INDEPENDENCE DAY AT DRUMTHWACKET: A presentation of the brief history of Ukraine (09/01/02)

INDEPENDENCE DAY AT DRUMTHWACKET:

A presentation of the brief history of Ukraine

Following is the full text of the "Brief History of Ukraine" read to Gov. James McGreevey of New Jersey and those gathered at Drumthwacket, the governor's mansion, for the Ukrainian Independence Day celebrations on Saturday, August 24.

by Dr. Bohdan Vitvitsky

Upon regaining independence in 1991, Ukraine became one of Europe's largest countries with a population of 50 million and a territorial size exceeding that of Germany or France. Its neighbors include Poland to the west and Russia to the north and east. To the south is the Black Sea.

Ukraine traces its political ancestry to Kyivan Rus', which between the ninth and the 12th centuries consolidated the East Slavic tribes into one of the largest and most prosperous medieval states in Europe based in Ukraine's present capital, Kyiv. Under the leadership of Grand Prince Volodymyr the Great, Ukraine accepted Christianity from Byzantium in 988. Reflecting the zenith of the Kyivan state's power and influence, the daughters of its ruler Yaroslav the Wise (1036-1054) were married to the kings of France, Norway and Hungary. Because Ukraine had accepted Christianity from Byzantium, when the Christian world ruptured between Rome and Byzantium in the 11th century, Ukraine became Orthodox.

Kyivan Rus' was weakened by political infighting and then destroyed by the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. Beginning in the 15th century and continuing for centuries, Ukraine became subject to partial or total foreign rule, mainly by Poland and then Muscovy, the precursor of Russia.

Importantly, however, under Polish and Polish-Lithuanian rule, and in stark contrast to life in Muscovy-Russia, nobles in Ukraine, including ethnic Ukrainian nobles, enjoyed broad political freedoms, and it was possible in Ukraine to establish the first two institutions of higher learning in Europe anywhere east of Poland: namely, the Ostroh Academy (1578), where instruction was in Church Slavonic, Greek and Latin, and whose curriculum included theology, philosophy, medicine and the natural sciences; and the Mohyla Collegium in Kyiv (1632), where instruction was mainly in Latin, Church Slavonic and Polish, and which focused on the classics, philosophy and theology.

In the mid-16th century, serfdom - a form of slavery in which nobles became owners of large tracts of land of which the serfs were considered appendages - was imposed upon Ukraine. Some men tried to flee such bondage by running away to the wild southern regions of Ukraine, the steppes, that then were beyond any political governance and were subject to frequent Tatar raids, whose purpose was the capture of people for sale into slavery in Asia. These men established quasi-military colonies of freemen called Kozaks, who chose their leader by vote and whose main base of operations was an island in the Dnipro River named Zaporizhia. In the early 17th century, formations of these Kozaks sacked numerous Turkish fortresses on the Black Sea and beyond, including an audacious raid on Constantinople in 1615. The purpose of these raids was to free slaves and to obtain booty.

In 1648 the Kozaks' leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky led a successful but bloody revolution against Polish domination that came close to establishing a Ukrainian political state, but to gain an ally against Poland and the Turks, Khmelnytsky signed a treaty with Muscovy, which Muscovy then used as a pretext gradually to impose its dominion over central and eastern Ukraine. With the 18th century conquest of Poland by Germany, Austria and Russia, western Ukraine came to be ruled by the Austro-Hungarian empire in Vienna.

In 1596 at the Union of Brest, a segment of Ukrainian clergy and bishops recognized the pope's supremacy in return for their right to maintain all of their Eastern rituals and rites, thereby creating what later became the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

The most important single figure in modern Ukrainian history is Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), an orphaned serf whose freedom was purchased in adulthood and who in his eloquent and moving poetry railed against both Russian social and political oppression, as well as tried to mobilize his downtrodden countrymen into action. For his troubles, the tsar sent him into exile for 10 years and then forbade his return to Ukraine, but his words - exhorting Ukrainians to find their own George Washington and calling for liberation and enlightenment - have been a beacon to Ukrainians for over 150 years.

The formation of modern Ukraine owes much to the experience of western Ukrainians under Austrian rule between 1772 and 1918: serfdom was abolished in 1848; and Ukrainian peasants were able to participate in elections to local legislatures and to the Parliament in Vienna. Most importantly, they lived in a state that tried to observe the rule of law. Ukrainians were also able to form their own political parties, and social, cultural, religious and women's organizations with mass membership. In contrast, Ukrainians living under the Russian tsars enjoyed nothing of the kind. Even the teaching of Ukrainian in village schools was forbidden.

Amidst World War I and the resulting disintegration of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, Ukraine declared independence in 1918, but had to fight on two separate fronts: Lenin's Red Army invaded from the north and forcibly incorporated the eastern three-quarters of Ukraine into the Soviet Union, and western Ukraine was occupied by Poland after a bloody Polish-Ukrainian war.

As part of a large-scale genocidal campaign against Ukraine, Stalin and his henchmen caused the "Holodomor," an artificially created terror-famine in 1932-1933 during which 4 million to 7 million Ukrainian farmers were killed. In addition, the Soviets destroyed both the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (1930) and later the Ukrainian Catholic Church (1946).

Ukraine was devastated during World War II; it lost an astonishing 8 million to 12 million people. The Nazis planned to use Ukraine for German colonization and embarked upon a policy of enslavement and mass murder. The UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army), a guerrilla army formed in the early 1940s, fought both the Germans and the Red Army. Other Ukrainians were drafted into the Red Army. With the Red Army's conquest of all of Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, all of Ukraine was incorporated into the USSR. A tragic consequence of this was that Ukrainians then came to constitute the majority of the political prisoners in the Soviet gulag.

In the 1960s and '70s, an active national and human rights movement sprang up in Ukraine. Although it was crushed, some of its supporters in 1988 helped create Rukh, a patriotic pro-democracy movement that helped pave the way for Ukraine to declare independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. At about this same time, two Ukrainian Orthodox Churches came into being, and the Ukrainian Catholic Church was reborn after many years in the catacombs. All three Churches welcomed Pope John Paul's groundbreaking visit to Ukraine in 2001.

Ukrainians began to settle in New Jersey a hundred years ago and continue to do so today. And, the national headquarters of some of the largest Ukrainian American institutions, as well as the editorial offices of the two national Ukrainian American newspapers, are all located in our Garden State.

Bohdan Vitvitsky is a lawyer, writer and lecturer who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and is a longtime contributor to The Ukrainian Weekly.

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