A Historical Perspective on Russia and Ukraine

Some people at the church I serve recently asked me to give a talk on Russian history and Ukraine in light of the current crisis between Russia and Ukraine. I do, after all, have a PhD in Russian history. So I agreed to do it. I gave that talk on May 17, 2014. By then I had received a couple of requests for a text of my presentation from people who couldn't be there. I didn't give the talk from a prepared text, only from an outline. I have however typed up a document based on that outline that more or less reflects what I said in the talk. Here it is.

Russia and Ukraine

The Historical Background Of a Contemporary Crisis

Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson

May, 2014

About the author: Rev. Dr. Thomas C. Sorenson is Co-Pastor of Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ in Monroe, Washington, USA. In addition to degrees in ministry and law he holds a PhD in Russian History from the University of Washington. His PhD dissertation is a study of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Over Procurator of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church from 1880 to 1905 and tutor of the last two tsars.

INTRODUCTION TO A CRISIS

Russia and Ukraine have been much in the news lately. A popular uprising in the Ukrainian capital city of Kiev and elsewhere in Ukraine ousted a pro-Russian popularly elected but corrupt Ukrainian government. Russia (technically The Russian Federation) has interfered with the territorial integrity of the Republic of Ukraine by taking control of the Crimean Peninsula, which had been part of Ukraine since 1954 but part of Russia since 1789. Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine have taken over cities and districts and fought bloody battles with Ukrainian troops and armed civilians. Russia has massed troops on its long border with Ukraine and is very probably meddling in internal Ukrainian affairs. The United States and the European Union have attempted to defend Ukraine, punish Russia, and influence Russia’s actions by imposing certain economic sanctions on leading figures in the Russian government and economy. Tensions between Russia and Ukraine run high, and the future of Russian involvement in Ukraine and of the continuing territorial integrity of Ukraine are very much in doubt.

The current crisis in Ukraine is rooted in a long history. That history begins with the very beginnings of Russian history in the tenth century CE. It involves conquest of the lands now called Ukraine by Mongols, Ottoman Turks, Lithuanians, Poles, and Russians among others. It becomes part of the history of the expansion of the Russian Empire and of the persistent conflict between Russia and the West. It is a long and complex history. I can give only a cursory overview of it here, but perhaps even that cursory overview will help us understand the current crisis more deeply than we can from the reports in the popular media, reports that rarely reflect much awareness of the historical context that shapes the crisis.

My thesis here is that the histories of Russia and Ukraine are so inextricably intertwined that they cannot truly be separated. Historically, Russians have not seen Ukrainian as a language and a culture distinct from the Russian language and culture while, for the last two hundred years or so, Ukrainians have aggressively claimed that they are. Today they are distinct, but traditional understandings change very slowly. The tensions between Russia and Ukraine today reflect the vagueness of Ukrainian identity, Russia’s long denial of a unique identity to the Ukrainians, and the demographic overlapping between Russian and Ukrainian populations. I intend nothing I say here as a justification for the actions of either the Russians or the Ukrainians. Understanding must come before judgment. My project here is to increase your understanding of the crisis in Ukraine. I’ll happily leave the judging up to you.

SOME NECESSARY GEOGRAPHY

To understand the current crisis between Russia and Ukraine we must understand the geography of Ukraine, southern Russia, and western neighbors of Ukraine including Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary. I will not include a map here because I don’t want to violate anyone’s copyright, but I urge you to go on line and look at a map of Ukraine that shows its relationship to Russia and its neighbors to the west. They’re easy to find through any search engine. Ukraine is located to the south of European Russia. It runs along the length of the northern shore of the Black Sea. In the northeast corner of the Black Sea is a large peninsula known as Crimea, or the Crimean Peninsula. Crimea is geographically contiguous with Ukraine, and it has no land border with Russia. Today on its western border Ukraine touches Moldova (like Ukraine a former Soviet Socialist Republic), Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland. On the north Ukraine borders Belarus and Russia. To the east it borders only Russia.

The Dnieper River flows through Ukraine and played a vital role in the region’s early history. The river flows into Ukraine from the north. It flows more or less northwest to southeast across the country before making a turn to the southwest and emptying into the Black Sea to the east of the Ukrainian city of Odessa. The Black Sea itself opens to the Mediterranean through narrow straits at the Turkish city of Istanbul, formerly Constantinople. The Black Sea never freezes over as do Russia’s outlets to the Baltic Sea (St. Petersburg) and the far northerly Barents Sea (Murmansk). It will help you as we go along to become familiar with this geography.

THE BEGINNINGS: KIEVEN RUS’

Where does Russian history begin? In Russia? In Moscow? In St. Petersburg? In the old Russian cities of Novgorod, Vladimir, or Suzdal? No, Russian history begins in Kiev, the capital city of present day Ukraine. Thus we see the intertwining of Russian and Ukrainian history right from the start. In the tenth century CE an important trade route existed along rivers from Scandinavia on the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and on to Constantinople. The Dnieper River was a major artery of that trade route. An entity called Kievan Rus’ straddled the Dnieper at Kiev, as the city of Kiev does today. That word “Rus’” is the origin of the word Russian, russkii in Russian. Kievan Rus’ was a Slavic culture, closely related to the languages and cultures of what today are Bulgaria and Serbia and a bit less closely related to the cultures and languages of Poland and other Slavic peoples. Under the rule of people who came to call themselves Grand Princes, Kiev came to control the trade along the Dnieper River.

The culture of Kievan Rus’ was Slavic, but it wasn’t Christian, at least not at first. Kievan Rus’ had a rather typical, primitive polytheistic religious system. In the year 988 CE something happened in Kievan Rus’ that all Russians have considered to be a central fact of Russian history from that day to this. In that year Grand Prince Vladimir I of Kiev, known as Vladimir the Great or even Saint Vladimir to the Russians, converted to Greek Orthodox Christianity. An ancient document called the Chronicle of Nestor, also called the Primary Chronicle or the Tale of Bygone Years, tells an intriguing story of why Vladimir chose Greek Orthodox Christianity as his faith. The Chronicle says that he decided that he would adopt one of the world’s great religions, either Islam, Judaism, western Catholic Christianity, or Greek Orthodox Christianity. He sent emissaries to investigate each of these faiths. The emissaries returned a report on each of them. Among the Muslims they found nothing but sadness “and a great stench.” Besides, Islam forbids eating pork and drinking alcohol. That Vladimir couldn’t tolerate for, as he said, drinking is the joy of the Russian. (It still is, by the way, with frequent tragic consequences). The historical fact that the Jews had lost Jerusalem meant that God had abandoned them. (They “lost” it to the Romans in 70 CE, an awfully long time before Vladimir of Kiev, but never mind.) Among the Catholic churches they found no beauty whatsoever. Then they came to Constantinople and the great cathedral Hagia Sophia, The Church of the Holy Wisdom, the greatest church in Christendom at the time. They said that the place was so beautiful that they didn’t know if they were still on earth or had been transported to heaven. (Hagia Sophia, by the way, still exists. After the Turks took Constantinople in 1454 CE they turned it into a mosque. Today it is a museum.) Those reports convinced Vladimir that Orthodox Christianity was the only way to go. He converted and was baptized in the year 988 CE. In those days if the prince adopted a new religion so, eventually at least, did the rest of the population. The conversion of St. Vladimir in 988 CE is the beginning of the Russian Orthodox Church, and every Russian knows it. Of course, that old story is just that, a story. Vladimir’s conversion to Greek Orthodoxy certainly had more to do with commercial ties to Constantinople and cultural ties to the Orthodox Bulgarians that with reports from emissaries about different religions.

Still, the conversion of Vladimir to Orthodoxy in many ways marks the beginning of Russian history; and that seminal event of Russian history didn’t take place in what today is Russia. It took place in what today is Ukraine. Try thinking of the matter this way: How would a lot of Americans feel if Lexington, Concord, Bunker Hill, and Valley Forge somehow ended up in Canada? They would still be the sites of seminal events in the history of the United States. We wouldn’t much like it if they belonged to a foreign country regardless of how much like our country that foreign country is. The parallel with Ukraine and Russia isn’t exact, for Ukrainian and Russian history are much longer than the history of the European cultures in North America. Still, the example may give you some idea of how Russians feel about Ukraine.

THE TARTAR YOKE AND THE RISE OF MOSCOW

Kiev remained the political and cultural center of the culture known as the Kievan Rus’ until the 1240s CE. That’s when the Mongols, often called the Tartars in Russian history (not to be confused with the Crimean Tatars, about whom more below), sacked Kiev. I’ll use the terms Mongols and Tartars interchangeably here. They’re the same people. The Mongols were from, of all places, Mongolia. They were Asiatic marauders who established a rule that extended from Russia in the west to China in the east. They dominated Russia (and much of Ukraine) for more than two hundred years. They were Muslims not Christians. They were eastern not western, Asian not European. Their sacking of Kiev left the Slavic people, the Rus’, with no political or cultural center of any significance. There were Russian cities and an Orthodox culture in places other than Kiev. They included the ancient Russian cities of Vladimir, Suzdal, and Novgorod, all to the north or northeast of the Ukraine and Kiev. They also included the little town of Moscow, which at the beginning of the Mongol period of Russian history amounted to precisely nothing. Moscow had a prince of course, but he didn’t amount to anything. Eventually, however, the Prince of Moscow signed on with the Mongols as their agent for collection of tribute from the Russian lands. Thus began the rise of Moscow.

Eventually Moscow, under rulers now call not just prince but Grand Prince, freed Russia from Mongol domination. That process wasn’t completed until the sixteenth century, but much of it was done in the fifteenth century. In particular a Grand Prince of Moscow named Ivan III, 1440-1506, known to history as Ivan the Great, had significant success in freeing Moscow and the Russian lands from the Tartars. He is known as “the gatherer of the Russian lands.” He tripled the size of the territory Moscow ruled.

Under Ivan III an ideology developed about the divine ordination of Russian rule. It’s known as Moscow, the Third Rome. That theory says that there had been two Romes before Moscow. The first one was ancient Rome itself. The city of Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire had been destroyed by invading Huns and other northern people by the end of the fifth century CE. The second Rome was Constantinople. The Emperor Constantine, the one who first legalized, then converted to Christianity, had made his new city of Constantinople, on the Bosporus, the strait at the opening of the Black Sea toward the Mediterranean, a second capital of the Roman Empire. After Rome fell in the west Constantinople became the capital of what was called the Byzantine Empire, which really was just the eastern Roman Empire living on as a Christian empire. In 1454 the Ottoman Turks, who were Muslims, conquered Constantinople. Thus the second Rome had fallen just as the first one had. The second Rome, Constantinople, had been a Greek Orthodox empire, at least in form. Moscow was an Orthodox power, again at least in form. So Muscovites began to see themselves as the Third Rome. They said there have been three Romes, and there shall never be a fourth. Few of us, I suppose, think of Moscow as any kind of Rome, but a lot of Russians did in the late fifteenth century.

The next significant Grand Prince of Moscow was Ivan IV, 1530-1584, known to the world as Ivan the Terrible. (His nickname in Russian actually means something more like Ivan the Threatening, but never mind.) Ivan IV is famous because at the end of his life he was probably suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. His condition was of course a tragedy for him but perhaps even more of a tragedy for the people upon whom he inflicted his paranoid delusions. He killed his own son in a fit of rage. He build St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square, the famous one with the multicolored onion domes. Then he put out the eyes of the church’s architect so that he could never build anything else as beautiful as St. Basil’s. More significantly, Ivan IV put a final end to the Mongol presence in Russia. The Mongols still has a fortress at the city of Kazan on the upper Volga River northeast of Moscow. Ivan’s forces famously tunneled under the city, filled the tunnel with explosives, and blew the place up.

Ivan consolidated the power of the Grand Prince of Moscow. He brought the landowning nobility under his control. Most significantly, he started to use the title Tsar. You will sometimes see it transliterated as Czar, but the correct transliteration into English is Tsar. It is a Russian corruption of the Latin word Caesar. Rome had had a Caesar. Byzantium had had a Caesar. Moscow, the Third Rome, would have a Caesar too, only in the Slavic language of the Russians it came out as Tsar. Ivan IV was the first Tsar. Nicholas II was the last.

Even after Ivan the Terrible the lands Moscow ruled did not include Kiev and the territory we now call Ukraine. Some of that land remained under Tartar domination for a time, but as the Tartars’ power fell much of Ukraine, especially its western portions, came to be ruled by Lithuania (which was a significant regional power at the time) or Poland (another significant power) or a Lithuanian/Polish confederation. Other parts of what today are parts of Russia and Ukraine came to be ruled by the Ottoman Turks, but it is significant for our purposes that much of what today is Ukraine was ruled by western, Catholic (that is, not Orthodox) powers for a very long time. Russia proper, including Moscow, never was, or at least never was for long.

The domination of Russia by the Mongols had a profound effect on Russian history and culture. Russia was cut off from all of the major developments of west European history for a very long time by the Mongol domination. The Scholastic Renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which produced such giants of western thought as Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas, never reached Moscow, and not just because Moscow was Orthodox rather than Catholic. The Renaissance proper, which began in Italy in the fourteenth century and flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had no effect on Russia at all because Russia was still cut off from Europe. Russian culture develop independently of those great western developments. It became a more eastern, Asian culture, or perhaps better, an admixture of Asian and European cultures. Russia was, after all, Christian, not Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist. Still, Ivan IV ruled more as an Asian khan than as a European monarch.

It was different in Ukraine, or at least in western Ukraine. Those territories came to be ruled by European, Roman Catholic powers. Poland in particular was (and is) a major European culture. Poland’s Roman Catholicism tied it to western Europe, to Catholic Germany and to Italy. Developments in European culture flowed easily into Poland and through Poland into Ukraine. Most of Polish Ukraine didn’t become Catholic, but part of it did come into full communion with Rome through a union signed at Brest-Litovsk in 1596 that allowed the Ukrainian churches to keep their Orthodox liturgy while coming under the jurisdiction of the Pope in Rome. Ukraine, or at least part of it, was becoming more western than Russia was. Keep in mind, however, that there still wasn’t much of anything called Ukraine and not much of anyone who would have called their language and culture Ukrainian. They were Rus’, that is, to a considerable extent they were Russian.

THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

Enter Peter the Great, 1672-1725. Peter I, Tsar of All the Russians, is one of the most fascinating and powerful figures in all of European history, not just Russian history. Under Peter Russia became an empire in fact and not just because its ruler called himself Caesar (Tsar). Peter was obsessed both with expanding Russian power and with western Europe. He traveled in western Europe. He studied shipbuilding in Holland. He made his nobles shave their beards and adopt western dress. He built a summer palace on the Gulf of Finland that he called “Petergof,” a Russian form of the German name Peterhof, Russian having no H sound. Today it is called Petrodvorets, a translation of Peterhof into Russian. It is an eighteenth century European palace that would not look out of place were it located just outside Paris. It really is quite magnificent. He forced the construction of a brand new city in swampland on the River Neva near the Gulf of Finland. He made it look like a western city, and today it still pretty much does. He called it St. Petersburg, essentially naming it after himself (or at least after his patron saint, Saint Peter). It became the capital of his empire. Under the Soviets it was called Leningrad, but today it is again St. Petersburg. It is easily the most western looking of the Russian cities. Peter built his western city where the Neva flows into the Gulf of Finland precisely because from there Russian ships could easily sail to western Europe and beyond.

Peter was fascinated with the west, and he made the people of his court adopt western ways, but he still ruled in quite an eastern way. If a courtier didn’t shave off his beard, Peter would grab the man and shave it off himself. He has his own son killed. He was brusque and gruff in his personal demeanor and hardly the cultured European he wanted people to think he was. He played at being western, but he didn’t even begin to make Russia itself much more western than it already was. Most Russians still lived the way they had for centuries, as peasants tied to the land through the system of serfdom that wasn’t quite slavery but was pretty close to it. And Peter’s power never extended to Ukraine, much of which was under Polish control during Peter’s time.

Then we come to the fourth “Great” Russian ruler in our story after Vladimir, Ivan, and Peter. Catherine the Great ruled Russia from 1762 to 1796. Catherine is another really famous ruler of Russia, being the Tsarina rather than the Tsar because Russian nouns carry gender. She’s a famous Russian ruler, but she wasn’t a Russian. She was a German. She was married off to Tsar Peter III and came to power in a coup that ousted him. Catherine did more to expand the Russian Empire than any other Russian ruler before or after her. Most significantly for our purposes she captured the Crimean Peninsula from the Ottoman Turks in 1789. Crimea remained part of Russia until 1954, and the Russians have now taken it back from Ukraine. She participated with Prussia and Austria-Hungary in the partition of Poland that ended Polish rule in Ukraine. During her reign all of Ukraine gradually came under Russian rule. By the end of the eighteenth century Ukraine was part of Russia. It had been the birthplace of Russian civilization but had developed along quite different paths from Russia since the thirteenth century. Part of it, the western part, had had much closer ties with western Europe than Russia had ever had. Many Ukrainians had come to think of themselves as more western than those benighted Russians, as many Ukrainians no doubt saw them. Ukraine had not voluntarily joined Russia. It had been absorbed by Russia.

The Crimean Peninsula and Ukraine became part of Russia, and to the Russians several events that occurred thereafter in Ukraine are pivotal events in modern Russian history. Many of us have heard of the Crimean War of 1853-1856. Under Tsar Nicholas I, a true reactionary, Russia had been exerting its influence in the Balkans, where the Russians came to consider themselves the protectors of the Orthodox Serbs against both the Ottoman Turks (who were Muslim, not Christian) and the Catholic Austrians. As the Ottoman Empire weakened Russia saw a chance to control the Black Sea access to the Mediterranean in a way it had never been able to do before. Western powers, especially Britain and France, opposed the expansion of Russian influence into that part of Europe. They fought the Crimean War to stop Russian expansion. We know that war best perhaps from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which tells the story of a battle from the Crimean War that didn’t go well for that particular unit of British forces.

Still, Russia lost the Crimean War, and that loss was something of a turning point in Imperial Russian history. In 1855, while the war was still on, Tsar Nicholas I died. He was succeeded by his son, Tsar Alexander II, 1818-1881, reigned 1855-1881. Alexander saw Russia’s weakness exposed by the loss to western powers in the Crimean War, and he vowed to do something about it. He introduced a series of reforms based on western models. Most significantly he emancipated the serfs. It was only a sort of half reform that left the peasants badly in debt to the landowners, but it did make it possible for some of them to leave the land to work in the new factories in the cities. He introduced a jury system into Russia. He introduced a kind of limited self rule for rural districts of the country. He reformed the army. Alexander II is really important in the modern history of Russia, and his work was all motivated by events that had happened not in Russia proper but in Crimea.

From the fifteenth century on the population of the Crimean Peninsula had consisted mostly of people known as the Crimean Tatars. They were, and are, a people with a Turkic language and Muslim faith. They arose as an identifiable ethnic group under Ottoman rule. For centuries they lived largely off the slave trade, capturing Russians and others and selling them to the Turks. They remained the majority population of the Crimean Peninsula until 1944. More about that below.

Ukraine continued to play an important role in Russian history into the twentieth century. There was a revolution against Tsar Nicholas II in 1905, the first Russian revolution, not the one that brought the Communists to power. One iconic event in that revolution was the revolt of the crew of the Russian battleship Potemkin. The great Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein made a film of the incident that most every Russian knows. It is for Russians something like the sinking of the US battleship Maine in Havana harbor in 1898 was for Americans, something everyone knows about. Just as the Maine wasn’t sunk in the US, the crew of the Potemkin didn’t revolt in what today is Russia. They did it in Odessa, the major Ukrainian port on the Black Sea.

The attitude of the Russian government toward Ukraine throughout the imperial period is telling. The Russian imperial authorities did not consider Ukrainian to be a separate language. They called it a dialect of Russian and didn’t allow it to be taught in the schools. They didn’t consider Ukraine to have a distinct culture. To them, Ukrainians were just Russians who spoke a bit funny. That attitude produced significant tensions in Ukraine. As happened with peoples in much of central and eastern Europe at the same time, beginning in the early nineteenth century Ukrainians began to see themselves as a distinct people with their own history and their own culture that they wanted to develop and practice. The Russians wouldn’t let them. Many Ukrainians were not exactly pleased.

THE SOVIET PERIOD

On Nov. 7, 1917 (October 25 by the old calendar the Russians still used at the time), Vladimir Lenin led a gang of his cohorts known as the Bolsheviks into the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg (called Petrograd at the time because St. Petersburg was way too German to use when Russia was at war with Germany). They captured the members of the Provisional Government, an ineffective bunch of western style intellectuals and politicians who had taken over Russia when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in March (February under the old calendar) because of the disaster World War I had been for Russia. The Soviets called the events of Nov. 7, 1917, the Great October Revolution (October of course because it happened in October not November under the old calendar). I still have in my home office a label pin I got in Russia with Lenin’s picture on it next to the word October. The revolution was at the beginning more of a coup d’état than a true revolution, but never mind. The Soviet period of Russian (and Ukrainian) history had begun.

Lenin quickly made peace with Germany, ending Russia’s involvement in the World War I through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. He knew he could do nothing with the country while the war was still raging. Besides, to him World War I was nothing but an imperialist struggle between capitalist powers that he wanted nothing to do with. His coup was followed by a long and bloody civil war between the Communists, as the Bolsheviks came to call themselves, and various groups opposed to Communist rule, generally called the Whites to distinguish them from Lenin’s Reds. Eventually the Communists prevailed and established rule by what came to be called the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Its rule extended throughout most of what had been the Russian Empire, including most of what today is Ukraine. In 1922 Lenin created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR to most of us. “Soviet,” by the way, is just an ordinary Russian word that means “council,” the rebels of 1905 having created soviets, councils, as governing authorities in areas they briefly freed from Imperial rule and making the soviet the ideal governmental form for the Communists. Originally there were four constituent Soviet Republics. There eventually came to be fifteen of them, but how that happened doesn’t matter for our purposes because Ukraine was one of the original four and remained a Soviet Socialist Republic until the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. Originally the Crimean Peninsula was part of the Russian republic, not the Ukrainian one.

In the late 1920s and the 1930s the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, dictated over by Josef Stalin, began a policy of the forced collectivization of agriculture. That means that the Communist regime was going to reorganize essentially all farming in the country into collectives in which the individual people owned no land of their own and were obligated to grow and harvest crops and quantities dictated to them by the central planners in Moscow. The peasantry throughout the Soviet Union resisted. They even killed their own farm livestock to keep it from being turned over to a collective farm. Stalin decided to force the peasantry to comply by starving millions of them to death through an artificially engineered famine. He did it throughout the country, but he did it most thoroughly and most viciously in Ukraine, where the Soviet Union’s richest farmland was located. One head of the Ukrainian Communist Party in the 1930s was Nikita Khrushchev. More about him anon.

In 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The German armies rather quickly overran Ukraine and Crimea. There was so much anti-Soviet and anti-Russian sentiment among the Ukrainian population that many scholars believe that Hitler could have made Ukraine an ally and gotten a great many Ukrainians to join him in fighting the Soviets. He didn’t. His demented racial ideology told him that all Slavic people, including Ukrainians, were subhuman. He didn’t want them as allies, he wanted to exterminate them and settle Germans in their land. Instead of enlisting them as allies the Nazis alienated the Ukrainians but good. Some of them fought with the Soviet Red Army against the Germans. Some joined guerilla bands that fought both the Germans and the Soviets. Few supported the Germans.

With one exception, although the exception was in Russia not Ukraine at the time. That exception was the Crimean Tatars. Many of them corroborated with the Germans, who occupied Crimea for a time. In 1944 the Red Army retook Crimea. Stalin retaliated against all of the Crimean Tatars, not just the ones who had supported the Germans. He set out to deport every last one of them out of Crimea. Many fled the country, with large numbers of them ending up in Turkey. Stalin, however, succeeded in deporting most of them to other parts of the Soviet Union, especially Uzbekistan in Central Asia. Crimea was resettled with Russians, and its population has remained predominately Russian to this day.

The Soviet Union of course defeated the Germans in World War II. The Russians don’t call that war World War II. They call it the Great War of the Fatherland (or depending on how you translate the Russian words, The Great Patriotic War). The suffering of the Soviet people was unimaginable. They had suffered under Stalin for nearly twenty years when the war began, then many of them suffered under the Nazis. Soviet casualties in the war are usually said to number around twenty million. Compare that to the less than 500,000 that the US lost. I don’t mean to minimize the losses to the families of those Americans who were killed, but in the Soviet Union every family had people who were killed. When I was there in 1968 people were surprised when I said that both of my parents were still alive. For Soviet people just a little older than I am having lost at least one parent in the war was so common that it was almost assumed. The Soviets of course used the war as an excuse for the economic harshness of Soviet life for a long time after the war, but there was some truth in that excuse. The country suffered horribly. Some of that suffering was of their own making, but the suffering cannot be denied or minimized. And Ukraine suffered as much or more than any other part of the country.

World War II ended in 1945 with an allied victory brought about more by the Soviet Union than by any other country, ours included. Stalin resumed his reign of terror, albeit with perhaps a bit less vehemence than he had had before the war. As part of the events that ended the war Stalin annexed some territory that had belonged to Czechoslovakia or Hungary to the Ukrainian SSR.

Stalin died in 1953. Shortly thereafter Nikita Khrushchev became the leader of both the Communist Party and the country. Recall that he had been the head of the Ukrainian Communist Party back in the 1930s. Despite the immense brutality of Communist policies in Ukraine at that time, Khrushchev seems to have had something of a soft spot in his heart for Ukraine. That at least is one explanation given for the fact that in 1954 he engineered the transfer of Crimea from the Russian Republic to the Ukrainian Republic. At that point Crimea had been part of Russia since Catherine the Great conquered it from the Turks in 1789, 165 years earlier. After Stalin’s deportation of the Crimean Tatars its population was mostly Russian, not Ukrainian. It is of course true that Crimea has a land border with Ukraine but none with Russia, and under the Soviet system it didn’t make much of a difference to the people whether they were in Russia or in Ukraine. Still, as we have seen, Crimea had seen crucial events in the history of Russia and was clearly Russian territory. Nonetheless, Khrushchev got the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, a top legislative body in the USSR, to transfer Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet didn’t actually have the legal authority to do it; but if the Party wanted something, legal niceties didn’t matter much. The Supreme Soviet changed the law a few days later to give itself the legal authority to do what it had already done. All that really mattered was that Khrushchev ran the Party, and Khrushchev wanted it done. Many have considered the transfer to have been illegal ever since. Legal or illegal, Crimea became part of the Ukrainian Republic in 1954 and remained part of it until a few weeks ago. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

THE POST-SOVIET ERA

The Soviet Union dissolved by order of the Supreme Soviet on December 26, 1991. The three Baltic Republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had already gained their independence. Ukraine had also taken steps toward independence by that time. The order dissolving the USSR recognized the independence of the remaining twelve Soviet Socialist Republics. Among those Republics were the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Republic. The new nations that were formed had the same borders as they had had as Soviet Republics. That meant that Crimea became part of the newly independent Republic of Ukraine. The rest of the world quickly recognized the newly independent republics as independent nations, which meant that both Russia and the rest of the world had recognized Crimea as part of Ukraine. But of course Crimea had been part of Ukraine for only thirty-seven years at that point, the mere blink of an eye in historical perspective. And Crimea’s population was overwhelmingly Russian, not Ukrainian. Crimea was given some sort of autonomous status within Ukraine, but it was still part of Ukraine.

The Republic of Ukraine has a more or less democratic constitution. In 2010 Viktor Yanukovych was elected President with 48% of the vote. Of course, the old divisions and tensions within Ukraine remained. The population was only something like 77% Ukrainian, with most of the rest of the population, including virtually all of the population of Crimea, being Russian. The Russians were, and are, concentrated mostly in the eastern parts of Ukraine that border on Russia. They looked to Russia for the aid Ukraine badly needed to deal with its severe economic difficulties. Most people in the rest of Ukraine looked to the European Union for that help.

Yanukovych leaned toward Russia. He scuttled an embryonic agreement that the previous Ukrainian administration had worked out with the European Union and sought closer economic ties with Russia. The people of Kiev and the western parts of the country rebelled. Their massive demonstrations brought down the Yanukovych government, and Yanukovych himself—a major league crook as it turned out—fled to Russia. A more western-leaning government took his place. That government, which currently runs Ukraine (more or less) was never popularly elected. Russia has something of a point when they say that that government is illegal. Yanukovych may have been a crook, and many people may have disliked his policies, but he had at least been popularly elected. The current government of Ukraine never was.

Whereupon Russia, under its President Vladimir Putin, took Crimea from Ukraine. Putin just sent in the troops and took it. It was a bit more complicated than that of course, but that’s essentially what happened. The Russians cooked up a referendum that had the people of Crimea vote for union with Russia, but of course most of the people of Crimea are Russians not Ukrainians. The world, including the US with President Obama leading the way, reacted with outrage. Russia’s action in taking Crimea from Ukraine was indeed clearly a violation of international law. Russia violated the territorial integrity of Ukraine as both Russia and the rest of the world had recognized it when the USSR dissolved. Still, it seems to me that the matter is hardly so simple. The people of Crimea are Russians not Ukrainians (for the most part at least). The port city of Sevastopol is the home port of the Russian navy’s Black Sea fleet, and it has been that for a very long time. To the Russians Crimea is Russian. That doesn’t give them the legal right to take it under international law, but it surely explains why they did what they did. After all, to them the transfer of Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 was illegal from the beginning. Beyond that, who was going to stop them? Surely not Ukraine. The Russian military could overrun Ukraine without even trying very hard. Surely not the US. We have no vested interest in the matter other than respect for international law, which is after all an abstraction that we ourselves violate whenever we feel like it. (Exhibit A: George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.) Moreover, Russia has enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on earth several times over. There’s no way we’re going to war with Russia over Crimea (or I trust over anything else). It seems to me that the Russian annexation of Ukraine is a done deal. It is justified by numerous historical and demographic circumstances. We just need to get over it.

Of course tensions between Russia and Ukraine, and between Ukrainian and Russian citizens of Ukraine, continue. Many cities and districts of the easternmost portion of Ukraine have majority Russian populations. The economy is in bad shape. In the eastern part of Ukraine the economy is based on mining and heavy industry related to the mining. It consists, however, mostly of Soviet era equipment that is obsolete and horribly inefficient. All of Ukraine needs outside economic assistance on a huge scale. The country is heavily dependent on Russian natural gas for its energy supply, as by the way is Germany. The historical enmeshing of Russia and Ukraine that we have briefly reviewed here simply cannot be ignored. We don’t know what Putin is going to do, but clearly we must base our response to whatever he does on a better understanding of the history of the region than our response so far seems to reflect. I hope that my humble efforts at explanation here help you with that understanding.