection of Yushchenko’s effort to make a hero of Bandera. The
radical nationalism of Bandera’s ideology, as well as the xenopho-
bic and anti-Semitic views of the OUN leadership, were equally
important.17
While they did not welcome the decree, many liberals also
did not believe that the new president’s revocation of the title of
hero was the right way to proceed. As Iaroslav Hrytsak, one of the
leading intellectuals of the national-liberal camp, explained in his
blog in the Lviv Internet publication Zaxid.net, while Yushchen-
ko’s decree had divided Ukraine, the revocation could not stitch it
back up. Many in the national-liberal camp did not welcome the
February 2010 resolution of the European Parliament that called
on the new president of Ukraine to annul his predecessor’s decree.
The Ukrainian intellectuals were especially disappointed by the
support for that resolution on the part of the Polish members
of the European Parliament, who, they believed, had failed to
appreciate the complexities of the political situation in Ukraine
and, by passing such a resolution, strengthened the hand of the
new authoritarian leaders of Ukraine and their Russian backers.
251
Hrytsak suggested that the ideal solution for Ukraine would be

to agree on some form of historical amnesia. Not very optimistic
in that regard, he called on his readers to accept a situation in
which minorities had the right to their own historical narratives
and heroes. Hrytsak cited London, with its monuments both to
Cromwell and to Charles I, as a possible model for the imple-
mentation of such politics of memory.18
While anti-Semitism featured prominently in the statement
of the nonexistent “Movement of 1 January,” and both commu-
nists and liberals touched upon it in their debates on the partic-
ipation of members of the Bandera faction of the OUN in the
Holocaust, the subject remained marginal. It moved much closer
to the center in the debate on Bandera’s legacy that was provoked
by the Yushchenko decree among students of Ukrainian history
in North America. The debate split a group of scholars, former-
ly maintaining something of a consensus in their assessment of
Ukrainian history, who were associated in one way or another
with the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the Uni-
versity of Alberta. Most of those who took part in that debate
during the first half of 2010 stressed the close relation between the
ideological premises of the Bandera organization and European
fascism, putting the emphasis on the anti-Semitic element of na-
tionalist ideology and nationalist collaboration in the Holocaust.
One of the participants in the debate, John-Paul Himka, referred
particularly to the results of his recent study of the Jewish pogrom
in Lviv immediately after the German takeover of the city in late
June and early July 1941.19
Many of the contributions to the Canadian debate appeared
the same year in Ukrainian translation in a book compiled by
Tarik Amar, Ihor Balynsky, and Iaroslav Hrytsak but had limited
impact on the discussion of Bandera’s legacy in Ukraine. The very
division of the memory camps in Ukraine along the Bandera-
Stalin line made the Holocaust theme marginal at best.
The Return of the Tyrant

The Zaporizhzhia communists felt it a matter of honor to restore
the monument to Stalin. Indeed, on 7 November 2011, slightly
more than ten months after the first monument was blown up
252
by still undetermined perpetrators, they unveiled a bust of Stalin

on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. This time
they encountered more obstacles on the part of the civic author-
ities than they had with the original installation. The authorities
in Kyiv and Zaporizhzhia alike were opposed to the monument,
and the city council finally agreed to its installation only as an
interior feature of the building that housed the local headquarters
of the Communist Party.
The communists placed their new bust of Stalin in a bay win-
dow of their reconstructed building. There was another change as
well. Along with Stalin, in the other wing of their building, the
communists installed a monument to none other than Zoia Kos-
modemianskaia, the heroine of Ivan Shekhovtsov, the pension-
er from Kharkiv who had donated 50,000 hryvnias to build the
original monument. This time, apparently, Shekhovtsov had run
out of funds but not out of ideas. He was not mentioned among
the major donors to the reconstruction, but Kosmodemianskaia
featured as prominently in the Zaporizhzhia pantheon as Stalin.
The dictator’s association with the history of the world war and
the legitimization of his cult by means of Great Patriotic War my-
thology were strengthened in the new version of the monument.20
With the perpetrators who had blown up the original monu-
ment still at large (the authorities had to release the leaders of the
nationalist Svoboda Party after it proved impossible to link them
to the blast), and the Tryzub members who had cut off Stalin’s
head a few days previously behind bars, no one seemed willing to
launch another assault on the monument. The new attack on it
came from unexpected sources and was carried out in an unusual
manner. Local journalists got together to produce and display on
a downtown billboard a poster challenging the legitimacy of the
Stalin monument in the context of the same historical mythology
that legitimized it—the mythology of World War II. The poster,
which went on display in December 2011, depicted the figure
of Adolf Hitler, his hands spread in apparent disappointment.
The text read: “What makes me any worse than Stalin? Give me
a monument as well.” A line in smaller print at the bottom of the
poster explained the reason for the action: “Let’s rid the city of
its shame!” The reference was of course to the Stalin monument.21
253
The communists challenged the display of the poster on legal

grounds. Ukraine has a law against fascist propaganda, and the
portrait of Hitler was interpreted as such. The Hitler poster was
soon removed, but a new one, sponsored by the same group of
journalists, took its place. It bore an image of Stalin (Ukraine did
not, at that time, have a law against the propaganda of Stalinism).
The text of the new poster read: “I killed millions of Ukrainians,
and what have you done to deserve a monument?” The line at the
bottom in smaller print remained unchanged: “Let’s rid the city
of its shame!” This time the installation of the monument to Stalin
was challenged on the basis of a different historical myth—that
of the Great Famine of 1932–33.22
While the heroization of Bandera left the Ukrainian national-
liberal intellectuals divided and disoriented, attempts to glorify
Stalin by building him a monument in Zaporizhzhia offered
grounds for solidarity across national-liberal lines. Comparing
Stalin to Hitler and presenting him as a criminal responsible for
the death of millions of Ukrainians during the Great Famine were
two main themes on which liberals and nationalists agreed with
one another. In November 2011, as a district court in Zaporizhzhia
was deciding the fate of Tryzub members accused of decapitating
the Stalin monument, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, the new leader
of Viktor Yushchenko’s party, Our Ukraine, was reported in the
media to have “reminded both representatives of the procuracy
and judges deciding the case that by decision of the Kyiv Ap-
pellate Court of 13 January 2010, Stalin and his henchmen were
found guilty of organizing the famine-genocide of the Ukrainian
people.” Nalyvaichenko, himself a native of Zaporizhzhia, stated:
“I remind all officials who tolerated the erection of a monument
to Stalin in Zaporizhzhia that the criminality of the Stalin regime
has been acknowledged by the parliamentary assemblies of the
CSCE and the Council of Europe, and that their resolutions
should be carried out by our state.” 23
On 12 December 2011, a court in Zaporizhzhia sentenced nine
members of the Tryzub organization, most of them young men
from eastern Ukraine, to prison terms ranging from one to three
years. The implementation of the sentence was postponed, mean-
ing that those sentenced were released from prison after the court
ruling. They were ordered to compensate the Communist Party
254
for 106,000 hryvnias spent on the construction of the monument,

50,000 of them donated by Ivan Shekhovtsov. Those sentenced
appealed the court’s decision, but in June 2012 the regional court
of appeal left the sentence without change. The same court ruled
that the erection of the Stalin monument was an illegal act.
The Tryzub members were tried and sentenced for causing
damage to property that happened to belong to the Communist
Party. In an interview given to media outlets after the court pro-
ceedings, the perpetrators showed no remorse for what they had
done. They declared that, with the Yanukovych administration’s
assumption of office, Ukraine had come under foreign occupation,
and the installation of the monument to Stalin was an insult to
the Ukrainian nation. To the disappointment of many liberals,
there was no trace of liberal ideology in the statements of those
who had toppled the symbol of the liberals’ main embodiment of
evil—Joseph Stalin.24
The War That Failed to End

In Ukraine, the history of World War II continues to serve as
a battleground of two different versions of its past. The first is rep-
resented by proponents of the well-developed Soviet-era myth of
the Great Patriotic War, revised after 1991 to restore the original
centerpiece of that myth—the image of Joseph Stalin as victor.
The alternative offered to that old myth is the heroic image of the
nationalist underground fighting on two fronts, against the Nazis
and the Soviets. While World War II mythologies serve as a con-
solidating factor for all of Ukraine’s neighbors, including Russia,
Belarus, and Poland, they continue to divide Ukrainian society
along political and geographic lines. The myth of the Great Pa-
triotic War with Stalin at its center unites Ukraine with Russia
and Belarus in its memory of World War II. The myth of heroic
nationalist resistance against communism brings Ukraine closer
to the countries of East-Central Europe.
The struggle over the Stalin monument in Zaporizhzhia pit-
ted two diametrically opposed political forces and visions of his-
tory, communist and nationalist, against each other, leaving scant
middle ground for interpreting the history of World War II in
Ukraine on the eve of the Maidan protests of 2013 and Russian
255
aggression and annexation of the Crimea in 2014. As shown by

the analysis presented here, the debates over Stalin and Ban-
dera, as well as over the Soviet and nationalist legacies, divided
Ukrainian society between two versions of the past. Neither side
seemed to realize at the time that both versions were little more
than politically constructed myths.
256
17.
Goodbye Lenin!
Sunday, 8 December 2013 witnessed by far the largest public pro-

test to take place in the city of Kyiv since the Orange Revolu-
tion of 2004. About 800,000 people poured into Independence
Square (Maidan) and Khreshchatyk Boulevard in the city center
to protest actions taken by the government of President Viktor
Yanukovych.
The protests had been initiated eighteen days earlier, on the
night of 21 November, by a few hundred people appalled at the
abrupt change in the policy of the Ukrainian government, which,
under pressure from Russia, had refused to sign the long-awaited
association agreement between Ukraine and the European Union.
The EuroMaidan, or the European Maidan protests, as they be-
came known in the media, were started by Kyiv yuppies—a rela-
tively small group of Western-oriented journalists, businessmen,
political activists, and students—who saw in the association
agreement their last hope of reforming Ukrainian politics and
society in order to liberate them from the Soviet legacy and the
corrupt Russian-backed regime of President Yanukovych.
The EuroMaidan turned into what became known as the
Revolution of Dignity on Sunday, 1 December, after government
riot police brutally dispersed student protesters encamped on the
square. Close to 350,000 Kyivans took to the streets of the capital.
The orientation toward Europe and signing of the association
agreement with the EU remained among their slogans and goals.
But the new protest was fueled first and foremost by their refusal
to countenance the regime’s brutality as a way of solving political
257
problems. The people rejected the increasingly authoritarian gov-

ernment, which they now wanted to bring down.
On the following Sunday, 8 December, the number of pro-
testers more than doubled, their ranks increased by sympathizers
from other parts of Ukraine, above all from the country’s pro-
European west. Emboldened, those leading the protests called
on their followers to blockade the Presidential Administration.
The Revolution of Dignity was about to enter a new stage. The
government knew that and was preparing troops to crush the
revolt. Violence was in the air.1
Lenin Falls
Sometime after 5:00 p. m. on 8 December 2013, when the main
rally was over and winter darkness had fallen on the streets of
Kyiv, a column of approximately 200 men, most of them wearing
balaclavas, began to proceed from the Kyiv city administration
building, the protesters’ headquarters on Khreshchatyk, to the
intersection of that boulevard with another one named after
Ukraine’s most famous poet, Taras Shevchenko. The column was
headed for the monument at the foot of Shevchenko Boulevard
across the street from the Besarabka (Bessarabian Market), the
city’s main agricultural bazaar. The monument, which honored
Vladimir Lenin, had been erected in December 1946, as the Soviet
authorities were “cleansing” and reclaiming the symbolic space
after the defeat of the Nazis, who had occupied the city from
1941 to 1943.
Ever since Ukraine’s declaration of independence in 1991,
followed by the removal of a much larger statue of Lenin from
the city’s main square, many in Kyiv had wondered whether the
Lenin monument on Shevchenko Boulevard should go as well.
Why should there be a monument to the founder of the Russian
Communist Party and godfather of the brutal Soviet regime on
the boulevard named after Shevchenko, whom many considered
the spiritual father of the Ukrainian nation? The statue was also
an eyesore to those less concerned with the Ukrainian nation
than with belief in the market economy—a belief symbolized by
the Bessarabian Market across the street from the monument.
It stood as proof that even the Bolsheviks could not fully crush
258
Goodbye Lenin!
market forces. Among the Kyivans who wanted the monument to

stay in place were members of the Communist Party of Ukraine,
who were prepared to defend it with their bodies if need be. The
civic authorities decided to play for time, citing the artistic value
of the marble statue as an excuse to keep it where it was.2
As monuments to Lenin were removed by city councils in
other parts of Ukraine, the Kyiv authorities took a pause on the
monument that lasted more than twenty years. That seemed ex-
cessive to Ukrainian liberals and intolerable to Ukrainian na-
tionalists. The latter decided to take the initiative into their own
hands. The first attempt to demolish the monument was un-
dertaken by members of the Ukrainian nationalist organization
Tryzub (Trident) on 30 June 2009, the anniversary of the decla-
ration of Ukrainian independence by nationalists in 1941 and the
birthday of one of the icons of Ukrainian nationalism, Roman
Shukhevych. The attackers managed to damage the monument
before they were arrested and put behind bars. As justification of
their action, they cited the decree on the Soviet regime’s responsi-
bility for the Holodomor, the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33,
signed a few days earlier by President Viktor Yushchenko. When
the pro-Western and anticommunist Yushchenko was replaced
in early 2011 by the pro-Russian President Yanukovych, who was
friendly to the communists, the perpetrators were prosecuted,
but their sentences were suspended. The Lenin monument was
restored soon after the attack. The pause taken by the civic au-
thorities continued.3
The start of the EuroMaidan protests in November 2013 pre-
sented a new threat to the monument, and the government dis-
patched a special detachment of riot police to protect it from any
eventuality. With a column moving toward the monument on
the evening of 8 December, the police knew what to expect. They
had already fought off an attack on the monument the previous
Sunday, 1 December, later claiming it had been so violent that
eight officers had had to seek medical attention. This time they
decided to do nothing. The large column and the mass character
of the protest earlier in the day may have been one reason. But it
is equally possible that the authorities did not mind the impend-
ing demolition and were preparing to use that act of symbolic
violence to justify the very real violence they intended to unleash
259
in the coming days. One way or another, the column of men in

balaclavas got a free hand to do what they had come to do—de-
molish the monument to Vladimir Lenin.4
Demolish they did. While the organizers of the action cheered
on the crowd gathered around the monument with nationalist
and anticommunist slogans, young men in balaclavas attached
a tall ladder to the monument—together with the pedestal, it
was more than 10 meters in height—put a loop around the neck
of the communist chief and, with considerable effort, pulled the
monument off the pedestal. Lenin fell headfirst, crushing a gran-
ite plate near the base of the monument. His neck did not survive
the impact, and the head broke off, to the further excitement of
the crowd. In front of the cameras the attackers, some armed with
heavy hammers, descended on the demolished idol, trying to split
off pieces of the marble body as revolutionary souvenirs. A rep-
resentative of the largest Ukrainian nationalist party, Svoboda
(Freedom), which claimed responsibility for the action, compared
the fall of the monument to that of the Berlin Wall.5
Leaders of the mainstream political parties were less enthu-
siastic. Andrii Shevchenko, a prominent Ukrainian journalist,
member of parliament, and future Ukrainian ambassador to
Canada, made a statement on behalf of the leadership of the
EuroMaidan coordinating committee, claiming that the demoli-
tion had not been sanctioned by that body. But Shevchenko also
refused to condemn the toppling of the monument, stating that
there was no place in downtown Kyiv for a monument to Lenin.
A few weeks later Ukraine’s most celebrated composer, Valentyn
Sylvestrov, expressed the opinion of many when he stated: “They
brought down the monument—a dubious achievement of the
revolution, but an achievement.” Many Kyivans, as well as people
in other parts of Ukraine, did not welcome the manner of the
removal or share the nationalist ideology of those who carried it
out, but they did not doubt that it was high time for Lenin to go.6
The toppling of the Lenin monument in Kyiv on 8 December
2013 is considered the start of what became known as the Leni-
nopad, or Leninfall—the mass demolition of Lenin monuments
in Ukraine in late 2013 and the first half of 2014. Indeed, television
coverage of the demolition of the most recognizable Lenin mon-
ument in the country triggered similar attacks in the Ukrainian
260
Goodbye Lenin!
provinces, but the process was slow to gather speed, and the im-
pact of the Kyiv toppling became clear only in retrospect. Only
three monuments were demolished or vandalized elsewhere in
Ukraine between 9 and 30 December 2013. Nine more were at-
tacked in January 2014, and an additional five in the first half of
February 2014. Given that there were hundreds of monuments to
Lenin all over Ukraine, the immediate impact of the fall of Kyiv’s
Lenin was modest at best.7
But then, all of a sudden, anti-communist hell broke loose. On
21 February alone, more than 40 Lenin monuments and statues
were either demolished or attacked by activists in small towns and
villages of Ukraine. By the next day, more than a hundred monu-
ments and statues were gone. Altogether the month of February
2014 witnessed the demolition of 320 statues and monuments to
Vladimir Lenin. The term “Leninfall” was born. The chronology
of the Leninfall, not unlike its beginnings in December 2013,
was closely associated with the main stages of the Revolution of
Dignity protests. The dramatic spike in attacks on Lenin monu-
ments on 21 February came in the wake of the violent clashes and
mass killing of protesters on the Maidan one day earlier. To the
crescendo of violence on the Maidan, the pro-Maidan forces in
the Ukrainian provinces responded with attacks on the symbols
of the erstwhile communist regime, which came to be seen as
a proxy for the corrupt administration of President Yanukovych.
While no other month matched February 2014 in number of
demolished or vandalized monuments to Lenin and other prom-
inent figures of the communist regime, the Leninfall continued
for the rest of the year, further fueled by the Russian annexation
of the Crimea in March 2014 and the beginning of open warfare
in the Donbas in April and May 2014. Altogether in 2013–14 more
than 550 monuments to Lenin were removed in Ukraine by local
activists and by decisions of local councils.8
The Leninfall of 2013–14 had a less dramatic but in many ways
even more consequential continuation in the following year. In
April 2015, the Ukrainian parliament passed a set of four “De-
communization Laws.” In the following month, President Petro
Poroshenko, elected to office in the middle of the Crimean and
Donbas crises in May 2014, signed the legislation into law. One
of the laws established a six-month deadline for the removal of
261
all monuments to Lenin and leaders of the communist regime.

It decreed the renaming of thousands of Ukrainian cities, towns,
villages, and streets in order to remove all communist-related
names. By early 2017, close to 1,300 additional Lenin monuments
and statues were gone. The Leninfall had attained its ultimate ob-
jective. Out of approximately 5,500 Lenin monuments and statues
in Ukraine in 1991, all but a few were gone by October 2017, the
month marking the centenary of Lenin’s October Revolution of
1917. In Ukraine, the century of V. I. Lenin was over.9
Interactive Mapping
What should one make of the Leninfall story? Was the dem-
olition of the Lenin monuments just an unfortunate episode,
a passing spasm of symbolic violence fueled by social upheaval
and resulting in the loss of part of the country’s cultural heritage
(some of the monuments, such as the one removed in Kyiv, had
unquestionable artistic value)? Or did it reflect a broader change
in society and its perception of itself and its past? And if the latter
is truer than the former, then what does that memory shift tell us
about the direction taken by Ukrainian politics and society since
the time of the EuroMaidan and the Revolution of Dignity?
None of these questions can be adequately addressed without
taking into account the spatial dimension of the Leninfall. Taking
place in the midst of Ukraine’s most profound political crisis since
the demise of the Soviet Union, the Leninfall was as much the
outcome of political strife as were the wars of historical memory.
Politics and memory had been closely interlinked in Ukraine at
least since the Orange Revolution of 2004, and both have had
very strong regional components. Regionalism in Ukrainian pol-
itics and memory had been strengthened by the Revolution of
Dignity and the loss of the Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine
to Russian-led separatist projects, which also mixed politics and
memory, as evidenced by the “Novorossiia” project, rooted in the
imperial past, and the creation of the Donetsk and Luhansk “peo-
ple’s republics,” inspired by the Soviet experience and endowed
with the Soviet legacy.
The exploration of the regional dimensions of Ukrainian
historical identity and the politics of memory based on that
262
Goodbye Lenin!
regionalism is the main objective of the “History and Identity”

module of the MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine Project devel-
oped by the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard Univer-
sity. This module is the result of collaboration with two main
partners: the project entitled “Region, Nation, and Beyond: An
Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Reconsideration of Ukraine”
under the leadership of Professor Ulrich Schmid at the Univer-
sity of St. Gallen, Switzerland, and a project undertaken by the
Razumkov Center in Kyiv under the title “The Formation of the
Common Identity of Ukrainian Citizens in New Circumstances:
Peculiarities, Prospects, and Challenges.” Some information for
the module was provided by the Institute of National Memory
of Ukraine.10
The maps developed by MAPA Project Manager Kostyantyn
Bondarenko and MAPA Research Fellow Viktoriya Sereda are
based on a spatial analysis of the data produced by two surveys
conducted in Ukraine in March 2013 and March 2015 by the Uni-
versity of St. Gallen Project with the support of the Swiss Nation-
al Foundation and the Wolodymyr George Danyliw Foundation,
as well as a December 2015 survey conducted by the Razumkov
Center and funded by the Swedish International Development
Cooperation Agency, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, and the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands under the auspices
of the “Social Transformation in Ukraine and Moldova” project.
The first two surveys included 6,000 respondents aged 18 and
above, while the third covered more than 10,000 respondents of
the same age category.
The discussion that follows is based on the data and maps
produced on the basis of the above-mentioned surveys. Both
the maps and the databases, including the formulation of survey
questions and responses to them, expressed as percentages of all
responses, may be consulted on the module page of the MAPA
website. The MAPA maps reproduced in this collection (see
pp. 216–24) represent one or more layers of the spatial information
available on the website. Although the MAPA-produced maps
and layers of information provide the basis for this discussion,
it also draws on maps and data produced by other mapmakers
and projects acknowledged in the notes. While this essay focuses
mainly on the Leninfall and seeks to offer preliminary answers
263
to the questions formulated at the start of this section, it is also

prepared as a demonstration of the possibilities inherent in GIS-
based mapping and spatial analysis based on it and is presented
as an invitation to further research into the spatial dimensions of
Ukrainian memory politics and Ukrainian society at large.
The Geopolitics of Memory

Ever since the Orange Revolution of 2004, memory wars have
shaken Ukraine almost without interruption. The battle has been
fought by proponents of two historical narratives: one post-Soviet,
strongly influenced by the Soviet-era Russocentric and pro-com-
munist interpretation of the past, the other ethnonational, with
strong anti-communist and often anti-Russian overtones rooted
in the nationalist resistance to Soviet rule during and after World
War II. The Ukrainian liberal camp, represented by a significant
group of Ukraine’s leading historians and backed by pragmatic
elements in the Ukrainian government and political elite, found
itself embroiled in this struggle between two radically different
visions of the Ukrainian past. The liberal narrative of Ukrainian
history, with its inclusive attitude toward citizens who were not
ethnic Ukrainians, helped lead the country toward independence
in the late 1980s and early 1990s but was unable to regain ground
lost after the polarization of Ukrainian politics, including the
politics of memory, in the course of the Orange Revolution.11
The polarization of Ukrainian politics after 2004 had a clear
regional dimension, pitting the east of the country, nostalgic for
the Soviet period, against the west, which was anti-communist
and oriented toward Europe. Under the circumstances, the pol-
itics of memory became an important instrument for political
parties trying to mobilize their regional electorates. But “lived
memory,” rooted in the actual history of a given region, began to
be modified by current politics in this period. The city of Kyiv,
for example, which had been under some form of Russian control
since the mid-seventeenth century, accepted many elements not
only of liberal national but also nationalist narratives of Ukrainian
history, as did the population of other urban centers in predom-
inantly rural central Ukraine. In regions east of the Dnieper, el-
ements of national and nationalist narratives made inroads not
264
Goodbye Lenin!
only in rural regions such as Poltava but also in industrial centers

like Dnipro (formerly Dnipropetrovsk).
Given the close connection between memory and politics in
Ukraine, it is only natural to start our discussion of the pres-
ent-day geography of memory by considering the country’s re-
gional political preferences, as shown on Map 1 (p. 216). Political
scientists and sociologists who study Ukraine have come up with
various divisions of Ukrainian political space into macroregions,
usually based on voter behavior but also including historical and
cultural components, especially linguistic preferences. The num-
ber of macroregions typically varies from two to five. This discus-
sion identifies four macroregions, but the regional map that we
have chosen differs somewhat from generally accepted political-
science models.12
For the purposes of our analysis, we found most useful the
regional division of Ukraine based on a map of the 2010 presiden-
tial elections. The map reproduced above divides Ukraine into two
parts and then splits those zones into two additional segments,
yielding a division of the country into four macroregions. The
basis for this division is the number of votes cast for the two major
contenders in the 2010 presidential elections, Viktor Yanukovych
and Yulia Tymoshenko. The areas where more than 75 percent vot-
ed for Tymoshenko constitute one macroregion, and those where
she received between 50 and 74 percent of the vote are another.
Two more macroregions consist of those areas where more than
75 percent voted for Yanukovych and those where he gained 50 to
74 percent of the vote. The two regions in which Yanukovych and
Tymoshenko achieved majorities constitute superregions dividing
Ukraine into eastern and western halves. To a large degree, the
divisions indicated on the map came into existence in the 2004
presidential elections that produced the Orange Revolution.
For the purposes of this discussion the regions marked on the
map can be labeled West, Center, Southeast, and East, the latter
being a composite region that includes the Donetsk and Luhansk
Oblasts of eastern Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula. Since I
find this map and its regional divisions by far the most useful
geographic tool for analyzing the data produced by the surveys,
I shall use the four regional names just mentioned in my further
discussion.
265
The Revolt of the Center

Let us now discuss the geographic dimensions of the Leninfall
as it occurred between December 2013 and the summer of 2014,
keeping in mind the map of the 2010 presidential elections.
Scholars and political activists in Ukraine have made sever-
al attempts to map the Leninfall. By far the best-known map,
which takes in the period up to the end of February 2014, was
produced by the newspaper Den (The Day). The Den map, repro-
duced above (Map 2, p. 217), includes the monuments removed
in the East—the Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
of Ukraine. The map leaves little doubt that the original Lenin-
fall—the demolition of Lenin statues within the first few months
after the fall of the Lenin monument in Kyiv—had a clear re-
gional dimension.13
The “eye” of the Leninfall “hurricane” is clearly visible in
Ukraine’s Center, making significant inroads into parts of the
Southeast. The virtual exclusion of the West from that map has
a fairly simple explanation: most of the monuments there were
demolished either in the months leading up to Ukrainian inde-
pendence or in the first years of independence. The exclusion of
the East—the Crimea and a good part of the Donbas—is a more
complex phenomenon associated with the Russian annexation of
the peninsula and the start of the hybrid war in eastern Ukraine.
The lack of enthusiasm for demolishing Lenin monuments there
is reflected in the results of the 2013 survey and, for non-occupied
parts of Ukraine, in the surveys of 2015, as will be discussed below.
What happened in the Center in late 2013 and early 2014,
and why did that macroregion emerge as the driving force of the
Leninfall? Was a shift in the attitudes of the local population
responsible for that change?
Our data from the March 2013 survey along with research
done by scholars in Ukraine suggest that even before the start
of the EuroMaidan, support for retaining Lenin monuments in
the Center was lukewarm at best. Kyiv Oblast, where attitudes
more or less reflected those of the Center in general, had 23 per-
cent of respondents wishing to keep such monuments in their
towns and villages. The strongest support for the status quo was
registered in Poltava Oblast, where 34 percent of respondents
266
Goodbye Lenin!
favored monuments to Lenin in their settlements. These figures

set the Center apart from both the West and the Southeast, its
immediate regional neighbors. Ternopil Oblast in the West had
the lowest level of support in the entire country—no respondents
at all—in favor of Lenin monuments. Odesa Oblast in the South-
east had the country’s highest level of support, with 51 percent of
respondents favoring Lenin statues.14
That was before the start of the Leninfall. The EuroMaidan,
the Revolution of Dignity, and the outbreak of warfare in the East
produced a major shift in the historical attitudes of the Center,
sharply reducing enthusiasm for Lenin. In Kyiv Oblast, support
for Lenin monuments fell from 23 percent to 16 percent, while
in Poltava it dropped from 34 percent to 10 percent, turning one
of the most pro-Lenin regions in the Center into one of its most
anti-Leninist.
Map 3 (p. 218) uses shades of color to show the level of
support for the demolition of Lenin monuments in March 2015
(the more intense the color, the stronger the desire to get rid of
Lenin). In the city of Kyiv there was a majority (53 percent) in
favor of demolition, while Kyiv Oblast was on par with Poltava
Oblast: in both cases, 42–43 percent of respondents favored dem-
olition. Once again, the Center stood apart from the Southeast,
where support for demolition did not exceed 28 percent of those
surveyed, with the lowest level of support (11 percent) registered in
Kharkiv Oblast. An important aspect of the Leninfall story that
emerges clearly from Map 3 is that, by March 2015, in terms of
desire to rid itself of Lenin monuments, the Center had effective-
ly joined the West to create a joint “Lenin-free” space in Ukraine.
For all its drama, the iconoclastic demolition captured by tele-
vision cameras in Kyiv and elsewhere was not a sudden rupture in
the Center’s narrative of memory but the culmination of a process
that had begun earlier. In the course of the 1990s, close to 2,000
Lenin monuments had been demolished in the Western regions
of Galicia and Volhynia. The process continued into the next de-
cade, spilling over into the Center. In those two macroregions
more than 1,200 statues were removed in the 2000s. Compared
to those figures, the Leninfall, which accounted for about 550
statues, was a rather modest development.15
267
The 2013 and 2015 surveys, the first taken before the Euro-
Maidan, the second afterwards, allow one to suggest that the
Center has joined the West in more than the rejection of Lenin
and communism. Obscured by the drama of the demolition was
the culmination of a process whereby, in the minds of the popu-
lation at large, Soviet-era mythology was replaced with elements
of the Ukrainian national narrative, which represented Ukraine
as a major, if not the principal, victim of the Soviet regime.
Since the Orange Revolution of 2004, that narrative has come
to include the interpretation of the Holodomor, or the Great
Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33, as an act of genocide perpetrated by
the communist regime in Moscow against the Ukrainian people.
Although the Ukrainian parliament voted in 2006 to recognize
the Holodomor as an act of genocide, the issue soon became
contested, as Russia mounted an international campaign against
the genocide interpretation of the Famine, while President Yanu-
kovych, elected in 2010, dropped the reference to genocide from
his official pronouncements.16
President Yanukovych’s change of rhetoric does not appear
to have had much impact on attitudes toward the Holodomor
in the Center, where, as shown on Map 4 (p. 219), the majority
continued to regard it as an act of genocide. That map shows
the percentage of respondents who rejected the interpretation
of the Holodomor as genocide in March 2013, March 2015, and
December 2015. The level of denial is shown by columns, while
the color map in the background indicates levels of support for
the demolition of Lenin monuments in March 2015.
As may be assumed on the basis of this map, as early as
March 2013, the Center was forming a common memory space
with the West when it comes to the popular attitude toward
the Holodomor and, by extension, toward the overall record of
the communist regime. This trend gained new impetus with the
EuroMaidan, with a further decline of naysayers in March 2015.
The adoption of the decommunization laws in April of that year
produced a slight rise in the numbers of naysayers in the Center
and even in some parts of the West but did not change the overall
picture: the West and Center stood together in recognizing the
Holodomor as an act of genocide. The number of skeptics was
already low in March 2013. In Chernihiv Oblast, for example, they
268
Goodbye Lenin!
declined from 15 percent in March 2013 to 4 percent in March

2015, and a slight rise of that number to 7 percent in December
of that year did not change the overall picture.
That interpretation of the Holodomor set the West and Cen-
ter apart from the Southeast, where in December 2015 the nay-
sayers, while not constituting a majority, still showed significant
strength. Their percentage was highest in the Ukraine-controlled
areas of Donetsk Oblast, reaching 30 percent of respondents. The
decommunization laws revealed the difference in the attitude to-
ward the Holodomor between the combined Center-West and
Southeast, reducing the number of naysayers in the Southeast and
slightly increasing it in the Center and West. The two memory
spaces were clearly marching to different drums.
The common memory space of the West and Center was
formed not only by the rejection of the communist regime and
the condemnation of its crimes but also by the joint adoption of
elements of the new nation-based historical discourse. The sig-
nificant element here is the popular attitude toward the fighters
of the UPA—the World War II-era nationalist-led Ukrainian
Insurgent Army, which has been a hot-button issue in Ukrainian
politics since 2004. The UPA, whose soldiers are as much praised
for their resistance to the communist regime as they are criticized
or even vilified for participation in the ethnic cleansing of Poles,
fought in the western regions of Galicia and Volhynia and has
been part of the living memory of the local population. Those liv-
ing in the West saw the UPA condemned under the Soviet regime
and celebrated during the years of independence. The Center,
which had no direct exposure to living memory of the UPA, has
been slow to accept the relevant historical mythology as part of
its own narrative.
This is one of the features of memory politics in Ukraine
reflected by Map 5 (p. 220). Its shades of color show levels of
support for the demolition of Lenin monuments, while its col-
umns show varying degrees of support for the proposed official
recognition of UPA soldiers as fighters for Ukrainian indepen-
dence. Ternopil Oblast, the West’s leader in terms of anti-Lenin
sentiment, also led in acceptance of the pro-UPA narrative. Sup-
port for the recognition of UPA soldiers as fighters for Ukrainian
269
independence increased there from 94 percent in 2013 to an over-

whelming 98 percent in 2015.
Map 5 also shows, that in enthusiasm for the UPA, the Center
has been catching up with the West, and the EuroMaidan pro-
duced a boost in that regard. In March 2015, more respondents
were in favor of the UPA in the Khmelnytskyi region in the
Center than in Volyn (Volhynia) Oblast in the West: 72 percent
vs. 69 percent. Support for UPA recognition increased most dra-
matically in Transcarpathia, where it grew from 37 percent to 75
percent of respondents. In Kyiv Oblast the rise in support was less
dramatic but increased from 47 percent to a majority of 57 percent.
While support for the UPA had been negligible in the Southeast
before the EuroMaidan, it grew in that region as well, especially
in oblasts affected by the Russo-Ukrainian war: in Luhansk from
7 percent to 35 percent and in Kherson from 13 percent to 44 per-
cent of respondents—still quite low in comparison to the Center.
Thus the Leninfall is best understood as the culmination of
a relatively long process fueled by two parallel developments—the
condemnation of communist crimes and the acceptance of a na-
tionalist alternative to the communist historical narrative. Both
developments began in the West in the 1990s and made inroads
into the Center in the 2000s. The creation of a common West-
Central memory space was sealed in symbolic terms by the public
toppling of the Lenin statues, but it had begun to develop in
the decades following Ukrainian independence and the Orange
Revolution of 2004.
The maps reproduced in this collection indicate that the
memory shift that brought the West and Center together also
highlighted differences in historical attitudes between the Center
and the Southeast. Under the influence of the EuroMaidan and,
especially, the Russo-Ukrainian war, the Southeast began to move
closer to the Center in condemning the crimes of the communist
regime but in many ways remained outside the new common
West-Central memory space. Few things better demonstrated the
memory gap between the West and Center on the one hand and
the Southeast on the other than the hundreds of Lenin monu-
ments still standing in prominent public spaces in the Southeast
after the triumph of the Leninfall in the Center in 2013–14. But
change was coming there as well.
270
Goodbye Lenin!
The Center Rules

The “Southeastern” chapter in the history of the Leninfall began
in earnest in May 2015, when President Poroshenko signed the
decommunization laws. Adopted by parliament in the previous
month, those laws decreed the removal not only of Lenin mon-
uments but also of all forms of commemoration of historical fig-
ures and events associated with the communist regime. One of
the laws bestowed on UPA soldiers the symbolic status of fighters
for Ukrainian independence.17
As the local authorities began to implement the new laws,
they put to shame the activists of the original Leninfall, removing
1,320 monuments and statues by January 2017, more than double
the number of those eliminated in 2013–14. With the Center al-
ready cleansed of most of its Lenin monuments and statues, the
brunt of the new policies was borne largely by the Southeast,
where support for such demolition was significantly lower than
in the Center. The data from the March 2015 survey, taken only
a month before parliament’s adoption of the laws, highlights the
differences between the two macroregions. If in Kyiv and Pol-
tava Oblasts of the Center support for demolition was about 42
percent, in Kharkiv Oblast of the Southeast it stood at only 11
percent, not significantly lower than in Odesa, where 18 percent
of respondents supported demolition. Even in Dnipropetrovsk
Oblast, the center of Ukrainian mobilization at the start of the
Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014, support for the removal of Lenin
monuments did not exceed 23 percent.
Map 6 (p. 221) combines data on attitudes toward the dem-
olition of Lenin monuments (shown, as on previous maps, in
shades) with data on the number of monuments and plaques to
communist leaders removed as a result of the decommunization
laws (represented by blue columns). The map leaves little doubt
that, with the curious exception of Poltava Oblast, most of the
remaining monuments and plaques were demolished or removed
in 2015 and 2016 in the Southeast of the country, where support
for demolition had been lowest before the adoption of the laws.
Why did the parliament pass and the authorities in the
Southeast accept and duly implement laws not favored by the
majority of the local electorate? The main explanation lies not in
271
the EuroMaidan, which triggered the original Leninfall, but in

the outcome of Russia’s aggression, which dramatically changed
the political map of Ukraine. Here it is useful to return to the map
of the 2010 presidential elections. According to it, the Ukrainian
electorate was split down the middle, with the blue areas electing
Viktor Yanukovych with approximately 49 percent of the overall
vote, while the orange areas supplied the lion’s share of the 46
percent of the overall vote received by Tymoshenko. Thus the vot-
ing power of the two halves of Ukraine, West and Center against
Southeast and East, was approximately equal. But the annexation
of the Crimea and the hybrid war in the Donbas removed the
East—the Crimea and the most populous parts of Donetsk and
Luhansk Oblasts—from Ukrainian political space, dramatically
reducing the voting power of the “blue” areas of the country.
Electoral politics were soon translated into the politics of
memory. In the October 2014 parliamentary elections, parties
based mainly in the West and Center received 68 percent of the
national vote, reducing the Opposition Bloc, based exclusively in
the Southeast, to a mere 10 percent of the vote. Map 7 (p. 222),
which shows the results of those elections, reflects the new polit-
ical reality. It represents the oblasts that elected candidates of the
pro-presidential bloc (dominated by local administrators, business
elites, and center-right pragmatists) in red; Prime Minister Ar-
senii Yatseniuk’s Popular Front (dominated by national liberals)
in dark red; and the Opposition Bloc, led by former members of
President Yanukovych’s administration, in blue.18
In the crucial vote on the decommunization laws in April
2014, the Opposition Bloc deputies refused to support the leg-
islation. But their support was not needed, and their opposition
could be ignored, as 69 of the 82 Popular Front deputies voted in
favor, as did 106 of the 146 members of Petro Poroshenko’s bloc.
The greater number of defections in the president’s camp than in
the prime minister’s might be explained by the fact that, unlike
in the Popular Front, many of the president’s allies came from
the Southeast, including the Odesa region, where support for
demolition did not exceed 18 percent of those polled in March
2015. If the Leninfall in the Center was prompted from below, in
the Southeast it proceeded from above.
272
Goodbye Lenin!
While the population of the Southeast was not eager to get

rid of Lenin, it also had no desire to fight in order to preserve
him. One possible reason is that the demolition was carried out
by the local authorities in a lawful and orderly manner. Another
reason was that, as indicated by Map 4, which shows the change
of attitudes toward the Holodomor, the Euromaidan helped move
the Southeast closer to the historical narrative accepted in the
Center, a tendency reinforced and solidified by the decommu-
nization laws. The most striking decline of skepticism toward
the interpretation of the Holodomor as an act of genocide was
registered in Odesa Oblast, where the number of naysayers fell
from 45.0 percent in March 2013 to 38.0 percent in March 2015
and then to 14.0 percent in December 2015.
The “Lenin-free space” dramatically expanded by the decom-
munization laws has been defined in memory terms by a growing
rejection of the Soviet-era historical narrative, but there is no con-
sensus on the narrative that should replace it. While the Southeast
partakes in the national interpretation of the Holodomor with
the Center and the West, it is reluctant to accept the heroization
of the UPA fighters emanating from the West, which has made
significant inroads in the Center. Between 2013 and 2015 there
was growing recognition throughout Ukraine of the UPA soldiers
as fighters for Ukrainian independence, but the numbers in the
Southeast are minuscule as compared with those in the other two
other macroregions (see Map 5, p. 220). If in Kyiv Oblast such
recognition increased from 47 percent to 57 percent, in Odesa
Oblast the increase was more modest, growing from 10 percent
to 15 percent of the respondents. In Kharkiv Oblast the level of
support remained at 15 percent, and in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast
the number actually decreased from 28 percent to 25 percent of
those polled. Decreased support was also registered in Kirovohrad
Oblast in the Center.
The King Is Dead

“The king is dead, long live the king!” is a saying that can be
applied only partially to the Leninfall both in the Center and in
the Southeast of the country. Lenin, the king of the communist
narrative, expired symbolically in the two successive waves of the
273
Leninfall, his monuments toppled and his plaques removed, but

his vacated central position in Ukrainian public space remains
contested. One potential contender for the vacancy is Stepan
Bandera, who emerged after independence as one of the coun-
try’s most celebrated historical figures. The most idolized figure
by far is Taras Shevchenko, with 1,256 monuments and plaques.
But Bandera seems to be the most celebrated political leader, with
40 monuments erected in his honor since 1990. As noted in the
media, some of them reminded viewers of the Lenin monuments
of the past.19
Is Ukraine indeed, as some argue, undergoing not only the
decommunization but also the simultaneous “Banderization” of
its historical memory and public spaces? Yes and no—here again,
geography is the key. The Bandera cult and its reflection in the
building of monuments is limited in geographic scope. As shown
on Map 8 (p. 223), as of October 2016, all forty Bandera monu-
ments were located in the West, most of them in three Galician
oblasts. The Volhynia region, which was also part of the UPA
theater of operations, had only two monuments in Rivne Oblast,
while Volhynia Oblast had no monument at all.20
Map 9 (p. 224), and the data on which it is based, sug-
gest that the situation will not change anytime soon. While
there is an appetite for erecting more monuments to Bandera in
Volhynia—a spike in that regard has been registered since the
EuroMaidan in the “Bandera-free” Volhynia Oblast—the drive
is still limited to the West, while the Center and Southeast re-
main largely immune to the Bandera cult. Although support for
the erection of monuments to Bandera (indicated by the blue
columns on the map) increased throughout Ukraine between
March 2013 and March 2015, it remains as low, or even lower,
than support among opponents of the Leninfall for maintaining
or rebuilding monuments to Lenin—the trend shown by the red
columns on the map.
The decline of public support for Lenin monuments and the
rise of support for monuments to Bandera is an all-Ukrainian
phenomenon, with a few exceptions such as the city of Kyiv in the
Center and the Mykolaïv region in the Southeast, where rising
support for Bandera monuments occurred simultaneously with
rising support for Lenin monuments. While in Kyiv, in March
274
Goodbye Lenin!
2015, more people wanted a monument to Bandera than to Lenin

(38 percent vs. 18 percent), respondents in the Sumy, Poltava, and
Kirovohrad regions in the Center still favored monuments to
Lenin over those to Bandera. The Southeast produced no oblast
preferring Bandera to Lenin, even though support for maintain-
ing Lenin monuments had declined significantly between March
2013 and March 2015. In Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts
more respondents wanted a monument to Bandera in 2013 than
in 2015, but the numbers were very low to begin with. In the case
of Kharkiv, they dropped from 8 percent to 6 percent of respon-
dents, and in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast from 9 percent to 7 percent.
When it comes to public support for monuments to Bandera,
the Center finds itself in the same memory space as the Southeast,
and both differ significantly from the West in that regard. The
lack of enthusiasm for Bandera in the East and, partially, in the
Center was confirmed by Volodymyr Viatrovych, the director of
the Institute of National Memory and one of the main sponsors,
promoters, and implementers of the decommunization laws. Ac-
cording to him, out of 51,493 streets renamed in Ukraine when the
laws were implemented, only 34 received the name of Bandera.
With the number of demolished Lenin monuments standing at
1,320, only 4 monuments to Bandera were erected before January
2017. While the decision to get rid of communist symbols was
made by parliament in Kyiv, the question of what new names to
give the now “decommunized” cities, towns, villages, and streets
rested with local authorities in the Center and Southeast of
Ukraine, and Bandera clearly was not among the favorites there.21
Neither the Center nor the Southeast is rushing to replace
one toppled political leader with another. That reluctance was
already apparent after the demolition of the first Lenin monu-
ment in downtown Kyiv in December 2013. Back then, Ukrainian
national and nationalist banners, as well as those of the European
Union, were placed on the now empty pedestal to fill the void in
the symbolically important public space. Kyivans interviewed for
the St. Gallen project in early February 2014, a few weeks before
the start of the actual Leninfall, were opposed to replacing Lenin
with a monument to another political leader.
“In my personal opinion, that space should simply be sanc-
tified for a long time, and a little chapel should be erected there
275
or, I don’t know, a memorial to the victims of the Holodomor or

of communist terror,” said one respondent. “I would not place
anything there for now. . . . I think there should be a public dis-
cussion about whom to place, some national hero or national
genius, or an artist or writer,” commented another Kyivan. Yet
another respondent supported the idea of temporary installations
in place of a permanent monument: “I liked the idea of one of
the artists of establishing it as a kind of permanent monument.
Giving an artist a month, say, to put up some kind of installation
or sculpture there. It stands for a month and is then replaced by
something else.” A floral installation at the base of the old pedes-
tal became a temporary solution to the Kyiv monument problem
in May 2017.22
In September 2017, a petition was circulated about replacing
the remnants of the monument with a fountain, while the top of
the pedestal was decorated with the trident emblem (the cen-
terpiece of Ukraine’s coat of arms) and with Ukraine’s national
blue-and-yellow and nationalist red-and-black banners. Radical
opponents of the new, post-Yanukovych government attached
a plaque to the pedestal commemorating two participants of the
EuroMaidan who were killed by the secret service and police loyal
to the new government after the Revolution of Dignity. One of
those commemorated was a radical leader with alleged criminal
connections, the other a Buddhist guru from the Donbas. The
Soviet-era inscription citing Lenin’s words about a free Ukraine
being possible only in union with the Russian proletariat still re-
mained on the pedestal. With the Lenin statue gone, the pedestal
had become an ideologically contested space. But the nature of
the main debate had changed: it no longer concerned loyalty to
Lenin or Russia but the future of the Ukrainian nation.23
The Center and parts of the Southeast found a different solu-
tion to the problem posed by the remaining pedestals. In the city
of Chernihiv, the surviving pedestal of the Lenin monument was
turned into a Ukrainian national shrine, with a poem by the early
twentieth-century poet Lesia Ukrainka inscribed on it, and the
trident painted in the blue-and-yellow colors of the Ukrainian
national flag and augmented with the motto “Ukraine or death.”
The pedestal became part of a public space dedicated to the he-
roes of the Heavenly Hundred—victims of the police shootings
276
Goodbye Lenin!
on the Kyiv Maidan in February 2014—and Ukrainian soldiers

who died in the war in the Donbas, officially called an anti-ter-
rorist operation (ATO). The square where the Lenin monument
had stood was renamed the Square of the Heavenly Hundred. In
Poltava and in the southern city of Kherson, pedestals of Lenin
monuments were also turned into shrines to the Heavenly Hun-
dred and soldiers of the ATO.
Thus, in many cities of the Center and parts of the Southeast,
Lenin monuments are being replaced not with monuments to
a single historical figure but with memorials to heroes of another
rising cult—defenders of democracy in the Revolution of Dignity
and defenders of Ukrainian independence and territorial integrity
in the war with Russia. In urban centers of the East—parts of the
Donbas recaptured by the Ukrainian army, where Lenin monu-
ments were removed mainly by Ukrainian volunteer battalions
fighting in the war—attempts to turn the remaining pedestals
into shrines to the heroes of the Heavenly Hundred did not take
root, and supporters of the pro-Russian rebels have taken the op-
portunity to cover the pedestals with anti-Ukrainian slogans and
graffiti. In the West, where Lenin monuments were removed in
the late 1980s and early 1990s, the public spaces were reappropri-
ated long ago, leaving little space in symbolically important city
centers for memorials to the Heavenly Hundred.24
The Catch-Up Game

The nationalist activists of the Revolution of Dignity, who began
the Leninfall in November 2013 with the removal of the Lenin
monument in Kyiv, achieved their immediate goal of cleansing
Ukraine of monuments that embodied the Russocentric Soviet
interpretation of Ukrainian history but failed to replace them
with a hero or historical narrative of their own. While the public
either supported or raised no objection to the toppling of the
Lenin monuments, it refused to replace him with a new demigod,
indicating a level of maturity in a society that is still emerging
from Soviet-era authoritarianism. But that refusal also indicates
another feature of the Ukrainian situation—the lack of a histor-
ical narrative and historical figures equally acceptable to all parts
of the country. This is a task that Ukraine has yet to address in
277
a variety of ways, including the process of reimagining and re-

dedicating its public spaces.
This spatial analysis of recent shifts in the historical attitudes
of Ukrainian society indicates that region, in particular macrore-
gion, remains a key component in the formation of the country’s
new political and historical identity. The Leninfall of 2013–14 had
a clear regional footprint marking the shift of historical memory
in central Ukraine. The toppling of Lenin monuments in the
Center was the culmination of a relatively long process of re-
thinking the recent and distant past, resulting in a new readiness
to condemn the communist regime for its crimes, the rejection of
Soviet and neo-Soviet historical narratives, and the ascription of
greater value to past struggles for independence—a phenomenon
reflected in the growing perception of UPA soldiers as fighters
for Ukrainian sovereignty.
The toppling of Lenin monuments in the Center helped cre-
ate a common memory space shared by the Center and West,
where the monuments had been removed a decade or two earlier
and the communist narrative replaced with a national or even
a nationalist one around the same time. The creation of a common
memory space was a catch-up process in which the shift of public
memory matched the political shift that had occurred a decade
earlier. The map of Ukrainian historical memory created by the
Revolution of Dignity in 2014 finally became congruent with the
political map of 2010, which reflected the political frontline that
first emerged during the Orange Revolution of 2004. This inter-
pretation of the origins of Ukraine’s memory shift suggests the
primacy of electoral politics over the politics of memory.
The revolt of the Center during the Revolution of Dignity
not only altered the memory landscape of the region but also
produced a major change in the politics of memory throughout
the country. The combined political power of the Center and
West enabled those two regions to impose their new consensus
with regard to the rejection of communism on the Southeast,
which was not only disoriented by the Revolution of Dignity
and the ongoing hybrid war with Russia but also outnumbered
in parliament because of the loss of the Crimea and the most
populous parts of the Donbas. The Center thus became the law-
giver in the realm of historical memory politics. It also served as
278
Goodbye Lenin!
a moderator and creator of a new national narrative in which the

pro-independence struggle represented by the UPA fighters was
promoted, while nationalism as an ideology embodied by Stepan
Bandera was rejected.
The story of the Leninfall provides new insights not only
into the changing memory landscape of contemporary Ukraine
but also into the country’s profound political shift. The political
consensus achieved in parliament on the issue of decommuniza-
tion by deputies representing the West and Center, as well as the
political decline of the Southeast, which lost its traditional allies
from the Russian-occupied eastern parts of Ukraine, herald the
end of the division of Ukraine into two virtually equal parts along
the line established during the Yushchenko-Yanukovych elections
of 2004 and replicated in the Yanukovych-Tymoshenko presiden-
tial contest of 2010. A new majority supported by the Yushchenko
and Tymoshenko electorate—a conglomerate of nationalists and
liberals united by the idea of a pro-Western political course—has
emerged in Ukraine and shown its ability to define the country’s
domestic and foreign policy. As in memory politics, so in electoral
politics the role of the Center has increased both as moderator
between the West and Southeast and as generator of policies
capable of uniting all parts of Ukraine.
279
IV
EUROPEAN
HORIZONS
18.
The Russian Question
The fall of the USSR exposed the confusion between the Russian
(later Soviet) empire and the Russian nation prevailing through-
out Russian history. In 1991, Russia abandoned the non-Slavic
components of its empire but has found it difficult to part ways
with the Slavic ones. Russia today has enormous difficulty in
reconciling the mental maps of Russian ethnicity, culture, and
identity with the political map of the Russian Federation, espe-
cially when it comes to neighboring Ukraine and Belarus.
The Russian question, understood as a set of problems facing
the Russian nation during and after the disintegration of the
Soviet Union, was first placed on the public agenda by Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, Russia’s best-known author of the second half of
the twentieth century, in a series of essays published between 1990
and 2008. One of those works, The Russian Question at the End of
the Twentieth Century (1994), includes a survey of Russian history
from the era of Kyivan Rus´ to the first post-Soviet years. The
Russian question, according to Solzhenitsyn, was really about the
survival of the Russian nation. He discerned threats from various
quarters, including moral decay, economic degradation, the rising
influence of Western values and institutions, and the partitioning
of Russia by newly created state borders. Solzhenitsyn looked
back to the final decades of imperial rule as a paradise lost for the
Russian Empire and the Russian nation.
Solzhenitsyn claimed that he was not an imperialist. Indeed
he was not. He was a Russian nation-builder. As early as 1990, he
called on the Russians to separate themselves from the non-Slavic
283
republics, even if they wanted to stay together with Russia. Sol-

zhenitsyn imagined the Russian nation as consisting of a Great
Russian core and an East Slavic periphery including Ukrainians
and Belarusians, as well as Russian-speakers residing in other
republics. His ideal solution was the creation of a “Russian Union”
consisting of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and northern Kazakhstan.
As this vision of Greater Russia failed to materialize in 1991,
Solzhenitsyn advocated an enhanced role for the Russian state
in providing legal protection for Russians and Russian-speakers
abroad, as well as the formation of Russian ethnic autonomies
in parts of foreign states where Russians and Russian-speakers
constituted a majority.1
Half Ukrainian by birth, Solzhenitsyn was especially bitter
about Ukrainian independence and questioned the sovereignty of
the Ukrainian state over its eastern and southern regions, where
Ukrainians constituted a majority, but the dominant language on
the streets was Russian. “Its burdensome error,” he wrote with
reference to Ukraine, “lies precisely in that inordinate expansion
on territory that was never Ukraine until Lenin: the two Donets
provinces and the whole southern belt of New Russia (Melito-
pol–Kherson–Odesa) and the Crimea. . . . That primal psycho-
logical error will produce ineluctable and deleterious effects in
the inorganic union of western provinces with eastern ones, in
the division into two (now three) religious branches, and in the
resilience of the oppressed Russian language, which 63 percent of
the population has hitherto regarded as its mother tongue. How
much ineffective, useless effort will have to be expended to cover
those cracks! As the proverb has it, stolen goods stick out a mile.” 2
Solzhenitsyn’s words became a self-fulfilling prophecy. An
ardent opponent of communism, he saw most if not all the trou-
bles besieging the Russian nation as the result of Soviet ideology
and practice. For him, progress actually meant going back to pre-
Soviet times. To overcome its profound political, economic, and
cultural crisis, Russia would have to return to its roots, which
included the big Russian nation of imperial times, encompassing
Ukrainians and Belarusians as well as Russians. The conservative
utopia of Russian nation-building that Solzhenitsyn proposed
to the new Russian state and society was a time bomb that went
off with the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Vladimir
284
Putin, who had repeatedly expressed his admiration for Solzhe-

nitsyn and his writings in public, used much the same language
in trying to convince President George W. Bush at the NATO
summit of 2008 that Ukraine was “not even a state” and that most
of its territory had been “given away” by Russia. In 2014, Russia
forcibly annexed the Ukrainian Crimea with its ethnic Russian
majority and began a military confrontation in the Donbas region
of eastern Ukraine with its ethnic Ukrainian but predominantly
Russian-speaking majority.3
The Russo-Ukrainian conflict reprised many of the themes
that had been central to political and cultural relations in the re-
gion for the previous five centuries. These included Russia’s great-
power status and influence beyond its borders; the continuing
relevance of religion, especially Orthodoxy, in defining Russian
identity and conducting Russian policy abroad; and, last but not
least, the importance of language and culture as tools of state
policy in the region. More importantly, the conflict reminded the
world that the formation of the modern Russian nation is still far
from complete. The Russian question, formulated in those terms,
still awaits solution. Will the hostilities in Ukraine open cracks in
the pan-Russian identity based on concepts rooted in the Russian
imperial era? Will it be replaced with the model of a Russian
political nation limited to the borders of the Russian Federation?
Clear answers to these questions are elusive, but a journey into
the history of the pan-Russian idea can help us explore its origins
and explain how it managed to survive for so long and why it has
proved inadequate as a foundation for a viable modern state.4
⁂
The Kyivan heritage has been central to Russian identity since
the rise of the Grand Duchy of Moscow as an independent state
in the mid-fifteenth century. Over the centuries, it has become
nothing short of the foundation myth of modern Russia. The
Kyivan roots of the Muscovite dynasty and church helped form
a powerful myth of origin that separated Muscovite Rus´ from
its immediate Mongol past and substantiated its claim to the
Byzantine heritage. There has been a long tradition of regarding
the Russian tsars, starting with the fifteenth-century founder of
285
the independent Muscovite state, Ivan III, as embodying two

traditions, those of the khan and the basileus—the Mongol and
Byzantine rulers.
What has been taken for granted in that interpretation of
tsarist rule is its princely origin, which is reflected not only in
the title of the Muscovite rulers. They all imagined themselves as
members (later continuators) of the Kyivan ruling dynasty known
today as the Rurikids, and Tsar Ivan the Terrible used the Kyivan
dynastic connection with Byzantium to present himself as an
heir of the Roman emperor Augustus. Even more important was
another element of dynastic continuity between Kyiv and Mos-
cow—the one that allowed the Muscovite rulers to lay claim to
the patrimony of the Kyivan princes. This patrimonial right, first
fully formulated in the late fifteenth century during the Musco-
vite subjugation of the Republic of Novgorod, was used to claim
not only ethnically Russian but also Belarusian and Ukrainian
territories in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.5
At the end of the eighteenth century, Catherine II, who had
neither Rurikid nor Romanov blood in her veins, found no better
argument to justify the partitions of Poland than to strike a medal
with the inscription “I returned what was torn away,” referring
to the restoration of the Kyivan patrimony lost in the previous
centuries. During World War I, Tsar Nicholas II celebrated the
short-lived reunification of the Rus´ lands under his scepter by
traveling to the city of Lviv in 1915. The theme of Moscow’s gath-
ering of the Rus´ heritage survived the collapse of the empire and
was revived in Stalin’s takeover of western Ukraine in the course
of World War II. Moscow’s struggle to reclaim the historical and
territorial legacy of the lost kingdom of Kyivan Rus´ lasted half
a millennium, ending only with the annexation of Transcarpath-
ian Ukraine to the USSR in 1945. Moscow lost Transcarpathia
along with other Ukrainian territories less than half a century
later with the disintegration of the USSR in 1991, turning the
dream of Rus´ reunification into an ever-moving target.6
Another important element of modern Russian culture and
self-identification that goes back to Kyivan times is religion. An
absolute majority of Russians associate themselves with the Or-
thodox Church—the brand of Christianity brought to what is now
Russia from Kyiv during the medieval period. The construction
286
of the monument to St. Volodymyr in downtown Moscow in

2018 underlines the importance of that connection not only for
Russian history but also for present-day Russian self-identifica-
tion. Moscow was the early winner in the age-old contest for the
religious mantle of Kyiv. In the first decades of the fourteenth
century, when the political center of Northeastern Rus´ was lo-
cated in the town of Vladimir, the junior branch of the Rurikid
princes in Moscow managed to convince the metropolitan of
Rus´, who had fled Kyiv in the wake of the Mongol invasion,
to settle there. Later metropolitans never left Moscow, helping
the Muscovite rulers claim supremacy in the contest for power
between the princes of Northeastern Rus´ and then extend their
control over other Orthodox lands of the former Kyivan realm.
Beginning with the emergence of the independent Musco-
vite (Russian) state in the second half of the fifteenth century,
the Russian Orthodox Church, with its headquarters in Moscow,
helped the Russian rulers set their realm apart not only from
the Muslim successors to the Mongol Empire but also from the
rest of the Christian world. When the Muscovite church refused
to accept metropolitans from Constantinople after Byzantium
entered into an ecclesiastical union with Rome at the Council of
Florence (1439), it effectively cut its ties with both Eastern and
Western Christianity, turning Muscovite Orthodoxy into a purely
Russian faith and institution. The division cut through the former
Kyivan lands, leaving Ukraine and Belarus, which remained under
Constantinople, on one side of the border and the independent
Muscovite church, unrecognized by other Christians, on the oth-
er. This not very splendid isolation had a profound impact on
Muscovite society and identity, which still manifests a symbiosis
between Russianness and the native form of Orthodoxy.
It was only in the seventeenth century, after the creation of
the Patriarchate of Moscow (1589) and the reestablishment of
ties with the Orthodox East, that Muscovy managed to over-
come the isolationism of its religious world view and employ
Orthodoxy as a tool for the “gathering of the Rus´ lands.” In the
mid-seventeenth century, when Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich took
the Ukrainian Cossack state led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky under
his “high hand,” the decision was justified by the need to protect
coreligionists—a powerful legitimizing argument in the age of
287
the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Reform. As Muscovite

and then Russian imperial armies moved west in the course of the
next century and a half, the Moscow patriarchs not only blessed
the troops but also presided over the forcible religious conversion
of the tsars’ new subjects—a development that proceeded apace
after the subordination of the Kyivan metropolitanate to Moscow
in the last decades of the seventeenth century. The problem was
that many inhabitants of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
who ended up within the Russian Empire after the partitions of
Poland were Uniate Catholics who accepted the jurisdiction and
dogmas of Rome.
The “return” of the Uniates to the “faith of their fathers”
was a leitmotif in the activity of the Russian Orthodox Church
throughout the nineteenth century: the Uniates of Belarus and
Ukraine were brought under its control at the Council of Polatsk
in 1839. It continued into the twentieth century, when in the last
months of World War II Joseph Stalin gave his blessing to the
forcible “reunification” of former Uniates, now known as Greek
Catholics, in western Ukraine. The revival of the Ukrainian Greek
Catholic Church in the last years of the USSR challenged the
Moscow Patriarchate’s control over the Eastern Christians of
Ukraine, as did the rise of independent movements among the
Ukrainian Orthodox, who created two autocephalous (self-ruled)
churches—the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and
the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate—in
what Moscow claimed as its canonical territory. The religious
unity of the former Kyivan realm under Moscow’s auspices was
also shattered in Belarus by the rise of the Roman Catholic and
Greek Catholic churches.7
⁂
The European concepts of empire and nation came to Russia at
the same time, during the rule of Peter I, who gained considerable
success in his efforts to reform his realm along Western lines and
turned the Tsardom of Muscovy into the Russian Empire. As far
as Peter was concerned, the new terms “empire” and “emperor”
were just Western equivalents of the old Russian terms “tsar-
dom” and “tsar.” The complete merger of the notions of empire
288
and nation took place in Russian discourse during the eighteenth

century. It was then that the marriage of empire and nation was
accomplished in the minds not only of the Russian elites but also
of the world at large. That was also the period in which Russian
geographers moved the eastern border of Europe from the Don
River (established by Strabo) to the Ural Mountains, and the
Russian Empire began to be imagined as part of the European
family of nations. That conception was fully developed during the
long rule of Catherine II. Emulating European models but also
considering themselves rivals of Europe, the Russian imperial
elites began to think of their empire as a nation-state.
Among the first to promote the concept of nationhood were
the tsar’s recently acquired subjects in Kyiv and Ukraine, who had
been exposed to European “national” thinking of earlier times.
The Kyivan clerics who published the Synopsis (1674), the histor-
ical narrative that became the first textbook of Russian history,
believed that not only Muscovy’s dynasty and religion but also
the idea of the Rus´ tsardom and the Rus´ nation had come to
Moscow from Kyiv. Few readers of the Synopsis in Muscovy un-
derstood at the time what a “nation” was. Thus it was with the help
of alumni of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy that the concept of the
imperial nation of Rus´, including inhabitants of both Great and
Little Rus´, came into existence. It became the cornerstone of the
idea of Russianness that received full expression in the nineteenth
century in the works of one of the founders of modern Russian
literature, the Ukrainian-born Mykola Hohol (Nikolai Gogol).
Imperial Russia made little meaningful distinction between the
different branches of the Eastern Slavs and closely associated
Russianness, broadly understood, with dynasty, state, religion, and
language, all originating in Kyiv.8
The Russian imperial elites of the eighteenth century used the
notion of dynastic, religious, and cultural commonality to build
a new model of Russian imperial identity. It was pan-Russian
in historical, cultural, territorial and, last but not least, ethnic
terms. It included the ancestors of modern Russians, Ukrainians,
and Belarusians, and from the perspective of later proponents of
Russian unity it constituted a paradise lost. The first significant
challenge to this conception came from an enemy defeated on
the battlefield: Poland tried to regain its place on the map of
289
Europe by reinventing itself as a modern nation, while claiming

the loyalty of the Ukrainian and Belarusian subjects of the tsars.9
The Poles rose in the revolt in 1830 and then in 1863. But
the weapons used were not guns alone: history, education, and
religion became important instruments in the struggle. Count
Sergei Uvarov not only formulated a new vision of Russian
identity based on autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality in its
pan-Russian incarnation but also helped make Kyiv an outpost
of Russian learning by establishing a university there in 1834.
The naming of the new university after St. Volodymyr was fol-
lowed by the erection of a monument to him on the slopes of
the Dnieper—a new symbol of the region’s Russian identity. The
Russian imperial project contended with its Polish opponent for
the loyalty of Ukrainians and Belarusians not only by opening
Russian educational institutions but also by closing Polish ones
and forcing Uniates into the Russian Orthodox Church. Backed
by the vast resources of empire, pan-Russian identity appeared
invincible in its progress.
But the same period witnessed the incipient fragmentation
of the pan-Russian model of identity. The rise of literary Russian,
best manifested in the writings of Aleksandr Pushkin, removed
Church Slavonic, the language of most eighteenth-century writ-
ing, from the center of imperial cultural life, doing away with
the common East Slavic literary medium of communication and
cultural expression. Ukrainians began to write and publish in
their vernacular, while some Polish or Polonized writers resid-
ing in Belarus began to experiment with the Belarusian idiom.
The development of linguistics, along with growing interest in
the common people and the rise of folklore studies, took many
proponents of pan-Russian identity by surprise. It turned out
that “Russians” all over the empire were using different languages
and dialects and following different, if related, customs and folk
traditions. First Polish and then Russian and Ukrainian authors
began to voice the opinion that various “Russians” not only spoke
different languages but also belonged to different ethnic groups.
The academic and cultural legitimacy of the pan-Russian nation
was now in question. It was only a matter of time before it would
be challenged politically as well.10
290
The first to declare the pan-Russian nation obsolete were

the members of the first Ukrainian political organization, the
Brotherhood of SS. Cyril and Methodius, which was led by the
historian Mykola Kostomarov and included Ukraine’s leading
poet, Taras Shevchenko. These were intellectuals mobilized by
the empire to fight for the pan-Russian idea against the Polish
threat. Instead of being inspired by loyalty to the empire, these
Romantics imagined Ukraine as the cornerstone of a federation
of Slavic nations, on a par with Russia and Poland. Although
they were arrested and exiled, they did not give up on their ideas.
In the 1860s, they took advantage of the liberalization that
followed the Russian defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56) to
establish the journal Osnova (Foundation), begin the publica-
tion of Ukrainian primers, and push for the introduction of the
Ukrainian language in the schools. The new Polish revolt of 1863
and the readiness of its leaders to use the Belarusian language
for propaganda purposes further undermined the Russian im-
perial project in the western borderlands. Politics and culture
came together to question not only the unity of the empire but
also the validity of the pan-Russian conception of Eastern Slav-
dom. The authorities fought back by prohibiting publications in
Ukrainian—a deliberate effort to arrest the development of an
alternative to Great Russian culture and identity.
The intellectual response to the growing cracks in the pan-
Russian edifice was formulated by the Russian publicist Mikhail
Katkov, who placed rising Russian nationalism at the service of
the empire. In the 1860s, he put together the elements of the
model of imperial identity that would survive, with some modi-
fications, until the fall of the empire in 1917. If Ukrainian activists
such as Kostomarov believed that there were two Rus´ nationali-
ties—the Northern or Great Russians, including the Belarusians
as a subgroup, and the Southern Russians or Ukrainians—Katkov
claimed that there were three such nationalities: Great, Little,
and White, all members of a big Russian nation. Each had the
right to a local dialect and folklore, but all were supposed to use
one literary language and develop one higher culture—the Great
Russian language and culture. The primacy of the Great Russian
language, literature, and culture was often presented as a common
accomplishment of all three branches of the pan-Russian nation.
291
This policy found its embodiment in a new round of prohibitions

of the Ukrainian language in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century.11
The Revolution of 1905 removed the prohibition on Ukrainian-
language publications but also awakened radical Russian nation-
alism, which began mobilizing the Ukrainian and Belarusian
peasantry in support of the empire and against Poles and Jews.
Official support for Russian nationalist organizations helped
turn the formerly Polish-ruled regions of Ukraine and Belarus
into hotbeds of Russian nationalism. Ukrainian and Belarusian
activists, for their part, were sidelined and marginalized in the
years leading up to World War I. The outbreak of war gave one
more boost to Russian nationalist patriotism, and the success of
Russian arms in Galicia briefly brought two ancient centers of
Kyivan Rus´, Lviv and Peremyshl (Przemyśl), under tsarist rule.
One more push into what is now Ukrainian Transcarpathia was
expected to complete the age-old process of gathering the Rus´
lands. But Russian defeat at the front and economic collapse at
home brought the empire and its dreams to an abrupt end. By
the time Nicholas II was forced to resign in March 1917, not only
Lviv and Peremyshl were lost to the enemy but also a good por-
tion of the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands acquired during the
partitions of Poland.12
⁂
The concept of the pan-Russian nation suffered a hard landing
in the revolutionary year 1917. In the course of that year, Russia
ceased to be an empire and was proclaimed a republic, while
Ukraine declared its autonomy as part of the Russian republic
and then established its own statehood, to be associated with
Russia by federal ties. The following year brought declarations of
independence of the Ukrainian and Belarusian republics and their
occupation by the Germans. The Bolshevik government, which
fought hard to regain control of Ukraine and Belarus, was forced
to make a number of political and cultural concessions, recog-
nizing their de jure but not de facto independence and the dis-
tinctness of their languages and cultures. Traditional pan-Russian
nationalism, championed by the White Movement, challenged
292
the Bolshevik claim to power and thus was no ally of the new
Bolshevik regime in St. Petersburg and then in Moscow. The rev-
olution brought about the complete delegitimization of the pan-
Russian nation, identity, and culture. Russians, Ukrainians, and
Belarusians, the former branches of the pan-Russian nation, were
recognized as separate peoples, formally equal in status and rights.
What to do with the three East Slavic nations and their pro
forma independence not only in cultural but also in political
terms was decided in the fall and winter of 1922. During his last
months in power, Vladimir Lenin convinced Stalin to abandon
his project of bringing the formally independent states of Ukraine
and Belarus into the Russian Federation and insisted that they
be recognized as republics of the Soviet Union on a par with
Russia. Lenin was trying to keep Russian nationalism in check,
apprehensive that it would repel not only existing Soviet repub-
lics but also potential new members in Europe and Asia. Lenin’s
victory over Stalin led in December 1922 to the formation of the
Soviet Union, which provided the non-Russian republics with
institutional foundations for the development of their cultures
and identities.13
In all three East Slavic republics, the new national identities
became closely associated with the communist experiment, which
linked them together. If for Russia communist rule meant the loss
of people and territory, for Ukraine and Belarus it brought along
an anti-colonial momentum linking the ideas of social and na-
tional liberation. In search of political support during his struggle
for power in Moscow, Stalin made an alliance with the national
communists in Ukraine, Belarus and other republics, allowing the
anti-colonial momentum to last until the end of the 1920s. The
active phase of Ukrainization and Belarusization, which brought
affirmative action promoting local cadres, languages, and cultures,
ended with criminal prosecutions and trials of the champions of
those policies. The Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33, in which close
to four million people died, was an assault not only on the village,
which refused to be collectivized, but also on the non-Russian
political and cultural cadres that had promoted national identity
beyond the limits of Moscow’s tolerance.14
Russian national identity was dominant on the all-Union
scene by the 1930s. Stalin’s increasingly secure monopoly of power
293
allowed him to dispense with support from the elites of the Union
republics. The industrialization drive made it necessary to cen-
tralize economic planning and production, which proceeded in
tandem with the growing prominence of Russian as the lingua
franca of the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik leadership, which was
preparing the country for the coming war, regarded non-Russian
cultural nationalism as a threat to unity. The authorities would in-
creasingly treat Russian nationalism as their best hope for survival
in the coming conflict: they were eager to stop discrimination
against Russian culture in the non-Russian republics and use it
as an instrument of mass mobilization in support of the regime.
Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 and the signing of the Anti-
Comintern Pact by Germany and Japan in 1936 were milestones
in Stalin’s efforts to promote Russian nationalism in the USSR.
Russia was dominant again, although the pan-Russian garb of the
imperial era was gone, and the Russian Federation was portrayed
as prima inter pares. To play down the extent of Russian control,
limited support was given to other cultures—a policy that became
known as the Friendship of Peoples.15
World War II brought some adjustments but no substantial
change to the growing alliance between Russian nationalism and
the political leadership of the Union that began in the 1930s. The
partial rehabilitation of Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalism
at the beginning of the war was used by the Kremlin to legiti-
mize the invasion of Poland and the seizure of its eastern, largely
Ukrainian and Belarusian territories assigned to Stalin by the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. Hitler’s invasion of the USSR
in the summer of 1941 pushed Russian nationalist propaganda
into high gear. All three East Slavic nationalisms were promoted
by the regime in the first and most difficult years of the German-
Soviet War, which Soviet propaganda called the Great Patriotic
War of the Soviet People.
But after the victories at Stalingrad and then Kursk in 1943,
the party leadership took a more cautious approach toward the
promotion of non-Russian nationalism—a policy that it ended
completely in 1945. What followed was a crackdown on the more
liberal elements in the Russian cultural establishment, the lead-
ers of the Jewish movement, and the champions of Ukrainian
and Belarusian culture. Also under attack were cultural figures
294
in other Soviet republics. By the time of Stalin’s death in 1953,

Russian nationalism was dominant again, as was the Russian
Orthodox Church, and an anti-Semitic campaign, disguised as
a struggle against “rootless cosmopolitanism,” was under way.16
The non-Russian cultures revived somewhat in the late 1950s
with the de-Stalinization campaign and the liberalization of
Soviet political and cultural life initiated by Nikita Khrushchev.
But Khrushchev also launched a utopian project of construct-
ing communism, along with the formation of a new Soviet man
and the forging of a new historical entity, the Soviet people. This
was in keeping with inherited dogma about the disappearance
of nationalities at the communist stage of human development.
The only cultural foundation for such a merger was the Russian
language and Russian culture. Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid
Brezhnev, abandoned the utopian idea of building communism
but promoted linguistic and cultural Russification under the slo-
gan of the formation of the Soviet people. It gathered speed in the
1970s and came to an end only in the late 1980s, having produced
lasting effects in the East Slavic core of the Soviet Union. While
Russification efforts encountered serious resistance in the Baltics,
the Caucasus, and Central Asia, they bore fruit in Ukraine, and
especially in Belarus, where the Belarusian language was pushed
out not only from the streets of the big cities but also from the
offices and corridors of educational and cultural institutions.17
⁂
The goal of creating a pan-Slavic nation was much closer to re-
alization on the eve of the fall of the USSR than it had been
on the eve of World War I and the fall of the Russian Empire.
While Ukrainians and Belarusians were recognized as distinct
peoples, the level of their cultural Russification, which increased
with urbanization and the movement of village dwellers to the
Russian-speaking cities, the Russification of the educational sys-
tem, especially at the university level, and the growth of mass
media, was much higher than it had been seventy years earlier.
The fall of the Soviet Union resulted from political rather than
ethnocultural mobilization, which crossed linguistic and cultural
lines, particularly in Ukraine. But the fall of the USSR promoted
295
the development of distinct political and cultural identities in

each of the new East Slavic states.18
Russia was ready to shake off the economic burden of the
non-Slavic empire, but the disintegration of the Slavic core
caught its leadership by surprise. The shock caused by the loss
of empire was compounded by the challenge of building a new
political nation on territory carved out of a much larger linguistic
and cultural space considered to be Russian. Modern Russian
identity is probably best imagined as a set of matrëshka nesting
dolls. At the core is the doll of Russian ethnic identity, followed
by the doll of Russian citizenship, which includes not only ethnic
Russians, then by the doll of East Slavic identity and, largest of all,
the doll of participants in Russian culture—the Russian-speakers
of the world.
When it comes to official policy, initially the civic model of
the Russian nation emerged victorious over the project of restor-
ing the Soviet empire or Solzhenitsyn’s vision of a big Russian
nation. But failure to maintain control of the post-Soviet space
either through the Commonwealth of Independent States or
through the more flexible project of forming a Russian “liberal
empire” provoked the new Russian leadership to revive the pan-
Russian nation as a means of restoring Russia’s great-power sta-
tus and mobilizing support for its foreign-policy ventures in the
“near abroad.” As in Eastern Europe after World War II, Moscow
lacked the resources to build a liberal empire in open competition
with the West. Thus it turned to imperial symbols and concepts
of the pre‑1917 era, using them as instruments of soft and then
hard power in the region.19
The Russo-Ukrainian conflict has been characterized on the
Russian side by a return to outdated ways of thinking about na-
tions and their relation to language and culture, coupled with
a nineteenth-century model of great-power behavior in the inter-
national arena. Paradoxically, that conflict was initiated at a time
when nostalgia for former unity was in decline both in Russia and
in other post-Soviet states. While the Russian government was
quite successful in mobilizing support among the largely ethnic
Russian population of the Crimea, the outcome of Russian pro-
paganda in the Russian-speaking but for the most part ethnically
296
Ukrainian regions of eastern and southern Ukraine was mixed

at best.
The pan-Russian idea was brought to Ukraine by armed mi-
litias along with authoritarian rule and the concept of a nation
monolithic in ethnicity, language, and religion—a proposition
that was always a hard sell in the historically multiethnic and
multicultural borderlands of Eastern Europe. Thus, Russia suc-
ceeded in annexing or destabilizing areas where the majority or
plurality of inhabitants considered themselves ethnic Russians
but failed in culturally Russian areas where most of the popu-
lation associated itself ethnically and politically with Ukraine.20
The Russian question, formulated as a set of issues involv-
ing historical and modern Russian identity, is far from resolved.
Lack of clarity in defining Russian nationality and the country’s
cultural and territorial boundaries helped turn the virtual iden-
tity conflict between the Russian and Ukrainian nation-building
projects into a shooting war. It pitched the nineteenth-century
model of a language-based nation against the modern model of
a political nation united by values. The long-term outcome of
the conflict and its impact on nation-building in the region are
still unclear, but, contrary to the wishes of its authors, it accel-
erated the disintegration of one big Russian-dominated cultural
space and promoted the development of separate identities on
the ruins of the pan-Russian projects of the past. The solution to
the Russian question lies not in territorial expansion but in the
formation of a law-based democratic society capable of living
in harmony with its neighbors and playing a positive role in the
modern world.
297
19.
The Quest for Europe
As the Orange Revolution of 2004 confirmed Ukraine’s democrat-

ic credentials and focused world attention on it, Ukraine’s demo-
cratically elected leaders launched a peaceful “offensive” in Brussels
and other European capitals, trying to put their country on a fast
track to membership in the European Union (EU). But the “old
Europe,” dragged into talks on the resolution of the Ukrainian
crisis in late 2004 by the countries of the “new Europe,” was more
than reluctant to send encouraging signals to Kyiv. In fact, the
Brussels bureaucrats were trying to discourage the newly elect-
ed Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, and his team from
submitting an application for Ukraine’s membership in the EU.
In May 2005, Ukraine’s representative to the EU made the
following comment on the EU’s recent attempts to stop Ukraine
from applying for membership: “We consider that the decision
to apply for EU membership is the sovereign right of any Eu-
ropean state that ‘respects principles of freedom, democracy, hu-
man rights, fundamental freedoms and rule of law.’ Notably, it is
envisaged by Article 49 of the EU Treaty.” 1 Indeed, the EU has
no right to ignore an application from a “European state.” But
is Ukraine a European state? The Brussels bureaucrats had some
doubts in that regard. Emma Udwin, the spokeswoman for EU
External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner, noted
in January 2005 with regard to Ukraine’s prospects of membership
that “implicitly, there will first have to be a discussion of whether
a country is European,” implying that Ukraine’s self-identifica-
tion as a European state was far from universally accepted. “The
299
bloc,” wrote a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty correspondent

reporting on Udwin’s comments, “has yet to decide where the
borders of Europe lie.” 2
The importance and urgency of that task can hardly be exag-
gerated, given that in December 2004 the EU invited Turkey to
begin membership talks, and by mid‑2005 voters in a number of
West European countries, most notably France, had defeated the
draft EU constitution, which was explained as a protest against
future EU enlargement. While the general mood in Western and
Central Europe opposed eastward expansion of the Union and
favored strengthening its eastern borders, the countries of Eastern
Europe, many of which had just joined the EU, were in favor of
continuing enlargement of the most prestigious European orga-
nization. Arguments in favor of the latter option were best artic-
ulated in November 2006 by the EU’s enlargement commissioner,
Olli Rehn. In his report on the future of the EU, Rehn opposed
attempts to define the borders of Europe and called instead for
thinking about Europe’s frontiers—a concept that suggests both
challenge and opportunity. To strengthen his case, Rehn quoted
the historian Eric Hobsbawm, who once stated: “Geographically,
as everyone knows, Europe has no eastern borders and the con-
tinent therefore exists exclusively as an intellectual construct.” 3
Indeed, Europe is actually a peninsula with a very broad east-
ern frontier. It is not easy to draw the line separating Europe
from Asia, even where the two continents are divided by water.
After all, according to Greek legends, the princess Europa, who
gave her name to the peninsula, was forcibly taken to the future
“European” Crete from Phoenicia (in present-day Lebanon). At
least Crete is divided from the mainland by a substantial body
of water, but there is nothing comparable to the Mediterranean
Sea between Lisbon and Vladivostok, or, for that matter, Singa-
pore. Where one draws the line dividing the Eurasian land mass
depends on one’s notion of where Europe ends; hence the geo-
graphic puzzle facing opponents of the eastward enlargement of
the European Union. Perhaps they would prefer to deal with the
concept of Christendom, which was replaced by the secular idea
of Europe around the turn of the eighteenth century. By that cri-
terion, Turkey would readily be denied membership on the basis
of its Muslim religion and culture. It might even be possible to
300
draw a line dividing Western and Eastern Christendom, thereby

excluding not only Romania and Bulgaria, which joined the ex-
tended EU on 1 January 2007, but even the Greek homeland of
the European idea.
But that approach would not work with Ukraine, which Sam-
uel Huntington defined in his bestselling study of modern civi-
lizations as a “cleft” country divided between the Orthodox East
and the European West. Back in the 1990s, Huntington seriously
considered a scenario of Ukraine’s disintegration along the East-
West civilizational line. Ukraine survived the post-Soviet chaos
of the 1990s and managed to turn its weakness into a strength,
emerging as one of the most democratic and tolerant societies of
the post-communist world. The name “Ukraine” means “border-
land,” reflecting not only the country’s position on the civiliza-
tional divide but also its historical capacity to serve as a contact
zone between Eastern and Western Christianity, Judaism and
Islam. For centuries, Ukraine was also divided between the Rus-
sian Empire and its Central and East European rivals, the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman and Habsburg
Empires. Each of those powers promoted and advanced its own
religious and civilizational project.
The history of Ukraine as a borderland reflects the long strug-
gle of its inhabitants to transcend political boundaries and forge
an identity that would distinguish them from their immediate
neighbors to the east, west, and south. First Western Christian-
ity and later the secular cultures of Europe served as important
“others” against whom the Ukrainians defined themselves and
their country as part of Orthodox-Byzantine civilization. Even
more significant for the present discussion is that these Western
cultural influences were among the major factors that helped de-
fine Ukraine’s identity: through long association with them, the
Ukrainians came to see themselves as part of the West, distinct
from their Orthodox neighbors to the east.
How does this age-old tradition of complex and often contra-
dictory relations with the Christian and European West influence
Ukraine’s present-day identity, and how does it affect the attitude
of Ukraine’s political and cultural elites toward the European
project of the last fifty years? This essay puts the efforts of the
Ukrainian leadership to join the EU into broader historical and
301
cultural perspective, sketching the development of Ukraine’s Eu-

ropean idea from the early eighteenth century to the first decade
of the third millennium. It argues that Ukraine’s current quest
for EU membership has important cultural and national dimen-
sions, apart from diplomatic, political, and economic ones. There
is a long and well-established intellectual tradition of defining
Ukraine through its close association with Europe, its culture
and values.
Ukraine’s past and present quest for inclusion in Europe can-
not be properly understood without taking into account the other
pole of Ukrainian cultural identity, that of Russia. Russia’s dom-
inant role in the region has been and continues to be regarded
as a potential threat to the survival of the Ukrainian language,
literature, culture, and identity. This encourages Ukrainian elites
to think of Europe not only as a political and economic but also
a cultural counterweight to their powerful eastern neighbor. Judg-
ing by the title of a book published in 2003 by the then president
of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma—Ukraine Is Not Russia—today’s
Ukraine is at pains to define itself vis-à-vis its northern neighbor,
and the importance of Europe’s role in that process can hardly
be exaggerated.
⁂
From very early on, the lands of present-day Ukraine were con-
sidered part of Europe. Medieval and early modern geographers,
following their Greek and Roman predecessors, drew the eastern
boundary of Europe along the Tanais River—that is, the Don,
which “flows quietly” through the modern Russo-Ukrainian
borderland. The eighteenth-century Russian historian Vasilii
Tatishchev drew the line even farther to the east, along the Ural
Mountains, which he saw as marking the division between Russia
proper and its Asian colonies, including Siberia. The mountains
were, of course, no match for an ocean, and Russia failed to be-
come a “normal” European state with a clear distinction between
the mother country and its colonies. But the notion that Europe
ended at the Ural Mountains was accepted by eighteenth-century
Europeans. Russia was a major actor on the European stage and
thus a European state, at least in the eyes of the German-born
302
empress Catherine II, the French encyclopedists with whom she

corresponded and, indeed, the educated European elite in general.
Throughout the eighteenth century, there were probably no
more enthusiastic promoters of the European identity and calling
of the Russian Empire than the alumni of the Kyiv Mohyla Acad-
emy in what is now Ukraine. Educated in Kyiv and in European
universities such as those of Rome, Göttingen, and Königsberg,
Ukrainians in the Russian service, from Feofan Prokopovych to
Oleksandr Bezborodko and Viktor Kochubei, were in the fore-
front of the Europeanization of the Russian psyche. But what
about their native Ukraine? By the mid-nineteenth century,
which saw the first stirrings of the Ukrainian national “awaken-
ing,” Ukraine was considered a cultural backwater of the Russian
Empire. Its role as a bridge between Europe and Russia, played
so successfully in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was
relegated to the past. The capital city of St. Petersburg, which
Ukrainians had helped build and populate with bureaucrats and
intellectuals, including such luminaries of Russian literature as
Mykola Hohol (Nikolai Gogol), had supplanted Ukraine as Rus-
sia’s window on Europe. Since then, Ukraine’s attitude to Europe
has largely been determined by its attitude to Russia—still the
two poles of Ukrainian collective identity and self-image.
For most of the nineteenth century, European influences were
channeled to Ukraine through Russia. This allowed Russians in-
tellectuals such as Vissarion Belinsky to read their own cultural
situation back into the early modern era and claim that the Pere-
iaslav Agreement of 1654, which placed Cossack Ukraine under
a Muscovite protectorate, had opened the doors of European civ-
ilization to Ukraine—a statement repeated in many Soviet-era
museum exhibits in Ukraine. The fact that it had been the other
way around did not bother Belinsky, who denied Ukrainians the
right to develop their own literature, or his twentieth-century
Russian and Ukrainian admirers. In the 1830s, Hohol (Gogol)
still thought of Ukraine in the all-European context, considering
the history of the Cossacks more interesting than that of any of
the independent nations of Europe. But his Russian contempo-
raries had serious doubts in that regard. To be fair, they were not
sure of their own identity either, with Slavophiles fighting West-
ernizers and vice versa. Until the arrest in 1847 of the members
303
of the clandestine Brotherhood of SS. Cyril and Methodius, the

first Ukrainian national organization, the Slavophiles seemed fa-
vorably disposed to Ukraine and its cultural strivings. Not so the
Westernizers.
Vissarion Belinsky opposed the development of a separate
Ukrainian literature on the grounds that it was not European,
as was, in his opinion, Russian literature, whose finest poetic
achievements were the result of Russia’s historical proximity to
Europe and the assimilation of European elements into Russian
culture. According to Belinsky, Ukrainian literature could develop
only if the Ukrainian elites eliminated European elements from
their culture, leaving the “non-European” Ukrainian element at
its core. He wrote in that regard:
As far as the Little Russians are concerned, it is laughable even

to think that anything could now develop out of their folk poet-
ry, which, by the way, is wonderful: not only can nothing develop
from it, but it has stood still ever since the days of Peter the
Great; one could set it in motion only if the best, noblest sector
of the Little Russian population gave up the French quadrille
and began dancing the trepak and hopak once again, exchanged
the tailcoat and frock coat for the jerkin and the homespun
mantle, shaved its head and let down its topknot—in a word, re-
verted from a condition of civilization, education, and humanity
(the acquisition of which Little Russia owes to its union with
Russia) to its former barbarism and ignorance. . . . 4
Thus, in the eyes of the Russian Westernizers, Russia was

Europe and Ukraine was not, and the development of a distinct
Ukrainian culture was a step away from Europe and the associated
ideals of progress and liberty. Indeed, Belinsky and the nineteenth-
century Russian Westernizers could be considered the forefathers
of the concept promoted until recently by the pro-Russian lobby in
Ukraine and epitomized in the slogan “To Europe together with
Russia.” If Belinsky wanted to halt the development of a distinct
Ukrainian poetry, literature, and culture, the proponents of this
slogan wanted Ukraine to follow in the wake of Russian foreign
policy—a course that could easily lead to curtailing the revival of
304
the Ukrainian language, literature, and culture and threaten the

development of a distinct Ukrainian identity.
On the Ukrainian side, the most prominent nineteenth-
century thinker to turn the tables on Russian intellectuals in the
debate on the European character of Russia and Ukraine was
Mykhailo Drahomanov. In his article “The Lost Epoch: Ukraini-
ans under the Muscovite Tsardom, 1654–1876,” he took issue with
Russian claims that Muscovite rule over Ukraine was responsible
for abolishing the old “disastrous” Cossack way of life and intro-
ducing new European mores. The Muscovite tsars, he argued,
did not introduce European methods of government but abso-
lutism and arbitrary bureaucratic rule. Discussing the Pereiaslav
Agreement and the conditions negotiated by the tsar and the
Cossack officers in the spring of 1654, Drahomanov wrote: “When
we compare the rights which were guaranteed to the Ukrainian
Cossacks with the despotism that existed in the Muscovite tsar-
dom, there is no doubt that the Cossack constitution had more in
common with the free European constitutional governments of
today than the Muscovite tsardom had, or than even the present
Russian Empire has.” 5
In Drahomanov’s view, Europe stood for the rights of man
and Russia for absolutism and arbitrary government without the
consent of the governed. He believed that Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s
revolt against Poland in 1648 was consonant with the ideas of
freedom that were then developing in Europe. According to
Drahomanov, Ukraine had good prospects of developing its own
freedoms and liberties from the modest beginnings apparent in
the Europe of that day. Those prospects were cut off by Muscovy,
which was responsible for Ukraine’s “lost epoch” of more than two
hundred years—centuries in which Ukraine could have joined
Europe on its path to freedom. “No wonder,” wrote Drahomanov,
“that, during the years when Ukraine was united to Muscovy,
with its autocratic tsar and legal serfdom and non-existent edu-
cation, Russian despotism gradually brought about the destruc-
tion of Ukraine’s freedom. . . . A wall of tsarist and bureaucratic
despotism was erected to prevent the free political ideas then
current in Europe, which Ukraine had always welcomed, from
penetrating.” 6 For Drahomanov, Europe equaled freedom, and
on that scale freedom-loving Ukraine was Europe (or close to it
305
historically and mentally), while Russia was not. In fact, it was

preventing Ukraine from becoming part of Europe. But if Russia
was not Europe, what was it?
⁂
Ukrainian thinkers and historians of the second half of the nine-
teenth century were in no doubt about what Russia represented.
In their eyes, Russia, with its authoritarianism and lack of respect
for collective and individual freedoms, stood for Asia, with all
the negative connotations characteristic of the nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century discourse of Orientalism. Drahoma-
nov’s former colleague at Kyiv University and founder of mod-
ern Ukrainian historiography, Volodymyr Antonovych, shared
the ideas of Polish historians, who often denied the European
character of Russia. No less critical of Russia’s “Asianism” was
Antonovych’s student Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the creator of the
national narrative of Ukrainian history and the first head of the
independent Ukrainian state in 1918. Hrushevsky believed that,
when it came to national culture and character, Ukrainians were
much closer to Europe than Russians.
Not unlike their European neighbors, Ukrainians had re-
spect for personal dignity and established forms of life, while
Russians, in his opinion, lacked those “European” characteristics
and idealized some questionable characteristics of their own cul-
ture. Among the latter, Hrushevsky listed “lack of human dignity
in oneself and disrespect for the dignity of others; lack of taste
for a good, comfortable, well-ordered life for oneself and disre-
spect for the interests and needs of others in such a life and the
achievements of others in that sphere; lack of will to establish an
organized social and political life; a disposition to anarchism and
even social and cultural destructiveness.” 7 In an essay on “Our
European Orientation” (1918), Hrushevsky underlined those
elements of Ukrainian history that linked it with Western and
Central Europe, establishing Ukraine’s “European” credentials
and stressing the differences between its historical development
and that of Russia.
After the defeat of the Ukrainian Revolution, Hrushevsky,
not unlike Drahomanov before him, saw the future of Ukraine
306
in a European federation of democratic states. After his return to

Ukraine in 1924, Hrushevsky fought vigorously against the chan-
neling of European cultural achievements to Ukraine through
Moscow. He protested Moscow’s attempts to limit translations
from European languages into the languages of the Soviet na-
tionalities, reserving for Russian literature the role of “window on
Europe” for the non-Russian literatures and cultures. Hrushevsky
insisted on direct access to European scholarship and culture
for the Ukrainian academic and cultural elites. These efforts of
Hrushevsky’s echoed the struggle against Russocentrism and for
a European orientation waged inside Ukraine’s communist estab-
lishment by the writer and publicist Mykola Khvyliovy. Accord-
ing to the Soviet constitution, the Soviet Union was not Russia
writ large but a union of independent republics, and Khvyliovy
and his colleagues insisted on treating it that way. They refused
to orient their culture toward Russia and insisted on access to
West European culture and literature, denying Moscow the role
of intermediary in that intercultural dialogue.
Writing in 1926, Khvyliovy asked his readers a rhetorical ques-
tion: “Is Russia an independent state?” and answered it: “It is!
Well, in that case we, too, are independent.” “By which of the
world literatures should we set our course?” he continued his
argument.
On no account by the Russian. That is definite and uncondition-

al. Our political union must not be confused with literature. . . .
The point is that Russian literature has weighed down upon us
for centuries as master of the situation, as a literature that has
conditioned our psyche to play the slavish imitator. And so, to
nourish our young art on it would be to impede its development.
The proletariat’s ideas did not reach us through Muscovite art;
on the contrary, we, as representatives of a young nation, can
better apprehend these ideas, better cast them in the appropriate
images. Our orientation is to Western European art, its style,
its techniques. 8
As is apparent from the quoted excerpt, Khvyliovy justified his

advocacy of the dramatic turn of Ukrainian culture from Russia
to Europe with reference to the two dominant Soviet discourses
307
of the time. The first was the idea of proletarian revolution, the
second that of the national-liberation struggle of “young” nations
against “old” imperial ones. In that context, Europe figured as
the homeland of the proletariat, while young Ukraine was bet-
ter equipped to understand proletarian culture than “old” Russia.
Thus Ukraine’s quest for Europe was cast in Marxist and revo-
lutionary terms.
The Russian response to Khvyliovy’s argument was formulat-
ed by none other than Joseph Stalin, once a promising Georgian
poet and later a ruthless Soviet dictator, who easily defeated the
Ukrainian Marxist writer at the game of Bolshevik dialectics. In
his letter of April 1926 to the Ukrainian Politburo dealing with
nationalist deviations in the Communist Party of Ukraine, Stalin
specifically attacked Khvyliovy and his writings. He wrote that,
in calling for the reorientation of Ukrainian culture from Rus-
sia to the West, Khvyliovy was in fact turning his back on the
homeland of the first proletarian revolution and allying himself
with the bourgeois West. Stalin’s line of argument, which ignored
Khvyliovy’s national-liberation paradigm and turned his class-
based argument upside down, was adopted by party officials in
Ukraine. One of them, People’s Commissar of Education Olek-
sandr Shumsky, who was accused of leniency toward Khvyliovy,
later attacked him, making full use of Stalin’s insistence on an
orientation toward Moscow not as the capital of Russia but as the
capital of the international workers’ movement. Shumsky argued
that “Red Moscow has also been created by the will, effort and
blood of Ukrainian workers and peasants. Moscow is the capital
of our Union. Moscow is the center and brain of the proletarian
cause throughout the world. This is our Moscow.” 9
Stalin’s argument won the day and determined the fate of
Ukraine’s European discourse for generations to come. Khvylio-
vy shot himself in 1933 to avoid arrest. Hrushevsky was exiled to
Moscow, the capital of the world revolution, and died in Rus-
sia under suspicious circumstances in 1934. Khvyliovy’s reluctant
critic, Oleksandr Shumsky, was assassinated on Stalin’s orders in
1946. The Second World War and especially the subsequent Cold
War promoted the notion of a hostile bourgeois Western Europe
in official Soviet discourse. That discourse presented Ukrainian
national aspirations as manifestations of Ukrainian bourgeois
308
nationalism, while proponents of Ukrainian national culture were

portrayed as stooges of the capitalist West.
⁂
From the 1930s on, Soviet Ukraine was effectively cut off from
the West, while anything resembling a European identity of
Ukrainian elites or a European orientation of Ukrainian culture
was not only discredited in the state-controlled public discourse
but also suppressed and persecuted in the institutions associat-
ed with Ukraine’s European orientation. That was the case with
the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which was dissolved and
“reunited” with the Russian Orthodox Church in 1946 in order
to break its link with Rome. Still, there were limits to what the
Soviet totalitarian state could control, especially with regard to
processes going on beyond its borders. Between the two world
wars, significant parts of Ukraine remained outside Soviet con-
trol. Galicia and Volhynia constituted parts of the Polish state,
while Bukovyna was part of Romania and Transcarpathia of
Czechoslovakia.
Those countries and their Ukrainian lands became known
in world politics of the time as Eastern Europe—a term applied
to the newly independent European states from the Balkans in
the south to the Baltics in the north and from the borders of
Germany in the west to those of the Soviet Union in the east.
“Eastern Europe” replaced the First World War-era term Mit-
teleuropa, coined by the German strategist Friedrich Naumann to
denote the lands “between Germany and Russia” that he expect-
ed to constitute the German sphere of influence after the war.
Contrary to his expectations, the war resulted in the complete or
partial disintegration of the empires that controlled those terri-
tories, creating a new zone in Europe that needed a new identity
and a new name.
Among those who promoted the concept of Eastern Europe,
while stressing wherever possible the new region’s connections
with Western Europe, was the Polish historian Oskar Halecki.
He and other Polish authors advocated the inclusion in East Eu-
ropean geographic space not only of Poland but also of Belarus
and Ukraine. This was partly a response to the geopolitical reality
309
of the time, as western Ukraine and western Belarus constituted

parts of the interwar Polish state. It was also a tribute to the
long-standing Polish historiographic tradition of referring to
Poland in its pre‑1772 borders when discussing it as a historical
entity. Back then, before the first partition of Poland, which wiped
the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth off the political map of
Europe, that state had included all the Belarusian territories and
all of Ukraine west of the Dnieper.
Ukrainian cultural elites in interwar Galicia also considered
their land part of Europe, not because it had been ruled for cen-
turies by Poland but because, for almost a century and a half, it
had been part of the Habsburg Monarchy and, later, Austria-
Hungary—a multiethnic conglomerate that extended from Brus-
sels in the west to Venice in the south and Lviv in the east. In
fact, some Ukrainian literary figures of the period believed that
the interwar Polish state had cut them off from the continent
and therefore promoted the slogan “back to Europe.” Political
commentators and historians, however, were less convinced of the
exclusively European character of their nation. In the 1920s, op-
posing the general trend among social scientists and historians of
the region to regard their newborn countries as part of a historical
and cultural space between the Eurasian East and the European
West, the Ukrainian geographer Stepan Rudnytsky and the his-
torians Stepan Tomashivsky and Viacheslav Lypynsky began to
treat Ukrainian history and culture as products of the country’s
situation at the crossroads between East and West.
Not unlike Polish and Romanian intellectuals, the Ukrainian
authors emphasized the Western (European) influences on their
national culture. In so doing, they not only followed in the foot-
steps of their Central European colleagues but also countered
opposing claims from the Russian Eurasianists and Pan-Slavists.
The interwar tradition of applying the East-West paradigm to the
interpretation of Ukrainian history and culture was continued in
North America in the second half of the twentieth century by
such scholars as Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Omeljan Pritsak, and Ihor
Ševčenko.
The Second World War brought about substantial changes
in the political geography of Europe. Not only did the former
Polish possessions of Galicia and Volhynia become parts of the
310
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, but the formerly Czecho-

slovak Transcarpathia was annexed to it as well, along with other
Ukrainian lands. All of Eastern Europe ended up in the Soviet
sphere of influence, including Germany’s eastern lands, adding
to the Mitteleuropa once conceived by German strategists not
only the lands between Germany and Russia but part of Ger-
many itself. The response of the East European intellectuals who
emigrated to the West after the war was to stress even more the
historical and cultural links of their region with the countries of
Western Europe.
In 1950, Oskar Halecki, who immigrated to the United States,
published a book entitled The Limits and Divisions of European
History. There he developed some of his earlier ideas on the his-
tory of Eastern Europe and suggested a new name, East-Central
Europe, which stressed the region’s close relation to the West.
Halecki divided Europe into three parts: western, central, and
eastern. He further divided Central Europe into West-Central
and East-Central segments. The former term was used to denote
Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, known during the inter-
war period as Eastern Europe. As had been the practice before
the war, Poland was treated not within its new political borders
but within its historical ones, including some if not all of the
Ukrainian and Belarusian territories, which were considered to
be part of East-Central Europe.
The term “West-Central Europe” has never gained acceptance
in scholarly and political discourse, but “East-Central Europe”
has become current in scholarship, if not in politics. While pol-
iticians and the media continued to speak and write about the
countries of the Soviet bloc as parts of Eastern Europe, academics
proved more willing to adopt the new name for the region. It
was promoted mainly by historians of Poland, including Halecki
himself, Piotr Wandycz, and others. The University of Washing-
ton Press published a multivolume series on the history of East-
Central Europe, and a number of chairs in history departments
of North American universities have dealt with the history of
East-Central Europe. The term made its way into political dis-
course in the countries of the region, especially Poland, after the
velvet revolutions of 1989.
311
In the academic sphere, the strongest promoter of the con-

cept has been the Institute of East-Central Europe in Lublin,
led by Professor Jerzy Kłoczowski. Over the last fifteen years the
institute has held scores of conferences and published dozens of
volumes dealing with the history of the region. For Polish polit-
ical and academic elites, the concept helped keep alive the long
tradition of treating Poland and its former Commonwealth ter-
ritories of Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine as parts of one region.
There is certainly a connection between the role that Poland plays
today in promoting Ukrainian interests in the West, including its
bid for membership in the EU, and the perception of its role as
a leader in the lands that once constituted the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth and now, in Polish eyes at least, make up part of
East-Central Europe.
In Ukraine, the idea of East-Central Europe found support
among historians first and foremost. The early 1990s saw the es-
tablishment of a Society of Historians of East-Central Europe
chaired by Professor Natalia Yakovenko, and in 2001 a History
of East-Central Europe was published in Lviv under the editor-
ship of Leonid Zashkilniak. Historians and literary scholars were
among the few Ukrainian intellectuals who pointed out European
elements of Ukrainian culture long before the dissolution of the
USSR. Research on early modern Ukrainian culture and the mul-
tilingual (Ukrainian, Polish, and Latin) literature of the period
could hardly avoid stressing the differences between Ukrainian
and Russian culture and the closeness of the former to European
literary and cultural trends. But that argument was never fully
articulated in the USSR, given prevailing circumstances, nor did
it make a major impact on Ukrainian political thought of the
period. Soviet censorship bears only part of the responsibility for
that situation.
Given the division of Europe, the rise of the United States
to prominence in international affairs, and the creation of the
United Nations, the postwar period was often characterized by
a discourse in which the concept of Europe as Russia’s traditional
“other” was replaced by a notion of the West that included not
only Western Europe and North America but also such a remote
and southeastern part of Western civilization as Australia. The
Ukrainian dissidents of the last decades of the USSR’s existence
312
oriented themselves not on specifically European values but on

universal values and human rights promoted by Western coun-
tries. One of them, the literary scholar and publicist Ivan Dziuba,
writing in the 1960s, decried the lack of translations of world
literature into Ukrainian. Protesting suggestions that Ukrainians
“could reach the world’s intellectual life through the medium of
Russian culture rather than directly,” Dziuba followed in the foot-
steps of Hrushevsky and Khvyliovy, the difference being that it
was not just Europe but the whole world from which Ukraine was
cut off by Russia. The signing of the Helsinki Final Act on Securi-
ty and Cooperation in Europe (1975) gave international legitimacy
to the dissident movement in the USSR and the countries of the
communist bloc, but, when it comes to Ukrainian political and
cultural thought of the period, Europe as such remained part of
the broader category of the American-led West.
⁂
After the dissolution of the USSR, independent Ukraine found
itself at the crossroads of different cultural and political trends.
Should the new Ukrainian nation go west and try to join the EU,
play a more active role in the Commonwealth of Independent
States, or become a major actor in the region that Polish intel-
lectual and political elites called East-Central Europe? Or should
it, perhaps, seek to lead the group of former Soviet countries of
the Black Sea region? Ukraine under President Leonid Kuch-
ma eventually adopted the model of a multivector foreign policy.
Finding no welcome in the West, given their corrupt political and
economic practices, and not wanting too close an association with
Russia and its much more powerful oil tycoons, the Ukrainian
political elites were also restrained by the conflicting political and
cultural sympathies of the Ukrainian population—pro-European
in western Ukraine and pro-Russian in the eastern parts of the
country. As a result, Ukrainian foreign policy lacked a clear ori-
entation for most of the 1990s and early 2000s, unless one can
consider as such repeated attempts to play Russia off against the
West and vice versa in order to achieve tactical goals.
The first years of the new millennium showed quite clearly
that Ukraine’s intellectual elites and some of its political leaders
313
were growing weary of the ineffectiveness of the Kuchma regime.

Its balancing act between East and West not only in terms of
foreign policy but also with regard to political, economic, and
social development was leaving the newly independent nation
further and further behind its western neighbors, who had re-
formed their political and economic systems in preparation for
joining the EU. Disappointment was especially pronounced in
western Ukraine, where it found expression in a revival of the cult
of the “grandmotherly” Austria-Hungary, which had ruled the
region prior to 1918, and in a particular kind of Galician cultural
isolationism. Some of the region’s most prominent intellectuals
were prepared to toy with the idea of Galicia’s leaving Ukraine
and “returning” to Europe.
More a dream than a plan, and more a cultural than a political
project, those ideas found their reflection and inspiration in the
writings of Ukraine’s most popular novelist, Yurii Andrukhovych.
Frustrated with the corruption and ineptitude of the Kuchma
regime in Kyiv, Andrukhovych defined his new cultural space not
within the boundaries of Ukraine as a whole, as in his writings of
the early 1990s, but in Galicia, historically rooted in its Austrian
past and conceived as part of a common space with countries of
Central Europe—the imagined world created prior to 1989 in
the writings of Milan Kundera and Czesław Miłosz. It took the
Orange Revolution to bring Andrukhovych back to his post-in-
dependence belief in Ukraine as a country that was parting ways
with its colonial past and setting out on the path of European
integration.
What was the response of the European West to the
Ukrainian elite’s post‑1991 attempts to declare their country part
of Europe? Although experts at the Deutsche Bank predicted
that Ukraine would become the most prosperous of the former
Soviet republics, the EU never took Ukraine seriously as a po-
tential member. In 1993, when the Council of Europe first looked
into the possibility of its eastern expansion, the only post-Soviet
republics considered for future membership were the Baltic states
of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The disastrous performance
of the Ukrainian economy was certainly one of the reasons for
such lack of interest in the country responsible for the disinte-
gration of the once mighty Soviet Union. But Ukraine’s dispute
314
with Russia over nuclear weapons, Russia’s claims to the Crimea

and the Black Sea Fleet, and lack of international recognition of
Ukraine’s borders also could not fail to influence the EU’s posi-
tion on Ukraine. Meanwhile, the newly independent country was
struggling to assert its independence. It did not obtain support in
the international arena, as the West did not want to antagonize
the wounded Russian bear lest the political situation slip from
Boris Yeltsin’s control and the nuclear-armed post-Soviet states
follow the example of the former Yugoslavia, with much more
disastrous consequences for the whole world.
Thus the Americans made common cause with the Russians,
forcing Ukraine to give up its nuclear arsenal. The Poles and oth-
er East Europeans, on whom Ukraine was counting to form an
anti-Russian bloc, were eager to join the EU and did not want
to associate themselves too closely with a potentially failed na-
tion or further antagonize Russia, which was in the process of
withdrawing its troops from the former Soviet-bloc countries.
Thus, in the summer of 1994, Ukraine had no choice but to agree
to sign a document offered to it by the EU. The Agreement on
Partnership and Cooperation between the EU and Ukraine was
supposed to take effect only in 1998, almost four years after its
signing, and its true purpose was to help Ukraine achieve political
and economic stability, not to become a member of the EU.
In 1998, at the first meeting of the Council for Coopera-
tion between Ukraine and the EU, created to oversee the imple-
mentation of the 1994 agreement, Ukraine requested associate
membership, only to receive a polite “no.” This occurred less than
a year after the EU had not only initiated negotiations on future
membership with such East European countries as Poland and
Lithuania, with which Ukraine had been linked culturally and
historically for many centuries, but also welcomed applications
from countries like Romania and Bulgaria, whose political re-
gimes and economic situation were hardly better than those of
Ukraine. The document offered to the Ukrainian authorities, en-
titled “The Common Strategy of the EU toward Ukraine,” made
no provision for future membership.
In 2004, following the largest ever expansion of the EU, which
extended it to the western borders of Ukraine (with Hungary,
Slovakia, and Poland gaining membership), Ukraine was offered
315
a new document entitled “The Action Plan” and designed for

countries neighboring with the EU. Brussels was thus treating
Ukraine on a par with such “neighbors” as Israel and Morocco.
The entire world watched the drama and triumph of the Orange
Revolution in Kyiv in November and December 2004—an event
inspired by Ukrainian society’s desire to part ways with Russian-
sponsored authoritarianism and join the democratic family of
European nations. It was then that the EU decided to open mem-
bership negotiations with Turkey.
When the new Ukrainian government of President Yush-
chenko approached the EU in the aftermath of the Orange Rev-
olution, asking for a “clear European perspective,” or the prospect
of membership, it was offered nothing more than an additional
ten-point program that did not change the substance of its re-
lations with the EU and held out no hope of membership even
in the most distant future. As a goodwill gesture, Ukraine intro-
duced visa-free entry in 2005 for citizens of the member states of
the EU. For its part, the EU forced its new members to reintro-
duce strict Cold War-era controls on their borders with Ukraine.
This was the case, for example, in the Slovak village of Szelmenc.
“A 10‑foot-high wire fence means that villagers on the Ukrainian
side have to travel 416 miles to buy a 30 Euro visa (a fortune in
that part of the world) to meet a relative on the other side of the
street,” reported the Wall Street Journal in September 2005 in an
article entitled “The ‘Apartheid Wall.’” The author noted that “It’s
hard to forge an ‘Alliance of Civilizations’ when Europe’s so busy
putting up walls.” 10
The stagnation of the Ukrainian economy in the 1990s and
the corruption of the Kuchma regime were of course major rea-
sons for the EU’s reluctance to consider Ukraine as a prospec-
tive member. Ukraine’s failure to introduce strict controls on its
borders with Russia could not but influence the EU’s decision to
“fortify” its new eastern boundary. Another reason is Ukraine’s
size and the concern that its admission would cost the EU too
much in agricultural and infrastructure subsidies. But that is only
part of the story. The Brussels bureaucrats felt most comfortable
with those forces in the Kuchma administration, including for-
mer Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who showed little ini-
tiative concerning Ukraine’s integration into Europe and oriented
316
themselves on Russia. As Winfried Schneider-Deters pointed out

at the time, Russia remained the EU’s major concern. After all,
the agreement signed in 1999 by the leaders of the EU and Russia
on the development of mutual relations in the decade 2000–2010
included recognition of Russia’s leading role in creating a new
system of political and economic relations in the Commonwealth
of Independent States.
While the old Europe welcomed the Orange Revolution and
the resulting prospects for Ukraine’s democratic development, it
remained uneasy about Russia’s reaction to Ukraine’s growing
ties with Europe. Quite telling in that regard was the statement
made in September 2005, when Viktor Yushchenko was chosen
as the first recipient of the Chatham House Prize: he was given
the award in part for leading the Orange Revolution in such a way
that Ukraine, Russia’s largest partner, brought about no serious
deterioration in Europe’s relations with Moscow.
⁂
The EU’s reluctance to admit that Ukraine is a European state
even as it opens membership negotiations with Turkey, a country
predominantly non-European in geography, history, and culture,
may be viewed with amusement by outside observers, but it clear-
ly annoys the Ukrainian political elite. Ukraine’s claim to the Eu-
ropean character of its state, based on its geography, history, and
culture, was once summarized by Oleh Zarubinsky, acting chair
of Ukraine’s parliamentary commission on European integration.
In September 2005, addressing a conference in Washington,
D.C., he made the following statement:
I would like to remind you of one thing which is self-evident.

I can’t stop repeating it, and I won’t get tired of repeating it. That
is: Ukraine is a European state. First of all, Ukraine is geograph-
ically situated in Europe, and moreover, the geographic center
of Europe is situated in Ukraine—in Transcarpathia, near the
village of Rakhiv. The history of Ukraine is not a topic of con-
versation today, but one may remember that Kyivan Rus´ was
one of the most developed countries in Europe over 1,000 years
ago. One of the ancient trade routes crossed the territory of
317
Ukraine—“from the Varangians to the Greeks.” Over time our

links with Europe were cut off due to historical circumstances
beyond our control. Therefore, one should admit that Ukraine
has always been a European state in terms of geography, history,
and culture. Now it is time Ukraine regained its place in Europe
in terms of developed institutions of democracy and political
system. It is high time Ukraine joined the family of well-devel-
oped democratic European states. 11
The lukewarm reaction of the old Europe to prospective

Ukrainian membership in the EU brought profound disappoint-
ment and disillusionment to those activists in Ukraine who most
strongly promoted President Viktor Yushchenko’s pro-European
course. The feelings of that part of the Ukrainian intellectual elite
were best expressed by Yurii Andrukhovych, an enthusiastic pro-
moter of Ukraine’s European choice during and immediately
after the Orange Revolution. By the spring of 2006, he was so
disappointed with the lack of support for Ukraine’s bid for EU
membership on the part of the old Europe that he vented his
frustration with the state of Ukrainian-European relations at the
Leipzig Book Fair, where he was awarded the Prize “For Euro-
pean Understanding.”
In his Leipzig speech, delivered on 15 March 2006, An-
drukhovych directed the attention of his audience to a recent
statement by a senior official of the European Commission who
claimed that in twenty years all the European states except those
that used to be part of the USSR would be members of the EU.
That statement was used by anti-European forces in Ukraine to
discredit President Yushchenko’s European project. Travel restric-
tions imposed on Ukrainians wishing to go to Germany and other
EU countries also served to derail the efforts of the pro-European
lobby in Ukraine. “Actually,” said Andrukhovych, “I am not asking
for very much: I want Ukrainians to be able to travel in Europe
without restrictions. If only because they, too, are Europeans.” 12
By the autumn of 2006, Andrukhovych was even more critical
of the European Union’s policy toward Ukraine. In his writings and
public statements, he distinguished clearly between Europe and
the EU—terms that had been used interchangeably in Ukrainian
political discourse since 1991. According to Andrukhovych, they
318
were not identical. Europe, in his mind, had no clear boundaries

and extended as far eastward as European culture itself. From that
perspective, Ukraine was and remains a European country. The
European Union, on the other hand, is a conglomerate of West
European powers that lost their colonies and created the EU in
an effort to recover their past glory and influence by launching
a joint eastward expansion. As the countries of the “new Europe”
refused to take orders from the old ones, the latter lost interest
in EU expansion.
Andrukhovych accused the European “neo-imperialists” of
helping to bring about the de facto defeat of the pro-European
forces in the Ukrainian parliamentary elections of 2006. The same
elections that pushed Andrukhovych over the edge in his critique
of the EU have been treated more positively by another promi-
nent Ukrainian publicist and supporter of “European Ukraine,”
Mykola Riabchuk. Long and painful negotiations between polit-
ical blocs in the Ukrainian parliament eventually resulted in the
revenge of the forces backed by Russia in the presidential election
of 2004 and the return to prime-ministerial office of Yushchen-
ko’s principal opponent in that election, Viktor Yanukovych. The
new/old prime minister did not overtly reverse Ukraine’s course
toward integration into European institutions; instead, he made
common cause with Ukraine-cautious Brussels bureaucrats and
labeled Yushchenko and his supporters “Euro-romantics.”
Some observers saw Yanukovych’s return as the beginning
of the end of Ukraine’s pro-European policy, but Riabchuk re-
mained more optimistic. He argued that the ideas of the Orange
Revolution, as the embodiment of European values, were poised
to gain ground in the future. Ukraine’s civilizational matrix would
lead it toward Europe one way or another. Riabchuk believed that,
despite the setback of the 2006 elections, Ukraine has preserved
an essentially European political culture embodied in the rising
power of civil society and free mass media; Europe has retained
its positive image and attractiveness in the eyes of Ukrainians; and
the Ukrainian oligarchs were sure to be increasingly interested in
stability and the rule of law.13
To many in Ukraine, Riabchuk’s vision of the new Europe-
an Ukraine seemed more like wishful thinking than a realistic
assessment of the current situation. This applied particularly to
319
the hopes that he pinned on the Ukrainian oligarchs. However,

there were increasing signs that, if a consensus on any aspect
of Ukrainian foreign policy was emerging between the Yush-
chenko and Yanukovych camps, then it concerned Ukraine’s
integration into European institutions. In October 2006, Ya-
nukovych stated in an article in the Washington Post: “President
Yushchenko and I also agree that Ukraine has made a choice
for Europe and will pursue closer relations with all European
and Euro-Atlantic institutions. With the European Union, we
are working on an action plan of reforms under the auspices of
the European Neighborhood Policy, which we hope will lead
to the beginning of negotiations on an E.U.-Ukraine free-trade
agreement.” 14 President Yushchenko, for his part, restrained his
pro-European rhetoric, countering Yanukovych’s accusations that
he was a “Euro-romantic.”
If that was the position of the elites, what did Ukraine’s or-
dinary citizens think about the country’s European prospects?
It would appear that, despite the failure of Ukraine’s desperate
attempts to secure from the EU a mere promise of future mem-
bership in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution, the Ukrainian
population at large remained quite sympathetic to Europe and
believed that its new government had a chance of achieving
its goal. Even before the Orange Revolution, 40 percent of the
Ukrainian population was favorably disposed to the EU, accord-
ing to a poll conducted by the National Institute of Strategic
Studies of Ukraine in October 2004.
A poll conducted in May 2005 by the newspaper Dzerkalo
tyzhnia (Weekly Mirror) indicated that more than 66 percent of
Ukrainians believed that the new government was more trusted
by the EU than the Kuchma regime, and more than 56 percent
of those polled believed that the new government was making
real steps toward Europe. The percentage of those who thought
so was much higher in western than in eastern Ukraine. Even
so, sympathy for a European orientation has been making spec-
tacular progress in both western and eastern Ukraine since 1991.
The whole country had been undertaking what it calls a “Iev-
roremont”—the renovation of apartments, offices, and entire
buildings according to European standards. But the “Ievrore-
mont” was not limited to physical reconstruction. Ukraine’s new
320
government and society at large put enormous effort into or-

ganizing the Eurovision song contest in Kyiv in the summer of
2005. According to an opinion poll conducted by the Ukrainian
Oleksandr Razumkov Center in September 2005, 33.3 percent of
the Ukrainian population considered itself European. Almost 85
percent of those polled considered Ukraine to be part of Europe
in geographic terms and 61 percent in historical terms, but most
respondents—54 and 51 percent respectively—did not believe that
Ukraine was a European state in political and cultural terms,
while 77 and 74 percent did not consider Ukraine to be on a par
with European economic and social standards. Clearly, it was not
geography, history, or even culture but the difference between
the standard of living in Ukraine and the countries of the EU
that presented the main obstacle to the Ukrainian population’s
adoption of a full European identity.
Kyiv looked to many in Ukraine like a “normal” European
capital, and the provinces interpret its economic and cultural
success as a sign of belonging to Europe. Interviewed by a Radio
Liberty correspondent in September 2005, a visitor from the city
of Mykolaïv in southern Ukraine ignored the question of wheth-
er she had participated in the Orange Revolution and attend-
ed rallies on the Maidan—Kyiv’s Independence Square—and
commented instead on the European appearance of Kyiv, which
greatly impressed her. Kyivans, in her opinion, were already living
in Europe, something that she defined by the level of services
and wages, as well as smiles on people’s faces. The provinces, she
said, were lagging behind. Fifteen years earlier, a visitor from
the provinces commenting on the same phenomenon of Kyiv’s
higher standard of living would probably have said that Kyivans
were already living under communism, or compared Ukraine’s
capital to Moscow. Therefore, people in the Ukrainian provinces
began using a different scale—a European one—to measure their
capital’s successes and failures, as well as their own. In this con-
nection, one might note the successive renaming of the square at
the northern end of Khreshchatyk in downtown Kyiv. Before 1917,
it was known as the Tsar’s Square; in the mid-twentieth century,
it was Stalin Square; later still, it was the Square of the Leninist
Young Communist League. Its current name is European Square.
321
Given the Mykolaïv visitor’s refusal to answer the loaded

question about the Maidan and her readiness to speak about Ky-
iv’s European character, it remains tempting to think about the
emergence of the European idea in Ukraine as a potential key-
stone in the formation of a new Ukrainian identity. That identity
is oriented toward elements in Ukrainian history and culture that
are consonant with the ideas of individual freedom and democra-
cy; it includes all citizens of the state; and it is profoundly differ-
ent from the post‑1991 Russian identity, which is based not only
on recognition of the Russian Federation’s geostrategic position
in Eurasian space but also on the tradition of Russian statism,
authoritarianism, and great-power status. President Yushchenko
once formulated the Ukrainian national idea as follows: “A Euro-
pean Ukraine with liberal values and human rights and liberties.”
According to a Razumkov Center poll carried out in De-
cember 2006, 63 percent of Ukraine’s opinion-makers agreed
that European integration could indeed become a goal unit-
ing Ukrainian society and providing the basis for a new type of
Ukrainian identity, but only 27 percent of Ukraine’s population
shared that optimistic attitude. This represents a decrease of 10
percent since the spring of 2005, when Ukrainians believed that
the Orange Revolution would bring them closer to the European
Union, and the percentage of those who believed in the unifying
force of the European idea and those who disagreed with them
was almost equal. It would appear that Ukrainian proponents of
European integration have their work cut out for them not only
abroad but also at home. That work can hardly be accomplished
without support from the European Union.
Ukraine is interested in Europe, but so should Europe be
interested in an independent and democratic Ukraine. In theory
it is, but in practice it is still checking the textbooks to find out
where Europe ends and Asia begins. One hopes that it will not
take too long to accomplish that task. Commenting on the Or-
ange Revolution and Ukraine’s relations with Russia and the EU,
Alexander Motyl argued that the isolation of Ukraine in the stra-
tegic desert between democratic Europe and authoritarian Russia
automatically turns any pro-democratic movement in Ukraine
into a pro-European one and helps define Ukraine’s European
identity first and foremost in opposition to Russia.15
322
It is hard to disagree, especially in light of the subsequent

events of 2013–14, when Viktor Yanukovych provoked mass pro-
tests and eventually lost power after caving in to Russian pressure
and refusing to sign the association agreement with the EU, on
which he himself had been insisting for almost a year. Surprising-
ly, little of substance has changed in Ukraine since the times of
Mykhailo Drahomanov, when the “awakeners” of the Ukrainian
nation oriented their young national movement toward Europe
and away from Russia.
323
20.
The New Eastern Europe
More than thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
disintegration of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, the region
is still grappling with the problem of its new identity and the
choice of an appropriate name to reflect it. There has been con-
siderable talk about a “return to Europe,” as well as the emergence
of a “new Europe” and, as a consequence of the latter, the birth of
a “new Eastern Europe.” Where is Eastern Europe today? And
if it is not where it used to be, where did it go? If you google
“Eastern Europe+Map,” you will get about 11,600,000 results,
a reassuring sign that the region is alive and well. But do not ex-
pect an easy answer to the question of where it is actually located.
The web will provide you with endless variants, starting with
those that treat the region as everything between Prague in the
west and the Ural Mountains in the east, and ending with more
“modest” proposals, like that of the CIA World Factbook, which
would limit the region to the former western borderlands of the
Soviet Union, from Estonia in the north to Moldova in the south.
The confusion is understandable on more than one level. After
all, it is no easy matter to determine where Eastern Europe ends
if you do not know where Europe per se ends. Europe is not
a continent in its own right, and its imagined eastern frontier
is constantly on the move. It would seem, however, that Europe
and Eastern Europe are now moving in opposite directions. If
“Europe” is becoming more and more coterminous with the Eu-
ropean Union, and not with the geographic entity ending at the
Urals, then “Eastern Europe,” for its part, is moving not westward
325
but eastward, encompassing the regions left outside the borders

of the recently expanded European Union.
The world at large is understandably confused about the
meaning of the term “Eastern Europe.” So is the community of
experts, whom the general public holds mainly responsible for the
persistent confusion. Political scientists and specialists in security
studies and international relations, who (unlike historians) have
to deal with the region in “real time,” are trying hard to come up
with new definitions of the area. Their solution is to fragment the
region, dividing it into ever-smaller entities. One result of this
development is the eastward extension of Central Europe, which
now includes a number of former East European countries whose
historians insisted for decades on their East-Central European
status. Another outcome is the reinvention of the term “Eastern
Europe.” As it went out of fashion among former East Europeans,
they passed it on as a kind of intellectual hand-me-down to the
East, which has now been reinvented by specialists in interna-
tional studies as the “New Eastern Europe” (NEE).
The geographic scope of the term depends on the author and
his or her location. For the publishers of the journal Nowa Euro-
pa Wschodnia in Wrocław, the NEE includes almost everything
east of Poland. The authors of a position paper on the European
Union’s Eastern Partnership, produced in Stockholm, include
Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and the three Transcaucasian states of
Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia in the NEE. A study produced
in Austria limits the term to the first three countries, excluding
the Transcaucasus. There is clearly a growing tendency to treat
Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova as the core of the “New Eastern
Europe.”
These countries have recently found themselves in a unique
geopolitical position, sandwiched between the extended Europe-
an Union in the west and Russia in the east. They had never been
thought to constitute a distinct region and thus had no estab-
lished group designation in the world of international relations.
The concept of East-Central Europe, so popular in Poland since
the 1950s, failed to fire the imagination of local elites in the NEE.
But even outside the region, there is no consensus on wheth-
er the countries of the NEE belong to East-Central Europe. If
Jerzy Kłoczowski, the most loyal supporter of the East-Central
326
European idea, insists on Ukraine’s belonging to the region, Paul

Robert Magocsi includes only west and central Ukraine in his
Historical Atlas of East-Central Europe.
For better or for worse, “New Eastern Europe” emerges as
the only term capable of linking Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova
together in their geopolitical no-man’s-land. The Baltic states,
which are included in the “Eastern Europe” of the CIA World
Factbook, and the Transcaucasian states, which are included in the
“New Eastern Europe” of the EU Eastern Partnership Program,
have regional identities of their own. Not so Ukraine, Belarus,
and Moldova. If you partition the old Eastern Europe between
the new Central Europe, the Baltics, the Balkans, the Transcau-
casus, and, finally, Russia and Central Asia, the residue turns out
to be the three countries stuck in between: Ukraine, Belarus, and
Moldova—the quintessential “New Eastern Europe.”
Looking at the new political map of Eastern Europe, the
question one wants to ask is whether there is anything more to
this otherwise nameless region than pure geopolitical accident.
Some scholars justifiably argue that the NEE identity has been
invented outside the region and imposed on it by political devel-
opments beyond its control. Others say that talking about these
countries as a separate region in historical terms means justifying
the current division of Europe and making it all but permanent.
There are also voices claiming that a definition of this region as
a European rather than a Russian borderland is bound to encour-
age unwanted bids for EU membership on the part of local elites.
I shall leave aside the question of political expediency. What I
am interested in here is history and, in particular, the question of
whether looking at the history of Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova
as that of one region can help us better understand its past and
explain its current situation.
Let us begin by considering whether the immediate past of
these three countries contains some common element that differ-
entiates them from their neighbors on the other side of the EU’s
eastern border. Indeed it does: a mere thirty years ago they were
western borderlands of the USSR. Countries that were not part
of the Soviet Union, like Bulgaria and Romania, whose political
and economic situation was little better than that of Ukraine or
Moldova through most of the 1990s, made it into the European
327
Union, but those of the NEE did not, despite the frantic efforts
of Ukrainian governments of the Orange Revolution era to crash
the European party. It appears that the internal “iron curtain”
between the USSR and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe
was more formidable than the outer one that divided the capitalist
West from the socialist East.
This explanation would probably suffice were it not for the
Baltic states—former Soviet republics that managed to join the
European Union. Because the Baltic states are former Soviet
republics, the CIA World Factbook groups them together with
Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova as constituents of “Eastern Eu-
rope.” There are, however, major geographic, cultural, and his-
torical factors that link the NEE countries together while dis-
tinguishing them from the Baltic states. The most “primordial”
of these is geography. The northern border of the NEE more or
less coincides with the watershed between the Baltic and Black
Sea basins.
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania belong to the Baltic basin,
while most of Belarus and all of Ukraine and Moldova belong
to the Black Sea basin, with the Dnieper, Dniester, and Prut as
their largest rivers. If the Baltic countries have been oriented for
centuries toward the Baltic Sea and Northern Europe, the NEE
countries have been oriented toward the Black Sea. Throughout
history they have occasionally participated in Mediterranean po-
litical and cultural developments, but more often than not they
were cut off from the Mediterranean world by nomads. The Otto-
mans, who came to dominate the nomads in the fifteenth century,
controlled not only the northern Black Sea steppes but the Black
Sea Straits as well.
Thus, although the NEE countries belonged to the Black Sea
region, they gained little benefit from the sea, early on becoming
Europe’s ultimate midlands—an arena of competition among
foreign powers. Belarus, located on the Great European plain,
found itself on the route of choice for Western armies march-
ing toward Russia and Russian armies marching west. Ukraine
became a bone of contention among Poland, Russia, Austria-
Hungary, and the Ottomans, while Moldavia, long an Ottoman
outpost, became Russia’s gateway to the Balkans. The contrasting
geographic orientations of the countries of the Baltic and Black
328
Sea basins mean that their societies bring different historical ex-
periences to the present and conceptualize the borderlands of the
European Union in various ways.
Culture and ethnicity are other important factors that set
the countries of the NEE apart from their Baltic neighbors. It
suffices to mention religion. If, in the case of the Baltics, we are
dealing with Catholic and Protestant traditions, which set the
region apart from Russia, the dominant religious tradition in
Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova is Orthodoxy, which links them
intimately with Russia’s old and new imperial ideology. In the
cases of Ukraine and Belarus, there is also the phenomenon of
East Slavic proximity, which allows Patriarch Kirill of Moscow
to speak of Holy Rus´—an ethnoreligious entity that includes
Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Where religion and East Slavic
identity work together, as in Belarus and eastern Ukraine, the
spell of the former imperial center is strongest. Where they do
not reinforce each other, as in Moldova and the former Habsburg
lands of Ukraine, attachment to Moscow is less prominent or
completely nonexistent.
Thus, the NEE is not just a figment of current geopolitical
imagination. There are geographic, cultural, ethnic, and histor-
ical factors that set it apart from its neighbors. But can history
as a discipline and we as its practitioners benefit from this new
conceptualization of the old Eastern Europe? I believe so, and
I think that historians working in the region will be among the
primary beneficiaries of this approach. Now that the Soviet nar-
rative has been largely abandoned, EU prospects denied, and na-
tionalist myths attacked, historians of the former Soviet republics
of Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova are experiencing confusion and
uncertainty. Imagining the history of these three countries as that
of a unit will help liberate their historiographies from the isola-
tion imposed by the dominance of local/national, pan-Russian,
and pan-Romanian paradigms and contribute to a better under-
standing of the histories of each individual country and the re-
gion as a whole. In countries like Ukraine, history has once again
become a battleground between the old Soviet- or Russocentric
narrative and national or overtly nationalist paradigms. Under
these circumstances, a new framework for historical analysis can
break the existing intellectual deadlock and lead historians and
329
society at large to think about their history in broader and more

inclusive terms.
If there is one overriding paradigm that can link the countries
of the NEE together and help scholars of the region pose new
questions and provide new answers, it is that of the borderland
or the political and/or cultural frontier. Imagining the countries
of Eastern Europe as a European frontier or even a bulwark of
European civilization to enhance one’s European credentials is
of course an old device employed, not without success, by the
intellectual elites of the “old” Eastern Europe, which now count
themselves as part of its Central European core. Tony Judt wrote
in this regard that “Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians have all
represented themselves in their literature and political myths as
guarding the edges of ‘Europe’ (or Christianity). But, as a brief
glance at a map suggests, their claims are mutually exclusive: they
can’t all be right.” 1 In fact they can if one looks at the map of early
modern Eastern Europe, but that is not the point. The point is
to move beyond the “defenders of European values” paradigm.
The frontier approach, as developed in American and European
historiography, allows one to speak about much more than one
nation’s role in the “defense” of European and Christian values.
It is much more productive to think of the NEE frontier as
a meeting place of various states, cultures, and nationalities. His-
torically, there were at least three types of borders that came to-
gether in the NEE region: imperial (Russian, Ottoman, Habsburg,
and Commonwealth); cultural/religious, which divided Ortho-
doxy, Catholicism, Islam, and Judaism; and ethnic/national. The
list of the largest ethnic groups in the region would include, apart
from Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Moldovans/Romanians, also
Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Crimean Tatars and, last but not least,
Russians. These borders were associated with different cultures
that met, confronted one another, and negotiated a modus vivendi,
producing new kinds of meaning and understanding that shaped
the region’s long-term identity. Here is just one of many examples
of such a hybrid identity in the region, which has to do with a reli-
gious encounter. In the Middle Ages, Catholicism and Orthodoxy
met here, producing by the late sixteenth century a hybrid Uniate
Church that combined Orthodox ritual with Catholic dogma.
In the 1830s, that church was liquidated in Belarus by the tsarist
330
authorities, but its successor, the five-million-strong Ukrainian

Catholic Church, still exists in Ukraine.
Another cultural encounter in the region was that between
Christianity and Islam, which took place as Moldova, the Crimea,
and the northern Black Sea steppes all fell under Ottoman tute-
lage in the fifteenth century. The return of the Crimean Tatars to
their ancestral homeland after the collapse of the Soviet Union
reintroduced the Islamic factor into the region’s politics, remind-
ing us of the importance of the Christian-Islamic encounter in
the past. Finally, in the sixteenth century the region became a des-
tination of choice for Jews expelled from Western and Central
Europe. It is the homeland of some of the best-known Jewish
political and cultural figures, including Golda Meir, Leon Trotsky,
and Isaac Babel.
As part of the Russian imperial Pale of Settlement, it also
became the scene of some of the most horrendous crimes against
the Jewish population, including pogroms and the Holocaust.
Administered at various times by states dominated by Mon-
gols, Lithuanians, Poles, Austrians, Romanians, Germans, and
Russians, the NEE also became a meeting point for a variety
of administrative systems and political cultures. This encouraged
a unique popular adaptability to political change at the top. It is
no accident that the region has seen no major upheaval between
1992 (the military conflict in the Transnistria region of Moldova)
and 2014 (Russian aggression against Ukraine).
Did we not know all this before we began thinking about the
NEE as a region with a common historical identity? Of course
we did, but a new analytical framework makes it possible to see
things not seen or neglected previously. Here are two examples
of how looking at the region as a whole can help us better un-
derstand its individual parts and, indeed, East European history
as a whole. The first example highlights the importance of the
region as a major actor in the history of cultural transfers not only
between Europe’s West and East but also between its two Easts:
one Slavic, the other Greek or Mediterranean.
Although the important role of Eastern Orthodox hierarchs
in the region was long stressed by scholars such as Ihor Ševčenko
and Edward Keenan, it all but escaped the attention of historians
focused on cultural relations between Russia and the West. If the
331
NEE countries are considered as a region, one sees more clearly

the role of the Greek East and the Mediterranean in the cultural
transformation of the “old” Eastern Europe long after its adop-
tion of Christianity. The figure of the seventeenth-century Kyivan
metropolitan Petro Mohyla—a Moldavian prince, Polish noble,
Ruthenian hierarch, and reformer of world Orthodoxy (he pro-
duced the first Orthodox Confession of Faith)—is emblematic
of the historical importance of the region and its internal and
external connections.
The other example comes from the modern era. A focus on
national history prevents one from understanding what eventually
caused the most profound change in the region, namely, the “clos-
ing” of its cultural frontier—in other words, the elimination of
its traditional ethnic and cultural diversity. Blaming nationalism
alone for this development will not do, given the profound differ-
ences in the maturation and aggressiveness of ethnic nationalism
in that part of the world. The disappearance of many ethnic and
religious minorities from the territory of Belarus can hardly be
attributed to the strength of Belarusian nationalism.
When we look at the region as a whole, it becomes more ap-
parent that the transformation of the borderland from a multieth-
nic and multicultural space into an ethnic and cultural monolith
was accomplished largely by “outside” powers with strong imperial
ambitions. They managed to marshal resources and mobilize the
population on a scale unthinkable for the weak national move-
ments of the region, which generally served as junior partners in
the cleansing of the borderlands, occasionally undertaken with
the tacit or even explicit approval of democratic world leaders.
The existing borders of the NEE countries are the best exam-
ples of such outside influence. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,
the Holocaust, and the Yalta agreements shaped the new ethno-
cultural landscape of the region, and we have a better chance of
understanding such changes if we think about the region as a unit.
Finally, I would like to address the question of the place that
the history of the NEE can or should occupy in university cur-
ricula in North America. It is immediately obvious that the study
of the borderlands makes sense only in the broader context of
the study of the entities that possessed those borderlands. Thus
defined, the study of these borderlands and frontiers illuminates
332
not only their history but also that of the dominant powers,
which arguably define themselves best on the margins, at points
of encounter with their multiple others. The history of the NEE,
then, is best studied within the framework of an Eastern Europe
broadly understood—one that includes not only Poland but also
Russia. There is probably no better way to understand the frontier
than to remove the borders.
333
21.
Reimagining the Continent
The Ukraine Crisis, as the Russian annexation of the Crimea and

the hybrid war in the Donbas became known in international
media, began in late December 2013 with a group of young Ky-
ivan urbanites, many of them students, camping on the Maidan
(Independence Square in downtown Kyiv) to protest the refusal
of the Ukrainian government to sign an Association Agreement
with the European Union. The protests became known as the
EuroRevolution or Revolution of Dignity. As government for
ces attacked the protesters, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians
showed up on the streets of their capital to voice their disapproval
of the authorities’ actions.
It was the largest political rally in history sparked by a foreign-
policy decision, as well as a manifestation of belief in the trans-
forming power of the European Union and its institutions at
the very time when trust in those institutions inside the Union
was at one of its lowest points. The protests led to a change of
government in Kyiv and provoked Russian aggression against
a West-leaning country. Thousands were killed and wounded, and
millions of Ukrainian citizens were displaced as a result of the
conflict. Despite the war and unprecedented pressure from Rus-
sia, the new Ukrainian government signed an Association Agree-
ment with the EU and embarked on a series of reforms, viewing
the country’s future as linked to the family of European nations,
either within the European Union or in close alliance with it.1
The vision of Ukraine as an integral part of Europe and a fu-
ture member of the European Union took off in Ukraine in the
335
aftermath of the Orange Revolution of 2004, one of whose main

slogans was “joining Europe.” The leader of the revolution, Viktor
Yushchenko, declared in his inaugural address in January 2005:
“Our path to the future is the one now being followed by United
Europe. We belong to the same civilization as its peoples; we
share the same values.” 2 President Yushchenko and his numerous
supporters were in for a disappointment. The leaders of the Eu-
ropean Union, troubled by its internal problems and preoccupied
with the difficulties accompanying the two waves of eastward
expansion in 2004 and 2007, were not eager to consider any new
members. Moreover, Ukraine was far behind its western neigh-
bors who had joined the Union in bringing its legal and economic
system up to EU standards.
The Yushchenko years became known as a period of “Euroro-
manticism,” but they left some important marks on the identity of
Yushchenko’s countrymen. They also put Ukraine on the mental
map of Europe. Western media coverage of the Orange Rev-
olution familiarized the publics of English-speaking countries
with the names “Kyiv” and “Ukraine.” When the pro-European
protests began in Kyiv in November 2013, Ukraine was no longer
an unknown country in Eurasia. Whatever the Western public
thought about Ukraine’s pro-EU aspirations, few questioned its
European credentials, and many sympathized with the protest-
ers’ demands for closer ties with the European Union. Ukrainian
resistance to Russian aggression only enhanced these attitudes.
The Ukrainian protesters’ belief in Europe as a model for re-
form in their own country and the ability of the member coun-
tries of the European Union to stand by Ukraine in its time of
trouble surprised the Russian leadership and dramatically affected
EU-Russian relations. That belief also launched a process that
could lead to the political and cultural redefinition of Europe,
which until recently has been delimited in the minds of most
Europeans by the borders of the European Union. The role of
Ukraine in this process is yet to be fully studied and explained.
The Lure of Central Europe

In February 2011, a Kyiv tourist firm called KievClub offered its
clients a sweet Valentine’s Day deal. Advertised as a “romantic
336
weekend in the heart of Europe,” it cost only £ 660 per couple and
included round-trip airfare from Luton Airport near London,
accommodations in a three-bedroom apartment in downtown
Kyiv, and “meet and greet parking.” Only twenty years earlier
Kyiv, the city in the “heart of Europe” that British tourists were
being invited to visit, had been regarded by many in the West as
part of Russia, and thus not European at all.
KievClub is not the only firm luring Western clients to the
capital of Ukraine by calling it the heart of Europe. The same
advertising strategy is employed by Studio Kiev, which offers
visa support, lodging, language courses, and medical insurance to
visitors, and Kiev Apartments, which advertises on Facebook, as
do many other tourist and real-estate firms in Kyiv. What do the
authors of the Kyiv ads mean when they call their city the “heart”
of Europe? Whether their British clients know it or not, they are
referring to the geographic center of the continent (or, rather,
subcontinent). Once the guests arrive, they can find tour guides
who will be happy to bring them to a globe-crowned column on
Kyiv’s main street that they call the midpoint of Europe.3
There was nothing absolutely new or unexpected in the efforts
of Ukrainian political and cultural elites to present their country
to the world as a nation at the center of Europe. This tactic had
been used for decades by East European intellectuals and politi-
cians whose nations were left out of the prosperous, democratic
West European core. As mentioned earlier, in 1950, Oskar Hal-
ecki, a Polish émigré historian living in the United States, offered
a version of the European historical and cultural map that redrew
the boundaries of Central Europe so as to include Poland in its
eastern subdivision.
Importantly, the term “East-Central Europe”—the coun-
terpart to “West-Central Europe,” which included Germa-
ny—also gained currency in Western academic discourse. In the
early 1980s Milan Kundera, a Czech writer living in Paris, pub-
lished an essay that not only put his country, along with Poland
and Hungary, in the center of Europe but also defined it as part
of the European West. Kundera’s assumptions were fully reflected
in his title, “The Stolen West or the Tragedy of Central Europe.”
The essay, translated in 1984 from its French original into English
and published in the New York Review of Books, became one of
337
the most influential late Cold War texts shaping the views of
educated Westerners about the Soviet-occupied lands of Europe
on the eve of the collapse of Soviet power in the region.4
Both Halecki and Kundera sought to modify an established
mental map of Europe that placed Germany and areas immedi-
ately south and east of it at the center of the continent. In the
second half of the nineteenth century, Otto von Bismarck had
turned a newly united Germany into the hub of European di-
plomacy; then, at the dawn of the new century, his countrymen
declared Dresden the geographic center of Europe. It was the
territories around that center to which German political thinkers
such as Friedrich List and Friedrich Naumann gave the name
Mitteleuropa, a German-dominated area between France in the
west and Russia in the east. Writing in the midst of World War I,
Neumann rejected the idea of German imperial rule and military
occupation of the region but never clearly defined the form that
German predominance was to take.
Despite strong misgivings about German plans in the re-
gion, the idea of a federal organization of Mitteleuropa soon took
root among the leaders of peoples struggling against Austro-
Hungarian rule. In October 1918, Thomas Masaryk created in
the United States a Mid-European Democratic Union composed
of representatives of twelve European nations that sought to pro-
mote regional economic cooperation as an initial step toward fed-
eralization. The Union did not last long, but its creation showed
that Mitteleuropa was not only a German idea: its non-German
inhabitants were also prepared to imagine themselves as part of
a separate grouping between France and Russia.5
The defeat of the Kaiser’s Germany in World War I, the dis-
integration of Austria-Hungary, and the diminution of the Rus-
sian Empire dramatically changed the situation in the region.
The elites of the newly independent countries were in search of
a common new identity but wanted nothing to do with the now
discredited name of Mitteleuropa. The new states of the region
settled for the name “Eastern Europe,” despite its implication that
this “other” Europe was less than fully civilized. An even worse
alternative presented itself: Hitler’s attempt to create a German
Lebensraum in the lands earlier defined as Mitteleuropa led to
a disastrous world war that completely discredited the older
338
German term. But the idea of mid-European unity did not dis-
appear completely.
Masaryk’s vision lived on as an ideal after Eastern Europe
was overrun by the Red Army and subjected to rule from Mos-
cow. East European intellectuals were now eager to distance
themselves as much as possible from the communist East and
associate themselves with the democratic West. As soon as the
Berlin Wall fell and Moscow began the gradual withdrawal of
its troops from the region, the leaders of Poland, Czechoslova-
kia, and Hungary met in the Hungarian castle of Visegrád and
created a Central European alliance to promote integration with
their western neighbors—the European Union and NATO. By
2004, their dream had come true: all of them (Czechoslovakia
now divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia) had joined
Western institutions, shedding the legacy of Soviet occupation
and the civilizational stigma of Eastern Europe.6
Is it fair to say, then, that the Ukrainians are simply following
in the footsteps of their western neighbors, trying to sell them-
selves to the European West as a central and thus indispensable
part of Europe that was forgotten, if not betrayed, by its rich
western cousin? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that this was exact-
ly the argument employed by some Ukrainian political leaders
and intellectuals in the years following the Orange Revolution.
No, in the sense that the Ukrainians are using a different map
to make their case. This is not the Germanocentric map of Mit-
teleuropa, even though both Naumann and Halecki regarded parts
of Ukraine as components of Middle/East-Central Europe, and
the practical realization of Naumann’s vision led to the German
occupation of Ukraine in 1918.
Ukrainian leaders, intellectuals, and business people have
something else in mind when they claim a central position for
their country on the map of Europe. Their mental map can be
found in atlases used in schools from Tokyo in the east to San
Francisco in the west—with Kyiv, of course, somewhere in the
center. Their Europe does not end at the eastern borders of the
European Union or even at the western borders of Russia but ex-
tends all the way to the Urals. Such a perspective greatly changes
how one defines the center of the European subcontinent.7
339
The map of Europe used by Ukrainian proponents of Euro-

pean integration is a product of the Enlightenment, and it is as
confusing and contradictory as the legacy of the Enlightenment
itself. That era produced not only the fathers of the American
Revolution but also a cohort of “enlightened despots.” The latter
included Catherine II, who proclaimed that the Russian Empire,
with its vast Asian possessions going all the way to the Pacific,
was a European state. Although this definition was unpalatable
to Europeans, Russia eventually got its way. After the partitions
of Poland—a development welcomed by Voltaire, who believed
that, along with Russian troops, civilization and order had finally
arrived in that forsaken part of the world—few European rulers
or their cartographers dared to challenge the claim. They rejected
the age-old tradition beginning with Strabo, who had placed the
eastern boundaries of Europe on the river Tanais, or Don, and
redrew the map of Europe by moving its boundaries eastward, all
the way to the Ural Mountains.
According to the Russian promoters of the change, that was
where Russia proper ended and its colonies began. But the Rus-
sian success was incomplete. While European geographers agreed
to move their border eastward, the “map of Europe on the mind
of Enlightenment,” to use Larry Wolff ’s phrase, remained largely
the same. Strabo’s map of Europe fitted West European self-per-
ceptions much better than that of Catherine’s geographers, and
it persisted in the minds of educated European elites for gener-
ations to come, no matter what map they had studied in school.
This disjunction of the physical, political, and cultural geographies
of Europe persisted for most of the twentieth century. It is only
if one thinks in Strabo’s terms that Dresden can be imagined as
the geographic center of Europe, while Hungary, Poland, and
Czechoslovakia are consigned to Eastern Europe.8
It would be fair to say that Ukrainians treat the Enlighten-
ment-era map of Europe much more seriously than their West
European counterparts. They were instructed by generations of
teachers that their country was located at the geographic center of
Europe. It was on the territory of today’s Ukraine, near the town
of Rakhiv (47°57′46″N, 24°11′14″E), that in 1887 Austrian geogra-
phers placed the first known landmark indicating the geograph-
ic center of Europe. In so doing, the Austrians were claiming
340
European centrality for themselves. The Soviets, who took control

of the area in 1945, followed suit.
The Ukrainians are now doing likewise, but the field has be-
come crowded in the meantime: the Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, and Belarus have all made similar
calculations to boost their European credentials. Politics were
part and parcel of all the “discoveries” of the center of Europe. The
French did the calculation for Lithuania when that country was
about to leave the Soviet Union, and the Russians confirmed the
findings of the Belarusians at a time when Belarus had become
an international outcast, counting only the Russian Federation
and Venezuela as friendly nations.9
Politics are not solely to blame for present-day confusion
with regard to establishing the center of Europe. The complex
geography of Europe is also a factor. All recent attempts to “dis-
cover” its geographic center have been undertaken on the basis
of a map that goes all the way to the Urals, but calculations differ
depending on whether islands are counted and, if so, which ones.
There seems to be general agreement among geographers, what-
ever their political and cultural biases, that the center of Europe
is located somewhere along a line extending through Lithuania,
Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova and bisecting the continent. This
line is located east of the countries that make up what is now
known as Central Europe. However naïve and inaccurate the
definition of Kyiv as the center or heart of Europe (it lies more
than 500 km northeast of Rakhiv), it is not completely arbitrary
and reflects certain geographic realities that Ukrainians are now
trying to turn to their political, economic, and cultural advantage.
The Shadow of Mitteleuropa

In the early 1990s, the distinguished French geographer Michel
Foucher, one of the world’s leading experts on borders and fron-
tiers, put forward his vision of the new Europe that had just
emerged from the geopolitical turmoil caused by the fall of the
Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, and the disintegration
of the Soviet empire. In the atlas of “Middle and Eastern Europe”
that he produced in 1993, Foucher proposed a concept of Middle
Europe (Europe médiane) that differed from the Mitteleuropa of
341
Friedrich Naumann or Thomas Masaryk. While reminiscent of

Oskar Halecki’s East-Central Europe, it also included the Bal-
kans. Foucher’s Middle Europe was characterized by “an inter-
mediate geopolitical situation between the West and the USSR
or Russia; a current state of historic transition between these two
organizing centers: territorial and political legacies imposed by
the East, but modernization henceforth impelled by the West.”
The region was made up largely of countries that were under
communist control before 1989. Its northern part consisted more
or less of those states that now define themselves as belonging to
Central Europe: Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Hungary, Slovenia, and Croatia. Its southern part included the
Balkans, with the sole exception of Greece. According to Foucher,
the region “overflowed toward Ukraine and Belarus.” Foucher
included in Middle Europe those parts of Ukraine and Belarus
that belonged to Poland before 1939. Judging by some of the maps,
he also included Moldova.
By 2007, fourteen years after the atlas appeared, the eastward
expansion of the “West” as defined by its political, economic, and
military institutions, such as the European Union and NATO,
had largely swallowed up Foucher’s “Middle Europe.” It certainly
continues to exist as a historical concept but makes less and less
sense in terms of contemporary geopolitics. Still, the area be-
tween the “West,” defined in political, institutional, and military
terms, and Russia has not disappeared altogether. It has simply
moved east toward the countries that Foucher considered to be
on the margins of Middle Europe in 1993: Ukraine, Belarus, and
Moldova.10
This eastward geopolitical shift of the last decade of the
twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first has
also brought Foucher’s “Middle Europe” to the region where the
continent’s center has been located since the Enlightenment-era
revision of Strabo. This is also the region through which Europe’s
cultural dividing line has run ever since the eleventh century,
when the Christian world split into East and West. When the
Roman legates excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople,
who responded in kind, the church was divided, leaving the prin
ces of Kyiv on one side and the Polish, Hungarian, and German
kings on the other. It soon became apparent that the differences
342
between the two parts of the Christian world were not limited to
questions of church jurisdiction, clerical celibacy, or the filioque
controversy about the origins of the Holy Spirit.
The split reinforced already existing differences in relations
between church and state: an autonomous if not fully indepen-
dent church in the West, and a church subservient to the state in
the East. These differences turned out to be crucial for the subse-
quent development of social and political structures. In the West,
the existence of a Roman-dominated church often independent
of state power helped build autonomous institutions. In the East,
the Byzantine legacy of a state-controlled church left little scope
for autonomous bodies of any kind. The limited impact of the
Reformation on the Orthodox world further contributed to the
growth of differences in religious and political culture between
the Christian East and West.
The map of Eastern and Western Christendom in Samuel
Huntington’s bestselling Clash of Civilizations shows the bound-
ary between them passing generally along the geographic axis
of Europe, with Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary on
one side of the divide and Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova on the
other. Indeed, Huntington’s line runs through Ukraine, Belarus,
and Romania, assigning the western parts of those countries to
the sphere of Western civilization. The map allegedly indicates
the eastward extent of Western Christianity ca. 1500. In reality,
it more or less follows the Soviet-Polish border before 1939. But
it was not the geopolitical border of interwar Europe that the
cartographers had in mind as they struggled to recreate the real-
ities of pre-Reformation Europe. Their main problem was that of
turning the relatively broad Christian frontier, which is not easily
mapped, into a clear line.
What any such line fails to reflect is the existence of struc-
tures and entire regions that were neither eastern nor western
or, alternatively, both eastern and western. This pertains to the
Uniate Church established on the Catholic-Orthodox border in
the late sixteenth century, a product of the Catholic Counter-
Reformation and the Orthodox need for reform. The Uniate
Church was thus Orthodox or Eastern in ritual and tradition but
Western in jurisdiction and dogmas. With strong Polish support,
it became the dominant church in most of Ukraine and Belarus
343
by the mid-eighteenth century. It was wiped out by the tsars

once they took possession of those lands after the partitions of
Poland.11
The tsars wanted to abolish a church controlled from Rome
that had the potential to corrupt the Orthodox world with West-
ern values, the most dangerous of which was independence of
church structures from the imperial authorities. This was also
the motive of Joseph Stalin: in 1946, soon after Roosevelt and
Churchill agreed at Yalta to the Soviet incorporation of western
Ukraine and western Belarus, Stalin oversaw the incorporation
into the Russian Orthodox Church of the Uniate (Greek Cath-
olic) Church, which had survived in the western Ukrainian lands
ruled from Vienna and then Warsaw.
What Stalin tried to achieve, apart from pursuing the goal of
the tsars, was to turn the chaotic religious and civilizational fron-
tier into a clearly defined and easily policed cultural and political
border. He shipped hundreds of thousands of Roman Catholic
Poles to Poland and turned millions of Greek-Catholic Ukraini-
ans and Catholic Belarusians into pro forma Orthodox. This was
a dream come true for modern map makers. Finally there was
a line that could be drawn not only between Eastern and Western
Christianity but also between Eastern and Western civilization.
Collapsing religious, national, political and other frontiers into
borders turned out to be a favorite project of modernizing states
and societies. Stalin was simply its most brutal and most success-
ful practitioner.12
The borders imposed by Stalin have now been taken over
and reinforced by the European Union. If in the past it was the
Soviets who built walls like the one in Berlin, and Westerners
who wanted to tear them down, we now see a reversed situa-
tion. It is the proponents of Western values who are surrounding
their world with walls, from the US-Mexico border to the strict-
ly policed boundaries of the European Union. Keeping out the
“barbarians” (generally associated in the public mind with such
negative phenomena as illegal immigration, terrorism, and the
smuggling of drugs and weapons) while admitting the products
of their labor has been a basic task of the European states for
decades. During the Cold War they did not have to worry about
their eastern borders and could indulge in rhetoric about the free
344
flow of people and ideas. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and
the eastward shift of the EU borders, the rhetoric has changed: it
is no longer about walls but about frontiers and neighborhoods.
But the frontiers of the EU are not regarded in Brussels as open
contact zones; rather, they are seen as outer defensive lines, like
those of the Roman Empire.
The EU is involved beyond its borders and present in its
neighborhood, but one of its reasons for being there is to pro-
vide neighboring governments with incentives to help police the
approaches to Fortress Europe. This was certainly an important
aspect of EU policy in Ukraine, where, in return for the liberaliza-
tion of the visa regime, the Ukrainian government was expected
to take on the task of policing the perimeter of the European
Union. With EU financial assistance and expertise, it has been
reinforcing its border controls and promising to take back, pro-
cess, house, and deport illegal aliens who have managed to cross
its territory into the EU. The European Union provides funds to
improve detention facilities and train Ukrainian policemen to
respect the rights of migrants and asylum seekers, but it is the
task of the Ukrainian government to deal with tens of thousands
of refugees and illegal immigrants from all over the world who
are trying to claim their share of the European dream. The EU
purgatory has effectively been moved beyond the walls of the
Union to its frontier.13
There is certainly a danger of overdramatizing the situation by
comparing Stalin’s frontier-building endeavors with those of the
EU. After all, the current visa wall between Ukraine and Poland
is minuscule in comparison to the one that divided them before
1991. It is enormous, however, as compared to the one that was
there before 2004, the year in which the EU established itself on
the borders of Ukraine. Since the fall of communism, many things
have changed in the western borderlands of the former Soviet
Union. Stalin’s Iron Curtain was slowly giving way to the old po-
litical, cultural, and economic frontier that had previously existed.
The victory of Solidarity in the Polish elections of 1989 not
only triggered the implosion of the Soviet outer empire in what
was then known as Eastern Europe but also sent a powerful signal
across the border that did not exist before 1939—to Vilnius, the
capital of the Soviet republic of Lithuania. The start of Soviet
345
disintegration is often correctly associated with the Baltics. It is

important, however, to remember that of the three Baltic coun-
tries it was Lithuania, with its close traditional connections to
Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine, that began the process. In Decem-
ber 1989, a few months after the victory of Solidarity in Poland
and a few weeks after the success of the Velvet Revolution in
Czechoslovakia and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Lithuanian
communists broke with Moscow, and in March 1990 Lithuania
became the first Soviet republic to proclaim its independence.
Ukrainians in western Ukraine, which had been part of
Austria-Hungary before 1918 and part of Poland before 1939,
first voted for independence in March 1991. They confirmed their
choice, together with Ukrainians from the center and east of the
country in December 1991, effectively putting an end to the So-
viet Union. By that time, the Greek Catholic Church—the most
vivid institutional embodiment of the East-West frontier—had
emerged from the catacombs and renewed its activity with the
help of Pope John Paul II and the reluctant “blessing” of Mikhail
Gorbachev. The Moscow-controlled church in Ukraine split in
two, with one of the new churches proclaiming its independence
of Moscow. The Stalin-imposed cultural border crumbled, and the
frontier came back into the everyday life of Ukrainian citizens.
They could now travel not only to Russia but also to Poland, Hun-
gary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Then came the expansion of
the European Union, which shifted Foucher’s Middle Europe to
the east and promptly built a visa fence to separate the old Middle
Europe from the new one.
The fact that the European Union came so close to Ukraine
but stopped at its borders not only caused severe dislocations in
the post-Soviet economics of the region but also dealt a stunning
blow to the self-identification of the Ukrainian elites. Ukraine
was cut off not only from Poland but also from Lithuania, with
which it had had long-standing cultural and religious ties. Since
the second half of the nineteenth century, Europe had been a his-
torical, cultural, and political mainstay of Ukrainian identity. As
discussed earlier in this volume, the desire to join Ukraine’s Eu-
ropean neighbors by means of an association agreement with the
EU, which was a driving force behind the Maidan protests of
346
2013–14, led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the annex-

ation of the Crimea.
It comes as no surprise that Russian aggression has made
many Ukrainians who used to look at the West with suspicion
into proponents of closer ties with the European Union. If in
February 2014 36 percent of Ukrainians supported their coun-
try’s joining the Russian-led Eurasian Union, that number fell to
12 percent in June 2015. The proportion of those who wanted to
join the EU grew from 41 percent in February 2014 to 67 percent
in June 2015. These numbers, however, reflect not only the change
in the attitudes of Ukrainians but also the Ukrainian state’s loss
of the Crimea and parts of the Donbas, where pro-Russian sen-
timent was traditionally stronger than in other parts of Ukraine.14
The Russo-Ukrainian war forced many to start rethinking the
map of Europe as it has existed for generations in the minds of
Western elites and the public at large. In June 2015, only 1 percent
of those polled in the countries of the EU questioned Ukraine’s
right to join the Union; 31 percent believed that Ukraine had the
right to do so as a European country, and another 30 percent
believed that membership of the EU would help Ukraine to de-
fend its sovereignty against Russian aggression. Ukraine has come
a long way in redefining the map of Europe in the imagination of
its own citizens, but the same process seems to be beginning to
the west of its borders. Both processes are far from over. Neither
are they irreversible.15
It is more important than ever to acknowledge not only that
Ukraine belongs to Europe but also that it occupies a central geo-
political position on the continent. The region to which Ukraine
belongs has functioned as Europe’s geopolitical axis since the
dawn of modernity and as its religious and cultural axis ever since
the great schism between Rome and Constantinople. Ukraine
and its neighborhood constitute the quintessential geographic,
cultural, and now geopolitical midpoint of Europe. Arguably,
placing that area closer to the center of today’s geopolitical map
of Europe can help the West construct a new arch of European
security as much as it can help the newly emerged focal point of
European geopolitics to find its place in the political, economic,
and security structures of Europe.
347
Notes
Preface
1 Serhii Plokhy and Mary Sarotte, “The Shoals of Ukraine: Where Amer-
ican Illusions and Great-Power Politics Collide,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 1
( January/February 2020): 85–91.
2 See Oxana Shevel, “Memory of the Past and Visions of the Future:
Remembering the Soviet Era and Its End in Ukraine,” in Twenty Years after
Communism, ed. Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik (Oxford, 2014), 146–69;
Shevel, “The Politics of Memory in a Divided Society: A Comparison of
Post-Franco Spain and Post-Soviet Ukraine,” Slavic Review 70, no. 1 (Spring
2011): 137–64.
3 Patricia Herlihy, “What Vladimir Putin Chooses Not to Know about
Russian History,” Los Angeles Times, 1 May 2014; Tarik Cyril Amar, “Another
Conflict in Ukraine: Differing Versions of History,” Time, 25 February 2015;
Andriy Portnov, “On Decommunization, Identity, and Legislating History,
from a Slightly Different Angle,” Kyiv Post, 12 May 2015. See also relevant ar-
ticles on “The Ukrainian Crisis and History” in the special issue of Kritika 16,
no. 1 (Winter 2015) and the discussion of the Ukrainian crisis in the journal
Ab Imperio 2014, no. 3.
Quo Vadis Ukrainian History?

Adapted from “Quo Vadis Ukrainian History?” in The Future of the Past: New
Perspectives on Ukrainian History, ed. Serhii Plokhy (Cambridge, Mass., 2016),
1–24.
349
1 Edward Brown, preface to Pierre Chevalier, A Discourse of the Original,

Country, Manners, Government and Religion of the Cossacks (London, 1672),
fasc. A2–A3.
2 Dmytro Doroshenko, History of the Ukraine (Edmonton, 1939); W.
E. D. Allen, The Ukraine: A History (Cambridge, UK, 1940); Michael Hru-
shevsky, A History of Ukraine (New Haven, Conn., 1941).
3 Ivan L. Rudnytsky, “The Role of the Ukraine in Modern History,” Slavic
Review 22, no. 2 ( June 1963): 199–216, and Rudnytsky, “Reply,” ibid., 256–62;
Arthur E. Adams, “The Awakening of the Ukraine,” ibid., 217–23; Omeljan
Pritsak and John S. Reshetar, Jr., “The Ukraine and the Dialectics of Nation-
Building,” ibid., 224–55.
4 Ivan L. Rudnytsky, “Introduction,” in Rethinking Ukrainian History, ed.
Ivan L. Rudnytsky, with the assistance of John-Paul Himka (Edmonton,
1981), viii–x.
5 Roman Szporluk, Ukraine: A Brief History (Detroit, 1982); Orest Subtelny,
Ukraine: A History (Toronto, 1988); Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine
(Toronto, 1996).
6 Mark von Hagen, “Does Ukraine Have a History?” Slavic Review 54,
no. 3 (1995): 658–73, here 670, 673.
7 Georgiy Kasianov and Philipp Ther, “Introduction,” in A Laboratory of
Transnational History: Ukraine and Recent Ukrainian Historiography, ed. Geor-
giy Kasianov and Philipp Ther (Budapest and New York, 2009), 1–4; Andreas
Kappeler, “From an Ethno-national to a Multiethnic to a Transnational
Ukrainian History,” ibid., 51–80.
8 The papers given at the Munich conference were published in Ukraïna na
istoriohrafichnii karti mizhvoiennoï Ievropy (Kyïv, 2014). For the papers of the
Kyiv conference, see Svitlo i tini ukraïns´koho radians´koho istoriopysannia, ed.
Hennadii Boriak et al. (Kyïv, 2015), http://www.history.org.ua/?libid=10376.
9 The Future of the Past: New Perspectives on Ukrainian History (Cambridge,
Mass., 2016).
10 Istoriia Ukraïns´koï RSR, ed. Iurii Kondufor et al., 8 vols. (Kyïv, 1977–79);
Ukraïna kriz´ viky, ed. Valerii Smolii et al., 13 vols. (Kyïv, 1998–99). Most of
the volumes in the latter publication constitute monographic contributions by
individual authors.
11 Johann Christian von Engel, Geschichte der Ukraine und der ukrainischen
Cosaken, wie auch der Königreiche Halitsch und Wladimir (Halle, 1796).
12 Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political
Culture (Stanford, Calif., 2010).
350
Notes
13 For criticism of Russian interpretations of Ukrainian history by some

of the authors of The Future of the Past, see Heorhii Kasianov, Valerii Smolii,
and Oleksii Tolochko, Ukraïna v rosiis´komu istorychnomu dyskursi: problemy
doslidzhennia ta interpretatsiï (Kyïv, 2013).

For background information on the history of Ukraine, this essay draws on
the relevant chapters of my book The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
(New York, 2015), on which I worked concurrently with producing the
original draft of this paper. First published as “Princes and Cossacks: Putting
Ukraine on the Map of Europe,” in Seeing Muscovy Anew: Politics, Institutions,
Culture: Essays in Honor of Nancy Shields Kollmann, ed. Michael S. Flier, Val-
erie Kivelson, Erika Monahan, and Daniel Rowland (Bloomington, Ind.,
2017), 323–38.
1 Guillaume Levasseur de Beauplan, A Description of Ukraine, trans. An-
drew B. Pernal and Dennis F. Essar (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
2 See a copy of the 1613 edition of the map in the Stanford University
Libraries: MAGNI DVCATVS LITHVANIAE, CAETERARVMQVE RE-
GIONVM ILLI ADIACENTIVM EXACTA DESCRIPTIO. Ill[ustri]ss[i]mi ac
Excell[enti]ss[i]mi Pri[n]cipis et D[omi]ni D[omini] Nicolai Christophori Radzi-
wil, D[ei] G[ratia] Olicae ac in Nieswies Ducis, S[acri] Rom[ani] Imperii Prin-
cipis in Szylowiec ac Mir Comitis et S[ancti] Sepulchri Hierosolimitani Militis
etc. opera, cura et impensis facta ac in lucem edita, https://searchworks.stanford.
edu/view/10366631; for a 1633 edition of the map, which includes a map of the
Dnieper River, see https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/10366743.
3 On the history of the production of the map, see H. Bartoszewicz, “Geo-
deci i kartografowie radziwiłłowscy,” Geodeta 2001, no. 2: 45–49; Stanisław
Alexandrowicz, “Rola mecenatu magnackiego w rozwoju kartografii ziem
Rzeczypospolitej Obojga Narodów w XVI–I połowie XVII wieku,” in Europa
Orientalis: Studia z dziejów Europy Wschodniej i Państw Bałtyckich (Toruń,
2010), 235–54; Stanisław Alexandrowicz and Anna Treiderowa, “Makowski
Tomasz,” in Polski słownik biograficzny 19 (Wrocław, 1974), 248–49; Jarosław
Łuczyński. “Przestrzeń Wielkiego Księstwa Litewskiego na mapie radzi-
wiłłowskiej Tomasza Makowskiego z 1613 r. w świetle treści kartograficznej
i opisowej,” Ukraina Lithuanica 2 (2013): 121–52.
4 Stanisław Alexandrowicz, Rozwój kartografii Wielkiego Księstwa Litews-
kiego od XV do połowy XVIII wieku (Poznań, 1989); “The Radziwiłł Map of
the Duchy of Lithuania,” Cartographia Rappersviliana Polonorum. Muzeum
351
Polski w Rapperswilu, http://mapy.muzeum-polskie.org/articles-about-the-

collection/the-radziwi-map-of-lithuania.html (accessed 7 April 2017).
5 On the Union of Lublin, see Robert Frost, The Oxford History of
Poland-Lithuania, vol. 1, The Making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, 1385–1569
(Oxford, 2015).
6 On Ostrozky and his cultural activities, see Vasyl´ Ulíanovs´kyi, Kniaz´
Vasyl´-Kostiantyn Ostroz´kyі: Istorychnyi portret u halereï predkiv i nashchadkiv
(Kyïv, 2012).
7 For a detailed biography of Radvila, see Tomasz Kempa, Mikołaj Krzysz-
tof Radziwiłł Sierotka (Warszawa, 2000).
8 “Mikhalon Litvin o nravakh tatar, litovtsev i moskvitian,” trans. Kateryna
Melńyk, in Memuary otnosiashchiesia k istorii Iuzhnoi Rusi, 8: XVI v. (Kyïv,
1890), 19.
9 On the economic preconditions of steppe colonization in seventeenth-
century Ukraine, see chap. 11, “Socio-Economic Developments,” in Paul Rob-
ert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its People, 2nd ed. (Toronto,
2010), 144–58.
10 “Kozacÿ est genus militum ex honore privatis expulsis laboremq[ue]
evitantibus conflatum. Hi armis levibus antea utebantur, unde et Velites dicti
sunt, arcubus videlicet frameis, bombardis levioribus: nunc autem tormenta
muralia et omne genus, annorum antea illis inusitatum, usui est. Hi itaq[ue]
vitam d Porohas sive Cataracta in insulis Borÿsthenis, sub casis quibusuis
tempestatibus expositi, degunt, in obedientia atq[ue] suprema [supremo] exer-
cituum Poloniae praefecti continentur. Ducum [Ducem] inter se eligunt, elec-
tum facile deponunt, infeliciter autem illi rebus succedentibus nonnunquam
trucidant tum vero inopia annonae laborant, clam civitates vicinis invadere
et illis depopulatis praeda onusti reverti Solent, ut Duce Podkowa Tehiniam
Moldaviae kosinscio kozlonum. Turcarum Imperatoris civitates depraedati
ac depopulati sunt. Si vero ad exteros eundi occasio sese illis non obtulerit
ita paternis inhiant possessionibus ut non nunquam feroces eorum impetus
cum detrimento reprimantur.” Cf. Jarosław Łuczyński, “Przestrzeń Wielkiego
Księstwa Litewskiego na mapie radziwiłłowskiej Tomasza Makowskiego z
1613 r. w świetle treści kartograficzneji opisowej,” Zapiski Historyczne: Kwartal-
nik poświęcony historii Pomorza 78, no. 1 (2013): 141–42.
11 Kronika Polska Marcina Bielskiego, ed. Kazimierz J. Turowski (Sanok,
1856), 3: 1346–58, 1358–61, 1430–35.
12 Mikhalon Litvin, O nravakh tatar, litovtsev i moskvitian (Moskva, 1994),
52–53.
352
Notes
13 On the early history of the Ukrainian Cossacks, see Mykhailo Hru-

shevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus´, 7: The Cossack Age to 1625, trans. Bohdan
Strumiński, ed. Frank E. Sysyn and Serhii Plokhy (Edmonton, 1999); Serhii
Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford, 2001).
14 On Lassota and his diary, see Habsburgs and Zaporozhian Cossacks: The
Diary of Erich Lassota von Steblau, 1594, trans. Orest Subtelny, ed. Lubomyr
R. Wynar (Littleton, Colo., 1975). On Komulović and his encounters with
Ostrozky and the Cossacks, see Lubomyr R. Wynar, Ukrainian Kozaks and
the Vatican in 1654 (New York, 1965). For an English translation of the papal
letters to the Cossacks, see Habsburgs and Zaporozhian Cossacks, 120–23.

This essay has not been previously published.
1 See Viacheslav Lypyns´kyi, Ukraïna na perelomi, 1657–59: Zamitky do
istoriï ukraïns´koho derzhavnoho budivnytstva v XVII-im stolitti (Vienna, 1920),
28–29.
2 On the events of the period and the rise of the cult of Bohdan Khmel-
nytsky in the late 1720s, see Serhii Plokhy, Tsars and Cossacks: A Study in
Iconography (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 45–54.
3 See Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History (Toronto, 1988), 203.
4 On the interpretation of Russo-Ukrainian relations in Russian impe-
rial historiography, see Stephen Velychenko, National History as Cultural
Process: A Survey of the Interpretations of Ukraine’s Past in Polish, Russian, and
Ukrainian Historical Writing from the Earliest Times to 1914 (Edmonton, 1992),
79–140.
5 On Hrushevsky’s “deconstruction” of the Russian imperial narrative,
see my Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of
Ukrainian History (Toronto, 2005).
6 On the interpretation of Russo-Ukrainian relations in Soviet historiog-
raphy of the 1940s and 1950s, see Serhy Yekelchyk, Stalin’s Empire of Memory:
Russian-Ukrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical Imagination (Toronto,
2004).
7 On the treatment of the Pereiaslav Agreement in Soviet historiography
in connection with the 1954 celebrations of the “reunification of Ukraine with
Russia,” see John Basarab, Pereiaslav 1654: A Historiographical Study (Edmon-
ton, 1982), 179–87, and the introduction to the book by Ivan L. Rudnytsky,
“Pereiaslav: History and Myth,” xi–xxiii. For an English translation of the
“Theses,” see ibid., 270–87.
353
8 See, for example, Henadz´ Sahanovich, Neviadomaia vaina, 1654–67

(Minsk, 1995). On the treatment of the term “reunification” in contemporary
Russian and Ukrainian historiography, see my article “The Ghosts of Pere-
iaslav: Russo-Ukrainian Historical Debates in the Post-Soviet Era,” Europe-
Asia Studies 53, no. 3 (2001): 489–505.
9 See Akty, otnosiashchiesia k istorii Zapadnoi Rossii (Sankt-Peterburg, 1854),
4: 47–49.
10 See P. N. Zhukovich, “Protestatsiia mitropolita Iova Boretskogo i drugikh
zapadnorusskikh ierarkhov, sostavlennaia 28 aprelia 1621 goda,” in Statí po
slavianovedeniiu, ed. V. I. Lamanskii (Sankt-Peterburg, 1910), vyp. 3: 135–53,
here 143. Cf. Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion, 291.
11 See “Hustyns´kyi litopys,” in Ukraïns´ka literatura XVII stolittia (Kyiv,
1987), 146–66, here 147.
12 For the text of the letter, see Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiei: Dokumenty
i materialy v trekh tomakh (Moskva, 1954), 1: 46–48. Cf. Plokhy, The Cossacks
and Religion, 289–90.
13 See letters from Kopynsky to Filaret (December 1622) and Filaret’s letter
to Boretsky (April 1630) in Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiei, 1: 27–28, 81. On the
negotiations of 1632, see Sergei Solovév, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen
(Moskva, 1961), 5: 176.
14 On the origins of the “Ukase” and its impact on Muscovite religious poli-
cy, see Tatíana Oparina, “Ukrainskie kazaki v Rossii: edinovertsy ili inovert-
sy? (Mikita Markushevskii protiv Leontiia Pleshcheeva),” Sotsium 3 (2003):
21–44, here 32–33. Cf. Oparina, Ivan Nasedka i polemicheskoe bogoslovie kievskoi
mitropolii (Novosibirsk, 1998), 60–65.
15 For a detailed discussion of the rebaptism of Ukrainian Cossacks in
Muscovy, see Oparina, “Ukrainskie kazaki v Rossii,” 34–44.
16 On the legal nature of the Pereiaslav Agreement, see the articles by
Mykhailo Hrushevs´kyi, Andrii Iakovliv, and Oleksander Ohloblyn in
Pereiaslavs´ka Rada 1654 roku (istoriohrafiia ta doslidzhennia) (Kyïv, 2003). For
recent debates on the issue, see my article “The Ghosts of Pereiaslav: Russo-
Ukrainian Historical Debates in the Post-Soviet Era,” Europe-Asia Studies 53,
no. 3 (May 2001): 489–505.
17 See Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiei, 3: 189.
18 See the ambassadorial report of Ivan Fomin, the Muscovite emissary to
Khmelnytsky, on his discussions with the hetman in August 1653 (Vossoedine-
nie Ukrainy s Rossiei, 3: 357).
19 See the report on Ivan Iskra’s embassy to Muscovy in the spring of 1653
in Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiei, 3: 209.
354
Notes
20 For a survey of developments in the Muscovite church in the mid-sev-

enteenth century, see Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia: The
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York and Oxford, 1992), 51–73,
128–49. On the publication of Kyivan books in Moscow, see Oparina, Ivan
Nasedka, 245–86.
21 On the course of the negotiations of 1653, which took place in Lviv and
involved a Muscovite embassy headed by Boris Repnin-Obolensky, see Hru-
shevs´kyi, Istoriia Ukraïny-Rusy (New York, 1958) 9, pt. 2: 619–41.
22 See the decisions of the Assembly of the Land in Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s
Rossiei, 3: 414.
23 For the texts of the speeches, see the report of Buturlin’s embassy in
Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rosiiei, 3: 423–89. Cf. Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion,
318–25.
24 See Khmelnytsky’s letter dated 29 July (8 August) 1648 in Dokumenty
Bohdana Khmelńyts´koho (1648–1657), comp. Ivan Kryp’iakevych (Kyïv, 1961), 65.
25 There was also no attempt to play on the theme of ethnic affinity in
Khmelnytsky’s letter of 29 September (9 October) 1649 to the voevoda Fedor
Arseniev, in which the hetman complained about attacks on “the Orthodox
Rus´ and our faith” (ibid., 143). Khmelnytsky’s use of the formula “sovereign
of all Rus´” in his letters to the tsar seems to have been fairly insignificant,
given that in his letters to Muscovite correspondents (including the missive to
Arseniev) the hetman also used the full title of John Casimir, which included
a reference to the king as “Prince of Rus´.”
26 See Khmelnytsky’s letters in Dokumenty Bohdana Khmelńyts´koho, 286,
298, 316.
27 On the tsar’s new title, see Mykhailo Hrushevs´kyi, “Velyka, Mala i Bila
Rus´,” Ukraïna 1917, nos. 1–2: 7–19; A. V. Solovév, “Velikaia, Malaia i Belaia
Rus´,” Voprosy istorii 1947, no. 7: 24–38.
28 See Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion, 326.
29 See Khmelnytsky’s petition of 17 (27) February 1654 to the tsar in Doku-
menty Bohdana Khmelńyts´koho, 323.
30 See Khmelnytsky’s letter of 19 (29) July 1654 to the tsar in Dokumenty
Bohdana Khmelńyts´koho, 373.
31 See the description of the disagreement over the oath in Buturlin’s am-
bassadorial report (Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiei, 3: 464–66).
32 Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History (Harlow,
2001), 52.
33 Quoted in Oparina, Ivan Nasedka, 342.
355

This essay draws on two of my earlier articles: “Hadjac 1658: The Origins of
a Myth,” in Nel mondo degli Slavi. Incontri e dialoghi tra culture: Studi in onore
di Giovanna Brogi Bercoff, ed. Maria Giovanna Di Salvo, Giovanna Moracci,
and Giovanna Siedina (Florence, 2008), 449–58, and “Reconstructive Forgery:
The Hadiach Agreement (1658) in the History of the Rus´,” Journal of Ukrainian
Studies, nos. 35–36 (2010–2011) [2013]: 37–49.
1 On the Union of Hadiach, see Vasyl´ Herasymchuk, “Vyhovshchyna
i hadiats´kyi traktat,” Zapysky Naukovoho tovarystva im. Shevchenka 87 (1909):
5–36; 88 (1909): 23–50; 89 (1909): 46–91; Mykola Stadnyk, “Hadiats´ka uniia,”
Zapysky Ukraïns´koho naukovoho tovarystva u Kyievi 7 (1910): 65–85; 8 (1911):
5–39; Wacław Lipiński (Viacheslav Lypyns´kyi), Z dziejów Ukrainy (Kyïv and
Kraków, 1912), 588–617; Mykhailo Hrushevs´kyi, Istoriia Ukraïny-Rusy (New
York, 1958), 10: 288–359; Władysław Tomkiewicz, “Ugoda hadziacka,” Sprawy
narodowościowe 11, nos. 1–2 (1937): 14–21; Stanisław Kot, Jerzy Niemirycz, w
300‑lecie Ugody Hadziackiej (Paris, 1960); Andrzej Kamiński, “The Cossack
Experiment in Szlachta Democracy in the Polish-Lithuanian Common-
wealth: The Hadiach (Hadziacz) Union,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 1, no. 2
( June 1977): 178–97, here 195–97; Janusz Kaczmarczyk, “Hadziacz 1658: Kolejna
ugoda czy nowa unia,” Warszawskie Zeszyty Ukrainistyczne 2 (1994): 35–42;
A. Mironowicz, Prawosławie i unia za panowania Jana Kazimierza (Białystok,
1997), 149–89; Tetiana Iakovleva, Het´manshchyna v druhii polovyni 50‑kh rokiv
XVII stolittia: Prychyny ta pochatok Ruïny (Kyïv, 1998), 305–23.
2 On the negative aspects of the Hadiach Agreement, see Stefania
Ochmann-Staniszewska and Zdzisław Staniszewski, Sejm Rzeczypospolitej za
panowania Jana Kazimierza Wazy: prawo, doktryna, praktyka (Wrocław, 2000),
1: 315–18. Cf. Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine
(Oxford, 2001), 62–64.
3 See Lipiński, Z dziejów Ukrainy, 595–98; Hrushevs´kyi, Istoriia Ukraïny-
Rusy, 10: 352–57.
4 Ivan Franko, “Poza mezhamy mozhlyvoho,” http://franko.lviv.ua/faculty/
Phil/Franko/Poza_mezhamy.pdf.
5 See Andrzej Kamiński, Historia Rzeczypospolitej Wielu Narodów, 1505–1795
(Lublin, 2000), 134–35. For a survey of the ideas that informed traditional Pol-
ish historiography, see Hrushevs´kyi, Istoriia Ukraïny-Rusy, 10: 354–55. On the
approaches dominant in modern Polish historiography, see A. B. Pernal, “The
Union of Hadiach (1658) in the Light of Modern Polish Historiography,” in
Millennium of Christianity in Ukraine, 988–1988 (Winnipeg, 1989), 177–92.
356
Notes
6 Nataliia Iakovenko, Narys istoriï Ukraïny z naidavnishykh chasiv do kintsia

XVIII stolittia (Kyïv, 1997), 212. Cf. Iakovenko, Narys istoriï serednóvichnoï ta
rannómodernoï Ukraïny (Kyïv, 2005), 373–74.
7 Direct references to the Hadiach articles are to be found, for example, in
the instructions of Hetman Petro Doroshenko to his representatives at the
Ostrih Commission (1670), as well as in the instructions to Polish delegates
to the commission. See Tysiacha rokiv ukraïns´koï suspilńo-politychnoï dumky u
dev’iaty tomakh, vol. 3, bk. 2 (Kyïv, 2001), 56, 63, 67.
8 See Litopys samovydtsia, ed. Iaroslav Dzyra (Kyïv, 1971), 81. Cf. the
two distinct versions of the Hadiach Agreement in Hrushevs´kyi, Istoriia
Ukraïny-Rusy, 10: 334–43. Although the final text of the agreement contains
no reference to the Diet, such a provision appears in Wespazjan Kochowski’s
account of it. See Iakovleva, Het´manshchyna v druhii polovyni 50‑kh rokiv
XVII stolittia, 433.
9 See Litopys samovydtsia, 76.
10 Samuel Twardowski, Wojna Domowa z Kozaki i Tatary, Moskwą, potem
Szwedami i z Węgry Przez lat Dwanaście (Kalisz, 1681).
11 Ibid., 262–65.
12 See Samiila Velychka Skazaniie o voini kozatskoi z poliakamy (Kyïv, 1926),
166, 184–86.
13 On the time of writing of the chronicle, its author and his sources, see
Yuri Lutsenko’s introduction to Hryhorij Hrabjanka’s “The Great War of Bohdan
Xmelńyc´kyj” (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), xv–xliv. Cf. Serhii Plokhy, The Origins
of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus
(Cambridge, 2006), 343–45.
14 See Hryhorij Hrabjanka’s “The Great War of Bohdan Xmelńyc´kyj,” 378.
15 Ibid., 379–81.
16 See [Wespazjan Kochowski], Annalium Poloniae ab obitu Vladislai IV:
Climacter primus (Kraków, 1683). For a nineteenth-century Polish translation
of Kochowski’s work, see Historia panowania Jana Kazimierza z Klimakterów,
3 vols. (Poznań, 1859), 1: 363–65.
17 See Hryhorij Hrabjanka’s “The Great War of Bohdan Xmelńyc´kyj,” 379–80.
18 See Litopys samovydtsia, 80–81; Twardowski, Wojna Domowa, 262–63.
19 See Serhii Plokhy, Tsars and Cossacks: A Study in Iconography (Cambridge,
Mass., 2002), 45–54; cf. Plokhy, The Origins of the Slavic Nations, 348–50.
20 See Hryhorij Hrabjanka’s “The Great War of Bohdan Xmelńyc´kyj,” 378–81.
21 On the popularity of Hrabianka’s chronicle and the Brief Description of
Little Russia, see Elena Apanovich, Rukopisnaia svetskaia kniga XVIII veka na
Ukraine: istoricheskie sborniki (Kyïv, 1983), 137–201; Andrii Bovhyria, “‘Korotkyi
357
opys Malorosiï’ (1340–1734) u rukopysnykh spyskakh XVIII st.,” Istoriohrafich-

ni doslidzhennia v Ukraïni, vyp. 14 (Kyïv, 2004), 340–63.

This essay draws on two of my earlier articles, “Reconstructive Forgery: The
Hadiach Agreement (1658) in the History of the Rus´,” Journal of Ukrainian
Studies, nos. 35–36 (2010–2011) [2013]: 37–49, and “Forbidden Love: Ivan Ma-
zepa and the Author of the History of the Rus´,” in Poltava 1709: The Battle and
the Myth, ed. Serhii Plokhy (Cambridge, Mass., 2012), 553–68.
1 I refer here to the broad definition of myth employed by George Schöpf-
lin in his article “The Functions of Myth and a Taxonomy of Myths,” in
Myths and Nationhood, ed. Geoffrey Hosking and George Schöpflin (London,
1997), 19–35.
2 On the anathematization of Mazepa, see Nadieszda Kizenko, “The Battle
of Poltava in Imperial Liturgy,” in Poltava 1709: The Battle and the Myth,
227–70.
3 A. I. Martos, “Zapiski inzhenernogo ofitsera Martosa o Turetskoi voine
v tsarstvovanie Aleksandra Pavlovicha,” Russkii arkhiv, no. 7 (1893): 345.
On Oleksii Martos, see Volodymyr Kravchenko, Narysy z istoriï ukraïns´koï
istoriohrafiï epokhy natsionalńoho Vidrodzhennia (druha polovyna XVIII–sere-
dyna XIX st.) (Kharkiv, 1996), 91–98. On Ivan Martos, see I. M. Gofman, Ivan
Petrovich Martos (Leningrad, 1970).
4 Diary of Mikhail Pogodin, Russian State Library, Manuscript Division,
fond 231, vol. 1, fols. 188v‑189r. Cf. Nikolai Barsukov, Zhizn´ i trudy M. P. Pogo-
dina, vol. 1 (Sankt-Peterburg, 1888), 153.
5 Diary of Mikhail Pogodin, vol. 1, fols. 188v‑189r. Cf. Barsukov, Zhizn´
i trudy, 1: 153; Oleksander Ohloblyn, Liudy staroï Ukraïny (Munich, 1959),
155–57; “Pamiatnoe delo,” Osnova ( July 1861): 41–74, here 52–53.
6 Istoriia Rusov ili Maloi Rossii: Sochinenie Georgiia Koniskogo, arkhiepisko-
pa Belorusskogo (Moskva, 1846); Volodymyr Sverbyhuz, Starosvits´ke panstvo
(Warsaw, 1999), 122–24; I. F. Pavlovskii, Poltavtsy: ierarkhi, gosudarstvennye
i obshchestvennye deiateli i blagotvoriteli (Poltava, 1914), 38–45.
7 See Mykhailo Vozniak, Psevdo-Konys´kyi i psevdo-Poletyka (“Istoriia
Rusov” u literaturi i nautsi) (L´viv; Kyïv, 1939), 5–7; O. P. Ohloblyn, Do pytannia
pro avtora “Istoriï Rusiv” (Kyïv, 1998); Kravchenko, Narysy, 87, 101–57; Serhii
Plokhy, Ukraine and Russia: Representations of the Past (Toronto, 2008), 49–65.
8 Istoriia Rusov, 200.
358
Notes
9 Voltaire, History of Charles the Twelfth, King of Sweden (New York, 1858),
127–28; Istoriia Rusov, 200.
11 Ibid., 203–5.
12 Persha konstytutsiia Ukraïny het´mana Pylypa Orlyka, 1710 rik (Kyïv, 1994),
iii–vii; see Orlyk’s letter to Metropolitan Iavorsky in Osnova, no. 10 (October
1862): 1–28; Orest Subtelny, The Mazepists: Ukrainian Separatism in the Early
Eighteenth Century (Boulder, Colo., 1981), 190.
13 “Kratkoe istoricheskoe opisanie o Maloi Rossii do 1765,” Chteniia v Ob-
shchestve istorii i drevnostei rossiiskikh, no. 6 (1848): 37.
14 Istoriia Rusov, 209–10.
15 Ibid., 210.
16 Kravchenko, Narysy, 151, 154.
18 Ibid., 206–7.
19 Semen Divovych, “Razgovor Velikorossii s Malorossieiu,” in Ukraïns´ka
literatura XVIII stolittia (Kyïv, 1983), 398.
21 Ibid., 212–13.
22 Ibid., 215.
23 Kravchenko, Narysy, 97.

This essay first appeared as a discussion piece in a forum entitled “The
Geopolitical Legacy of the Russian Revolution,” Geopolitics 22, no. 3 (2017):
665–92.
1 Nicholas P. Vakar, Belorussia: The Making of a Nation. A Case Study (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1956), 103.
2 V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moskva, 1969), 39: 335.
3 V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moskva, 1969), 45: 361.
Killing by Hunger
This is the original version of an article published with some revisions
as “Killing by Hunger,” a review of Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Sta-
lin’s War on Ukraine (New York, 2017), in the New York Review of Books 65,
no. 13 (16 August 2018), https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/08/16/
359
stalin-ukraine-killing-by-hunger/. All quotations in this review are cited from

the book.

First published under the same title in The Future of the Past: New Perspectives
on Ukrainian History (=Harvard Ukrainian Studies 43, nos. 1–4 (2015–2016):
385–430).
1 “Z shchodennyka vchytel´ky O. Radchenko,” in Holodomor 1932–1933
rokiv v Ukraïni: Dokumenty i materialy, ed. Ruslan Pyrih (Kyïv, 2007), 1012–25.
2 For the variety of approaches to the study of the Holodomor, see S. Mak-
sudov, “Losses Suffered by the Population of the USSR, 1918–1958,” in The
Samizdat Register II, ed. R. Medvedev (London and New York, 1981); Robert
Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-
Famine (New York and Edmonton, 1986); Mark B. Tauger, “The 1932 Harvest
and the Famine of 1933,” Slavic Review 50, no. 1 (1991): 70–89; Andrea Grazi-
osi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1918–1934 (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1996); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations
and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001); Koman-
dyry velykoho holodu: Poïzdky V. Molotova i L. Kahanovycha v Ukraïnu ta na
Pivnichnyi Kavkaz, 1932–1933 rr., ed. Valerii Vasylíev and Iurii Shapoval
(Kyïv, 2001); J. Vallin, F. Meslé, S. Adamets, and S. Pyrozhkov, “A New
Estimate of Ukrainian Population Losses during the Crisis of the 1930s and
1940s,” Population Studies 56, no. 3 (November 2002); Mark Tauger, Natural
Disasters and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931–1933, The Carl Beck
Papers in Russian & East European Studies (Pittsburgh, 2001); Stanislav
Kulćhyts´kyi, Demohrafichni naslidky Holodomoru 1933 r. v Ukraïni (Kyïv,
2003); Stephen Wheatcroft, “Towards Explaining the Soviet Famine of
1931–3: Political and Natural Factors in Perspective,” Food and Foodways 12,
nos. 2–3 (2004): 107–36; R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of
Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–33 (Basingstoke, 2004); Michael Ellman, “The
Role of Leadership Perceptions and of Intent in the Soviet Famine of 1931–
1934,” Europe-Asia Studies 57, no. 6 (September 2005): 823–41; Roman Serbyn,
“The Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33 as Genocide in the Light of the UN
Convention of 1948,” Ukrainian Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2006): 181–94; Hunger by
Design: The Great Ukrainian Famine and Its Soviet Context, ed. Halyna Hryn
(Cambridge, Mass., 2008); Hiroaki Kuromiya, “The Soviet Famine of 1932–33
Reconsidered,” Europe-Asia Studies 60, no. 4 (2008): 663–75; V. V. Kon-
drashin, Golod 1932–33 godov: Tragediia rossiiskoi derevni (Moskva, 2008);
360
Notes
N. A. Ivnitskii, Golod 1932–33 godov v SSSR: Ukraina, Kazakhstan, Povolzhé,

Tsentralńo-Chernozemnaia oblast´, Zapadnaia Sibir´, Ural (Moskva, 2009);
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York,
2010); Norman Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, N.J., 2010); Stanislav
Kulćhitskii [Stanyslav Kulćhyts´kyi], “Ukrainskii Golodomor kak genotsid,”
in Sovremennaia rossiisko-ukrainskaia istoriografiia goloda 1932–33 gg. v SSSR,
ed. V. V. Kondrashin (Moskva, 2011), 217–316. For a historiographic overview
of recent discussions on the Holodomor, see Liudmyla Grynevych [Hry-
nevych], “The Present State of Ukrainian Historiography on the Holodomor
and Prospects for Its Development,” The Harriman Review 16, no. 2 (2008):
10–20; Heorhii Kasíanov, Danse Macabre: Holod 1932–33 rokiv u politytsi,
masovii svidomosti ta istoriohrafiï (1980‑ti–pochatok 2000‑kh) (Kyïv, 2010).
3 On the Digital Atlas of the Holodomor as a collaborative project, see
Hennadii Boriak and Rostyslav Sossa, “GIS-Atlas Holodomoru v Ukraïni
1932–33 rr.,” in Natsionalńe kartohrafuvannia: stan, problemy ta perspektyvy
rozvytku, vyp. 5 (Kyïv, 2012), 30–34. Joseph Livesey (University of New York)
collected and systematized data on government policies; Heorhii Papakin
(Institute of History, Kyiv) collected and systematized data on blacklisted
communities; Hennadii Iefimenko (Institute of History, Kyiv) collected and
systematized data on collectivization in Ukraine; and Tetiana Boriak (Nation-
al Academy of Cadres in Culture and Arts, Kyiv) systematized data based on
the testimonies of famine survivors. The map of the 1928 famine is based on
data collected by Liudmyla Hrynevych (Institute of History, Kyiv). Hennadii
Boriak (Institute of History, Kyiv) provided intellectual leadership for the
research projects conducted in Ukraine in conjunction with the Digital Atlas
of Ukraine project, and Alexander Babyonyshev (Sergei Maksudov), an asso-
ciate of the Davis Center at Harvard, provided consultations for our project
on more than one occasion. Research on the project has been supported by
the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University and the Ukrainian
Studies Fund.
4 Holodomor 1932–1933 rokiv v Ukraïni: Dokumenty i materialy, ed. Ruslan
Pyrih [Cited henceforth as Holodomor].
5 On the steppe areas of Ukraine, see V. Dokuchaev, Nashi stepi prezhde
i teper´ (Sankt-Peterburg, 1892); A. Izmail´skii, Kak vysokhla nasha step´ (Pol-
tava, 1893); V. Pashchenko, “Stepnaia zona,” in Priroda Ukrainskoi SSR: Land-
shafty (Kyïv, 1985); Priroda Ukrainskoi SSR: Landshafty i fizikogeograficheskoe
raionirovanie, ed. A. M. Marinich, V. M. Pashchenko, and P. G. Shishchenko
(Kyïv, 1985).
361
6 The maps discussed here are available online at the HURI Mapa website:
Map 1: Famines of the 1920s, Map 2, https://gis.huri.harvard.edu/media-gal-
lery/detail/1382387/1085949.
Map 2: Famines of the 1920s, Map 3, https://gis.huri.harvard.edu/media-gal-
lery/detail/1382387/1085950.
Map 3: Demography, Population Losses, Map 1, https://gis.huri.harvard.edu/
media-gallery/detail/1381000/1082125.
Map 7: Government Policy, Collectivization, Map 1, https://gis.huri.harvard.
edu/media-gallery/detail/1383000/1084434.
Map 8: Ecology and Agriculture, Map 1, https://gis.huri.harvard.edu/me-
dia-gallery/detail/1381978/1083803. The source for the map is Volodymyr
Kubiiovych, Atlias Ukraïny i sumizhnykh kraïv (Lviv, 1937), no. 4, xii.
dia-gallery/detail/1381978/1083804.
dia-gallery/detail/1381978/1083806.
Map 11: Government Policy, Blacklisted Localities, Map 1, https://gis.huri.
harvard.edu/media-gallery/detail/1382384/1085780.
Map 12: Government Policy, Procurement and Grain Loans, Map 3, https://
gis.huri.harvard.edu/media-gallery/detail/1382386/1088169.
7 On famines in Ukraine in the twentieth century, see O. M. Veselova
et al., Holodomory v Ukraïni 1921–23, 1932–33, 1946–47: Zlochyny proty naro-
du (Kyïv and New York, 2002); Liudmyla Hrynevych, Khronika kolektyvizatsiï
ta Holodomoru v Ukraïni, vol. 1, bk. 2: Pochatok nadzvychainykh zakhodiv: Holod
1928–1929 rokiv (Kyïv, 2012).
8 O. Rudnytsky, N. Levchuk, O. Wolowyna, and P. Shevchuk, “ 1932–
33 Famine Losses in Ukraine within the Context of the Soviet Union,”
in Famines in European Economic History: The Last Great European Famines
Reconsidered, ed. D. Curran, L. Luciuk, and A. Newby (Abingdon, 2015).
9 See Steven Uitkroft [Stephen G. Wheatcroft], “Pokazateli demografi
cheskogo krizisa v period goloda v SSSR,” 89–90, online at http://rusarchives.
ru/publication/wheatcroft-pokazateli-demografy-crizis-golod-sssr/; cf.
362
Notes
FamineWeb—Comparative History of Famines, Map Gallery, http://www.

famine.unimelb.edu.au/ussr33bd/ukraine33d.php.
10 “Iz informatsionnoi svodki no. 52 Kolkhoztsentra o khode kollektiv-
izatsii v zernovykh raionakh v kontse sentiabria–nachale oktiabria 1930 g.
18 oktiabria 1930 g.” in Tragediia sovetskoi derevni: Kollektivizatsiia i rasku-
lachivanie: Dokumenty i materialy, vol. 2, Noiabr´ 1929‑dekabr´ 1930 (Moskva,
2000), 670–76; “Povidomlennia informatsiinoï hrupy Narkomzemu USRR
pro khid sutsilńoï kolektyvizatsiï i stavlennia do riznykh verstv selianstva, 17
bereznia 1931 r.,” in Kolektyvizatsiia i holod na Ukraïni: 1929–1933: Zbirnyk do-
kumentiv i materialiv, comp. H. M. Mykhailychenko and Ie. P. Shatalina (Kyïv,
1992), no. 139. Between 1925 and 1930 the division of Ukraine into zones was
changed more than once, but steppe areas were always treated as a separate
zone or set of zones.
11 “O tempe kollektivizatsii i merakh pomoshchi gosudarstva kolkhoznomu
stroitel´stvu, Postanovlenie TsK VKP(b), 5 ianvaria 1930 g.,” in KPSS v rezoliut-
siiakh i resheniiakh s˝ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK 5 (Moskva, 1984), 72–75;
“Direktivy Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) po kontrolńym tsifram na 1930/31 g. o
programme rekonstruktsii sel´skogo khoziaistva, 25 iiulia 1930 g.,” in Tragediia
sovetskoi derevni, 2: 548.
12 “Postanova TsK VKP(b) pro traktory dlia Ukraïny,” in Holodomor, 95;
“Lyst sekretaria TsK KP(b)U S. Kosiora do sekretaria TsK VKP(b) I. Stalina,”
26 April 1932, in Holodomor, 127–30.
13 “Lyst sekretaria TsK KP(b)U S. Kosiora do sekretaria TsK VKP(b) I. Sta-
lina,” 26 April 1932, in Holodomor, 127–30.
14 “Lyst V. Chubaria do V. Molotova ta I. Stalina,” 10 April 1932, in Ho-
lodomor, 201.
15 “Lyst sekretaria Kyïvs´koho obkomu partiï M. Demchenka do S. Kosi-
ora,” 6 April 1932, in Holodomor, 115; “Zi shchodennyka partiinoho slidchoho
Kyïvs´koï kontrolńoï komisiï D. Zavoloky,” in Holodomor, 1005.
16 “Lyst upovnovazhenoho TsK KP(b)U A. Richyts´koho do S. Kosiora,”
20 May 1932, in Holodomor, 166–67; “Lyst V. Chubaria do V. Molotova ta
I. Stalina,” 10 June 1932, in Holodomor, 201.
17 “Postanova Politbiuro TsK KP(b)U,” 17 May 1932, in Holodomor, 161; “Lyst
H. Petrovs´koho do V. Molotova ta I. Stalina,” 10 June 1932, in Holodomor, 198;
“Dopovidna zapyska Kharkivs´koho obkomu partiï TsK KP(b)U,” June 1932,
in Holodomor, 221–24.
18 “Postanova TsK KP(b)U pro dodatkovu prodovolćhu dopomohu,”
21 June 1932, in Holodomor, 213–14.
363
19 “Vytiah iz lysta I. Stalina do L. Kahanovycha,” 15 June 1932, in Holodomor,

206.
20 “Vytiah iz lysta L. Kahanovycha do I. Stalina,” 16 June 1932, in Holodomor,
207–8. On the policies and politics of famine relief, which often came in the
form of loans to be repaid with interest the following year, see Tetiana Boriak,
“Prodovolćha dopomoha Kremlia iak instrument Holodomoru v Ukraïni,” in
Zlochyny totalitarnykh rezhymiv v Ukraïni: naukovyi ta osvitnii pohliad (Kyïv,
2012), 1–33.
21 “Lyst sekretaria Kyïvs´koho obkomu partii M. Demchenka do S. Kosi-
ora,” 6 April 1932, in Holodomor, 115; “Zi shchodennyka partiinoho slidchoho
Kyïvs´koï kontrolńoï komisiï D. Zavoloky,” in Holodomor, 1005.
22 “Zi shchodennyka partiinoho slidchoho Kyïvs´koï kontrolńoï komisiï
D. Zavoloky,” in Holodomor, 1006–8.
23 “Postanova Politbiuro TsK KP(b)U,” 5 May 1932, in Holodomor, 149;
“Lyst V. Kuibysheva do V. Chubaria,” 10 May 1932, in Holodomor, 154–55;
“Telehrama sekretaria TsK VKP(b) I. Stalina do sekretaria TsK KP(b)U
S. Kosiora i holovy RNK USRR V. Chubaria,” 29 May 1932, in Holodomor, 191.
24 “Postanova RNK SRSR i TsK VKP(b) ‘Pro plan khlibozahotivel´ z
urozhaiu 1932 roku…,’” 6 May 1932, in Holodomor, 150.
25 “Lyst V. Molotova i L. Kahanovycha do I. Stalina,” 6 July 1932, in Ho-
lodomor, 231; “Postanova TsK VKP(b) pro orhanizatsiiu khlibozahotivel´ u 1932
rotsi,” in Holodomor, 236; “Lyst TsK KP(b)U i RNK USRR do TsK VKP(b)
iz prokhanniam perehlianuty rozbyvku khlibozahotivel´ po sektorakh dlia
Ukraïny,” in Holodomor, 255–56.
26 “Postanova Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) pro plan khlibozahotivel´ v Ukraïni z
urozhaiu 1932 roku,” in Holodomor, 260.
27 “Lyst L. Kahanovycha ta V. Kuibysheva do I. Stalina ta V. Molotova,”
24 August 1932, in Holodomor, 298; “Postanova Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) pro
plan khlibozahotivel´ v USRR,” 28 August 1932, in Holodomor, 303–4.
28 “Plan khlibozahotivel´ po USRR na 1932 rik,” in Holodomor, 242; “Posta-
nova Politbiuro TsK KP(b)U,” 30 October 1932, in Holodomor, 356.
29 “Telehrama M. Khataievycha do S. Kosiora, V. Molotova, V. Chubaria,”
4 November 1932, in Holodomor, 367.
30 “Dyrektyva TsK VKP(b) obkomam, kraikomam ta TsK kompartiï soiu-
znykh respublik,” 2 January 1933, in Holodomor, 571–72.
31 “Postanova TsK KP(b)U pro zmenshennia obsiahiv khlibozdachi,” in Ho-
lodomor, 601–2.
32 “Z shchodennyka vchytel´ky O. Radchenko,” in Holodomor, 1018–19.
364
Notes
33 “Analiz tsyfrovykh danykh pro operatyvnu robotu orhaniv DPU USRR,”

8 December 1932, in Holodomor, 465; “Vytiah iz zvitu DPU USRR pro borot´-
bu z teroryzmom,” January 1933, in Holodomor, 631.
34 “Z shchodennyka vchytel´ky O. Radchenko,” in Holodomor, 1022, 1024–35.
35 “Postanova Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) pro vidpusk zerna Dnipropetro-
vs´kii oblasti,” 7 February 1933, in Holodomor, 663; “Postanova Politbiuro TsK
VKP(b) pro vidpusk zerna Odes´kii oblasti,” 7 February 1933, in Holodomor,
663; “Postanova TsK KP(b)U pro stan khlibopostachannia Donbasu,” 17 Feb-
ruary 1933, in Holodomor, 689–90.
36 “Dovidka DPU USRR,” 12 March 1933, in Holodomor, 756; “Vidomosti
TsK KP(b)U pro vydilennia prodovolćhoï dopomohy,” on or after 27 March
1933, in Holodomor, 795.
37 “Zapyska Narkomzemu USRR TsK KP(b)U,” 14 March 1933, in Ho-
lodomor, 765.
38 “Postanova Politbiuro TsK KP(b)U pro zakhody, spriamovani na
podolannia holodu v Kyïvs´kii oblasti,” 17 March 1933, in Holodomor,
775–78; Oleh Wolowyna, “Seasonal Distribution of 1932–34 Famine Loss-
es in Ukraine” (paper presented at the international conference “Holod
v Ukraïni u pershii polovyni XX stolittia: prychyny i naslidky,” Kyïv,
20–21 November 2013).
39 In early 1933, the rural population of Ukraine was 23.9 million. Of that
number, Kyiv Oblast accounted for 4.95 million; Kharkiv, 4.76; Vinnytsia,
4.10; Dnipropetrovsk, 2.82; Chernihiv, 2.54; Odesa, 2.29; Donetsk, 1.98; and the
Moldavian Autonomous Republic, 0.52 million people.
40 “Lyst S. Kosiora i V. Chubaria do I. Stalina,” 29 May 1933, in Holodomor,
852; “Postanova Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) pro prodovolćhu pozyku Ukraïni,”
30 May 1933, in Holodomor, 857–58; Wolowyna, “Seasonal Distribution.”
41 “Svodnaia vedomost´ ob otpravlenii ėshelonov s pereselentsami na
Ukrainu,” 28 December 1933, in Holodomor, 993.
42 See Andrey Shlyakhter’s chapter “Borderness and Famine: Why Did
Fewer People Starve to Death in Soviet Ukraine’s Western Border Districts
during the Holodomor, 1932–33?” in his forthcoming University of Chicago
dissertation, “Smugglers and Soviets: Contraband Trade, the Soviet Strug-
gle against It, and the Making of the Soviet Border Strip, 1917–1939.” On
Ukrainian peasants fleeing across the border to Poland in 1930, see Timothy
Snyder, Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist’s Mission to Liberate Soviet
Ukraine (New Haven and London, 2005), 92–95.
43 Wolowyna, “Seasonal Distribution.”
44 Uitkroft, “Pokazateli demograficheskogo krizisa,” 89–90.
365
45 “Vytiah iz dopovidnoï zapysky Vinnyts´koho obkomu partiï TsK

KP(b) U,” 18 March 1933, in Holodomor, 779–83.
46 “Dovidka Narkomzemu USRR,” 2 December 1932, in Holodomor, 439.
The Call of Blood

First published as “The Call of Blood: Government Propaganda and Public
Response to the Soviet Entry into World War II” in L’Union soviétique et la
Seconde Guerre mondiale / The Soviet Union and World War II, ed. Alain Blum,
Catherine Gousseff, and Andrea Graziosi (=Cahiers du monde russe. Russie,
Empire russe, URSS, États indépendants 53, nos. 2–3 (2012)).
1 Na prieme u Stalina. Tetradi (zhurnaly) zapisei lits priniatykh I. V. Stalinym
(1924–1953 gg.), ed. A. A. Chernobaev (Moskva, 2008), 272–73; Dokumenty
vneshnei politiki SSSR, vol. 22, bk. 2 (Moskva, 1992), 25–28; Mykola Lytvyn and
Kim Naumenko, Stalin i Zakhidna Ukraïna, 1939–41 (Kyïv, 2010), 10–12; The
Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, ed. Ivo Banac (New Haven, Conn., 2003), 115–16.
2 Schulenburg to the German Foreign Office, 10 September 1939, in Nazi-
Soviet Relations, 1939–1941: Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign
Office, ed. Raymond James Sontag and James Stuart Beddie (Washington,
D.C., 1948), 91.
3 Schulenburg to the German Foreign Office, 14 September 1939, in
Nazi-Soviet Relations, 92–93; Wrzesień 1939 na kresach w relacjach, ed. Czesław
Grzelak (Warszawa, 1999), 41–42; Natalija Liebediewa, “Wrzesień 1939 r.:
Polska między Niemcami a Związkiem Sowieckim,” in Kryzys 1939 roku w
interpretacjach polskich i rosyjskich historyków, ed. Sławomir Dębski and Michail
Narinski (Warszawa, 2009), 437–75, here 447–48.
4 “O vnutrennikh prichinakh porazheniia Pol´shi,” Pravda, 14 September
1939, 1; Ribbentrop to Schulenburg, 15 September 1939, in Nazi-Soviet Rela-
tions, 94.
Soviet Relations, 95.
6 “Rech´ po radio predsedatelia Soveta narodnykh komissarov SSSR
tov. V. M. Molotova 17 sentiabria 1939 g.,” Pravda, 18 September 1939, 1;
“Nota pravitel´stva SSSR, vruchennaia pol´skomu poslu v Moskve utrom 17
sentiabria 1939 goda,” ibid., 1; Schulenburg to the German Foreign Office,
17 September 1939, in Nazi-Soviet Relations, 96.
7 V. Kovaliuk, “Novi arkhivni dokumenty pro Narodni zbory Zakhidnoï
Ukraïny (zhovten´ 1939 r.),” Arkhivy Ukraïny, 1991, no. 5–6: 88; Radians´ki
366
Notes
orhany derzhavnoï bezpeky u 1939‑chervni 1941 r. Dokumenty HAD SBU Ukraïny,

comp. Vasyl´ Danylenko and Serhii Kokin (Kyïv, 2009), 46–49, here 48.
Soviet Relations, 101; Ribbentrop to Schulenburg, 23 September 1939, ibid., 102;
Schulenburg to the German Foreign Office, 25 September 1939, ibid., 102–3.
9 On the German interest in Galicia, see Michael Jabara Carley, 1939:
The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II (Chicago, 1999),
192–93.
10 A New York Times correspondent reported from Paris on 17 September:
“Some people here think that Russia intends to take that part of Poland
that was offered to her in the plan for settlement of Marquess Curzon of
Kedleston. This went to a considerable distance west of the Soviet’s present
legal border. Then, it is presumed, the Russians would declare that they had
a logical basis to claim this territory on the ground that even so extreme an
opponent of the Bolsheviki as Lord Curzon had been willing to concede the
Soviet’s right to it.” See Harold Denny, “Paris Sees Stalin in Betrayer Role,”
New York Times, 18 September 1939, 6. The London Times published a map of
Poland including the Curzon Line and the new Soviet-German boundary in
its issue for 18 September 1939. On the origins of the Curzon Line, see Jerzy
Borzecki, The Soviet-Polish Peace of 1921 and the Creation of Interwar Europe
(New Haven, Conn., 2008), 79–104. On the significance of Stalin’s speech
at the Eighteenth Congress of the Communist Party, see Donald Cameron
Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War (New
York, 1989), 110–11.
11 See Ingeborg Fleischhauer, “The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: The German
Version,” International Affairs (Moscow) 37, no. 8 (August 1991): 114–29. For
the texts of the documents signed by Ribbentrop and Molotov in the early
hours of 29 September (but dated the previous day), see Nazi-Soviet Relations,
105–9.
12 For Stalin’s remark to Ribbentrop, see Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin:
The Court of the Red Tsar (New York, 2003), 311. On negative reaction to the
pact among the Nazi anti-Bolshevik core, see Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–45:
Nemesis (London, 2000), 205–6.
13 Khrushchev Remembers, introduction, commentary and notes by Edward
Crankshaw; trans. and ed. Strobe Talbott (New York, 1971), 133; Viacheslav
Molotov, Soviet Peace Policy: Four Speeches (London, 1941), 16. For NKVD
reports on public reaction to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Molotov’s
speech at a session of the USSR Supreme Soviet explaining the reasons for
signing, see Radians´ki orhany derzhavnoï bezpeky, 968–85.
367
14 “O vnutrennikh prichinakh porazheniia Pol´shi.” Cf. E. Sosnin, “Germa-

no-pol´skaia voina (Obzor voennykh deistvii),” Pravda, 11 September 1939, 4.
15 “O vnutrennikh prichinakh porazheniia Pol´shi.”
16 “Russia: Dizziness from Success,” Time, 25 September 1939.
17 “Rech´ po radio predsedatelia Soveta narodnykh komissarov SSSR tov.
V. M. Molotova.”
18 See Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism
in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca and London, 2001), 8–9, 225–27, 292–93,
312–19, 351–52.
19 See Joseph Stalin to Lazar Kaganovich, 11 August 1932, in Stalin
i Kaganovich: Perepiska, 1931–1936, comp. Oleg Khlevniuk et al. (Moskva,
2001), no. 248; “Iz otchetnogo doklada pervogo sekretaria TsK KP(b)U
N. S. Khrushcheva XIV sézdu KP(b)U,” in Politicheskoe rukovodstvo Ukrainy
1938–1989, comp. V. Iu. Vasilév, R. Iu. Podkur, Kh. Kuromiia, Iu. I. Shapoval,
and A. Vainer (Moskva, 2006), 35–47.
20 “Akt vsemirno istoricheskogo znacheniia,” Pravda, 18 September 1939, 2.
21 “Krasnaia armiia neset schasté narodu,” Pravda, 18 September 1939, 3.
22 “Red Army in Polish territory. Molotoff excuses Soviet action. Protection
of ‘blood-relations.’ A stab in the back,” The Times, 18 September 1939, 6; G.
E. R. Gedye, “Soviet ‘Neutrality’ Stressed in Move. Moscow Assures Other
States on Invasion—Molotoff Gives Talk to Bewildered People,” New York
Times, 18 September 1939, 1.
23 Carley, 1939: The Alliance That Never Was, 216–26. On the relation between
ideology and realpolitik in Stalin’s foreign policy of the period, see Amir
Weiner, “Saving Private Ivan: From What, Why, and How?” Kritika 1, no. 2
(Spring 2000): 305–36, here 309–13. For research on public opinion during
World War II, see Sarah Davies, Soviet Public Opinion in Stalin’s Russia:
Terror, Propaganda and Dissent (Cambridge, 1997); Steven Casey, Cautious
Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and the War against
Nazi Germany (New York, 2001); Daniel Hucker, Public Opinion and the End
of Appeasement in Britain and France (Farnham, UK, 2011).
24 On the peculiarities of Soviet secret-police reports as a historical source
concerning the state of public opinion, see Davies, Soviet Public Opinion in
Stalin’s Russia, 9–14.
25 See Jochen Hellbeck’s exchange with Sarah Davies in a reprint of the
Kritika polemics: The Resistance Debate in Russian and Soviet History, ed. Mi-
chael David-Fox (Bloomington, Ind., 2003). For a continuation of the debate,
see Hiroaki Kuromiya, “How Do We Know What the People Thought under
368
Notes
Stalin?” in Sovetskaia vlast´—narodnaia vlast´? ed. Timo Vihavainen (Sankt-

Peterburg, 2003), 1–16.
26 Radians´ki orhany derzhavnoï bezpeky, nos. 431–56, 998–1073.
27 Radians´ki orhany derzhavnoï bezpeky, 49.
28 Radians´ki orhany derzhavnoï bezpeky, 998, 1001.
29 Radians´ki orhany derzhavnoï bezpeky, 995, 1001, 1054.
30 Radians´ki orhany derzhavnoï bezpeky, 1009–11, 1015, 1049; Harvard Uni-
versity, Widener Library, The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System,
Schedule B, vol. 6, case 193, 4.
32 See Davies, Soviet Public Opinion in Stalin’s Russia, 97–99.
33 Radians´ki orhany derzhavnoï bezpeky, 1055; Vladyslav Hrynevych and
Oleksandr Lysenko, “Ukraïna na pochatkovomu etapi Druhoï Svitovoï viiny,”
in Ukraïna: politychna istoriia, XX–pochatok XXI stolittia (Kyïv, 2007), 675.
34 Radians´ki orhany derzhavnoï bezpeky, 1012, 1018, 1021, 1032.
35 Like many others interviewed by the Harvard Project, this particular in-
terviewee did not trust the Soviet media. She stated in that regard: “I read the
newspapers very rarely because I knew that in the newspapers there was only
Soviet propaganda.” See Harvard University, Widener Library, The Harvard
Project on the Soviet Social System, Schedule A, vol. 34, case 148/(NY) 1398,
30.
36 Radians´ki orhany derzhavnoï bezpeky, 1001, 1011, 1047, 1060.
37 G. E. R. Gedye, “Moscow Outlines Polish Partition,” New York Times,
19 September 1939, 1, 5; V. I. Vernadskii, Dnevniki, 1935–1941, ed. V. P. Volkov,
2 vols. (Moskva, 2006), 2: 56, 67. On the revival of Russian national themes
on the official and popular levels in the years leading up to World War II,
see David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the
Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, Mass.,
2002), 43–114.
38 Vernadskii, Dnevniki, 1935–1941, 2: 68.
40 Radians´ki orhany derzhavnoï bezpeky, 998–99, 1021–22.
41 Martin, Affirmative Action Empire, 9; Serhy Yekelchyk, Stalin’s Empire of
Memory: Russian-Ukrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical Imagination (To-
ronto, 2004), 13–62; Vladyslav Hrynevych, “Viina z Hitlerivs´koiu Nimech-
chynoiu (1941–1945),” in Ukraïna: politychna istoriia, 736–56.
42 Jan Tomasz Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s
Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton, N.J., 2002), 71–114, 125–43;
Serhii Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York, 2010), 166–82; Viktor
369
Koval´, “Borot´ba za mizhnarodne vyznannia ukraïns´koho vidtynku novoho

Zakhidnoho kordonu SRSR (1941–45),” in Ukraïna: politychna istoriia, 814–48.

First published as “Stalin and Roosevelt,” Diplomatic History 42, no. 4 (Sep-
tember 2018): 525–27.
1 “Foundations of Leninism” in Joseph Stalin, Works (Moscow, 1953), 6: 196.
The American Dream

This essay has not been previously published.
1 “Postanovlenie Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) “O vospreshchenii brakov mezh-
du grazhdanami SSSR i inostrantsami,” 15 February 1947, Fond Aleksandra
Iakovleva, http://www.alexanderyakovlev.org/fond/issues-doc/69332; “V SSSR
zapreshcheny braki mezhdu sovetskimi grazhdanami i inostrantsami,” Calend.
ru http://www.calend.ru/event/6932/.
2 M. M. Wolff, “Some Aspects of Marriage and Divorce Laws in Soviet
Russia,” Modern Law Review 12, no. 3 ( July 1949): 290–96; Mie Nakachi,
“N. S. Khrushchev and the 1944 Soviet Family Law: Politics, Reproduction,
and Language,” East European Politics and Societies 20, no. 1 (2006): 40–68;
Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of
Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, Mass., 1995); Rachel Applebaum, Empire
of Friends: Soviet Power and Socialist Internationalism in Cold War Czechoslova-
kia (Ithaca, N.Y., 2019), 59–63.
3 Serhii Plokhy, Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front: An Untold Story of
World War II (London, 2019), 104–21, 176–85, 261–69.
4 “John Bazan in the 1940 Census,” http://www.archives.com/1940‑census/
john-bazan-ny‑58629820; “Catherine Bazan in the 1940 Census,” http://www.
archives.com/1940‑census/catherine-bazan-ny‑58629819; “John J. Bazan—
WWII Enlistment Record, Bronx County, New York,” http://wwii-army.
mooseroots.com/l/3148004/John-J-Bazan; Photos of John Bazan, Arkhiv
Sluzhby bezpeky Ukraïny (henceforth SBU Archives), fond 13, no. 1200, after
f. 288.
5 Head of Zhovkva MGB department, Major Kudriashov, to head, 2nd de-
partment, Lviv MGB, Colonel Fokin, “Dokladnaia zapiska po delu-fomuliar
no. 7236 na Tkachenko Zinaidu Danilovnu, podozrevaemuiu v prinalezhnosti
k agenture amerikanskoi razvedki,” SBU Archives, fond 13, no. 1200, fols.
370
Notes
325–26; Lieutenant Colonel Reshetnikov (Poltava) to Colonel Fokin (Lviv),

25 March 1948, SBU Archives, fond 13, no. 1200, f. 321.
6 See correspondence between the Zhovkva district MGB office and
MGB headquarters in Lviv and Kyiv between May 1947 and April 1948, SBU
Archives, fond 13, no. 1200, fols. 308–24.
7 Major Kudriashov (Zhovkva) to Colonel Fokin (Lviv), “Dokladnaia
zapiska,” after 25 June 1948, SBU Archives, fond 13, no. 1200, fols. 325–26;
Colonel Fokin and head of 1st section, 2nd department, Lviv MGB director-
ate, Senior Lieutenant Gorbunov, to deputy chief, 2nd department, Ministry
of State Security of Ukraine, Lieutenant Colonel Kovalev, 24 November 1948,
ibid., f. 335; idem to Kudriashov, 24 November 1948, ibid., f. 336.
8 “Spravka po delu-formuliar no. 897 na [Tkachenko] Zinaidu Danilovnu,”
December 1952, SBU Archives, fond 13, no. 1200, fols. 296–98.
December 1952; Senior operative plenipotentiary, 1st section, 2nd department,
Poltava MGB directorate Lieutenant Panfilov; Chief, 1st section, 2nd depart-
ment, Poltava MGB directorate Lieutenant Colonel Meshcheriakov; and
Head, 2nd department, same directorate, Colonel Reshetnikov, “Spravka po
delu-formuliar no. 897” to head, Poltava MGB directorate Colonel Alekseev,
3 March 1953, SBU Archives, fond 13, no. 1200, fols. 281–84.
3 March 1953; “Spravka po delu-formuliar no. 897 na [Tkachenko] Zinaidu
Danilovnu,” December 1952; Senior operative plenipotentiary, 1st section, 1st
department, Poltava MGB directorate Lieutenant Kalńitskii; Chief, 1st sec-
tion Lieutenant Colonel Meshecheriakov, and Head, 2nd department Colonel
Reshetnikov, “Zadanie agentu 1‑go upravleniia MVD USSR ‘Kareninoi,’” July
1953, SBU Archives, fond 13, no. 1200, fols. 290–91.
3 March 1953; “Spravka po delu-formuliar no. 897 na [Tkachenko] Zinaidu
Danilovnu,” December 1952; Lieutenant Colonel Meshcheriakov and Colonel
Reshetnikov, approved by Colonel Alekseev, October 1952, “Plan vvoda v
razrabotku Tkachenko Zinaidy Danilovny agenta ‘Nikolaeva,’” SBU Archives,
fond 13, no. 1200, fols. 302–3; Meshcheriakov, Reshetnikov and Alekseev, “Za-
danie Nikolaevu,” October 1952, ibid., f. 304; “Zadanie Nikolaevu,” October 4,
1952, ibid., f. 306.
12 Joshua Rubenstein, The Last Days of Stalin (New Haven and London,
2016).
3 March 1953, SBU Archives, fond 13, no. 1200, fols. 281–84.
371
14 Panfilov, Meshcheriakov, and Reshetnikov, “Plan verbovki Tkachenko

Zinaidy Danilovny,” approved by Colonel Akopov, head, Poltava MGB direc-
torate, on 3 March 1953, SBU Archives, fond 13, no. 1200, f. 285; “Plan doprosa
Tkachenko Zinaidy Danilovny,” 3 March 1953, ibid., fols. 286–88.
15 Montefiore, Stalin, 651.
16 “Zadanie agentu 1‑go upravleniia MVD USSR ‘Kareninoi,’” July 1953,
SBU Archives, fond 13, no. 1200, fols. 290–91.
17 Senior plenipotentiary, 1st section, 2nd department, Poltava KGB
directorate Lieutenant Kalńitskii; Head, 1st section, Lieutenant Colonel
Lukinykh; Head, 2nd department, Colonel Kolikov, “Zakliuchenie o sdache
dela-formuliara v arkhiv,” 22 September 1954, approved on 23 September 1954
by Major Klochko, head, Poltava directorate, KGB of the Ukrainian Soviet
Socialist Republic, SBU Archives, fond 13, no. 1200, fols. 342–44.
18 “Ukaz Prezidiuma VS SSSR ot 26.11.1953 ‘Ob otmene Ukaza Prezidiuma
Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR ot 15 fevralia 1947 goda ‘O vospreshchenii brakov
mezhdu grazhdanami SSSR i inostrantsami’,” http://bestpravo.com/sssr/
eh-dokumenty/j3n.htm; John Bazan †70 (1911–1981), https://www.sysoon.
com/deceased/john-bazan‑35.
The Soviet Collapse

First published as “The Soviet Union Is Still Collapsing,” For-
eign Policy, 22 December 2016, https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/12/22/
the-unlearned-lessons-from-the-collapse-of-the-soviet-union/.
Chornobyl
Originally published in Spanish in the March/April 2016 issue of Política
Exterior, under the title “La lápida del imperio temerario.”
Truth in Our Times

This essay is based on the Baillie Gifford Prize lecture delivered at the
Edinburgh International Book Festival on 14 August 2019. It first appeared
as a pamphlet published by the Edinburgh Book Festival, Chernobyl: Truth in
Our Times (Edinburgh, 2019).
1 Serhii Plokhy, Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe (New
York, 2018). The British edition appeared under the title Chernobyl: History of
a Tragedy (London, 2018).
372
Notes

First published as “The Return of the Empire: The Ukraine Crisis in Histori-
cal Perspective,” South Central Review 35, no. 1 (2018): 111–26.
1 Vladimir Putin, “Obrashchenie Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii,”
18 March 2014, http://kremlin.ru/news/20603; cf. “Transcript: Putin says Rus-
sia will protect the rights of Russians abroad,” Washington Post, 18 March 2015.
2 Peter Baker, “Pressure Rising as Obama Works to Rein In Russia,” New
York Times, 2 March 2014; Douglas Ernst, “Bill Clinton: Putin Trying to
“re-establish Russian greatness,” Washington Times, 14 May 2014; “Iatseniuk:
Putin mriie vidrodyty SRSR,” BBC Ukraine, 20 April 2014,
http://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/politics/2014/04/140420_yatsenyuk_putin_ok.
3 On the history of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, see Stephen
Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (New York, 2008),
and my The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (New York, 2014).
4 On Ukraine in the 1990s, see Alexander J. Motyl, Dilemmas of Inde-
pendence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism (Washington, D.C., 1993); Bohdan
Harasymiw, Post-Communist Ukraine (Edmonton and Toronto, 2002).
5 On the Orange Revolution, see Andrew Wilson, Ukraine’s Orange Rev-
olution (New Haven and London, 2006); Democratic Revolution in Ukraine:
From Kuchmagate to Orange Revolution, ed. Taras Kuzio (London and New
York, 2013).
6 Oleksandr Zinchenko, “Shchodennyk Maidanu. Pro shcho my todi
dumaly,” Istorychna pravda, 17 February 2015, http://www.istpravda.com.ua/
articles/2015/02/17/147354/. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from
the Russian and Ukrainian are mine.
7 For an overview of events on the Maidan, Kyiv’s Independence Square,
from November 2013 to February 2014, see Andrew Wilson, Ukraine Crisis:
What It Means for the West (New Haven and London, 2014), chapters 4 and 5.
8 “Putin rasskazal, kak prinimalos´ reshenie o vozvrashchenii Kryma,”
NTV, http://www.ntv.ru/novosti/1356399/; Putin, “Obrashchenie Preziden-
ta Rossiiskoi Federatsii,” 18 March 2014, http://kremlin.ru/news/20603.
The Russian takeover of the Crimea is discussed in Wilson, Ukraine Crisis,
chapter 6. On the prehistory of the Russian annexation of the peninsula,
see Taras Kuzio, The Crimea: Europe’s Next Flashpoint? (Washington, D.C.,
2011); Gwendolyn Sasse, The Crimea Question: Identity, Transition, and Conflict
(Cambridge, Mass., 2014).
9 The Russian hybrid war in eastern Ukraine received extensive coverage in
the rapidly growing literature on the Ukraine crisis. Apart from the book by
373
Andrew Wilson cited above, monographic contributions to the field include

Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (London, 2014),
and Rajan Menon and Eugene B. Rumer, Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding
of the Post-Cold War Order (Boston, 2015).
10 “Al´fred Kokh i Boris Nemtsov o realiiakh Rossii i Putina,” Krugozor,
October 2014, http://www.krugozormagazine.com/show/article.2370.html.
11 Philip Rucker, “Hillary Clinton says Putin’s actions are like ‘what Hitler
did back in the ‘30s,’” Washington Post, 5 March 2014; Vera Mironova and
Maria Snegovaya, “Putin is behaving in Ukraine like Milosevic did in Serbia.
History repeats itself,” New Republic, 19 June 2014, http://www.newrepublic.
com/article/118260/putin-behaving-ukraine-milosevic-did-serbia.

First published as “When Stalin Lost His Head: World War II and Memory
Wars in Contemporary Ukraine,” in War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine and
Belarus, ed. Julie Fedor, Markku Kangaspuro, Jussi Lassila, and Tatiana Zhur-
zhenko (Cham, Switzerland, 2017), 171–88.
1 “Komunisty khytristiu vstanovyly Stalina v Zaporizhzhi,” Ukraïns´ka
pravda, 5 May 2010, http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2010/05/5/5010465/;
“Obezholovlenyi skandalńyi pam’iatnyk Stalinu?” Ukraïns´ka pravda, 28 De-
cember 2010, http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2010/12/28/5727613/; “Vid-
povidalńist´ za holovu Stalina vziala na sebe mobilńa hrupa,” Ukraïns´ka pra-
vda, 29 December 2010, http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2010/12/29/5728631/;
“U Zaporizhzhi idol Stalina znyshcheno,” http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=RlmbIZfffNg&feature=related.
2 On the formation and history of the Stalin cult, see Adam Hochschild,
The Unquiet Ghost: Was Stalinism Really Necessary? (New York, 1994); Jan
Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (New Haven and
London, 2012). On the polling data, see Iurii Levada, Ot mnenii k poni-
maniiu: sotsiologicheskie ocherki (Moskva, 2000), 453–59; Sarah Mendelson and
Theodore Gerber, “Failing the Stalin Test,” Foreign Affairs 85, no. 1 ( January–
February 2006); Aleksei Levinson, “Zachem mertvyi Stalin nuzhen zhivym
rossiianam,” Polit.ru, 25 March 2010, http://polit.ru/article/2010/03/25/stalin/;
“Sotsiologi porassuzhdali nad zagadkoi Stalina v sviazi s godovshchinoi smer-
ti—i ‘krovavyi tiran’ i ‘mudryi vozhd´’” News RU, 4 March 2013, http://www.
newsru.com/russia/04mar2013/stalin.html.
3 “Petro I u reitynhu heroïv Ukraïny obiishov Banderu,” TSN, 28 Septem-
ber 2010, http://tsn.ua/ukrayina/petro-i-stav-geroyem-ukrayini.html.
374
Notes
4 “U Zaporozhzhi pidirvaly pam’iatnyk Stalinu,” Ukraïns´ka pravda,

1 January 2011, http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2011/01/1/5740807/; “Stalin
Monument Opens in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine,” http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=exKx46yy0NQ.
5 “Ivan Shekhovtsov. Advokat Stalina,” Vremia, 29 November 2004, http://
timeua.info/011204/shehovcov.html.
6 “Pamiatnik Stalina v Zaporozhé. Rech´ veterana VOV Shekhovtsova,”
YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W9mfJQMOR8.
7 “Kniga otzyvov. Otkrytie pamiatnika I. V. Stalinu. Zaporozhskii obkom
Kompartii Ukrainy,” 2, 4, 5, 11.
8 “U Zaporozhzhi pidirvaly pam’iatnyk Stalinu,” Ukraïns´ka pravda, 1 Jan-
uary 2011; “Pam’iatnyk Stalinu vidnovyly,” Ukraïns´ka pravda, 29 December
2010, http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2010/12/29/5731032/.
9 “U Zaporozhzhi pidirvaly pam’iatnyk Stalinu,” Ukraïns´ka pravda, 1 Jan-
uary 2011.
10 “Vidpovidalńist´ za pidryv pam’iatnyka Stalinu vziala na sebe orhaniza
tsiia ‘Rukh Pershoho sichnia.’ Ofitsiina zaiava,” Politiko, 1 January 2011, http://
politiko.ua/blogpost50828.
11 “U poshukakh terorystiv,” Halyts´kyi korespondent, http://www.gk-press.
if.ua/node/4236.
12 “Petro I u reitynhu heroïv Ukraïny obiishov Banderu,” TSN, 28 Septem-
ber 2010.
13 “Stepan Bandera—heroi Ukraïny,” Radio Svoboda, 23 January 2010, http://
www.radiosvoboda.org/content/article/1936818.html.
14 Iurii Lukanov, “Spasybi Banderi za pam’iatnyk Stalinu,” Livyi bereh,
LB.ua, 10 May 2010, http://society.lb.ua/life/2010/05/10/43269_spasibi_
banderi_za_pamyatnik_sta.html.
15 “Cherez pidryv pam’iatnyka Stalinu KPU vymahaie zabraty heroia u
Bandery,” Zaxid.net, 1 January 2011, http://zaxid.net/home/showSingleNews.
do?cherez_pidriv_pamrzquoyatnika_stalinu_kpu_vimagaye_zabrati_ge-
roya_u_banderi&objectId=1119893.
16 Clifford J. Levy, “Hero of Ukraine Prize to Wartime Partisan Revoked,”
New York Times, 12 January 2011, A11; “EU to Ukraine’s New President:
Please Reverse Honoring Nazi Collaborator,” RT, 25 February 2010, http://
rt.com/politics/eu-resolution-bandera/; “Kniga otzyvov. Otkrytie pamiatnika
I. V. Stalinu. Zaporozhskii obkom Kompartii Ukrainy,” 2.
17 See articles by Kost´ Bondarenko, Iaroslav Hrytsak, Mykola Riabchuk,
Volodymyr Kulyk, and Andrii Portnov in Strasti za Banderoiu, comp. Tarik
Syril Amar, Ihor Balyns´kyi, and Iaroslav Hrytsak (Kyïv, 2010), 321–40.
375
18 Iaroslav Hrytsak, “Shche raz pro Iushchenka, shche raz pro Banderu,” in
Strasti za Banderoiu, 340–45; Hrytsak, “Klopoty z pam’iattiu,” ibid., 346–57.
19 See the articles by David Marples, Zenon Kohut, Timothy Snyder, Alex-
ander Motyl, Per Anders Rudling, John-Paul Himka, and Moisei Fishbein in
Strasti za Banderoiu, 129–309.
20 “V Zaporozhé s drakami i skandalom otkryli novyi pamiatnik Stali-
nu,” MIG.news.com.ua, 7 November 2011, http://mignews.com.ua/ru/arti-
cles/92033.html.
21 “V Zaporozhé Gitler voproshaet gorozhan, chem on khuzhe Stalina,
i trebuet sebe pamiatnik,” Bagnet, 6 December 2011, http://www.bagnet.org/
news/society/168114.
22 “V Zaporozhé prodolzhaetsia bor´ba s pamiatnikom Stalinu,” Novosti,
12 January 2012, http://abzac.org/?p=12383.
23 “‘Nasha Ukraina’ prizvala dobit´ stalinizm i spasti ‘trizubovtsev,’” Gazeta.
ua, 23 November 2011, http://gazeta.ua/ru/articles/politics/_nasha-ukraina-
prizvala-ukraincev-dobit-stalinizm-i-spasti-trizubovcev/410984.
24 “Sprava Stalina zhyve, abo derzhavnyi teroryzm v Ukraïni
21 stolittia,” Pohliad, 27 June 2012, http://poglyad.te.ua/podii/
sprava-stalina-zhyve-abo-derzhavnyj-teroryzm-v-ukrajini‑21‑stolittya/.
Goodbye Lenin!
This essay was first published online under the title “Goodbye Lenin! A
Memory Shift in Revolutionary Ukraine” as part of the MAPA: Digital Atlas
of Ukraine project, https://gis.huri.harvard.edu/leninfall. It appears here for
the first time in print.
1 Reuters Timeline: Political crisis in Ukraine and Russia’s occupation
of Crimea, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-timeline-
idUSBREA270PO20140308; BBC Ukraine Crisis: Timeline, http://www.bbc.
com/news/world-middle-east‑26248275; Andrew Wilson, Ukraine Crisis: What
It Means for the West (New Haven and London, 2014), 66–85.
2 “Istoriia pam’iatnyka Leninu v Kyievi,” Istorychna pravda, 9 December
2013, http://www.istpravda.com.ua/articles/2013/12/9/140323/.
3 “Na Lenini lytsia nemaie! Ukraïns´ka presa u seredu,” BBC Ukraine, 1 July
2009, http://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/pressreview/story/2009/07/090701_ua_
press_1_06.shtml; “Sud otlozhil na neopredelennoe vremia srok rassmotreniia
dela o razrushenii pamiatnika Leninu v Kieve,” Korrespondent, 9 April 2013.
376
Notes
4 “MVS povidomliaie pro 8 hospitalizovanykh militsioneriv pislia sutychky

bilia pam’iatnyka Leninu,” Tyzhden.ua, 1 December 2013, http://tyzhden.ua/
News/95462.
5 Oleksandr Aronets´, “Povalennia pam’iatnyka Leninu v Kyievi,” YouTube,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVgjjv0WcX8#t=516; “Svobodivtsi
vzialy na sebe vidpovidalńist´ za povalennia Lenina,” IPress, 8 December
2013, http://ipress.ua/news/svobodivtsi_vzyaly_na_sebe_vidpovidalnist_za_
povalenogo_lenina_35123.html; “Povalennia pam’iatnyka Leninu v Kyievi,”
Wikipedia, uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Повалення пам’ятника Леніну в Києві.
6 “V Kieve vozveli barrikady i snesli pamiatnik Leninu,” BBC Russia,
9 December 2013, http://www.bbc.com/russian/international/2013/12/131208_
ukraine_kiev_lenin; Mariia Semenchenko, “Valentyn Syl´vestrov: chytaite
Shevchenka poky ne pizno,” Den´, 29 December 2013.
7 “Khronolohiia Leninopadu (2013–2014),” https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Хронологія_Ленінопаду_(2013–2014); Oleksandra Haidai, Kam’ianyi hist´:
Lenin u tsentralńii Ukraïni (Kyïv, 2016), 172–89.
8 “Khronolohiia Leninopadu (2013–2014),” https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Хронологія_Ленінопаду_(2013–2014).
9 Vitalii Chervonenko, “Rada ukhvalyla ‘dekomunizatsiinyi paket,’” BBC
Ukraine, 9 April 2015, http://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/politics/2015/04/150409_
communizm_upa_vc; “Poroshenko signs laws on denouncing Communist,
Nazi regimes,” Interfax-Ukraine, 16 May 2015, http://en.interfax.com.ua/
news/general/265988.html; “Khronolohiia Leninopadu (2013–2014),” https://
uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Хронологія_Ленінопаду_(2013–2014); “Khro-
nolohiia Leninopadu (2015),” https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Хронологія_
Ленінопаду_(2015); “Khronolohiia Leninopadu (2016),” https://uk.wikipedia.
org/wiki/Хронологія_Ленінопаду_(2016); “Khronolohiia Leninopadu
(2017),” https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Хронологія_Ленінопаду_(2017).
10 “History and Identity,” MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine,
http://harvard-cga.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.
html?id=5c2c743e132f4b048293d3e3adc075fc.
11 On Ukraine’s memory wars, see Oxana Shevel, “Memory of the Past and
Visions of the Future: Remembering the Soviet Era and Its End in Ukraine,”
in Twenty Years After Communism, ed. Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik
(Oxford, 2014), 146–69; Shevel, “The Politics of Memory in a Divided Society:
A Comparison of Post-Franco Spain and Post-Soviet Ukraine,” Slavic Review
70, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 137–64.
12 Dominique Arel, “Language and the Politics of Ethnicity: The Case
of Ukraine,” University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1993, http://
377
www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/23297; Lowell W. Barrington and Erik

S. Herron, “One Ukraine or Many? Regionalism in Ukraine and Its Political
Consequences,” Nationalities Papers 32, no. 1 (2004): 53–86; Mykola Riab-
chuk, “Ukraine: One State, Two Countries,” Transit Online 23 (2002), http://
www.eurozine.com/pdf/2002–09–16‑riabchuk-en.pdf.; Gwendolyn Sasse,
“The ‘New’ Ukraine: A State of Regions,” Regional & Federal Studies 11, no. 3
(2010): 69–100.
13 “Ikonohrafika. Padinnia vozhdia. Liutyi 2014,” http://incognita.day.kiev.
ua/infohraphics/padinnya-vozhdya.html.
14 Haidai, Kam’ianyi hist´, 102–32.
15 Pavlo Podobied, “Vid Leninizmu do Leninopadu,” Radio Svoboda,
30 December 2014, https://www.radiosvoboda.org/a/26770232.html.
16 “Yanukovych: Famine of 1930s was not genocide against Ukrainians,”
Kyiv Post, 27 April 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20140724173055/http://
www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/yanukovych-famine-of‑1930s-was-not-
genocide-agains.html.
17 The decommunization laws provoked debate among Ukraine-watchers
and produced a significant literature, including the following: Volodymyr
Viatrovych, “Dekomunizatsiia i akademichna dyskusiia,” Krytyka, May 2015,
https://krytyka.com/ua/solutions/opinions/dekomunizatsiya-i-akademichna-
dyskusiya; David Marples, “Decommunisation in Ukraine: Implementation,
Pros and Cons,” New Eastern Europe, 16 September 2016, http://neweaster-
neurope.eu/articles-and-commentary/2126‑decommunisation-in-ukraine;
Oxana Shevel, “Decommunization in Post-Euromaidan Ukraine: Law and
Practice,” PONARS Eurasia, January 2016, http://www.ponarseurasia.org/
memo/decommunization-post-euromaidan-ukraine-law-and-practice.
18 For lists of deputies who voted for and against the Law of Ukraine on
the Condemnation of the Communist and Nazi Regimes, see the records
of the Ukrainian parliament at http://w1.c1.rada.gov.ua/pls/radan_gs09/
ns_golos?g_id=1427.
19 “Prykarpattia uviishlo u knyhu rekordiv Ukraïny za kil´kistiu pam’iatny-
kiv Shevchenku,” Radio Svoboda, 30 December 2014, https://www.radiosvo-
boda.org/a/26769910.html; “Pam’iatnyky Stepanovi Banderi,” https://uk.wiki-
pedia.org/wiki/Пам%27ятники_Степанові_Бандері; “P’iat´ pam’iatnykiv
Stepanovi Banderi, shcho naibil´she nahaduit´ skul´ptury Lenina,” Gazeta.
ua, 8 December 2009, https://gazeta.ua/articles/people-and-things-journal/_
pyat-pamyatnikiv-stepanovi-banderi-scho-najbilshe-nagaduyut-skulpturi-
lenina/318953.
378
Notes
20 “Stalo izvestno, skol´ko pamiatnikov Bandere v Ukraine,” Apostrof, 15 Oc-

tober 2016, https://apostrophe.ua/news/society/2016–10–15/stalo-izvestno-
skolko-pamyatnikov-bandere-v-ukraine-opublikovana-infografika/74209.
21 “Banderyzatsiï nemaie—Viatrovych krytykam dekomunizatsiï,” Gazeta.
ua, 25 January 2017, https://gazeta.ua/articles/life/_banderizaciyi-nemaye-
vyatrovich-kritikam-dekomunizaciyi/748417; “Pro ‘banderyzatsiiu’ til´ky fakty,”
Volodymyr Viatrovych, Facebook post, 16 January 2017, https://www.facebook.
com/volodymyr.viatrovych/posts/10208193515895091.
22 Interviews with Kyivans, 2 February 2014, University of St. Gallen
University Project “Region, Nation, and Beyond: An Interdisciplinary and
Transcultural Reconsideration of Ukraine.”
23 Author’s observations from his visit to the monument site on 16 Septem-
ber 2017.
24 Data on the use of pedestals was collected by Viktoriya Sereda.

First published in Cossacks in Jamaica, Ukraine at the Antipodes: Essays in Honor
of Marko Pavlyshyn, ed. Alessandro Achilli, Serhy Yekelchyk, and Dmytro
Yesypenko (Brookline, Mass., 2020).
1 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Kak nam obustroit´ Rossiiu? (Paris, 1990); Solzhe-
nitsyn, “Russkii vopros v kontse XX veka,” Novyi mir, 1994, no. 7; Solzheni-
tsyn, Rossiia v obvale (Moskva, 1998).
2 Solzhenitsyn, Rossiia v obvale, 79.
3 “Putin Hints at Splitting Up Ukraine,” Moscow Times, 8 April 2008,
www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/putin-hints-at-splitting-up-
ukraine/361701.html.
4 For an in-depth treatment of these questions, see my Lost Kingdom:
A History of Russian Nationalism from Ivan the Great to Vladimir Putin (Lon-
don, 2017).
5 On the appropriation of the Kyivan heritage in early modern Muscovy,
see “Novaia imperskaia istoriia Severnoi Evrazii,” chapter 5, ed. I. Gerasi-
mov, S. Glebov, A. Kaplunovskii, M. Mogilner, and A. Semenov, Ab Imperio
2014, no. 3: 363–407; V.T. Pashuto, B. N. Floria, and A. L. Khoroshkevich,
Drevnerusskoe nasledie i istoricheskie sud´by vostochnogo slavianstva (Moskva,
1982); Jaroslaw Pelenski, The Contest for the Legacy of Kievan Rus´ (Boulder,
Colo., 1998); Serhii Plokhy, The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identi-
ties in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (Cambridge, 2006).
379
6 On the “grand strategy” of the Russian Empire, see John P. LeDonne, The
Russian Empire and the World, 1700–1917: The Geopolitics of Expansion and Con-
tainment (Oxford, 1997); John P. LeDonne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian
Empire, 1650–1831 (Oxford, 2003).
7 On the role of Orthodoxy in Russian political culture and East European
history, see Donald Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols: Cross-Cultural In-
fluences on the Steppe Frontier, 1304–1589 (Cambridge, 2002); Tatiana Tairova-
Yakovleva, “The Role of the Religious Factor and Patriarch Nikon in the
Unification of Ukraine and Muscovy,” Acta Poloniae Historica 110 (2014): 5–22;
Barbara Skinner, The Western Front of the Eastern Church: Uniate and Orthodox
Conflict in Eighteenth-Century Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia (DeKalb,
Ill., 2009); Mikhail Dolbilov, Russkii krai, chuzhaia vera: Ėtnokonfessionalńaia
politika imperii v Litve i Belorussii pri Aleksandre II (Moskva, 2010); Nathaniel
Davies, A Long Road to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy,
2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo., 2003).
8 On the Synopsis and its place in Russian and Ukrainian historiography,
see articles by Zenon Kohut in his Making Ukraine: Studies on Political Cul-
ture, Historical Narrative, and Identity (Edmonton and Toronto, 2011).
9 On the rise of state nationalism in imperial Russia, see Hans Rogger,
National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1960);
Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.,
1992); Vera Tolz, Russia: Inventing the Nation (London and New York, 2001).
10 On the ethnic “fragmentation” of Eastern Europe in the first half of
the nineteenth century, see Serhiy Bilenky, Romantic Nationalism in Eastern
Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford, Calif.,
2012); Vytautas Petronis, Constructing Lithuania: Ethnic Mapping in Tsarist
Russia, ca. 1800–1914 (Stockholm, 2007); Steven Seegel, Mapping Europe’s
Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (Chicago and London,
2012); Darius Staliunas, Making Russians: Meaning and Practice of Russifica-
tion in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863 (Amsterdam and New York, 2007);
P. V. Tereshkovich, Ėtnicheskaia istoriia Belarusi XIX–nachala XX vv. v kontek-
ste Tsentralńo-Vostochnoi Evropy (Minsk, 2004).
11 On the rise of Ukrainian political activism, see Alexei Miller, The
Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth
Century (Budapest and New York, 2003); Orest Pelech, “The History of the
St. Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood Reexamined,” in Synopsis: A Collection
of Essays in Honour of Zenon E. Kohut, ed. Serhii Plokhy and Frank Sysyn
(Edmonton and Toronto, 2005), 335–44; Johannes Remy, “The Valuev Circular
and Censorship of Ukrainian Publications in the Russian Empire (1863–1876):
380
Notes
Intention and Practice,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 49, nos. 1–2 (2007): 87–110;
David Saunders, “Mikhail Katkov and Mykola Kostomarov: A Note on Petr
A. Valuev’s Anti-Ukrainian Edict of 1863,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 17,
nos. 3–4 (1993): 365–83; Saunders, “Pan-Slavism in the Ukrainian National
Movement from the 1840s to the 1870s,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 30, no. 2
(Winter 2005): 27–50; Saunders, “Russia and Ukraine under Alexander II: The
Valuev Edict of 1863,” International History Review 17, no. 1 (1995): 23–50.
12 On imperial policies and the rise of modern nationalism in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Theodore R. Weeks, Nation
and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and Russification on the Western
Frontier, 1863–1914 (DeKalb, Ill., 1996); Faith Hillis, Children of Rus´: Right-
Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation (Ithaca and London, 2013);
D. A. Kotsiubinskii, Russkii natsionalizm v nachale XX stoletiia: Rozhdenie
i gibel´ ideologii Vserossiiskogo natsionalńogo soiuza (Moskva, 2001).
13 On the nationality question in the Russian Revolution and the formation
of the Soviet Union, see Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union:
Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1997);
Anna Procyk, Russian Nationalism and Ukraine: The Nationality Policy of the
Volunteer Army during the Civil War (Edmonton and Toronto, 1995); Stephen
Velychenko, Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red: The Ukrainian Marxist
Critique of Russian Communist Rule in Ukraine, 1918–1925 (Toronto, 2015).
14 On national communism, korenizatsiia and their impact on the develop-
ment of Ukrainian and Belarusian culture, see Terry Martin, The Affirmative
Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca
and London, 2001); Terry Martin, “An Affirmative Action Empire: The Soviet
Union as the Highest Form of Imperialism,” in A State of Nations: Empire and
Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, ed. Ronald Grigor Sunny and
Terry Martin (Oxford, 2001), 67–92; George Y. Shevelov, The Ukrainian Lan-
guage in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (1900–1941): Its State and Status
(Cambridge, Mass., 1989); Per Anders Rudling, The Rise and Fall of Belarusian
Nationalism, 1906–1931 (Pittsburgh, 2015).
15 On the “Russian Question” in the USSR, see Aleksandr Vdovin, Russkie
v XX veke: fakty, sobytiia, liudi (Moskva, 2004); Francine Hirsch, Empire of
Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca
and London, 2005); Geoffrey A. Hosking, Rulers and Victims: The Russians in
the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).
16 Concerning the impact of World War II on Russian and Ukrainian
nationalism, see David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass
Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956
381
(Cambridge, Mass., 2002); Serhy Yekelchyk, Stalin’s Empire of Memory:

Russian-Ukrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical Imagination (Toronto,
2014); Serhii Plokhy, “The Call of Blood: Government Propaganda and Public
Response to the Soviet Entry into World War II,” Cahiers du monde russe 52,
nos. 2–3 (2011): 293–320.
17 On Russian nationalism after World War II, see Yitzhak M. Brudny,
Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991 (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 2000); Simon Cosgrove, Russian Nationalism and the Politics of
Soviet Literature: The Case of Nash Sovremennik 1981–91 (New York, 2004);
John Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism (Princeton, N.J.,
1983); Nikolai Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia: Dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov
v SSSR, 1953–1985 (Moskva, 2003); Roman Szporluk, Russia, Ukraine, and the
Breakup of the Soviet Union (Stanford, Calif., 2001).
18 On nationalist mobilization and the fall of the USSR, see Mark
R. Beissinger, Nationalist Mobilization and the Collapse of the Soviet State
(Cambridge, UK, 2002); George W. Breslauer and Catherine Dale, “Boris
Yeltsin and the Invention of a Russian Nation-State,” Post-Soviet Affairs 13,
no. 4 (1997): 303–32; Timothy Colton, Yeltsin: A Life (New York, 2008); David
D. Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the New
Abroad (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998); Serhii Plokhy, The Last Empire: The Final Days of
the Soviet Union (New York, 2014).
19 On Russian nationalism and foreign policy after the Soviet collapse,
see Russian Nationalism and the National Reassertion of Russia, ed. Marlene
Laruelle (London and New York, 2009); Marlene Laruelle, In the Name of
the Nation: Nationalism and Politics in Contemporary Russia (New York, 2009);
Igor Torbakov, “Emulating Global Big Brother: The Ideology of American
Empire and Its Influence on Russia’s Framing of Its Policies in Post-Soviet
Eurasia,” Turkish Review of Eurasian Studies 2003, no. 3: 41–72; Igor Torbakov,
“A Parting of Ways? The Kremlin Leadership and Russia's New-Generation
National Thinkers,” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratiza-
tion 23, no. 4 (Fall 2015): 427–57; Igor Torbakov, “Ukraine and Russia: Entan-
gled Histories, Contested Identities, and a War of Narratives,” in Revolution
and War in Contemporary Ukraine: The Challenge of Change, ed. Olga Bertelsen
(Stuttgart, 2016), 89–120; Andrei P. Tsygankov, Russia’s Foreign Policy: Change
and Continuity in National Identity (Lanham, Md., 2006); Andreas Umland,
“Eurasian Union vs. Fascist Eurasia,” New Eastern Europe, 19 November 2015;
Andrew Wilson, Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West (New Haven,
Conn., 2014), 118–43.
382
Notes
20 On the Russo-Ukrainian War, see Andrew Wilson, Ukraine Crisis: What

It Means for the West (New Haven, Conn., 2014); Serhy Yekelchyk, The Conflict
in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York, 2015).

The first version of this essay appeared as a brochure entitled Ukraine’s Quest
for Europe: Borders, Cultures, Identities (Saskatoon, 2007).
1 “Comment of Roman Shpek, Representative of Ukraine to the EU, re-
garding the statement of B. Ferrero-Waldner, EU Commissioner (Ukrainian
Service “BBC”),” http://ukraine-eu.mfa.gov.ua/eu/en/publication/con-
tent/2094.htm.
2 See Ahto Lobjakas, “EU: Updated ‘Action Plan’ for Ukraine Wards Off
Talk of Membership,” Brussels, 24 January 2005, RFE/RL, http://www.rferl.
org/featuresarticle/2005/01/86C89707–1759–4DAE‑8774–7FF75DAC0710.html.
3 George Parker, “Our Rotten, Defensive Attitude to Change,” Financial
Times, 15 November 2006.
4 “Statí o narodnoi poėzii” in Vissarion Belinskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 9
vols. (Moskva, 1976–82), 4: 163–64.
5 Mykhailo Drahomanov, “The Lost Epoch: Ukrainians under the Mus-
covite Tsardom, 1654–1876,” in Towards an Intellectual History of Ukraine: An
Anthology of Ukrainian Thought from 1710 to 1995, ed. Ralph Lindheim and
George S. N. Luckyj (Toronto, 1996), 157.
6 Ibid., 160.
7 “Novi perspektyvy” (1918) in Mykhailo Hrushevs´kyi, Na porozi novoï
Ukraïny: Statti i dzherelńi materialy, ed. Lubomyr R. Wynar (Kyïv, 1992),
21–22.
8 See Mykola Khvylovy, “Pamphlets (Excerpts),” in Towards an Intellectual
History of Ukraine, 276–77.
9 Quoted in Serhii Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky
and the Writing of Ukrainian History (Toronto, 2005), 244.
10 Wall Street Journal, 26 September 2005.
11 The Action Ukraine Report (Washington, D.C.), no. 575, article 13, 3 Octo-
ber 2005.
12 Iurii Andrukhovych, “Evropa, moï nevrozy,” Krytyka 10, no. 5 (May
2006): 29–30.
13 See Mykola Riabchuk, “Zbii prohramy,” Krytyka 11, nos. 1–2 ( January–
February 2007): 2–4.
383
14 Viktor Yanukovych, “Ukraine’s Choice: Toward Europe,” Washington Post,

5 October 2006, A33.
15 See Alexander J. Motyl, “Institutional Legacies and Systemic Transfor-
mation in Eastern Europe: Ukraine, Russia and the EU.” Ukrainian version in
Krytyka 9, nos. 7–8 ( July–August 2005): 17.

First published as “The ‘New Eastern Europe’: What to Do with the Histo-
ries of Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova?” East European Politics and Societies 25,
no. 4 (November 2011): 763–69.
1 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York, 2006),
752–53.

The first version of this essay appeared under the title “The EuroRevolution:
Ukraine and the New Map of Europe,” in Ukraine and Europe: Cultural En-
counters and Negotiations, ed. Giovanna Brogi Bercoff, Marko Pavlyshyn, and
Serhii Plokhy (Toronto, 2017), 433–48.
1 Andrew Wilson, Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West (New Haven,
Conn., 2014).
2 “Romantic weekend in the heart of Europe!” http://www.klubkiev.com/
index.php/romantic-weekend; “The Center of Europe,” http://www.tripfilms.
com/Travel_Video-v64305-Kiev-The_Center_of_Europe-Video-Embed.html;
Kiev Studio, http://crytek.com/career/studios/overview/kiev; “Kiev Apart-
ments,” http://www.facebook.com/Kiev.Apartments.Rent.
3 “Romantic weekend in the heart of Europe!” http://www.klubkiev.com/
index.php/romantic-weekend; “The Center of Europe,” http://www.tripfilms.
com/Travel_Video-v64305-Kiev-The_Center_of_Europe-Video-Embed.html;
Kiev Studio, http://crytek.com/career/studios/overview/kiev; “Kiev Apart-
ments,” http://www.facebook.com/Kiev.Apartments.Rent.
4 Oscar Halecki, The Limits and Divisions of European History (New York,
1950); Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” New York Review of
Books 31, no. 7 (26 April 1984): 33–38.
5 Friedrich Naumann, Mitteleuropa (Berlin, 1915); Peter Bugge, “The Na-
tion Supreme: The Idea of Europe, 1914–45” in Pim den Boer et al., The History
of the Idea of Europe (London, 1993), 60–70; Bo Strath, “Mitteleuropa from
List to Naumann,” European Journal of Social Theory 11 (May 2008): 171–83.
384
Notes
6 See the official portal of the Visegrád group at http://www.visegradgroup.

eu/main.php. On the origins of civilizational bias in Western treatment of
Eastern Europe, see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civili-
zation on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, Calif., 1994).
7 On the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which brought German and Austro-
Hungarian troops to Ukraine, see John Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk:
The Forgotten Peace, March 1918 (London, 1938; repr. New York, 1971). On the
German and Austro-Hungarian visions of Ukrainian statehood, see Mark
von Hagen, War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans
in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914–1918 (Seattle, 2007); Timothy Snyder, The Red
Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke (New York, 2008), 99–120.
8 On the “Russian revolution” in European cartography, see Vera Tolz,
Russia: Inventing the Nation (New York, 2001), 155–61.
9 N. Gardner, “Pivotal Points: Defining Europe’s Centre,” Hidden Europe 5
(November 2005): 20–21; “Dilove. The Center of Europe,” http://www.castles.
com.ua/dilove.html.
10 Fragments d’Europe—Atlas de l’Europe médiane et orientale, ed. Michel
Foucher (Paris, 1998), 55, 60.
11 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of
World Order (New York, 1996), 157. On the establishment of the Uniate (Greek
Catholic) Church, see Borys Gudziak, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metro-
politanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Genesis of the Union of Brest
(Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
12 On the liquidation of the Greek Catholic Church, see Bohdan R. Bo-
ciurkiw, The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State, 1939–1950
(Edmonton, 1996).
13 See articles on the website of the EU-sponsored program “Rights of
Refugees and Migrants in Ukraine,” http://www.migration.org.ua/english/
index.html.
14 Cynthia Kroet, “EU approves visa-free travel for Ukrainians,” Politico,
11 May 2017, http://www.politico.eu/article/eu-approves-visa-free-travel-
for-ukrainians/; “V ES khotiat 53% ukraintsev, v Tamozhennyi Soiz—28%,”
24kanal, 5 April 2014, http://24tv.ua/news/showNews.do?v_es_hotyat_53_
ukraintsev_v_tamozhenniy_ soyuz__28&objectId=429597&lang=ru;
Katie Simmons, Bruce Stokes, and Jacob Poushter, “Ukrainian Public
Opinion: Dissatisfied with Current Conditions, Looking for an End to
the Crisis,” Pew Research Center, 10 June 2015, http://www.pewglobal.
org/2015/06/10/3‑ukrainian-public-opinion-dissatisfied-with-current-
conditionslooking- for-an-end-to-the-crisis/.
385
15 Anastasiia Zanuda, “Shcho dumaiut´ ievropeitsi pro Ukraïnu ta ïï
vstup v IeS,” BBC Ukraine, 24 June 2015, http://www.bbc.com/ukrainian/
politics/2015/06/150624_europeans_ukraine_az.
Index
Adamovich, Ales, 244 Assembly of the Land, 46, 49

Adams, Arthur E., 5 Avakov, Arsen, 233
Afinogenov (retired major), 246
Agreement on Partnership and Babel, Isaac, 331
Cooperation between the Baburin, Aleksei, 244
EU and Ukraine, 315 Baltic states, 328–329, 345–346
agriculture Balynsky, Ihor, 252
collectivization of, 95, Balytsky, Vsevolod, 101
99–100, 109–111, 128 Bandera, Stepan, xi, 223fig, 224fig,
colonization and, 26–27 241–243, 247–252, 274–275, 279
Ahmed I, 35 Bantysh-Kamensky, Dmitrii, 3, 75
Aksenov, Sergei, 231 Barbara, Saint, 50
Aleksandrov, Anatolii, 184–185 Batory, King Stefan, 18, 23, 30, 60
Aleksei Mikhailovich, Bazan, John J., 170–178
Tsar, 48, 51, 287 Belarus, independence of, 89
Allen, W.E.D., 4 Belenky, Aleksandr, 246
Amar, Tarik, 252 Belinsky, Vissarion, 303–304
American Revolution, 83 Benadsky (student), 151
Andrukhovych, Yurii, 314, 318–319 Berestechko, battle of (1651), 46
Anti-Comintern Pact, 294 Beriia, Lavrentii, 137, 150,
anti-Semitism, 175–176, 177, 151–152, 158, 177
247–248, 252, 295 Berlin blockade, 165
Antonii, Saint, 50 besieged fortress mentality,
Antonovych, Volodymyr, 56, 306 145, 147, 161
Applebaum, Anne, 96–98, 102, 103 Bessarabia, 157, 161
Arab Spring, 238 Bezborodko, Oleksandr, 3, 303
387
Bible, 1, 21, 22, 49 Greek Catholics, 288, 309, 346

Biden, Hunter, x Uniate Church and, 331, 343
Biden, Joseph, x Union of Hadiach and, 63
Bielski, Joachim, 28–29 Central Powers, 89
Bielski, Marcin, 28–29 Central Rada, 88, 89, 90
Bila Tserkva, 31–32, 52 Charles XII (King of Sweden),
Bismarck, Otto von, 338 59, 65–67, 72–78, 83
Blix, Hans, 186 Chatham House Prize, 317
Bodin, Jean, 83 Chernobyl (HBO/Sky
Bolkhovsky, Semen, 50 miniseries), 191, 202–203
Bolsheviks, 90, 97–98, 99, 141, 163– Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear
164, 181, 258–259, 292–293, 294 Catastrophe (Plokhy), 191
Bondarenko, Kostyantyn, 106, 263 Chevalier, Pierre, 2
Boretsky, Iov, 41–42, 44 Chornobyl, 183–190, 191–204
Borodai, Aleksandr, 235 Christianity
Brexit, 203 Cossacks and, 28
Brezhnev, Leonid, 295 Mazepa and, 81–82
Brief Compendium of Teachings about See also Catholic Church;
the Articles of the Faith, 49 Orthodox Church;
Brief Description of Little Uniate Church
Russia, 64, 75 Chubar, Vlas, 112, 114, 116, 126
Briukhanov, Viktor, 194, 196 Church Slavonic, 22, 290
Brotherhood of SS. Cyril and Churchill, Winston, 148, 161,
Methodius, 291, 304 163–164, 165, 344
Brown, Edward, 2 Cimmerians, 1
Budapest Memorandum (1994), 225 Civil War, The (Twardowski), 60
Bukovyna, 161 Clash of Civilizations
Bush, George W., 285 (Huntington), 343
Buturlin, Vasilii, 46, 50, 52–53 Clement VIII, Pope, 33
Byron, 67 Climacters (Kochowski), 62
Byzantine Empire/heritage, Clinton, Bill, 226
285–286, 287 Clinton, Hillary, 238
Cold War, 4, 161–162, 164–166,
Calvin, John, 21 170–178, 344–345
cannibalism, 122 Coleman, Heather, 11
Carpatho-Volhynian dialects, 25 collectivization of agriculture,
Catherine II, empress, 3, 38, 67, 95, 99–100, 109–111, 128
79, 286, 289, 303, 340 colonization, 26–27
Catholic Church Commonwealth of Independent
Cossacks and, 33–34, 35 States, 227, 296, 317
388
Index
Conquest, Robert, 97 Decommunization Laws, xi–xii,

conspiracy theories, Chornobyl 261–262, 268–269, 271, 273, 279
and, 202–203 Delo Stalina-”prestupnika” i ego
Constitution of 1711, 74 “zashchitnika” (The Case of
Conversation between Great and Stalin the “Criminal” and of His
Little Russia (Divovych), 79, 84 “Defender”; Shekhovtsov), 244
Cossacks Demchenko, M., 115
attacks from, 29, 32 Den (The Day), 266
Battle of Poltava and, 65–66 Denikin, Anton, 89
efforts to recruit, 30–31, 35 Desnitsky, Metropolitan Mikhail, 68
Hetmanate and, 37 de-Stalinization, 295
historical context for wars of, 2 Diatlov, Anatolii, 197
Khmelnytsky Uprising and, 46 Digital Atlas of Ukraine
Pereiaslav Agreement (MAPA), 106–107
and, 37–38, 52–53, 305 Dimitrov, Georgi, 132, 134, 140, 142
Radvila map and, 27–29, 34–35 Discourse of the Original, Country,
rebaptism and, 43–44 Manners, Government and
Union of Hadiach and, 55–64 Religion of the Cossacks,
uprisings of, 31–32 A (Chevalier), 2
Zaporozhian, 33–34, 47–48 Divovych, Semen, 79, 83–84
Council for Cooperation between Dnieper, Radvila map and, 27
Ukraine and the EU, 315 “Does Ukraine Have a History?”
Council of Europe, 254 (von Hagen), 7–8
Council of Florence (1439), 287 Donbas, war in, ix, xi, 14,
Council of Polatsk (1839), 288 232–237, 261, 285, 335
Counter-Reformation, 343 Dontsov, Dmytro, 10
Crimea, Russian seizure of, ix, xi, xii, Doroshenko, Dmytro, 4
9, 14, 181, 225–227, 231–232, 237– Drach, Ivan, 187, 189
238, 261, 285, 296–297, 335, 347 Drahomanov, Mykhailo,
Crimean Peninsula, transfer 3, 56, 305–306, 323
of sovereignty over, 39 Drahomanov, Svitozor, 152
Crimean Tatars, 24–25 Dyczok, Marta, 12, 13
Crimean War, 291 Dzerkalo tyzhnia (Weekly
CSCE, 254 Mirror), 320
Curzon Line, 139 Dzerzhinsky, Feliks, 91–92
Czechoslovakia, 4, 139, 143, 144, Dziuba, Ivan, 10, 313
165, 309, 311, 339–340, 346
East-Central Europe, 311–312,
Davies, Sarah, 153 326–327, 337, 342
Eastern Europe, New, 325–333
389
Enlightenment, 3, 340 Future of the Past, The, 9–12

EU Eastern Partnership
Program, 327 Galicia, 3, 10–11, 25, 38, 138–139, 157,
Euromaidan Revolution, ix, 267, 269, 274, 292, 309–311, 314
9, 228–230, 238, 257–258, Galicia-Volhynia, 20–21
267, 270, 276–277, 335 Gedye, G. E. R., 147, 157
European Neighborhood Policy, 320 Geographic Information System
European Union (GIS)-based Digital
Association Agreement with, Atlas of the Holodomor,
ix, 228–229, 257–258, 315, 335 106–107, 127–129, 264
attempt to join, 299–323, 347 German Press Agency
immigration and, 344–345 (DNB), 141–142
Russia-Ukraine conflict Gerritsz (Gerard), Hessel, 18
and, 238–239 Gershanovich, D. K., 177
sanctions from, 230 Giedraitis, Bishop Merkelis, 19
Eurovision song contest, 321 Girkin, Igor, 233, 235
Executionists, 20 glasnost, 40, 187, 197–198
Eyewitness Chronicle (Rakushka- Glazev, Sergei, 230
Romanovsky), 58–59, 61 Golden Horde, 19, 53
Gomerbarg (student), 154
famine. See Great Famine Gorbachev, Mikhail, 181, 185–188,
(Holodomor) 195–198, 203, 242, 346
fatality rates for Great Famine, grain-procurement/requisitioning,
108–109, 111, 122–123, 124–125, 129 95–96, 100–101, 113, 115–121, 128
Fedorov, Ivan, 22 Grand Duchy of Lithuania,
Feodosii, Saint, 50 17–18, 19–21, 23
Ferrero-Waldner, Benita, 299 Graziosi, Andrea, 10, 13
Fersman, Aleksandr, 158 Great Famine (Holodomor)
Filaret, Patriarch, 42, 47, 48 advent of, 111–115
Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Applebaum on, 96–98, 102, 103
Front (Plokhy), 170 as assault on national
Forsmark nuclear power identity, 293
plant, Sweden, 185 blacklisting during, 118–119, 128
Foucher, Michel, 341–342, 346 causes of, 112–113
Fowler, Mayhill, 11 collectivization and, 109–111
Franko, Ivan, 57 criminal responsibility for, xi
Ukrainian Free Academy disparity in effects of, 124–128
of Sciences, 7 fatality rates for, 108–109,
French Revolution, 71, 83 111, 122–123, 124–125, 129
Fukushima disaster, 201
390
Index
as genocide, 219fig, 249, History of Little Russia

259, 268–269, 273 (Bantysh-Kamensky), 3
grain requisitions and, 118–121 History of the Reunification
Khrushchev’s implicit of Rus’ (Kulish), 38
reference to, 145 History of Ukraine (Magocsi), 7
procurement quotas and, 115–118 Hitler, Adolf, 139, 141, 143, 153,
Radchenko on, 105, 107, 154, 163, 253–254, 294, 338
109, 111, 120, 121 Hobsbawm, Eric, 300
resettlement and, 124 Hohol, Mykola (Nikolai
Shekhovtsov on, 244 Gogol), 289, 303
Stalin and, 95–96, 99–103, 110– Holocaust, 252, 331, 332
112, 114, 116–118, 123, 128, 249, 254 Holodomor. See Great
Great War of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Famine (Holodomor)
The (Hrabianka), 61 Horlynsky, Mykola, 150–152, 154
Greek Catholics, 288, 309, 346 Hrabianka, Hryhorii, 61–64
Green Party, 189 Hrabianka Chronicle, 75
Green World, 198 Hrinchenko, Mykola, 159
Hrushevsky, Mykhailo, 3, 4, 10,
Habsburg Monarchy, 10 38–39, 56, 88, 306–307, 308
Halecki, Oskar, 309, 311, Hrynevych, Vladyslav, 161
337, 338, 339, 342 Hrytsak, Iaroslav, 251–252
Harvard Refugee Interview Human Rights Council, 231
Project, 155 Huntington, Samuel, 301, 343
Harvard Ukrainian Research Hustovydyn (peasant), 154
Institute, 9 Hustynia Chronicle, 41
Harvest of Sorrow (Conquest), 97
Heavenly Hundred, 230, 276–277 Iakovenko, Nataliia, 57
Helsinki Final Act on Security and Ialovy, Mykhailo, 102
Cooperation in Europe, 313 Iaroshynska, Alla, 198–199
Herasymchuk, Vasyl, 56–57 Iasnopolsky, Leonid, 158
Herlihy, Patricia, 6 Iavorivsky, Volodymyr, 200
Herodotus, 1 Iavorsky, Matvii, 3
Hillis, Faith, 11 Iavorsky, Metropolitan Stefan, 74
Himka, John-Paul, 6, 252 Idea of Galicia (Wolff ), 10
Historical Atlas of East-Central Ignalina nuclear power plant, 199
Europe (Magocsi), 327 imperial collapse, 181–182
Histories (Herodotus), 1 Institute of Ukrainian History, 9
History of Charles XII (Voltaire), 71 International Atomic Energy
History of East-Central Europe Agency, 186, 196
(ed. Zashkilniak), 312
391
International Workers’ Kirill, Patriarch, 329

Day parade, 188 Kiubyshev, Valerian, 116
Irina Mikhailovna, Princess, 48 Kliuchevsky, Vasilii, 38, 88
Islam, 331 Kłoczowski, Jerzy, 312, 326–327
Istoriia Rusov (History of Kochowski, Wespazjan, 62
the Rus’), 69–84 Kochubei, Viktor, 303
Iudovsky, Vladimir, 146 Kohut, Zenon E., 6
Iunost’ (Youth), 198 Kolomoisky, Igor, 233
Ivan III, tsar, 286 Komulović, Aleksandar, 33–34, 35
Ivan the Terrible, tsar, 19, 286 Konysky, archbishop, Heorhii, 69
Kopynsky, Metropolitan, Isaia, 42
John Paul II, Pope, 346 Kopystensky, Zakhariia, 41
Judaism, 331 Kosior, Stanislav, 111–112, 113, 116, 126
Judt, Tony, 330 Kosmodemianskaia, Zoia, 245, 253
Kosov, Metropolitan Sylvestr, 49
Kaganovich, Lazar, 101, 114, 116, 126 Kostomarov, Mykola, 3, 291
Kalinin, Mikhail, 98 Kosynsky, Kryshtof, 31–32, 34
Kalynychenko (peasant), 154 Kravchenko, Volodymyr, 12, 13
Kapova-Kagan, Rakhil Kritika, 149
Borisovna, 176 Kronika Polska (Bielski), 28–29
Kappeler, Andreas, 8, 53 Kronika polska, litewska,
Karenina (MGB agent), 174, 175, 178 żmodzka i wszystkiej Rusi
Kartohrafiia Publishers, 106 (Stryjkowski), 18–19
Kasianov, Georgiy, 8, 9–10 Krosalo (peasant), 154–155
Katkov, Mikhail, 291 Kubarev, Aleksei, 68
Katyn Forest, 244 Kuchma, Leonid, 302, 313–314, 316
Keenan, Edward, 331 kulaks/kurkuls, 99–100, 101
KGB, 178 Kulish, Panteleimon, 38
Khara, Vasyl, 249 Kundera, Milan, 314, 337–338
Khataevich, Mendel, 118, 126 Kuromiya, Hiroaki, 10
Khmelnytsky, Bohdan, hetman, Kurtsevych, archbishop, Iosyf, 41
37, 46–52, 56, 63, 287, 305 Kyiv Land, 20–21
Khmelnytsky, Iurii, hetman, 59 Kyiv Mohyla Academy, 289, 303
Khmelnytsky Uprising, 17, 37, 40 Kyivan Cave Monastery, 50
Khodkevych, Hryhorii, 22 Kyshtym nuclear disaster, 184
Khrushchev, Nikita, 141,
145, 150, 158, 295 Laboratory of Transnational History,
Khrystiuk, Pavlo, 10 A (ed. Kasianov and Ther), 8
Khvyliovy, Mykola, 3, 102, 307–308 language
KievClub, 336–337
392
Index
ban/limitations on Ukrainian, Liubchenko (worker), 157

89–90, 96, 102, 292 Livonian War, 18, 19, 31
dialects of Ukrainian, 25 London, Jack, 163
in Donbas, 234 “Lost Epoch, The”
Lenin on, 90–91 (Drahomanov), 305
pan-Russian identity Lugansky, Colonel A., 246
and, 290, 291–292 Lviv Orthodox brotherhood, 41
Russian as state, 89–90 Lypynsky, Viacheslav, 5, 37–38, 56, 310
Solzhenitsyn on, 284
unity of literary, 87, 88 Magocsi, Paul Robert, 7, 327
Lanovy (student), 152–153 Maidan protests, x, 189, 228–230,
Lassota, Erich von, 33–34, 35 257–258, 267, 276–277, 335
Lebedintsev, Petr, 11 Makhno, Nestor, 99
Left Bank Ukraine, 110 Makowski, Tomasz, 18
Legasov, Valerii, 186, 196, 197 Malaysian Airlines Flight
Leipzig Book Fair, 318 MH 17, 235–236, 237
Lemkin, Raphael, 103 Manafort, Paul, ix–x
Lenin, Vladimir Manuilsky, Dmytro, 132, 140
grain-procurement and, 98 MAPA: Digital Atlas of
on imperialism, 152 Ukraine Project, 263
Leninopad (Leninfall), marriage with foreigners,
217fig, 218fig, 219fig, prohibition of, 169–178
220fig, 221fig, 257–279 Marshall Plan, 165
monuments to, 224fig Martin, Terry, 90, 144, 161
nationality and, 90–93 Martos, Ivan, 67
Stalin on, 163 Martos, Oleksii, 67–68, 73, 82, 83
status of Ukraine and Masaryk, Thomas, 338–339, 342
Belarus and, 293 May Day parade, 195–196
Leszczyński, Stanisław, 59 Mazepa, Ivan, hetman, 38,
Levada Center, 242 59–60, 65–84, 250
Levasseur de Beauplan, anathemization of,
Guillaume, 17 66–68, 76, 81, 82
Levchuk, Nataliia, 107 Mazeppa (Byron), 67
Liber, George, 10 Meir, Golda, 177, 331
Limits and Divisions of European memory wars, 242, 248, 250, 264–265.
History, The (Halecki), 311 See also World War II
List, Friedrich, 338 Menshikov, Aleksandr, 71, 78–79, 80
Lithuanian independence, 199–200 Merkel, Angela, 226
Little Russian College, 64, 66 Michalon the Lithuanian, 26, 30
Little Russian identity, 11
393
Mid-European Democratic National Academy of Sciences

Union, 338 of Ukraine, 9
Milošević, Slobodan, 238 national awakening paradigm, 11
Miłosz, Czesław, 314 national liberation paradigm,
Minin, Kuzma, 67 147, 161–162
Ministry of State Security nationalism
(MGB), 171–178 Cold War and, 4
Minsk II agreement, 236 Lenin and, 293
Mitteleuropa, 309, 311, 338, non-Russian, 294
339, 341–347 rise in, 203–204
modernization paradigm, 12 Russian Revolution
Mohyla, Metropolitan, Petro, 49, 332 and, 91–92, 99
Moldavian Autonomous study of history and, 3
Republic, 111, 117 nationality, anti-Soviet
Molotov, Viacheslav statements and, 155–159
grain-procurement National-Liberation War, 40
and, 95, 116, 118 nationhood, concept of, 288–294
invasion of Poland and, 131, 132 Naumann, Friedrich, 309,
release of wife of, 177 338, 339, 342
World War II and, 133–136, Nayyem, Mustafa, 228–229
137, 139–140, 143–144, Nemtsov, Boris, 237
145–147, 150–152, 158 Nemyrych, Iurii, 56, 61, 62
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, New Deal, 163
131–132, 136–137, 139–141, 151, New Eastern Europe (NEE),
153, 155, 157, 164, 294, 332 165–166, 325–333
Mongols, 2, 285–286 New Economic Policy, 98
Motyl, Alexander, 322 New Russia (Novorossiia),
“Movement of 1 January,” 232, 233, 236–237, 262
247–248, 252 Nicholas II, 88, 286, 292
Mstislavets, Petr, 22 Nikolaev (MGB agent), 175
Nikon, Patriarch, 48, 49
Nalyvaichenko, Valentyn, 254 NKVD pollsters, 148–161
Nalyvaiko, Demian, 32, 33, 34 Noghays, 24–25
Nalyvaiko, Severyn, 32, 33, 80 Northern War, 65, 66
narod Novorossiia (New Russia), xii,
absence of use of 232, 233, 236–237, 262
in Khmelnytsky’s nuclear disaster at Chornobyl,
correspondence, 51–52 183–190, 191–204
meaning of, 45
Narodychi district, 198–199 Olearius, 44
394
Index
“On the Procurement of Grain Pavlychev, Comrade, 150

in Ukraine, the North peasant revolts, 99–100
Caucasus, and the Western Pereiaslav Agreement, 37–40, 46–48,
Region,” 95–96, 101 50–53, 59, 64, 82, 303, 305
“On the Prohibition of Marriage perestroika, 242
between Citizens of the USSR Peter I, Tsar, 38, 59–60, 65–66, 71,
and Foreigners,” 169–178 73, 77–78, 83, 250, 288–289
Opposition Bloc, 272 Petliura, Symon, 100
Orange Revolution, 228–229, 245, Petrovsky, Hryhorii, 113
248, 251, 262, 264, 268, 270, Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan, 11
278, 299, 314, 316–317, 336 Pidkova, Ivan, 28, 29, 30, 34
Order of Judas, 66 Piedmont principle, 144–145, 161
Ordzhonikidze, Sergo, 91 Piłsudski, Józef, 100–101, 145
Organization for Security Poberezny, Gennadi, 106
and Cooperation in Pogodin, Mikhail, 38, 68–69, 70, 84
Europe (OSCE), 236 Poland
Organization of Ukrainian Eastern Europe and,
Nationalists (OUN), 309–310, 311, 312
241, 243, 248, 252 Molotov-Ribbentrop
Orientalism, 306 Pact and, 131, 132
Orlyk, Pylyp, 74 partitions of, 10, 38, 236, 286, 340
Orthodox Church, 286–287, revolts in, 289–290, 291
309, 331–332, 343 Soviet entry into World
Osnova (Foundation), 291 War I and, 133–136
Ostrih Bible, 22 Soviet invasion of, 135–138,
Ostrogski (Ostrozky), 141–144, 150–154, 160–161
Prince Janusz, 31–33 Union of Lublin and, 17, 19–21
Ostrozky, Prince Kostiantyn, 18, Polatsky, Simeon, 49
20, 21., 22–23, 24, 30, 31 Polissia region, 25, 110
Ottoman Empire, 25–26, 30, Poltava, Battle of, 3, 38, 59–60, 65–67
33, 34–35, 182, 331 Poltava air base, 170–171
“Our European Orientation” Poltavskaia settlement, 95–96
(Hrushevsky), 306 Popular Front, 272
Our Ukraine, political party, 254 populism, 203–204
Poroshenko, Petro, 235,
Panfilov, Lieutenant, 176–177 261–262, 271, 272
Pan-Slav movement, 38 positive void effect, 193–194, 196
parliamentary elections, 222fig Postyshev, Pavel, 102
Party of Regions, 249 Potsdam Conference, 165
Patriarchate of Moscow, 287 Pozharsky, Prince Dmitrii, 67
395
presidential elections, Leninfall and, division of Europe and, 342–344

216fig, 217fig, 265–266, 272, 279 European borders and, 300–301
Pritsak, Omeljan, 4–5, 6, 310 NEE and, 329, 330–332
Prokopovych, Archbishop political opposition and, 21–22
Feofan, 66, 82, 303 Russian culture and, 286–288
Protestation of Orthodox See also individual
hierarchy, 41 religions and churches
Provisional Government, 88 Renaissance Foundation, 9
Prypiat, 190, 192–193, 194, 195 Repnin, Prince Nikolai, 69
Pushkin, Aleksandr, 290 Reshetar, John S., Jr., 5
Putin, Vladimir, 66, 225–227, Rethinking Ukrainian History, 5
231–232, 237–239, 242, 284–285 reunification paradigm, 38
Putinism, 203 Revolution of 1905, 292
Pyrih, Ruslan, 107 Revolution of Dignity, ix, 9,
14, 229, 257–258, 261–262,
Radchenko, Oleksandra, 105, 267, 276–278, 335
107, 109, 111, 120, 121 Riabchuk, Mykola, 319–320
Radvila, Mikalojus Kristupas, the Ribbentrop, Joachim von,
Orphan (Mikołaj Krzysztof 135, 139, 140–141
Radziwiłł), 17–19, 22–23 Rieber, Alfred, 6
Radvila, Mikalojus, the Black, 21 Rigelman, Aleksandr, 75
Radvila, Mikalojus, the Red Right-Bank Ukraine, 11, 110
(Mikołaj Radziwiłł), 20, 21 RKKA (Workers’ and Peasants’
Radvila map, 17–35, 206– Red Army), 151
207fig, 208–215fig Robinson, Cliff, 185
Rakushka-Romanovsky, “Role of the Ukraine in Modern
Roman, 58–59, 60, 61 History, The” (Rudnytsky), 5
Razin, Stepan, 68 Romankevych (professor), 157
rebaptism, 42–44 Romanov, Mikhail Fedorovich,
Red Army tsar, 41–42, 50
enlistments in, 151–152 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano,
Zaporizhzhia monument 161, 163–165, 344
and, 243–244, 246 Rosatom, 202
Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine Rozova (MGB agent), 175, 178
(Applebaum), 96–98, 103 Rudnytsky, Ivan L., 5, 310
Reformation, 2 Rudnytsky, Omelian, 107
Rehn, Olli, 300 Rudnytsky, Stepan, 310
Relation of the Cossack War with Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, 33
the Poles (Velychko), 60–61, 62 Rukh, 199–200
religion Rurikids, 286, 287
396
Index
Rus’ Schulenburg, Friedrich-Werner Graf

chronicles of, 1–2 von der, 133–138, 141, 143–144
Istoriia Rusov (History Scythians, 1
of the Rus’), 69–84 Second Gulf War, 238
Khmelnytsky and, 50–51 Sereda, Viktoriya, 263
Kyiv Mohyla Academy and, 289 serfdom, revival of, 26–27
Orthodoxy and, 287 Serov, Ivan, 150
Ostrozky and, 24 Ševčenko, Ihor, 4–5, 310, 331
Radvila map and, 19 Shakhovskoi, Prince Semen, 48
reunification of, 41–42, 88, 286 Shcherbak, Iurii, 189, 198, 199
Russia Shcherbytsky, Volodymyr, 188
after collapse of USSR, 225–227 Sheiner, R. P., 152
Crimea and, ix, xi, xii, 9, 14, Shekhovtsov, Ivan, 244–245, 253, 255
181, 225–227, 231–232, 237–238, Shevchenko, Andrii, 260
261, 285, 296–297, 335, 347 Shevchenko, Taras, 274, 291
Donbas conflict and, 232–237 Shevchenko Scientific Society, 7
Euromaidan Revolution Shevchuk, Pavlo, 107
and, 229–231 Shukhevych, Roman, 249, 250, 259
See also individual leaders Shulgin, Vasilii, 88, 89
Russian Civil War, 163 Shumsky, Oleksandr, 308
Russian question, 283–297 Shyrai, Mykhailo, 68–69, 70
Russian Question at the End Shyrai, Stepan, 68, 69
of the Twentieth Century, Sigismund Augustus, King, 19, 21
The (Solzhenitsyn), 283 Sikorski, Radosław, 230
Russian Revolution, 87–93, Skliarenko, Semen, 159
97, 98–99, 292 Skoropadsky, Ivan, 38, 65–66
Russian Unity Party, 231 Skrypnyk, Mykola, 102
Ruthenian Orthodoxy, slavery, 25–26
41–43, 44–45, 49–50 Slavic Review, 5, 7–8
Rybchynsky (student), 153 Slavophiles, 303–304
Rylsky, Maksym, 158–159 Slavynetsky, Iepifanii, 49
Ryzhkov, Nikolai, 195 SMERSH, 171
Smolensk War, 48
Sajūdis, 199 Society of Historians of East-
Sarotte, Mary, x Central Europe, 312
Satanovsky, Arsenii, 49 Solidarity, 345, 346
Savchuk, Alla, 107 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr,
Schmid, Ulrich, 263 283–285, 296
Schneider-Deters, Winfried, 317 Sosnin, E., 142
Sosnovyi Bor, 193
397
Sossa, Rostyslav, 106 Yalta Conference

“Soviet Genocide in Ukraine” and, 161, 164–165
(Lemkin), 103 Zaporizhzhia monument
Soviet Union to, 241–256
collapse of, 181–182, 200, star of Hero of Ukraine
225–226, 286, 295–296, 345–346 (state award), xi
formation of, 293 Steppe region, 110
United States and, 164 “Stolen West or the Tragedy
See also individual leaders of Central Europe, The”
Soviet-German Boundary and (Kundera), 337–338
Friendship Treaty (1939), 132 Strabo, 340, 342
Stalin, Joseph Strubicz, Maciej, 18
anti-Semitic campaign and, 176 Struve, Peter, 90
death of, 177 Stryjkowski, Maciej, 18–19
division of Poland and, Subtelny, Orest, 5, 7
139–140, 142, 143 Sucharski, Henryk, 131
Great Famine and, xi, Sudiienko, Osyp, 84
95–96, 99–103, 110–112, 114, Sudiienkos, 68
116–118, 123, 128, 249, 254 Sukhanov, Arsenii, 47
invasion of Poland and, Sundance Film Festival, 202
136–138, 157–158 Suvorov, Aleksandr, 69
Khvyliovy and, 308 Svoboda (Liberty; Freedom),
on Leninism, 163 nationalist party, 248,
Molotov-Ribbentrop 250, 253, 260
Pact and, 140–141 Sylvestrov, Valentyn, 260
popularity of, 242–243 Symonenko, Petro, 250
liquidation of the Greek Symonovsky, Petro, 75
Catholic Church and, 288, 344 Synopsis, 289
role of Ukraine in Sysyn, Frank E., 5
USSR and, 145 Szporluk, Roman, 5, 6, 7
Russian Federation and, 91–93
Russian nationalism Tatars, 21
and, 294–295 Tatishchev, Vasilii, 302
status of Ukraine and Taylor, Roger, 174, 178
Belarus and, 293 “terrorism” during Great
suppression by regime of, 3–4 Famine, 120–121
United States and, 163–164 Theophanes III, Patriarch
World War II and, 131–132, of Jerusalem, 41
133, 134, 147, 286 Ther, Philipp, 8
Third Lithuanian Statute (1588), 26
398
Index
Time of Troubles, 42, 48, 52 Ukrainian Question, 97

Tkachenko, Zinaida, 170–178 Ukrainian Revolution, 40
“To the Inhabitants of Ukrainian Studies Fund, 9
Little Russia,” 89 Ukrainian Writers’ Union, 188–189
Tolochko, Oleksii, 9–10 Ukrainization, 98
Tomashivsky, Stepan, 310 Ukrainka, Lesia, 276
trade Ukrainian Greek Catholic
Baltic, 26 (Uniate) Church, 45, 60–61,
conflict with Russia over, 229 288, 330–331, 343–344
Transcarpathia, 139, 270, 286, Union of Brest (1596), 2, 34
292, 309, 311, 317 Union of Hadiach (1658), 55–64
Trotsky, Leon, 331 Union of Lublin (1596),
Truman, Harry S., 165 17, 19–21, 23, 24
Trump, Donald J., ix, x Union of the Russian People, 90
Tryzub (Trident), 241–242, 248, United Nations Organization, 164
250, 253, 254–255, 259 United States
Tsukanov (worker), 154 Russian relations with, 166–167
Turkey, 300, 316, 317 Russia-Ukraine conflict
Twardowski, Samuel, 60, 62, 63 and, 238–239
Tymoshenko, Semen, 137, 250 Soviet Union and, 163, 170–178
Tymoshenko, Yulia, 265, 272 See also individual presidents
Unity Day, 249
Udwin, Emma, 299 Ustrialov, Nikolai, 38
“Ukase on How to Investigate Uvarov, Sergei, 290
and on the Belarusians
Themselves,” 42–43 Varangians, 1–2
Ukraine: A Brief History (Szporluk), 7 Vasilii, Reverend, 246
Ukraine: A History (Subtelny), 7 Velednytsky (student), 153
Ukraine at the Turning Point Velvet Revolution, 346
(Lypynsky), 37–38 Velychko, Samiilo, 60–61
Ukraine Is Not Russia (Kuchma), 302 Vernadsky, George, 4
Ukrainian Autocephalous Vernadsky, Vladimir, 157–158
Orthodox Church, 288 Viatrovych, Volodymyr, 275
Ukrainian Free University, 9 Volhynia, Radvila map and, 23–24
Ukrainian independence, Voltaire, 71, 340
199–200, 346 von Engel, Johann Christian, 10
Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), von Hagen, Mark, 7–8, 10, 13
xi, 248, 249, 269–270, 271, 273, 279 Vushko, Iryna, 10–11
Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Vyhovsky, Ivan, hetman,
the Kyiv Patriarchate, 288 55, 56, 57, 59, 61–63
399
Vyshnevetsky, Dmytro, 28, 29–30 prison sentences of, 234

Vyshnevetsky, Mykhailo, 24 protests against, 228–230, 257, 261
Vyshnevetsky, Oleksandr, 32 Russian seizure of
Vyshnevetsky family, 24–25 Crimea and, 231
Vytautas, Grand Duke, 27 support for, 265, 272
Svoboda Party and, 248
Waldemar, Prince (Netherlands), 48 Tryzub (Trident) and, 259
Wandycz, Piotr, 311 Yushchenko’s decrees
Warsaw Pact, 182 and, 249–250
Wereszczyński, Józef, 35 Yatseniuk, Arsenii, 226, 250, 272
Westernizers, 303–304 Yekelchyk, Serhy, 161
Wheatcroft, Stephen G., 108, 126 Yeltsin, Boris, 226, 227, 315
White Movement, 292–293 Yugoslavia, 238
Wolff, Larry, 10, 340 Yushchenko, Viktor
Wolowyna, Oleh, 107, 108, 123 Bandera and, xi, 249, 251–252
World Cinema Documentary Chatham House Prize and, 317
Grand Jury Prize, 202 election of, 228
World War II European Union and,
commemorations of, 39 299, 316, 318, 320
partitions of Poland and, 236 Orange Revolution and, 336
political geography of Ukrainian national
Europe and, 310–311 idea from, 322
Russian nationalism and, 294 Yanukovych and, 250, 259
Soviet entry into, 131–132,
133–136, 143–148, 150–155, 160 Zaborovsky, Lev, 40
western Ukraine and, 286 Zalizniak (student), 154
Zaporizhzhia monument and, Zaporozhian Cossacks, 33–34, 47–48
243–244, 245, 248–249, 255–256 Zarubinsky, Oleh, 317–318
Zashkilniak, Leonid, 312
Yakovenko, Natalia, 312 Zavoloka, Dmytro, 113, 115
Yalta Conference (1945), 161, Zbaraski, Janusz, 30
164–165, 332, 344 Zboriv Agreement (1649), 47
Yanukovych, Viktor Zealots of Piety, 48
Bandera and, xi Zebrzydowski Rebellion
election of, 319 (1606–1607), 23
European Union and, Zelenskyi, Volodymyr, x
316–317, 320, 323 Zhdanov, Andrei, 132, 140
Great Famine and, 268 Zhemchuzhina, Polina, 177
Manafort and, x Zyzanii, Lavrentii, 45
ouster of, ix
400

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The Frontline

Ukrainian Research Institute

Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies 81

HURI Editorial Board

Distributed by Harvard University Press

© 2021 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

Printed in the U.S. on acid-free paper

ISBN: 9780674268821 (hardcover),

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939912

Cover illustration: Kazimir Malevich, “Red Cavalry Riding” (1928–1932).

Cover and book design by Mykola Leonovych, https://smalta.pro

1. Quo Vadis Ukrainian History? 1

2. Placing Ukraine on the Map of Europe 17

II. The Red Century

6. How Russian Was the Russian Revolution? 87

12. The Soviet Collapse 181

IV. EUROPEAN HORIZONS

18. The Russian Question 283

I am deeply grateful to those who contributed most to the

In the text of this collection, a modified Library of Congress

In the fall of 2013 Ukraine made a dramatic entry into world

of financial violations, including undisclosed payments received

Russian aggression turned not only Ukraine but also

a European map but also discusses the synergic relationship be-

The third section of the volume, “Farewell to the Empire,”

The history of Ukraine as a territory, not unlike that of many

Christianity as their new religion. But the concept of world his-

The eighteenth century brought the ideas of the Enlight-

exponents. The concept of the “history of the USSR” reduced

and culture in the broad context of the Eurasian and Byzantine

Rethinking Ukrainian History

among the participants were Roman Szporluk, then of the Uni-

Ukraine’s unique historical identity” and contribute to the “better

provocatively titled “Does Ukraine Have a History?” Von Hagen

The Future of the Past

also of traditional approaches to writing multivolume academic

those who criticize the tendency of adherents of nationally fo-

Relations between history and society in Ukraine and abroad

Toward a New Narrative?

Today, unlike in 1995, no one asks whether Ukraine has a his-

The events of the last few years—the Revolution of Dignity,

The word “Ukraine,” which is now the name of an indepen-

By far the most important development reflected on the Radvila

by a fellow Lithuanian aristocrat, Bishop Merkelis Giedraitis of

the king, a common Diet, or parliament, and broad autonomy for

of independent or semi-independent principalities, and, if one

While Radvila harbored no political ambitions that might un-

map covers the territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as

settlements, establishing towns, and funding monasteries. The

century were incorporated into the Baltic trade because of the

the steppe borderlands of Ukraine, where princes and nobles were

as follows: “The Cossacks are a martial people, mixed with private

Bielski, and first published in Cracow in 1597. There the Cossacks

Prince Vyshnevetsky became a popular hero as the first Cossack

well. When Janusz Ostrogski seized his land, which he held on

diary, which described the democratic order that prevailed in the

Cossacks, making them attractive allies in the eyes of Europe-

In 1920, the prominent Ukrainian historian and political activist

functioned in Ukraine after the defeat of Hetman Ivan Mazepa’s

the non-Russians of the former empire. Lenin’s victory created