Ukraine: History

Pre-20th-Century History

Ukrainian history began with the rumble of hooves - Scythians dominated the steppes north of the Black Sea from the 7th to the 4th centuries BC, initiating centuries of outside political and cultural domination. Traces of Scythian culture can be found in Kyiv's Caves Monastery, where the tombs contain superb goldwork depicting highly detailed animal and human forms. Following the Scythians, a series of invaders, including Ostrogoths, Huns and the Turko-Iranian Khazars, ruled areas of present-day Ukraine.

The first people to unify and control the area for a long period were Scandinavians known as the Rus. The Rus took Kyiv in 882 AD, and by the late 10th century the city was the centre of a unified state known as Kyivan Rus, which stretched from the Volga west to the Danube and south to the Baltic. In 988, the Kyivian Rus leader Volodymyr accepted Christianity from Constantinople, beginning a long period of Byzantine influence over Ukrainian politics and culture. By 1520 the Ottoman Empire controlled all of coastal Ukraine.

Military devastation and plague had wiped out much of the population of the Ukrainian steppe by the 15th century, when the region became popular with runaway serfs and Orthodox refugees escaping more tightly controlled neighbouring domains. These people came to be known as kazaks (Cossacks), a Turkic word meaning outlaw, adventurer or free man. Ukrainian Cossacks eventually formed a state that, although officially under Polish and later Russian rule, was to a significant degree self-ruling, but 20 years later the state was divided between Poland and Russia.

Modern History

Ukrainian nationalism flourished in the 1840s, prompting Russian authorities to ban the Ukrainian language in schools, journals and books. Following WWI and the collapse of tsarist authority, Ukraine finally had a chance to gain its independence, but none of the bewildering array of factions could win decisive support. Civil war broke out and the country quickly descended into anarchy, with six armies vying for power and Kyiv changing hands five times in one year. After prolonged fighting involving Russia, Poland and various Ukrainian political and ethnic factions, Poland retained portions of western Ukraine and the Soviets got the rest. Ukraine officially became part of the USSR in 1922.

While the leadership in Moscow sorted itself out, another Ukrainian national revival took off in the 1920s. When Stalin took power in 1927, however, he made a test case out of Ukraine for his ideas about 'harmful' nationalism. In 1932-33 he engineered a famine that killed as many as 7 million Ukrainians. Execution and deportation of intellectuals further depopulated the country. Stalin also went after the country's premier religious symbols, its churches and cathedrals, destroying over 250 buildings. During the purges of 1937-39, millions more Ukrainians were either executed or sent to Soviet labour camps. WWII brought further devastation and death, with 6 million perishing in the fighting between the Red Army and the German forces. It's estimated that during the first half of the 20th century, war, famine and purges cost the lives of over half the male and a quarter of the female population of Ukraine.

The 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine and the appallingly slow official Soviet response provoked widespread discontent, and the Uniate Church emerged from isolation two years later. The Ukrainian People's Movement for Restructuring, an umbrella nationalist movement founded in Kyiv by prominent intellectuals and writers, won local seats across the country in 1990. In July of that year, the parliament issued a sovereignty - but not secession - declaration to little effect. Shortly after the failed Soviet coup in August 1991, the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) was banned, and in December the population voted overwhelmingly for independence. Leonid Kravchuk, former chairman of the CPU, was elected as the first president of Ukraine.

Factionalism forced the government's resignation in September 1992, and disagreements with Russia over Ukraine's cache of inherited nuclear weapons and control of the Black Sea fleet (harboured in the Crimean port of Sevastopol) strained relations between the two countries. Meanwhile, skyrocketing inflation, fuel shortages and plummeting consumer power plagued the country and exacerbated regional and ethnic differences. Pro-Russian reformer Leonid Kuchma beat Kravchuk in the 1994 presidential election. The CPU benefited from the political and economic turmoil, capturing a substantial majority of parliamentary seats in the 1994 elections.

Recent History

In the late 1990s, new tensions arose between Ukraine and Russia over Ukraine's closer ties with NATO. In late April 2001 the Prime Minister, Viktor Yushchenko, was sacked, followed soon after by the November 2002 sacking of his successor.

At the dawn of the new millennium, things finally began to look up for Ukraine. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant was closed in 2000, and the last Soviet nuclear missile silo destroyed in 2001. The economy started a period of sustained growth and in 2002 the government decided to abandon its policy of neutrality and applied for NATO membership.

President Kuchma was set to prolong his rule when a court approved his bid to run for office again in 2004, but his subsequent 2005 electoral victory was challenged by a nation-wide movement that became known as the 'Orange Revolution'. It swept his old pro-Western rival Victor Yushchenko into office. By early 2006, as Russia began playing hardball with energy supplies, his popularity was waning.

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