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The origins of the fault lines in Ukraine

KENNY COYLE examines how the turbulent events of the early 20th century affected politics and sense of identity in today's Ukraine

All reactionary expressions of nationalism invariably base their claims on mythical and mystical origins - and the Ukrainian far-right is no exception.

Tracing Ukrainian nationhood back to the 9th century with the foundation of the state of Rus in Kiev by Scandinavian counterparts of the Normans, right-wing Ukrainian nationalism - like its counterparts elsewhere in Europe - shares an unscientific fixation on race and unhistorical obsession with national purity.

Rus later became the root term for Great Russia and Byelorussia (White Russia) while the territory of Ukraine itself was often referred to as Malorussia (Little Russia).

For several hundred years, there was no "Ukraine," no unified territory and certainly no independent state with that name.

Lithuania, Poland, Austria-Hungary and the tsarist empire each ruled over parts of what we now know as Ukraine.

One important legacy of this period was that the Ukrainian-speaking people of the eastern parts of the Ukrainian lands were largely Orthodox by denomination, while in the western parts they were Greek Catholic.

Ukraine has always been a territory of mixed and changing population, home to diverse religious, ethnic and linguistic communities. Ukrainian identity is fluid not fixed. The word Ukraine itself means "borderland."

As the historian Alexei Miller has shown, even as late as 1861 one of the intellectuals associated with the emerging Ukrainophile nationalist movement could happily describe his compatriots as "Southern Russians, Little Russians, or, more correctly, Rusyns," and the same writer identified the territory of "the Ukraine" as merely greater Kiev.

Following the first world war, ethnic Ukrainians found themselves split between the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia.

Attempts in western Ukraine to establish a Ukrainian republic were crushed by the Poles, while in the eastern territories the conflict between pro and anti-Bolshevik forces, strongly supported by Germany and Austria, finally led to the emergence of a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

The record of Soviet Ukraine remains bitterly contested. Today only the anti-communist side is promoted, focusing on the famine deaths of the early 1930s, repression against Ukrainian intellectuals, the effects of Russification, the purging of Ukrainian communists during the Stalin era and so on.

But it is a bitter irony for the ultra-nationalists that it was the Soviet era that saw the most powerful consolidation of Ukrainian identity, language and territory. Without this it is impossible to envisage the current statehood of Ukraine.

As we will see in a later article, distortions of history regarding Soviet Ukraine have become a common currency of the far-right, the conservative nationalists and even would-be liberals in the West.

In the Ukrainian SSR, Lenin's policy of korenizatsiia, promoting local cadres to replace Russian ones, was put into effect.

In 1922 the Communist Party of Ukraine had only 56,000 members, mostly ethnically Russian and Jewish. Less than a quarter were ethnically Ukrainian and only 11 per cent knew Ukrainian.

 

By 1927 ethnic Ukrainians constituted more than half of party members and government officials.

Even the anti-communist historian Paul Kubiceck in his History Of The Ukraine, conceded that the Ukrainian SSR "was showered with resources" so that by the end of the 1930s "Ukraine was one of Europe's leading industrial centres, producing more metal and machines than Italy and France and nearly as much as Great Britain."

Kubiceck also showed that the Soviet government actively promoted Ukrainian culture and language.

"By 1929, 83 per cent of elementary schools and 66 per cent of secondary schools offered instruction in Ukrainian, and almost all ethnic Ukrainian students were enrolled in Ukrainian schools, which, it bears emphasising, were banned under the tsars.

"Similarly, by the end of the 1920s, most of the books and newspapers in the Uk SSR were in Ukrainian, and Soviet investment in education meant that literacy rates grew to more than 50 per cent by 1927. The arts - including theatre, music, literature, painting, and film - experienced a renaissance, thanks in part to government subsidies."

Soviet Ukraine underwent a profound social transformation, becoming a centre of industrialisation and urbanisation unknown previously.

In 1939, as a result of the Non-Aggression Pact between Moscow and Berlin, when the nazis moved into western Poland Stalin sent Soviet forces into disputed Polish-held eastern territories.

Here Poles were a minority. Majority Ukrainian areas became part of the Ukrainian SSR. Other parts went to Lithuania, including its current capital Vilnius, and to Byelorussia.

The entry of Soviet troops into these territories is still presented in mainstream historiography as part of the sordid record of "Soviet imperialism."

However, the wily Stalin was careful to ensure that the territories lay to the east of the Curzon Line, named after the British foreign secretary who proposed remarkably similar frontiers between Soviet Russia and the newly reconstituted Poland in 1919.

After the Soviet-Polish War of 1920 this was overtaken by the 1921 Treaty of Riga, where the Soviet side agreed to territorial concessions after a war between the two states.

With minor variations, the Curzon Line was used as the basis for the Yalta Agreement in 1945.

Churchill's unsuccessful attempt to keep Lviv (Lwow) in Poland, would have relegated today's Svoboda supporters to the status of a minor Polish irritant, rather than a Ukrainian political party.

Certainly no Ukrainian today is asking for this particular "crime of Stalin" to be corrected. It is in what was once Polish-ruled western Ukraine, especially around the city of Lviv, where the fascist wing of Ukrainian nationalism has its deepest roots born.

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