 | McLae´s guide to Ukraine |  |
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Ukraine Internet country code: .ua International telephone prefix: +380  Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It lies at the northwest end of the Black Sea, with Russia to the east, Belarus to the north, Poland to the northwest, Slovakia and Hungary to the west, and Romania to the south west and south, with Moldova in between. Most of the country was formerly a part of Tzarist Russia; after WWII, the entire country - known as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic - was a part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine is the second-largest country in Europe. Language: Ukrainian is the official language. Near the neighboring countries, Russian, Romanian, Polish, and Hungarian are spoken. Russian is a close relative of Ukrainian and is most often the language of choice in the south and east of Ukraine. It is safe to assume that in large cities everyone would understand Russian (the post-Soviet heritage), however, beware that in central and especially western parts people may be reluctant to help you if you speak Russian. On the other hand, in eastern parts and especially Crimea, Russian is commonplace. Young people speak a little English, because it's common as a foreign language in school. If you are traveling to the Ukraine learn either basic Ukrainian or basic Russian before hand (i.e. know your phrase book well). Virtually nobody in any official position (Train Stations, Police, Bus drivers, Information Desks, etc.) will be able to speak any language other than Russian or Ukrainian. If you already know another Slavic language you will be able to communicate sufficiently. Respect: Ukraine is by no means a conservative country with respect to clothing, behaviour, overcharging you if they can get by with it, getting what you paid for (quality), smoking in your face, running over you with a car, cart, etc. It is very different from our western perspective in some of these extremes. Ukrainian women are very attractive. Unlike the West, many of them wear risque clothes. This does not always mean that the woman is a prostitute or "easy". History: During the tenth and eleventh centuries the territory of Ukraine became the center of a powerful and prestigious state in Europe, Kievan Rus, laying the foundation for the national identity of Ukrainians, as well as other East Slavic nations, through subsequent centuries. Its capital was Kiev, the capital of modern Ukraine, wrestled from Khazars by Askold and Dir in the late 800s. According to the Primary Chronicle the Kievan Rus' elite initially consisted of Varangians from present-day Scandinavia. The Varangians later became assimilated into the local Slavic population and gave the Rus' its first powerful dynasty, the Rurik Dynasty. Kievian Rus' was comprised from several principalities, ruled by the interrelated Rurikid Princes. The seat of Kiev, the most prestigious and influential of all principalities, became a subject of many rivarlies between Rurikids as the most valuable prize in their quest for power, sometimes through intrigue but often through bloody conflicts. The Golden Age of Kievan Rus' falls on the years of Kiev being ruled by Vladimir the Great (Volodymyr) (980—1015) who turned Rus' towards the Byzantine Christianity and his son Yaroslav the Wise (1019—1054) during whose lengthy reign, Kievan Rus' reached a zenith of its cultural flowering and military power that was followed by the state's increasing fragmentation as the relative importance of regions rose again. After the one last resurgence under the rule of Vladimir Monomakh 1113—1125 and his son Mstislav (1125—1132) the Kievan Rus' finally disintegrated into the separate principalities following Mstislav's death. The thirteenth century Mongol invasion dealt Rus' a final blow from which it never recovered. On the Ukrainian territory, the state of Kievan Rus' was succeeded by the principalities of Halych and Volodymyr-Volynskyi, which were merged into the state of Halych-Volynia. In the mid 14th century it was subjugated by Casimir IV of Poland while the heartland of Rus', including Kiev, fell under the Gedimid Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Following the 1386 marriage of Lithuania's Grand Duke Jagiello to Poland's Queen Jadwiga, most of the Ukrainian territory was cotrolled by the increasingly Ruthenized Lithuanian rulers as part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the term Ruthenia and Ruthenians as the Latinized versions of "Rus'", became widely applied to the land and its people, respectively). By the 1569 Union of Lublin that formed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a significant part of Ukraine was moved from largely Ruthenized Lithuanian rule to the Polish administration, as it was transferred to the Polish Crown. Under the cultural pressure of polonization much of the Ruthenian upper class converted to Catholicism as such transitions were beneficial for achieving the political influence within the state, e.g. King Michael of Poland who reigned in 1640—1673 was of the originally Ruthenian Vishnevetsky Wis'niowiecki family. At the same time the common people, especially the peasants retained their old ways of especially, the allegiance to their historic Eastern Orthodox Church, which led to the increasing social tensions, visible in such events as the 1596 Union of Brest, created by Zygmunt III, who attempted to bring the Orthodox population under the Catholicism through creation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. This controversial move failed to achieve its goals. Resisted even by some Ruthenian magnates, otherwise loyal to the Polish kings (Ostrogskis being the most notable example), the new "intermediate" religion was unnecessary for the most of the upper class, much of whom increasingly turned directly towards Catholicism with each subsequent generation. Thus, the Ukrainian commoners, deprived of their native protectors among Ruthenian nobility, turned for protection to the militant Cossacks who remained fiercely Orthodox at all times. In the mid of the 17th century, a Cossack quasi-state, the Zaporozhian Sich, was established by the Dnieper cossacks and the Ruthenian peasants fleeing Polish serfdom. Poland had little real control of this land in central Ukraine, which became an autonomous military state, at times allied with the Commonwealth in the military campaigns. However, the enserfment of peasantry by the Polish nobility, overall emphasize of the Commonwealth's agricultural economy on the fierce exploitation of the unfree workforce, and, perhaps most importantly, the suppression of the Orthodox church pushed the allegiances of Cossacks away from Poland. Their aspiration was to have a representation in Polish Sejm, recognition of Orthodox traditions and the gradual expansion of the Cossack Registry, all being vehemently denied by the Polish kings. The cossacks turned toward Orthodox Russia, which was one reason for the later downfall of the Polish-Lithuanian state. In 1648 Bohdan Khmelnytsky lead the largest of the Cossack uprisings against the Commonwealth and the Polish king John II Casimir. This uprising finally led to a partition of Ukraine between Poland and Russia. Left-Bank Ukraine was eventually integrated into Russia as the Cossack Hetmanate, following the 1654 Treaty of Pereyaslav. After the partitions of Poland in the end of the eighteenth century by Prussia, Habsburg Austria, and Russia at the end of the eighteenth century, Western Ukrainian (Galicia) was taken over by Austria, while the rest of Ukraine was progressively incorporated into the Russian Empire. Despite the promises of Ukrainian autonomy given by the treaty of Pereyaslav, Ukrainians never received the freedoms they were hoping for from Imperial Russia. The Ukrainians played an important role in the frequent wars between East European monarchies and the Ottoman Empire. As a result of Russian successes in the wars against Turkey and Crimean Khanate of 1768-74 and 1787-1792, the territories along the Black Sea coast were annexed to the Russian Empire as well. Within the Empire Ukrainians frequently rose to the highest offices of Russian state (e.g., Aleksey Razumovsky, Alexander Bezborodko, Ivan Paskevich), and dominated the Russian Orthodox Church (e.g., Stephen Yavorsky, Feofan Prokopovich, Dimitry of Rostov). In the same time, the tsar regime was implementing a harsh policy of Russification, banning the use of the Ukrainian language in print, and in public. During World War I Austro-Hungarian authorities subjected to repression Ukrainians in Galicia that sympathized with Russia. Over twenty thousand supporters of Russia are arrested and placed in the Austrian concentration camp in Talerhof, Styria, and in a fortress at Terezín, now in the Czech Republic. With the Russian and Austrian empires' collapse following the World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917 Ukrainian national movement for self-determination reemerged. During 1917-20 several separate Ukrainian states briefly emerged: the Central Rada, the Hetmanate, the Directorate, the Ukrainian People's Republic and the West Ukrainian People's Republic. However, with the defeat of the latter in the Polish-Ukrainian War and the failure of the Polish Kiev Offensive (1920) of the Polish-Soviet War, the Peace of Riga concluded in March 1921 between Poland and Bolsheviks left Ukraine divided again. The western part of Ukraine had been incorporated into newly organized Second Polish Republic, and the larger, central and eastern part, established as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in March of 1919, later became a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, when it was formed in December of 1922. The Ukrainian national idea lived on during the early-Soviet years and the Ukrainian culture and language even enjoyed a revival as the Ukrainization became a local implementation of the Soviet-wide Korenization ("indigenization") policy whose gains were sharply reversed by the early-1930s policy changes. Ukraine saw its share of the Soviet industrialization starting from the late-1920s and the republic's industrial output quadrupoled in the 1930s. However, the industrialization had a heavy cost for the peasantry, demographically a backbone of the Ukrainian nation. To satisfy the state's need for increased food supplies and finance industrialization, Stalin instituted a program of collectivization of agriculture as the state combined the peasants' lands and animals into collective farms and enforcing the policies by the regular troops and secret police. Those who resisted were arrested and deported and the increased production quotas were placed on the peasantry despite the collectivization had a devastating effect on agricultural productivity. As the members of the collective farms were not allowed to receive any grain until the unachievable quotas were met, the starvation became widespread. At least four million starved to death in a famine (some estimates give a higher death tolls of five to seven million), known as the Holodomor. The times also coincided with the Soviet assault on the national political and cultural elite often accused in "nationalist deviations" as the Ukrainization policies were reversed at the turn of the decade. Two waves of purges (1929-1934 and 1936-1938) resulted in the elimination of the four-fifth of the Ukrainian cultural elite. During World War II, some elements of the Ukrainian nationalist underground fought both Nazi and Soviet forces, while others collaborated with them, having been ignored by all other powers. In 1941 the German invaders and their Axis allies initially advanced against desperate but unsuccessful efforts of the Red Army. In the encirclement battle of Kiev, the city was acclaimed by the Soviets as a "Hero City", for the fierce resistance of the Red Army and of the local population. More than 660,000 Soviet troops were taken captive. Initially, the Germans were received as liberators by many Ukrainians, especially in western Ukraine which had only been occupied by the Soviets in 1939. However, German rule in the occupied territories eventually aided the Soviet cause. Nazi administrators of conquered Soviet territories made little attempt to exploit the population of Ukrainian territories' dissatisfaction with Soviet political and economic policies. Instead, the Nazis preserved the collective-farm system, systematically carried out genocidal policies against Jews, and deported others (mainly Ukrainians) to work in Germany. Under these circumstances, most people living on the occupied territory passively or actively opposed the Nazis. Total civilian losses during the war and German occupation in Ukraine are estimated between five and eight million, including over half a million Jews shot and killed by the Einsatzgruppen, sometimes with the help of Ukrainian collaborators. Of the estimated eleven million Soviet troops who fell in battle against the Nazis, about a quarter (2.7 million) were ethnic Ukrainians. Ukraine is distinguished as one of the first nations to fight the Axis powers in Carpatho-Ukraine, and one that saw some of the greatest bloodshed during the war. After the Second World War, the borders of then-Soviet Ukraine were extended to the West (see Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Curzon line), uniting most Ukrainians under one political state with much of the non-Ukrainian population of the attached territories having been deported. After the war Ukraine became a member of the United Nations Organization. In 1954, Crimea was transferred from the RSFSR to Ukraine. This decision of Nikita Khrushchev, intended to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Pereyaslav, seen in Soviet historiography as the 'union of two fraternal peoples', led to tensions between Russia and Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Independence was achieved in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Ukraine was a founding member of the Commonwealth of Independent States. |
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