Regular viewers of OSP may know that we plan our videos out several months in advance,
and in this case, I've had it in my schedule for a year and a half to
make a video about Ukraine. But it's a big topic, long history there, so I held off,
ultimately procrastinating my way into an Actual F*cking WAR. Embarrassingly, that is the second
time I've done this. I had this video slated for summer, but given the gravity of the situation,
this frankly can't wait any longer. Because not only have the people of Ukraine shown themselves
to be iron-willed legends in defense of their country, but some delusional
amateur historians have claimed that the entire concept of the Ukrainian identity is imaginary,
and their nation state is nothing more than some Russians who got lost and picked up an accent.
As a result, I would say that some historical context is in order. So, to learn the course of
Ukrainian civilization and understand what their patriots are fighting for, let's do some history.
One technicality before we dig in, the name is just Ukraine, no The. “Ukrayina” means Borderland
according to one version of the etymology, as it referred to territory between Kyiv and
the many many empires that surrounded it over the centuries, so traditional names essentially called
it The Borderlands. But since the dissolution of the USSR (don’t worry we’ll get there) it’s a tad
declassee to use The. Ukraine calls itself Ukraine, and thus so should we. One of the
reasons it’s been neighbors with so many different people is because the East European Plain just
goes. Everything north of the Black Sea and East of the Carpathian Mountains is flat, open,
and full of rivers, so it’s an easy walk, ride, or sail. In the 600s, the land of the Eastern
branch of Slavs reached up along the Dnieper, a river that would soon be dominated by our boys
The Vikings. Sailing south from their Baltic home to schmooze with the fat cats in Constantinople,
Vikings followed the rivers through Slavic land, building up some handy waystations for
the long trips. And in a remarkable contrast from literally the entire rest of European history,
the Slavs apparently invited the Vikings to stay — at least, according to the Primary
Chronicle from three centuries later, the Slavs invited three Viking brothers to come rule over
the northern Dnieper valley and protect them from the Turkic Khazars to their east.
In the decades following, Viking enthusiasm for new local cultures led them to Slavicize,
and so the two cultures merged, giving the predominantly-Slavic lands of what was known
as the “Rus” a characteristically Scandinavian talent for seafaring. And after Prince Rurik
established what would become a seven-century dynasty in 862 at the northern town of Novgorod,
his successor Oleg pushed south along the Dnieper to take Kyiv as his new capital in 882 — a city
that would remain the beating heart of Rus civilization for centuries. Now, the Slavic+Viking
cultural mosaic of what Historians now call the “Kyivan Rus” had a third piece to add,
and that was Byzantine Christianity. Princess Olga of Kyiv converted while visiting Constantinople
in the 950s, and is honored as a saint for her efforts in the early Christianization of the Rus.
This pairs interestingly with her tenure as Princess-Regent after her husband’s murder,
because she exacted a rather thorough revenge on the party responsible, going so far as to
sack a city with improvised incendiary pigeons. Allegedly. Still, points for ingenuity. Later
that century, Grand Prince Volodymyr wanted a political marriage to the Byzantine princess,
so he obliged the emperor’s request to please stop being a heathen and convert to Christianity. But
Volodymyr’s baptism in 988 had much wider effects: converting the entire Kyivan Rus, adopting the
Cyrillic alphabet, and building new schools and churches. The Byzantines, for their part,
got a band of 6,000 elite Varangian mercenaries, plus a much friendlier neighbor and trading
partner to the north. Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise kept pace with a new legal code and a booming
literary culture, making the 1000s a Golden Age for the Kyivan Rus and a transformational period
in Slavic history. If we look at Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus today, we’re seeing the
legacy of the Kyivan Rus, not just in the root of their name, nor just in their geography, but as a
civilization made from the combination of Slavic, Scandinavian, and Byzantine Orthodox cultures.
Yet, as we’ve seen time and time again, states and empires are fragile things in the medieval period,
so after trade along the Dnieper slowed and wars on the eastern frontier drained the treasury,
subsequent infighting among the princes sapped the Kyivan Rus of the power and
wealth it enjoyed before. The state began decentralizing after Yaroslav’s death in 1054,
but it went splitsies for-real after a Grand Prince died in 1132 & local lords
got grabby. Kyiv still held onto its immediate vicinity, but Novgorod and Vladimir became their
own centers of power in the north, with many smaller principalities sprinkled in between,
such as Galicia and Volhynia in the far southwest, who combined in 1199 and got promoted by the Pope
to the Kingdom of Ruthenia in 1253 — that name being the Latin for “Rus”, and an early name for
Ukraine before just, Ukraine — the kingdom founded a new capital at Lviv in 1272, from where they
traded with Poland, Hungary, the post-crusade Byzantines, and the Mongols. Yeah, about that.
So while all that was happening, the lands of the former Rus got turbo-stomped by the Mongol armies,
with Moscow sacked in 1238 and Kyiv biting it in 1240. What wasn’t directly absorbed
into the Golden Horde was made a vassal, and this left an opening for the Kingdom
of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania to go snapping up all the defenseless principalities
over the next century. By 1400, Poland pushed through Lviv down to Bilgorod at the coast,
and the recently-Christianized Lithuania punched into the Dnieper valley for Kyiv,
with the Golden Horde still holding the coast from Crimea eastward. And so Ukraine’s
trajectory breaks away from Russia (and later Belarus) and toward a long history at the
borderlands of foreign empires. The next century of Polish-Lithuanian dominion saw a steady process
of Polonization in what they called Ruthenia. This meant promoting Catholicism in place of
Orthodoxy and encouraging Ruthenian nobles to act more like the Polish-Lithuanian nobility.
However, this influence couldn’t reach everywhere, so an Orthodox ethnic Ukrainian group called the
Cossacks made the “Wild Fields” of the far southeast a bastion of Ukrainian culture.
When and how exactly they did so is tricky to pinpoint, but by the 1600s they had
grown from seasonal hunting communities into a democratically-self-governing cultural militia
sort of thing. Because in addition to Poland they were also sandwiched between the Russian empire
and the Ottomans. Poland appreciated when the Cossacks fought the Ottomans but didn’t
repay that with autonomy or more rights, so after decades of previous attempts, the leading Hetman
Bohdan Khmelnytsky rose against the Polish crown and succeeded in creating the Cossack Hetmanate,
the first independent Ukrainian state in over 300 years. The sovereign spirit
of this moment is captured in the 1891 painting Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks,
wherein after the Ottoman Sultan sent them a letter politely asking their surrender,
the Cossacks had the absolute time of their lives drafting a response telling the Sultan why
and specifically how he could f*ck off. In detail! Stuff of legends,
in this case quite literally because it was probably just a story, but nonetheless hilarious.
The Hetmanate made diplomatic overtures to their assorted imperial neighbors, but they were all
pretty flakey, and so the Cossacks see-sawed between various alignments, until 1667 when Russia
and Poland split the difference by splitting Ukraine. Carving it up along the Dnieper with
Poland taking the “Right Bank” and Russia taking the Left. Both coopted religion for the benefit of
the rulers, as the Orthodox Church in the Russian Empire governed from (and in the interest of)
Moscow, while the fully-Catholic “Ruthenian Uniate Church” was the only Liturgically-Orthodox option
allowed in Poland. Ukrainian culture did have its own Baroque era at the turn of the
1700s – with such monuments as the Kyivan Golden Age Saint Sophia Cathedral getting restored and
gorgeously embellished in Baroque style – but it was swiftly followed by a century of stronger and
stronger outside interference, culminating in the Russian Empire & friends destroying
Poland and conquering almost all of Ukraine, along with Crimea, for itself. The Cossack
Hetmanate was no easy ride, as it’s tough to be independent amid a game of Hungry-Hungry-Empires,
but this moment of re-emerging statehood represented a new mode of Ukrainian culture,
defined in part by its borderland encirclement and independent aspirations in spite of big
angry neighbors. Easy, perhaps, to see why that might be a powerful motivator.
So, coming into the 1800s, we find ourselves neck-deep in The Russia Plotline, where we
will stay, for a while. Hot of their success in obliterating Poland, step 2 was “Russifying”
their newly acquired territories: moving Russians into the east and south to replace Crimean Tatars
with ethnic Russians, building up urban centers to Russian spec, and later banning the Ukrainian
language to replace it with Russian. The one exception being Austrian-held Galicia, where
Ukrainian and Polish thinkers were able to express their national identity through literature.
And that cultural groundwork came in mighty handy when the Russian Empire imploded in 1917 — longer
story, World War 1 is a wild ride. With the Tsars, the Austrians, and the Ottomans out of the picture
entirely, and rather suddenly at that, Ukraine and several neighbors declared independence. The
idea of Ukrainian nationhood was in the air for the past century, but as each of the newly-formed
Eastern European states soon found out, actually creating a country is a complicated business.
Unfortunately, the choice was taken out of their hands, as the Russian revolutionaries who replaced
the Tsars soon rolled into Ukraine and looped it into the new United Soviet Socialist Republic.
Administratively, this was different from the old empire, as Ukraine was its own
Soviet Socialist Republic within the wider Soviet Union, alongside Belarus, Russia,
and the other 12 constituent Republics. And at first, Soviet policy celebrated this variety,
creating a specifically Ukrainian Orthodox Church and promoting the language and culture.
However, that was before Stalin. Again, longer story, Communism is a wild ride,
but as far as Ukraine was concerned, Joseph Stalin was the mustachioed embodiment of Hell Itself.
As part of his policy to punish Ukraine for crimes ranging from
not being Communist enough to existing at all, Stalin ordered nearly all Ukrainian wheat to
be exported for industrialization, essentially orchestrating an artificial famine that killed
over four million Ukrainians in the early 1930s. This coincided with a systematic purge
of Ukrainian intellectuals and their orthodox clergy. Now, Ukraine had handled Polonization
and Russification under the old empires, but this was full-on Genocide. This wasn’t
some tragic but necessary consequence of Soviet ideology, this was the point: keep them poor,
break their spirit, take their resources, and hope they forget they exist.
And just when it couldn’t get worse… World War 2! Russia’s invasion of Poland in 1939
added Galicia to the Ukrainian SSR, but 2 years later Germany launched a surprise-ish attack,
and took all of Ukraine. The Soviets, for their part, made a point to burn everything on the
way out, killing political prisoners, destroying infrastructure and wrecking food supplies. By the
time the USSR was reassembled and the war was won, Ukraine suffered another 8 million deaths. And
from being down a quarter of the population inside of a decade, it was hard for things to get worse.
With the exception of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, Ukraine’s postwar history
was a steady albeit slow climb upward, culminating in the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 and a 92%
vote in favor of Ukrainian Independence. Given everything we have learned about Ukraine over the
thousand-plus years of their history, this should not be surprising. But this of course does not
mean that the story is over. Political corruption is a habit that dies hard, so Ukrainians took to
the streets in 2004 and again in the Maidan uprising of 2014 to oust Viktor Yanukovych,
both times, from office, the result of which was the Russian Federation annexing the Crimean
peninsula and violently exacerbating an insurgency in the eastern Donbas region.
In 2018 the Russian Orthodox Church severed ties with the Orthodox church in Constantinople for
recognizing Ukraine’s religious independence from Moscow. And, of course, in 2022,
Russia monstrously and disgracefully invaded the sovereign nation of Ukraine — longer story,
the 2020s are a wild ride. But as we’ve clearly seen,
Ukrainian history isn’t just backstory to a modern conflict, it’s a tale of a
civilization crafting an identity from the confluence of multiple different cultures,
then defending that identity against invasive forces, and then recontextualizing that identity
as that precise borderland struggle. In a part of Europe otherwise known for Giant Empires,
that’s somethin’ — and something very much worth fighting for, at that. Russkiy voyennyy korabl',
idi nakhuy – Slava Ukraini.[Russian Warship, Go F*ck Yourself – Glory to Ukraine.]
Thank you so much for watching. OSP will be donating the advertising-revenue from
this video to Direct Relief in Ukraine, providing urgently-needed medical care across the country.
So if you would like to do something to help but can’t afford to donate your money, simply share
this video with a friend. Everything we donate and everything we learn makes a massive difference.