The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine

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As I mentioned before, I wanted a little something that would open my eyes to some of my ancestral roots, as well as offer me the history and politics of a region about which I know so little. Plokhy does this in an even-handed manner, mixing social, cultural, and political history together in an easy to digest format. The book tries not to skim, but it is almost impossible to delve in too deeply and still offer up a book that can be carried from one place to another. Plokhy’s arc of Ukrainian history opens the discussion, but never does he profess to having all the answers or to be the final word on the matter. While I refuse to call it a primer, this book does lay some basic foundations for those who want to learn more. Plokhy’s writing style is also easy to comprehend, offering readers lots of information in a relevant format. Depending on the topic at hand, chapters can be short or more detailed, permitting to reader to extract what they want before moving along. Written in English, there was little I felt I might be missing at the hands of a translator, which helped me feel confident in my reading, though I am sure Plokhy has been able to thoroughly research the topics in their original languages, as well as relying on other historians who have taken the leap before him. While the region may not be of interest to all, I can see many readers learning a great deal, even if they chose only to read key chapters in the book: lead-up to the Great War through the the Cold War fallout. While I never promote ‘parachuting’ into a book, I admit this was the section that interested me most and allowed me to extract a great deal of information to whet my appetite and cultivate a stronger understanding of familial roots. I suppose I will have to see if I cannot better comprehend what led my family to leave Ukraine and settle in Saskatchewan. The Prairie West does have a strong Ukrainian population and Plokhy has given me some good ideas why this might be the case. Plokhy starts with the ancient Greeks, and then continues through to the Vikings, the Byzantine Empire, the Mongolian Empire, the Habsburg and Russian Empires, and the Soviet Union. Ukrainian nationalism, like other European nationalisms, became more pronounced in the 19th century. Plokhy emphasizes how that impacted other multinational empires, and how other wars accelerated demands for independence. For a general survey, Plokhy finds a lot of time to study opinions of political elites and intellectuals. He finds time to include the debate over Russian and Ukranian identity, and the debates between the "Little Russian" and "Ukrainian" debates over what Ukrainian identity is - and those debates have become painfully relevant. This book is more than just a history of Ukraine and its people – it’s also describes the language, culture and religion of people who have been under some type of foreign domination for most of its history. Plokhy paints a picture of Ukraine through the centuries with its beginnings as Kyiv-Rus in the 10th century and takes us on a journey through time through the Cossak Hetmanat in the 17th century to the formation of Ukraine as an independent nation. In many ways, the Ukrainian people had to endure a litany of horrors culminating in the Holodomor (famine) of 1932-1933 when millions of Ukrainians died of starvation directly caused by Stalin. The Ukrainian independence of 1918 and 1919 did not last long and the proclamation of independence in 1941 was crashed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Russia. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought into the mid 1950s against the Soviets and independence finally came when the Soviet Union collapsed. That independence is again being threatened by Putin who seeks to rebuild the Soviet Union again. This ongoing battle will go long way in seeing if Europe is going to be dragged into a future where armed invasions of neighboring countries becomes the norm.

The author explains as well the religious intricacies of the Uniate Church (a blend of Orthodox and Catholicism) and Russian Orthodox. There has always been a pull of Ukrainian nationhood towards the West. The brutalization by the Soviet Union to Ukraine culture (and also Eastern European countries and the Baltic countries) encouraged this Western pull. Even with the dominance of Russia/Soviet Union of Ukraine over the centuries, there was always a stirring and simmering of Ukrainian nationalism to form a country. I said, in my review of ‘The History of Ukraine and …’, “If you want to understand why things are as they are in Ukraine today, read this.” Due to constant repression from several ethnicities, many Ukrainians left for the United States and Canada in the early 1900s – over 600,000. This set up a base for a growing and flourishing diaspora.Kyivan Rus' development stretched over hundreds of years, but its end came abruptly. Kyivan Rus', a polity with no generally recognized date of birth, has a definite date of death. It occurred on December 7, 1240, when yet another wave of invaders from the Eurasian steppes, the Mongols, conquered the city of Kyiv. The city of Kyiv diminished in importance under Mongol rule (also known as the Golden Horde). In a decisive battle in 1362, Lithuanian and Rus’ forces defeated the a leading tribe of the Golden Horde. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth subsequently controlled the Ukrainian region for many years. The first Maidan (Ukrainian word for square) was considered to be October 1990, the second was in 2004 and the third in 2013 and 2014. Think of Ukrainian independence attempts after Kyivan Rus, as first 1918 in Kyiv and Lviv, second 1939 in Transcarpathia, and third 1941 in Lviv. Then comes the real deal in 1991, when Ukrainians went to the polls to vote their future. 90% wanted independence. One week after Ukrainian citizens voted for independence, the Soviet Union was dissolved; as Yeltsin explained, without Ukraine, Russia would be simply “outnumbered and outvoted by the Muslim Republics”. Gorbachev’s resignation speech marked the end of the Soviet Union. Moscow, that is the Greater Russian nation, has always been hateful to our Little Russian nation; in its malicious intentions it has long resolved to drive our nation to perdition.”

This is present-minded history at its most urgent. Anyone wanting to understand why Russia and the West confront each other over the future of Ukraine will want to read Serhii Plokhy's reasoned, measured yet passionate account' Michael Ignatieff It is a cruel game to ask a historian to look into the future. But here we are and, as Plokhy himself says, rephrasing Churchill, historians are probably “the worst commentators on contemporary events except for all the others”. So what about the Ukrainians’ spring counteroffensive, I ask – which, when we speak in the last days of April, is expected any day. He goes to great length, as well, to talk about the cultural differences that developed between the Rus of Kiev and the Rus in Muscovy, and the religious and cultural changes that occurred under the tutelage of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The desire for independence throughout history did not always exist, but Ukraine developed its own national identity throughout history due to its connections to other European states, and its closeness to the Turkic and Tartar tribes that inhibited the Crimean region. These were the more interesting parts of the book. This revised edition includes new material that brings this definitive history up to the present. As Ukraine once again finds itself at the center of global attention, Plokhy brings its history to vivid life as he connects the nation’s past with its present and future. But soon he began to change his mind. History, after all, is a weapon in this conflict. Vladimir Putin’s justification for his aggression towards Ukraine is rooted in his (twisted and faulty) understanding of the past. He even wrote a sprawling, inaccurate essay laying out his views in 2021, titled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians. Plokhy began to feel compelled to fight the Russian president’s terrible history writing with good, solid history writing of his own.Episodul: în 1994 se semnează Memorandumul de la Budapesta, prin care Rusia, dar și Marea Britanie și Statele Unite îi garantează Ucrainei securitatea granițelor, în schimbul semnării de către Ucraina a Tratatului de neproliferare a armamentului nuclear. Se presupune că, la acel moment, Ucraina deținea al treilea cel mai mare arsenal nuclear al lumii (moștenire sovietică). Ucraina chiar renunță la arsenal. Să judece fiecare în ce măsură cele trei puteri își respectă angajamentul. Plokhy agrees with the position that the historical Slavic inhabitants of Kyivan Rus are the forefathers of modern Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians (thereby recognizing the ethnic, culture, religious, and historical commonality between them) but argues convincingly that the various historical trajectories, though oftentimes overlapping, sets them apart from each other as unique ethnic and cultural groups. I bought this on 24th February, the day Putin invaded Ukraine for the second time. I guess what I have seen daily on the T. V. over the past month is the next chapter. Plokhy’s book was published in 2015, the year after the Russian annexation of Crimea. The author’s concluding words echo prophetically in the light of the last few weeks: The [Russian] imperial minister of education Count Sergei Uvarov formulated the foundation of the new Russian imperial identity: autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationalism… Uvarov’s nationality was not general, but specifically Russian… They gather into one whole the sacred remnants of Russian nationality. That nationality included Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians.

A straightforward, useful work that looks frankly at Ukraine’s ongoing “price of freedom” against the rapacious, destabilizing force of Russia. An exemplary account of Europe's least-known large country" ( Wall Street Journal) by an award-winning historian. Ukraine was Hitler’s Lebensraum centerpiece. Hitler knew that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) recognized that Ukraine was independent of Russia. His plan was kill everyone up to the Volga and then fill that void with German colonists (a plan Hitler took from the time-tested US settler-colonial technique for odiously killing/removing its native population). Babi Yar in Ukraine outside of Kyiv, was where the first attempt in Europe to mass exterminate Jews happened. The first to die at Auschwitz by Zyklon-B were actually Soviet POW’s (September 1941). “Ukraine under German occupation became a large-scale model of a concentration camp.” Ukrainians who tried to assist Jewish people were not only executed but often their families as well. Germans left the collective farms intact so the exploitation could continue under a different master “extracting resources from the local population”. Ukrainians were almost 80% of all Ostarbeiter taken by Nazis from occupied land. “The Holocaust eradicated most of Ukrainian Jewry. WWII’s end showed Ukraine with 15% more territory, but 7 million citizens had died, and 10 million no longer had a roof over their head. The same is true of Serhii Plokhy's history of Ukraine, though he is far more objective and fair in his presentation of Ukrainian history than the mere nationalists on either side of the Ukrainian debate. Plokhy is definitely not pro-Russian, but he doesn't come across as someone on the far side of Ukrainian nationalism. He's a Ukrainian patriot who recognizes that the history of Ukraine consists of the union of a plurality of identities, languages, faiths, and cultures.

I wonder whether he can foresee the disintegration of the Russian Federation as it is currently constituted – especially in a context where Russia is seemingly recruiting its military disproportionately from its Muslim peoples and peripheral autonomous republics. “The process of disintegration has already started,” he replies. “Already Russia doesn’t control its constitutional territory” – by which he means that some parts of Ukraine that were formally adopted as part of the Russian Federation last autumn in the wake of the full-scale invasion, such as Kherson, have already been liberated and restored to Ukrainian hands. But yes, he says, republics on the edges of the federation – such as Tuva, Buryatia and Sakha, not to mention Chechnya, are vulnerable. “The longer the war goes on, the stronger the narrative that Russia is using them as cannon fodder.” De la primele triburi războinice din stepă la Rusia Kieveană - ironic, mai mult Kieveană decât Rusie, pentru ca e vorba de fapt de vikingul Rus'-, la cazacii care trezesc conștiința națională și călugării kieveni din secolul XVII care fac greșeala fundamentală să creeze conceptul de malo ruși (micii ruși), în încercarea de a obține protecția țarilor, o sintagmă ce încă dă apă la moară unui dictator dement din secolul XXI, până la Holodomor și Holocaust, Ucraina Sovietică, cele trei Maidane și anexarea Crimeei + războiul separatist din Donbass, Plokhy (Plohîi în altă grafie) dă mult de lucru cititorului. Mult și greu. Precum istoria acestei țări hărțuite neîncetat de toate imperiile din zonă, mai ceva ca România (la ei au mai fost și Polonia și Lituania, pe lângă toti rușii, otomanii, austro-ungarii, nemții). Dar în final ajungi la ceva foarte dificil de realizat, mai ales zilele astea: o viziune de ansamblu a unei situații extrem de complicate.