Along with many westerners, I have watched with shock and trepidation the recent incursion of the Russian military into Ukraine. Yet, having a better familiarity with the course of history in the region and decent facility in modern Russian, I have found myself diverging in some ways from the reaction of my peers to transpiring events. One important reason for the ways in which my reaction differs from other westerners lies in the fact that I understand well that the country we now call Ukraine is largely a creation of the Soviet polity of the early 20th century, with of course some influence from European powers operating in the region toward the end of the First World War. For that reason I do not hold that the country of Ukraine, with respect to its current geographical boundaries is in any way an immutable entity. Rather, I believe what we may now be witnessing is a further disintegration of outmoded Soviet era geo-political arrangements.
This is not to say that I would dispute either the fact that there is a population in the area of modern-day Ukraine that has distinctive linguistic and cultural characteristics as compared to their neighbors to the northeast, or that such a people deserve to inhabit their own land and to determine their own future on the world political stage. Bearing in mind, of course, that less powerful nations have always throughout the course of history been at the mercy, to a greater or lesser degree, of more powerful nations--geographic proximity playing a major role in the influence those other nations exercise on their weaker neighbor’s fate. Such would have been the case at the founding of the modern nation we now call Ukraine, with the countries of Germany to the west and the remnants of Imperial Russia and the newly-forming Soviet Union to the northeast, playing decisive roles in the creation of the nation-state we call Ukraine, in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
Rather, if there is a debate to be had in this connection, it is over the question of what should now be the borders of this nation in the current context, and the corollary question of whether or not those established by Soviet authority starting in the first half of the twentieth century and lasting through 1954 are any longer sustainable. The question was raised in an acute fashion with Russia's recent annexation of Crimea. Now with the recent invasion of the region, it is a debate the world will likely soon need to engage anew.
It seems that, at the popular level, most of my American compatriots have no awareness of the fact that, prior to the Bolshevik Revolution in the early decades of the twentieth century, there was no country on the map called Ukraine. A perusal of maps published prior to 1920, whether originating from Imperial Russian or from European sources, show no signs of a separate country, stretching north from the Black Sea, to the east toward Russia, or west in the direction of Europe (the location of the Austro-Hungarian Empire for the latter part of the nineteenth century and first couple of decades of the twentieth) with corresponding borders.
The area, while doubtless having a largely homogenous population in terms of language and culture, was a geographic region referred to as "Ukraine" on some of those maps, somewhat along the lines of geographic swathes in the U.S. that are now called "the midwest," "the south," “New England,” etc. The naming convention, translated into modern English, means something like "near the border" or "outskirts." As the case may be, no borders segregating the area from Imperial Russia are evident on any of those maps.
Richard Pipes, the great twentieth century scholar of recent Russian history, remains a major authority in the West on the formation of the Soviet Union and the history of Russia in general. He, incidentally, was of Jewish ethnicity and his family fled Poland during World War 2. Many of his contemporaries thought him an ardent cold warrior, so he is not someone who should now be suspected of having secret sympathies for Russia, whether the old Imperial Russia or the later Communist version--much less modern Russia under Putin.
Pipes offers a bit of condensed historical background related to Ukraine (in the 1964 edition of his "The Formation of the Soviet Union") as follows:
The Ukrainians . . . descended from the Eastern Slav tribes which had been separated from the main body of Russians as a result of the Mongolian invasions and Polish-Lithuanian conquest of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. For over five centuries, these two parts of Eastern Slavdom developed under different cultural influences. By the end of the eighteenth century, when Moscow had conquered the areas inhabited by the other Eastern Slavic groups, the dissimilarities caused by centuries of separate growth were too considerable to permit a simple fusion into one nation. Through contact with their western neighbors, those peoples had acquired distinct cultural traditions with their own dialects and folklores. Moreover, the steppes of the Black Sea region had for several centuries following the Mongolian invasion remained a no man’s land, where runaway serfs, criminal elements, or simply adventurers from Poland, Muscovy, or the domains of the Ottoman Empire had found a haven. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, those groups to which the Turkic name “Cossack” (freebooter) was applied, had formed an anarchistic society with a center along the lower course of the Dnieper, which lived in complete freedom, hunting, fishing, or pillaging. In the course of time, these Cossacks—with their ideal of unlimited external and internal freedom—developed a new socioeconomic type of great importance for the future Ukrainian national consciousness. (9)
He further states:
The cultural phase of the Ukrainian movement began in the 1820's, under the stimulus of the ideas of Western romanticism transmitted through Russia. Scholars began it by undertaking ethnographic studies of the villages of southwestern Russia, where they uncovered a rich and old folklore tradition and the ethos of a peasant culture, the existence of which had been scarcely suspected. On this basis, there arose in Russia and in the Ukrainian provinces a sizable provincial literature which reached a high point with the publication in 1840 of the Kobzar, a collection of original poems in Ukrainian by Taras Shevchenko, then a student at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts. This began the transformation of a peasant dialect into a literary, and subsequently, a national language. In 1846, a number of writers and students at Kiev founded the Cyril and Methodius Society — a secret organization permeated with the spirit of utopian socialism, German idealism, and the notions of international brotherhood and social equalitarianism. Present also was a strong element of cultural Pan-slavism. (10)
These developments would be the beginning of the nationalistic sentiments that evolved during the second half of the nineteenth century into strains in many ways consonant with the aims of revolutionaries from greater Imperial Russia who were eager to overthrow the old regime and to found in its place what they presumed, under Communist delusions, would one day develop into a worldwide Proletarian paradise.
The inclusion within the Bolshevik project, of Ukranians harboring such nationalistic sympathies, was not without its difficulties. Some of the Communist leaders thought nationalism, an ultimate allegiance to an ethnic group and culture, inimical to or subversive of the Communist ideal of unifying the world's proletariat. But marshaling support from disaffected groups from throughout the Imperial Russia Empire proved appealing enough to the Bolsheviks that they, for pragmatic purposes, were willing to overlook the departures from ideological purity that Ukrainian nationalism entailed and thus accepted them into the fold.
Not all residents of the areas about to be incorporated into the nation we now know as Ukraine, despite having lengthy family histories in the region, were favorably disposed toward the Bolsheviks and their Communist ideology. Nor were the inhabitants homogenous in terms of language and culture.
Among those identifying with Ukrainian nationalism there had been forces prepared to agree to terms with the Provisional Government that had taken over after the Tsar's abdication in March 1917. That body had ruled favorably on the proposal that 5 governates (gubernii, administrative districts that had been established under Imperial Russia: Kiev, Volhynia, Podolia, Poltava, and Chernigov) be conceded to the Ukrainians for the founding of the new nation. Other nationalists were hostile to the proposals of the Provisional Government, demanding the concession of 12 governates. (64-65)
Once the October Revolution had managed to oust the Provisional Government the old deal became a moot point and the demand for the 12 governates formed the new order of the day. At that time, in addition to the internal divisions among the Ukrainian nationalists were added cultural and linguistic frictions between the peoples inhabiting the now-expanded nascent nation. The Soviets in greater Russia, on attempting to dictate to the central figures in Kiev regarding military matters, were rebuked in a way that portends events currently underway in the region:
Declaring that the reply of the General Secretariat given on December 17 [New Style] is the proper answer to the attempt of the People’s Commissars to violate the rights of the Ukrainian peasants, workers, and soldiers, the All-Ukrainian Congress of Peasants’, Workers’, and Soldiers’ Deputies deems it necessary to take all measures in order to prevent the spilling of brotherly blood and appeals warmly to the peoples of Russia to stop, with all means at their disposal, the possibility of a new shameful war. (122)
The prospect of a civil war, with Slavs killing fellow Slavs (Ukrainians versus Russians), seemed a real danger to these early Ukrainian nationalists.
Tensions further flared subsequently, with a faction of area Soviets who did not wish to be under the hegemony of the Ukrainian nationalist administration developing in Kiev, founding a rival administrative center in Kharkov, toward the eastern border of the newly-forming country of Ukraine. As Pipes, summarizing the comparative popular support for Ukrainian nationalism in the area notes:
In the province of Kharkov . . . the pro-Ukrainian vote was insignificant.
The 'Soft' policies of the right-wing factions of the Kievan Bolsheviks having ended in a fiasco, the left wing now took over. Upon their arrival in Kharkov, the Bolshevik deputies who had walked out of the All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets joined the Bolshevik-controlled Congress of Soviets of the Donets and Krivoi Rog Basins, meeting at Kharkov at the time; and together, on December 11, they formed a new All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets. This rump group appointed a Central Executive Committee, which announced that it was henceforth to be considered as the sole legal government of the entire Ukraine. The new 'government,' composed of Kiev and Kharkov Bolsheviks, first of all sent a telegram to Petrograd in which it pledged its allegiance to the Soviet government, and declared all the decrees of the Russian Council of People’s Commissars to be applicable to the Ukraine. On December 12, with the aid of freshly arrived worker and sailor detachments from Moscow, the Kharkov Bolsheviks accomplished a coup against the other socialist groups and seized power in the city. The split between the Bolsheviks and the Ukrainian nationalists was now complete, and the outbreak of an armed conflict was only a matter of time." (123)
Meantime the war underway in Europe began impacting the region, the German armies seeing in the ongoing disarray an opportunity to fortify their military effort by appropriating natural resources from Ukraine. Thus in early 1918 the western part of the forming nation of Ukraine, including Kiev, came under the authority of the Central Powers (the German, Austro-Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Ottoman alliance of World War 1).
In a remarkable pre-saging of recent developments in the area, the rival Ukrainian administration that had been set up in Kharkov welcomed this development. Pipes, citing from a contemporaneous source, writes:
The Kharkov Bolsheviks were not at all unhappy over the plight of their Kievan comrades. Rather, they applauded their own wisdom in having formed a distinct republic, and interpreted the destruction of the Ukrainian Soviet government as an excellent opportunity for a final break with the Kievans. 'Economically our basin is connected with the Petrograd Republic,' mused one of their press editorials on March 6, 1918, shortly after the German armies entered the city of Kiev, 'politically it is also more convenient for us to join the Russian federation. The conditions of national life in the provinces of Kharkov and Ekaterinoslav also do not tie us to the Ukraine. The proletariat of the Donets Republic must focus all its efforts in the direction of asserting its autonomy and independence from the Ukraine. (131)
The split turned out to be short-lived. Pipes characterizes the reunification, agreed to abroad by elements who had fled eastward after the invasion of the west by German armed forces, as follows:
The victory, for the time being, went to the left. At the Second All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets, held in Ekaterinoslav in March 1918, this group succeeded in compelling the right to give up the idea of a separate Donets—Krivoi Rog Republic and agree to the inclusion of their territory and the territories of the two other Soviet republics which had arisen since 1917 (Odessa and the Crimea) in a single Ukrainian Soviet Republic. There is some evidence that the influence of Lenin was instrumental in terminating the shortlived but potentially explosive dual regime. At this Congress the Ukraine was also proclaimed an independent Soviet republic. According to early Communist sources this step was taken for purely tactical reasons. The left faction, which dominated the Congress, was opposed to the Brest Litovsk Treaty, and hoped that by proclaiming Ukrainian independence from Soviet Russia it could continue to fight against the German invaders, without involving Russia in a war with the Central Powers. (131-132)
The Central Powers' interest in Ukraine as a source for raw materials wound up meeting with disappointment and the area was shortly afterward returned to the Soviet elements that had been vying for authority there over the preceding years. Thus began a long period of fine-tuning borders and rejiggering of Tsarist-era administrative districts within Ukraine. Kharkov remained the capitol of Ukraine until 1934, when that place of precedence was transferred back to Kiev.
It is important to appreciate the fact that, though the region continued to be centered on the 12 governates inherited from Imperial Russia, modifications to the borders continued up to the 1954 concession, under the Khruschev regime, of Crimea to Ukraine. During World War 2, for example, with the retreat of Nazi Germany the western border shifted significantly further to the west so as to encompass territory that had been contested between Russia and various European powers for centuries, most recently having been part of Poland. It is fair to say that the external borders of Ukraine had been in a state of flux during these decades.
It is also a matter of debate whether Ukraine, during Soviet times, was a separate nation such as westerners have in mind when envisioning the nation-state. Technically it was an independent republic, but in fact it had limited autonomy, being ruled in major ways from Moscow. Only really in 1991, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, did Ukraine start to enter the world stage as an actual analogue to the modern nation-state.
In light of this history, it must be asked whether the current borders of modern Ukraine are actually adequate to the demographic realities of the region. Though the recent violation of those borders by the Russian military was reprehensible, sight should not be lost of the fact that long-standing political and cultural tensions lie behind these actions. These tensions stretch back through the 2014 Minsk agreements, which were to result in autonomy for the eastern Ukrainian territories of Donetsk and Lugansk, and from there to the founding of Ukraine as a nation and the resistance in the early 20th century of eastern provinces, centered in Kharkov, to rule by Ukrainian nationalist elements located in Kiev.
The fact of the matter is that the border on Ukraine's east was drawn hastily and arbitrarily and with a view to political and military exigencies of a long-gone era. The state of affairs that resulted proved more or less viable under a totalitarian regime in which the populace of both Ukraine and Russia was united against a common enemy in the central government. But with the fall of the Soviet Union that common enemy is no longer in play, and long-simmering tensions in the local population have once again come to the fore.
The eastern border of Ukraine needs reconsideration. Whether the Minsk Agreement's prescription, should it finally be implemented, of autonomy for the Lugansk and Donetsk Republics in the east will prove to be an adequate answer, remains to be seen. Perhaps a yet larger portion of current-day Ukraine lying east the the Dneiper river will be involved in whatever will be the outcome of this conflict although, judging by sentiments of the local populace in that area, this seems to me unlikely.
NOTE: The above remarks are premised on my assumption, which runs counter to views being promoted in western media, that Putin is of sound mind and has rational ends in view in prosecuting this war. Having no professional training in diagnosing mental states, I could be wrong about that. But I have not seen any behavior that suggests to me that he is not acting in this case in the same exceedingly shrewd, calculating, and ruthless way he has operated throughout his political career. He has been highly successful thus far in fulfilling both his personal as well as his politico-national objectives. Short of the U.S. and NATO becoming more directly involved in this conflict, I think it likely he will achieve his intended aim in this matter as well. And, contrary to panic the media is trying to foment over Putin's alleged aims of occupying Ukraine, I am certain he knows that would be suicidal and totally contrary to Russia's interests: I believe he has far more limited ambitions. I will be happy to admit my error on this site should I prove wrong, and I challenge those who support western media's depiction of Putin and his mental state to return here and do the same should my projections prove a more accurate depiction of the final outcome.