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lördag 7 maj 2022

BUKOVINA: Osa on nyky-Ukrainaa.

Location of Bukovina within northern Romania and neighbouring Ukraine Ukraine in the interwar period In the aftermath of World War I and the revolutionary upheavals that followed, Ukrainian territories were divided among four states. Bukovina was annexed to Romania. Transcarpathia was joined to the new country of Czechoslovakia. Poland incorporated Galicia and western Volhynia, together with smaller adjacent areas in the northwest. The lands east of the Polish border constituted Soviet Ukraine.
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Bessarabia, mihin kohtaan se asettuu?

 https://carnegieeurope.eu/2018/05/24/bessarabia-s-hopes-and-fears-on-ukraine-s-edge-pub-76445

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Puna-armeijan voiton linja vuonna 1944 toukokuun alkuun mennessä

 Toukokuun 1944 alkuun mennessä venäläisten offensiivi päättyi kaikilla hyökkäyslinjoilla rintamalinjan kulkiessa nyt suunnassa Narva-Pihkova-Vitebsk-Zlobin-Kovel-Brody-Cernauti-Zernowits- Pascani-Jassy-Tiraspol-Odessa. Tämä offensiivi oli suoritettu suunnitelmien mukaan ainakin sikäli, että Ukraina oli otettu pois saksalaisislta ja varmistus työnnetty etelässä Puolaan ja Romaniaan. Mutta offensiivi oli tullut molemmille puolille tavattoman kalliiksi. taiostgeluja oli käyty uskomattomalla sitkeydellä, sitä todistavat varsinkin saartorenkaissa kaatuneitten saksalaisten lukumäärät sotavangeiksi otettuihin verrattuna.

Kesäkuussa (1944 tilanteedsta)  venlääiset arvioiva kaksi vuotta kestäneen taistelun voittoja ja tappioita seuraaviin lukuihin:
Kaatuneita ja vankeja: 
saksalaisia 6,400 000
Venäläisiä 4,200 000
Tykkejä: saksalaisia: 56 500 kpl,
venäläisiä 35 000 kpl.
Panssarivaunuja :
 saksalaisia 43 000 kpl
venäläisiä:60 000 kpl
Lentokoneita :
 saksalaisia 43 000 kpl
venäläisiä 23 000 kpl.
saksalaisten samanaikaisesti antamissa numerotiedoissa mainitaan  venäläisten menettäneen yhtensä 12 700 000 miestä kaatuneina ja 5 700 000 miestä sotavankeina. Omiksi tappioikseen saksalaiset ilmoittivat kaatuneina, haavoittuneina ja vankeina 5 000 000. 
Näin kertoo  pauli Huhtala 1948 painetussa kirjassa, joka kuvaa rintamaliikkeitä maailmansodan aikana.

Mitä oli tapahtunut   tuon rintamien mainitsemien kylien juutalaisväestöille? Katson jos netistä löytyy dokumenttia. 
 
Jassy on nykyRomanian koillisosassa. Se toimi I maailmansodan aikana Romanian pääkaupunkina, kun Bukarest oli miehitettynä.
 
https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ia%C8%99i   Iasi ( Jassy):
 Vielä 1800-luvun puoliväliin asti kaupungin väestöstä oli jopa kolmannes juutalaisia. Kaupungissa ilmestyi peräti jiddišinkielinen sanomalehti ja toimi jiddišinkielinen ammattilaisteatteri. Iașin pogromissa 29. kesäkuuta – 6. heinäkuuta 1941 tai sen jälkeen surmattiin puolet juutalaisista ja loput kuljettiin pois. 
 Muun kielisillä Wikipedia teksteillä  asiasta saa enemmänkin tietoa, muta tässä on linkki popgromiin, joka oli 27-29.9. 1941 ja se tapahtui Antonescun päivinä. Oman sodanjälkeisen väestölaskentansa mukaan juutalaisväestö ilmoitti uhreja olleen peräti 14 850.[1]

Entä Tiraspol?
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiraspol.  Saksalaisokkupaation aikana  Tiraspol oli romanialaisten hallinnosa ja miltei koko juutalaisväestö katosi, osa surmattiin, osa kuljetettiin  kuolemanleireille.
Konfliktialue edelleen ja nyt Ukrainan invaason aikana  Venäjä on pommittanut  Tiraspolia. Sen itsenäisyystoimi ei hyväksytty aikanaan kansainvälisesti. (PRM) 
Tässä mainitaan mm Odessasta.
 
Bessarabian alueen määrittely : tästä otan linkin  erikseen, koska se alue nyt on usean eri valtion aluetta.  Ukrainalla on sitä osa: mm.  odessan lääniä- ja Izmailian aluetta. 
 https://carnegieeurope.eu/2018/05/24/bessarabia-s-hopes-and-fears-on-ukraine-s-edge-pub-76445
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Stavropol Holokaustin aikana: Juutalaisten Lääkärien ja pakolaisten kohtalosta

 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32307967/

Review
. 2020 Apr;159(4):273-277.

[THE FATE OF THE JEWISH STAFF OF THE MEDICAL INSTITUTE IN THE CITY OF STAVROPOL DURING THE HOLOCAUST]

[Article in Hebrew]
Julia Schwartzmann  1 , Miriam Offer  2
Affiliations
  • PMID: 32307967

Abstract

In the first two decades of the 21st century, research on the history of Jewish medicine during the Holocaust expanded. Studies were written on the medical activity in German-occupied areas, particularly the large and medium-sized ghettos in Poland, Lithuania, and Czechoslovakia, in addition to Holland, Hungary, and Germany, and Jewish physicians' activity in the camps. Conspicuously absent is the study of Soviet Jewish medicine and physicians in areas occupied by the Germans in World War II with the German offensive against the Soviet Union, which began on 22 June 1941. This article sheds light on the fate of 36 Jewish physicians and scientists from Stavropol Medical Institute in the North Caucasus during the Holocaust-renowned professors, lecturers in all branches of medicine, of which one third were women of outstanding medical achievements. The description draws on writings by researchers from the Commonwealth, including Stavropol, witness testimonies collected by the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission to investigate Nazi atrocities (1943-1945), and the memoirs of Ludmila Schwartzman, daughter-in-law of Prof. Jacob Schwartzman, renowned cardiologist before the war and senior Medical Institute physician murdered with the rest. The article describes the history of Caucasian Jews and thousands of Jewish refugees who sought shelter in the area, focusing on Stavropol's Jews, including numerous Medical Institute teachers, researchers and their families, either shot to death in forests outside the city or killed in gas vans. Research of the history of Stavropol Medical Institute's Jewish staff both memorializes the Jewish physicians and scientists and opens a window into Jewish physicians' activity in Nazi-occupied Soviet regions. This is a research area in its infancy warranting deeper investigation.

 

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onsdag 6 april 2022

Suomen uutisia Hesarista tänään.

Talous|Venäjä

Lehti: Yandexin Venäjän-toimitus­johtaja muutti Israeliin

Israelilaisen Haaretz-lehden lähteiden mukaan toimitusjohtaja Elena Bunina on ei aio palata Venäjälle.

It-yhtiö Yandexin toimitusjohtaja Elena Bunina. Kuva: SERGEI KARPUKHIN / Reuters

15:41

Venäläisen hakukoneyhtiö Yandexin Venäjän-yhtiön toimitusjohtaja Elena Bunina on muuttanut Venäjältä Israeliin, kertoo israelilainen Haaretz-lehti.

Haaretzin nimettömien lähteiden mukaan Bunina on ollut Israelissa kuukauden, eikä aio palata Venäjälle. Hän on uskonnoltaan juutalainen.

Yandexin Israelin-yhtiön tiedottaja ei halunnut kommentoida toimitusjohtajan sijaintipaikkaa Haaretzille.

Bunina on johtanut Yandexin operatiivisesta toiminnasta käytännössä vastaavaa Venäjän-yhtiötä vuodesta 2017. Yandexin emoyhtiö on rekisteröity Hollantiin ja listattu Nasdaq-pörssiin New Yorkissa.

Buninan kauden yhtiön toimitusjohtajana oli määrä päättyä 15. huhtikuuta.

Lauantaina Yandex kuitenkin tiedotti, että Bunina jättää tehtävänsä Yandexissa noin kaksi viikkoa sovittua aiemmin omasta tahdostaan.

Yandex ei kommentoinut asiaa uutistoimisto Reutersin mukaan sen enempää.

Lue lisää: Venäjän ”Googlesta” tuli kertaheitolla kriisiyhtiö ja propagandan tuuttaaja – Sotasensuuriin alistuvasta Yandexista karkaavat nyt sekä työntekijät että rahoittajat.

Haaretz kertoo, että venäläismedian mukaan Bunina oli lähtenyt Venäjältä Ukrainaan hyökkäyksen ja pakotteiden seurauksena.

Hän julkaisi hyökkäyksen jälkeen Facebookissa kirjoituksen, jossa hän sanoi olevansa ”verta ja sotaa” vastaan.

Sunnuntaina venäläinen verkkosivusto The Bell kertoi Buninan kirjoittaneen yhtiön sisäiselle keskustelupalstalle, että hän muutti pois Venäjältä, koska ei voi työskennellä maassa, joka on sodassa naapurimaidensa kanssa, Haaretz kertoo.

Yandexin Hollannin-emoyhtiön toimitusjohtaja Tigran Khudaverdyan jätti paikkansa maaliskuussa sen jälkeen, kun hänet lisättiin Euroopan unionin pakotelistalle.

Yandex-yhtiöön ei kohdistu talouspakotteita.

Yandexin yksi palvelinkeskus sijaitsee Mäntsälässä, ja sen kyytipalvelu toimii Suomessa Yango-nimellä.

 

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måndag 28 mars 2022

Kiovan uutiset 28.3. 2022 klo 13:43

News Feed

 

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Venäjän tihutöitä, tuhotöitä, epästabilointiyrityksiä: Temppelien tuhoja

 ht


On average two per day: Russia’s war against Ukraine damaged and ruined at least 59 spiritual sites in at least 8 regions of


  • Категорія запису:News

While Kremlin propagandists are cynically covering their imperial ambitions with statements about “protecting Orthodox faith”, the aggressive attack of the Russian military ruins Orthodox temples and other spiritual sites.

Since the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine on February 24, at least 59 spiritual sites have been badly affected in at least eight regions of Ukraine: Kyiv, Donetsk, Zhytomyr, Zaporizhia, Luhansk, Sumy, Kharkiv and Chernihiv. Most of them are Orthodox churches. The damage was also inflicted upon mosques, synagogues, Protestant churches, religious education institutions and important administrative buildings of religious organizations. The interactive map allows to see all affected sites together as well as by a particular religious community.

On March 24, as a result of shelling in the city of Sievierodonetsk, the temple of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in honor of the icon of the Mother of God “Joy of All Who Sorrow” was damaged. It is located in the hospital territory in Sievierodonetsk. The altar part of the temple was damaged. One of the windows in the altar apse was broken and part of the ceiling collapsed.


 

 

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Vuoden 1950 kartalla Ukrainassa on kaupunki Majeevka

 Katson historian tietoa Majeevaka nimisestä Ukrainan kaupungista: 

https://www.britannica.com/place/Makiyivka

Siitä linkistä saan tietoa myös  nykyajan   Ukrainan valtiosta: 

Makiyivka, Russian Makeyevka, also spelled Makeevka, or Makejevka, city, eastern Ukraine. The city was founded as Dmitriyevsk (Dmytriyivsk) in 1899 with the establishment of a metallurgical works; the nearby small village of Makiyivka was later absorbed into the city. Dmitriyevsk subsequently developed as one of the largest coal-mining and industrial centres of the Donets Basin coalfield; in 1931 it was renamed Makiyivka. In addition to coal, the city also has produced iron and steel. Other industries have included metalworking, coke-chemical production, the manufacture of pneumatic machinery, shoemaking, and food processing. The city is rather dispersed, with numerous residential communities surrounding individual industrial plants over an extensive area; it is gradually extending to form a single metropolitan area with the nearby city of Donetsk, which lies just a few miles to the southwest. Pop. (2001) 389,589; (2005 est.) 375,992.

Housing estate for miners, Makiyivka, Ukraine

Housing estate for miners, Makiyivka, Ukraine
Novosti Press Agency

Ukraine

Alternate titles: Ukrayina
 
By Oleksa Eliseyovich Zasenko | See All • Last Updated:  
See all media
Head Of Government:
Prime Minister: Denys Shmyhal
Capital:
Kyiv (Kiev)
Population:
(2021 est.) 43,879,000
Head Of State:
President: Volodymyr Zelensky
Form Of Government:
unitary multiparty republic with a single legislative house (Verkhovna Rada1 [450])
 
https://www.britannica.com/place/Ukraine
 
 
Ukraine, country located in eastern Europe, the second largest on the continent after Russia. The capital is Kyiv (Kiev), located on the Dnieper River in north-central Ukraine.
Ukraine

UkraineEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

A fully independent Ukraine emerged only late in the 20th century, after long periods of successive domination by Poland-Lithuania, Russia, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). Ukraine had experienced a brief period of independence in 1918–20, but portions of western Ukraine were ruled by Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia in the period between the two World Wars, and Ukraine thereafter became part of the Soviet Union as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (S.S.R.). When the Soviet Union began to unravel in 1990–91, the legislature of the Ukrainian S.S.R. declared sovereignty (July 16, 1990) and then outright independence (August 24, 1991), a move that was confirmed by popular approval in a plebiscite (December 1, 1991). With the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in December 1991, Ukraine gained full independence. The country changed its official name to Ukraine, and it helped to found the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), an association of countries that were formerly republics of the Soviet Union.

Relief

Ukraine occupies the southwestern portion of the Russian Plain (East European Plain). The country consists almost entirely of level plains at an average elevation of 574 feet (175 metres) above sea level. Mountainous areas such as the Ukrainian Carpathians and Crimean Mountains occur only on the country’s borders and account for barely 5 percent of its area. The Ukrainian landscape nevertheless has some diversity: its plains are broken by highlands—running in a continuous belt from northwest to southeast—as well as by lowlands.

The rolling plain of the Dnieper Upland, which lies between the middle reaches of the Dnieper (Dnipro) and Southern Buh (Pivdennyy Buh, or the Boh) rivers in west-central Ukraine, is the largest highland area; it is dissected by many river valleys, ravines, and gorges, some more than 1,000 feet (300 metres) deep. On the west the Dnieper Upland is abutted by the rugged Volyn-Podilsk Upland, which rises to 1,545 feet (471 metres) at its highest point, Mount Kamula. West of the Volyn-Podilsk Upland, in extreme western Ukraine, the parallel ranges of the Carpathian Mountains—one of the most picturesque areas in the country—extend for more than 150 miles (240 km). The mountains range in height from about 2,000 feet (600 metres) to about 6,500 feet (2,000 metres), rising to 6,762 feet (2,061 metres) at Mount Hoverla, the highest point in the country. The northeastern and southeastern portions of Ukraine are occupied by low uplands rarely reaching an elevation of 1,000 feet (300 metres).

Among the country’s lowlands are the Pripet Marshes (Polissya), which lie in the northern part of Ukraine and are crossed by numerous river valleys. In east-central Ukraine is the Dnieper Lowland, which is flat in the west and gently rolling in the east. To the south, another lowland extends along the shores of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov; its level surface, broken only by low rises and shallow depressions, slopes gradually toward the Black Sea. The shores of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov are characterized by narrow, sandy spits of land that jut out into the water; one of these, the Arabat Spit, is about 70 miles (113 km) long but averages less than 5 miles (8 km) in width.

The southern lowland continues in the Crimean Peninsula as the North Crimean Lowland. The peninsula—a large protrusion into the Black Sea—is connected to the mainland by the Perekop Isthmus. The Crimean Mountains form the southern coast of the peninsula. Mount Roman-Kosh, at 5,069 feet (1,545 metres), is the mountains’ highest point.

 Philippe Michel/age fotostock

Drainage

Almost all the major rivers in Ukraine flow northwest to southeast through the plains to empty into the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. The Dnieper River, with its hydroelectric dams, huge reservoirs, and many tributaries, dominates the entire central part of Ukraine. Of the total course of the Dnieper, 609 miles (980 km) are in Ukraine, making it by far the longest river in the country, of which it drains more than half. Like the Dnieper, the Southern Buh, with its major tributary, the Inhul, flows into the Black Sea. To the west and southwest, partly draining Ukrainian territory, the Dniester (Dnistro) also flows into the Black Sea; among its numerous tributaries, the largest in Ukraine are the Stryy and the Zbruch. The middle course of the Donets River, a tributary of the Don, flows through southeastern Ukraine and is an important source of water for the Donets Basin (Donbas). The Danube River flows along the southwestern frontier of Ukraine. Marshland, covering almost 3 percent of Ukraine, is found primarily in the northern river valleys and in the lower reaches of the Dnieper, Danube, and other rivers.

The rivers are most important as a water supply, and for this purpose a series of canals has been built, such as the Donets–Donets Basin, the Dnieper–Kryvyy Rih, and the North Crimea. Several of the larger rivers are navigable, including the Dnieper, Danube, Dniester, Pripet (Pryp’yat), Donets, and Southern Buh (in its lower course). Dams and hydroelectric plants are situated on all the larger rivers.

Ukraine has a few natural lakes, all of them small and most of them scattered over the river floodplains. One of the largest is Lake Svityaz, 11 square miles (28 square km) in area, in the northwest. Small saltwater lakes occur in the Black Sea Lowland and in Crimea. Larger saline lakes occur along the coast. Known as limans, these bodies of water form at the mouths of rivers or ephemeral streams and are blocked off by sandbars from the sea. Some artificial lakes have been formed, the largest of which are reservoirs at hydroelectric dams—e.g., the reservoir on the Dnieper upstream from Kremenchuk. The Kakhovka, Dnieper, Dniprodzerzhynsk, Kaniv, and Kyiv reservoirs make up the rest of the Dnieper cascade. Smaller reservoirs are located on the Dniester and Southern Buh rivers and on tributaries of the Donets River. Small reservoirs for water supply also are found near Kryvyy Rih, Kharkiv, and other industrial cities. Three large artesian basins—the Volyn-Podilsk, the Dnieper, and the Black Sea—are exceptionally important for municipal needs and agriculture as well.

Soils of Ukraine

From northwest to southeast the soils of Ukraine may be divided into three major aggregations: a zone of sandy podzolized soils; a central belt consisting of the black, extremely fertile Ukrainian chernozems; and a zone of chestnut and salinized soils.

The podzolized soils occupy about one-fifth of the country’s area, mostly in the north and northwest. These soils were formed by the extension of postglacial forests into regions of grassy steppe; most such soils may be farmed, although they require the addition of nutrients to obtain good harvests.

The chernozems of central Ukraine, among the most fertile soils in the world, occupy about two-thirds of the country’s area. These soils may be divided into three broad groups: in the north a belt of the so-called deep chernozems, about 5 feet (1.5 metres) thick and rich in humus; south and east of the former, a zone of prairie, or ordinary, chernozems, which are equally rich in humus but only about 3 feet (1 metre) thick; and the southernmost belt, which is even thinner and has still less humus. Interspersed in various uplands and along the northern and western perimeters of the deep chernozems are mixtures of gray forest soils and podzolized black-earth soils, which together occupy much of Ukraine’s remaining area. All these soils are very fertile when sufficient water is available. However, their intensive cultivation, especially on steep slopes, has led to widespread soil erosion and gullying.

The smallest proportion of the soil cover consists of the chestnut soils of the southern and eastern regions. They become increasingly salinized to the south as they approach the Black Sea.

Climate

Ukraine lies in a temperate climatic zone influenced by moderately warm, humid air from the Atlantic Ocean. Winters in the west are considerably milder than those in the east. In summer, on the other hand, the east often experiences higher temperatures than the west. Average annual temperatures range from about 42–45 °F (5.5–7 °C) in the north to about 52–55 °F (11–13 °C) in the south. The average temperature in January, the coldest month, is about 26 °F (−3 °C) in the southwest and about 18 °F (−8 °C) in the northeast. The average in July, the hottest month, is about 73 °F (23 °C) in the southeast and about 64 °F (18 °C) in the northwest.

Precipitation is uneven, with two to three times as much falling in the warmer seasons as in the cold. Maximum precipitation generally occurs in June and July, while the minimum falls in February. Snow falls mainly in late November and early December; accumulation varies in depth from a few inches in the steppe region (in the south) to several feet in the Carpathians. Western Ukraine, notably the Carpathian Mountains area, receives the highest annual precipitation—more than 47 inches (1,200 mm). The lowlands along the Black Sea and in Crimea, by contrast, receive less than 16 inches (400 mm) annually. The remaining areas of Ukraine receive 16 to 24 inches (400 to 600 mm) of precipitation.

In contrast to the rest of Ukraine, the southern shore of Crimea has a warm, gentle, Mediterranean-type climate. Winters are mild and rainy, with little snow, and the average January temperature is 39 °F (4 °C). Summers are dry and hot, with an average July temperature of 75 °F (24 °C).

Plant and animal life

Though much of Ukraine’s original plant cover has been cleared for cultivation, three main zones of natural vegetation are still distinguishable. From north to south, they are the Polissya (woodland and marsh), the forest-steppe, and the steppe.

The Polissya zone lies in the northwest and north. More than one-third of its area—about 44,000 square miles (114,000 square km)—is arable land. Nearly one-quarter of it is covered with mixed woodland, including oak, elm, birch, hornbeam, ash, maple, pine, linden, alder, poplar, willow, and beech. About 5 percent is peat bog, a substantial portion is marshland, and the river valleys are floodplains. The Polissya contains the southernmost portions of the Pripet Marshes, and Ukraine has undertaken major efforts to drain these swamplands and reclaim the land for agriculture.

 

The forest-steppe, which covers an area of about 78,000 square miles (202,000 square km), extends south from the Polissya. About two-thirds of this agricultural region is arable land; forests take up only about one-eighth of the area.

Farther south, near the Black Sea, Sea of Azov, and Crimean Mountains, the forest-steppe joins the steppe zone, which is about 89,000 square miles (231,000 square km) in area. Many of the flat, treeless plains in this region are under cultivation, although low annual precipitation and hot summers make supplemental irrigation necessary. Remnants of the natural vegetation of the steppe, including its characteristic fescue and feather grasses, are protected in nature reserves.

Other natural regions are found near the borders of the country. Most of the country’s rich forestlands are in the Carpathian region of western Ukraine. The lower mountain slopes are covered with mixed forests and the intermediate slopes with pine forests; these give way to Alpine meadows at higher altitudes. Along the southern coast of the Crimean Peninsula, a narrow strip of land, only about 6 miles (10 km) wide, constitutes a unique natural region where both deciduous and evergreen grasses and shrubs grow.

The animal life of Ukraine is diverse, with about 350 species of birds, more than 100 species of mammals, and more than 200 species of fish. The most common predators are wolves, foxes, wildcats, and martens, while hoofed animals include roe deer, wild pigs, and sometimes elk and mouflons (a species of wild sheep). The wide variety of rodents includes gophers, hamsters, jerboas, and field mice. The major bird species are black and hazel grouse, owls, gulls, and partridges, as well as many migrating birds, such as wild geese, ducks, and storks. Among the fish are pike, carp, bream, perch, sturgeons, and sterlets. Introduced and well-acclimatized wildlife includes muskrats, raccoons, beavers, nutrias, and silver foxes.

Numerous nature and game reserves reflect Ukraine’s commitment to the conservation of its biological heritage. The country’s first nature reserve, Askaniya-Nova, began as a private wildlife refuge in 1875; today it protects a portion of virgin steppe. Some 40 different mammals, including the onager and Przewalski’s horse, have been introduced there as part of a successful program of breeding endangered species; ostriches also have been successfully introduced. The separate sections of the Ukrainian Steppe Reserve also preserve various types of steppe. The Black Sea Nature Reserve shelters many species of waterfowl and is the only Ukrainian breeding ground of the Mediterranean gull (Larus melanocephalus). Also located on the Black Sea, the Danube Water Meadows Reserve protects the Danube River’s tidewater biota. Other reserves in Ukraine preserve segments of the forest-steppe woodland, the marshes and forests of the Polissya, and the mountains and rocky coast of Crimea.

Environmental concerns

During the Soviet period, rapid industrialization, intensive farming, and a lack of effective pollution controls combined to seriously degrade the environment in Ukraine. Some of the most polluted areas in the world are now found there.

The coal-burning industries of eastern Ukraine, which emit high levels of sulfur dioxide, hydrocarbons, and dust, have created severe air pollution throughout the region. Air quality is particularly poor in the cities of Dnipropetrovsk, Kryvyy Rih, and Zaporizhzhya. Lightly industrialized cities in the west, such as Uzhhorod and Khmelnytskyy, face air pollution caused by the prevalence of inefficient automobiles.

Major rivers, including the Dnieper, Dniester, Inhul, and Donets, are seriously polluted with chemical fertilizers and pesticides from agricultural runoff and with poorly treated or untreated sewage. Coastal water pollution in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea has necessitated the closing of beaches and has led to a dramatic reduction in fish catches. The freshwater flow into the Sea of Azov has been largely diverted for irrigation purposes, leading to a sharp increase in salinity.

The 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant created severe environmental problems in northwestern Ukraine. Vast areas of land are contaminated by dangerous short- and long-lived radioactive isotopes, notably strontium-90, which can replace calcium in foods and become concentrated in bones and teeth. Contaminated agricultural lands near Chernobyl will be unsafe for thousands of years, though some of these areas continue to be occupied and farmed. Several thousand premature deaths from cancer are expected over the long term.

People of Ukraine

Ethnic groups

When Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union, a policy of Russian in-migration and Ukrainian out-migration was in effect, and ethnic Ukrainians’ share of the population in Ukraine declined from 77 percent in 1959 to 73 percent in 1991. But that trend reversed after the country gained independence, and, by the turn of the 21st century, ethnic Ukrainians made up more than three-fourths of the population. Russians continue to be the largest minority, though they now constitute less than one-fifth of the population. The remainder of the population includes Belarusians, Moldovans, Bulgarians, Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, Roma (Gypsies), and other groups. The Crimean Tatars, who were forcibly deported to Uzbekistan and other Central Asian republics in 1944, began returning to the Crimea in large numbers in 1989; by the early 21st century they constituted one of the largest non-Russian minority groups. In March 2014 Russia forcibly annexed Crimea, a move that was condemned by the international community, and human rights groups subsequently documented a series of repressive measures that had been taken against the Crimean Tatars by Russian authorities.

Historically, Ukraine had large Jewish and Polish populations, particularly in the Right Bank region (west of the Dnieper River). In fact, in the late 19th century slightly more than one-fourth of the world’s Jewish population (estimated at 10 million) lived in ethnic Ukrainian territory. This predominantly Yiddish-speaking population was greatly reduced by emigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and by the devastation of the Holocaust. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, large numbers of Ukraine’s remaining Jews emigrated, mainly to Israel. At the turn of the 21st century, the several hundred thousand Jews left in Ukraine made up less than 1 percent of the Ukrainian population. Most of Ukraine’s large Polish minority was resettled in Poland after World War II as part of a Soviet plan to have ethnic settlement match territorial boundaries. Fewer than 150,000 ethnic Poles remained in Ukraine at the turn of the 21st century.

Languages of Ukraine

The vast majority of people in Ukraine speak Ukrainian, which is written with a form of the Cyrillic alphabet. The language—belonging with Russian and Belarusian to the East Slavic branch of the Slavic language family—is closely related to Russian but also has distinct similarities to the Polish language. Significant numbers of people in the country speak Polish, Yiddish, Rusyn, Belarusian, Romanian or Moldovan, Bulgarian, Crimean Turkish, or Hungarian. Russian is the most important minority language.

During the rule of imperial Russia and under the Soviet Union, Russian was the common language of government administration and public life in Ukraine. Although Ukrainian had been afforded equal status with Russian in the decade following the revolution of 1917, by the 1930s a concerted attempt at Russification was well under way. In 1989 Ukrainian once again became the country’s official language, and its status as the sole official language was confirmed in the 1996 Ukrainian constitution.

In 2012 a law was passed that granted local authorities the power to confer official status upon minority languages. Although Ukrainian was reaffirmed as the country’s official language, regional administrators could elect to conduct official business in the prevailing language of the area. In Crimea, which has an autonomous status within Ukraine and where there is a Russian-speaking majority, Russian and Crimean Tatar are the official languages. In addition, primary and secondary schools using Russian as the language of instruction still prevail in the Donets Basin and other areas with large Russian minorities. The Ukrainian parliament moved to rescind the minority language law in February 2014, after the ouster of pro-Russian Pres. Viktor Yanukovych, but interim Pres. Oleksandr Turchynov declined to sign the bill into law.

Religion

The predominant religion in Ukraine, practiced by almost half the population, is Eastern Orthodoxy. Historically, most adherents belonged to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Kyiv Patriarchate, though the Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Moscow Patriarchate was important as well. A smaller number of Orthodox Christians belonged to the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. In January 2019 the Kyiv Patriarchate and Autocephalous churches were merged into a single body as the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. In creating the new church, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I formalized the independence of Ukraine’s Orthodox community, which had been under the jurisdiction of the patriarchate of Moscow since 1686. In western Ukraine the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church prevails. Minority religions include Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, Islam (practiced primarily by the Crimean Tatars), and Judaism. More than two-fifths of Ukrainians are not religious.

 

Settlement patterns

More than two-thirds of the population lives in urban areas. High population densities occur in southeastern and south-central Ukraine, in the highly industrialized regions of the Donets Basin and the Dnieper Bend, as well as in the coastal areas along the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. Portions of western Ukraine and the Kyiv area are also densely populated. Besides the capital, major cities in Ukraine include Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Odessa, Zaporizhzhya, Lviv, and Kryvyy Rih. Of the rural population, more than half is found in large villages (1,000 to 5,000 inhabitants), and most of these people are employed in a rural economy based on farming. The highest rural population densities are found in the wide belt of forest-steppe extending east-west across central Ukraine, where the extremely fertile soils and balanced climatic conditions are most favourable for agriculture.

Demographic trends

Ukraine’s population increased steadily throughout the Soviet era, peaking at over 50 million as the country transitioned to independence. However, a low birth rate, coupled with an aging population and low rates of migration into the country, contributed to a sharp population decline that extended into the 21st century. Millions of Ukrainians—especially those from the western part of the country—sought employment abroad, and by 2010 roughly one in seven Ukrainians was residing outside the country for work purposes. These labour migrants most often sought work in Russia and the EU, and they predominantly found employment in the fields of construction and domestic service. Aware of Ukraine’s net loss of workers to immigration and a fertility rate that was far below replacement level, Ukrainian policy makers recognized the burden that would be placed on the country’s old age pension system. In 2011 the retirement age for men was raised from 60 to 62 and women’s retirement age was raised from 55 to 60. By 2017 it was estimated that at least 1.5 million Ukrainians had been internally displaced by Russia’s forcible annexation of Crimea in 2014 and by ongoing fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists in southeastern Ukraine.

Economy of Ukraine

Ukraine’s modern economy was developed as an integral part of the larger economy of the Soviet Union. While receiving a smaller share (16 percent in the 1980s) of the Soviet Union’s investment funds and producing a greater proportion of goods with a lower set price, Ukraine was able to produce a larger share of total output in the industrial (17 percent) and especially the agricultural (21 percent) sectors of the Soviet economy. In effect, a centrally directed transfer of wealth from Ukraine, amounting to one-fifth of its national income, helped to finance economic development in other parts of the Soviet Union, notably Russia and Kazakhstan.

By the late Soviet period, however, the Ukrainian economy was under severe strain, and it contracted sharply early in the independence era. A period of extreme currency inflation in the early 1990s brought great hardship to most of the population. Despite early hopes that Ukrainian economic independence—with the concomitant end to the transfer of funds and resources to other parts of the Soviet Union—would alleviate the declining economy and standard of living, Ukraine entered a period of severe economic decline. Daily life in Ukraine became a struggle, particularly for those living on fixed incomes, as prices rose sharply. Citizens compensated in a number of ways: more than half grew their own food, workers often held two or three jobs, and many acquired basic necessities through a flourishing barter economy. By 1996 Ukraine had achieved a measure of economic stability. Inflation dropped to manageable levels, and the economy’s decline slowed considerably.

At the turn of the 21st century the economy finally began to grow, at least partially as a result of increased ties with Russia. In the early 21st century many young Ukrainians, particularly residents of the country’s rural west, sought employment opportunities abroad. Although such migration sometimes led to localized labour shortages within Ukraine, remittances from the Ukrainian diaspora amounted to some 4 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

The economy contracted sharply in 2014 as a result of the political crisis that toppled the government of pro-Russian Pres. Viktor Yanukovych. Russia responded to Yanukovych’s ouster by illegally annexing Crimea and fomenting an insurgency in southeastern Ukraine. A cease-fire between the Ukrainian government and Russian-backed forces in February 2015 created a state of frozen conflict, and the ongoing violence shattered daily life in what had been Ukraine’s most productive industrial region.

Agriculture and fishing

Partly because of rich soils and a favourable climate, Ukraine’s crop production is highly developed. Its output of grain and potatoes is among the highest in Europe, and it is among the world’s largest producers of sugar beets and sunflower oil. Ukraine’s livestock sector lags behind the crop sector, but its total output is still considerably larger than that of most other European countries.

A considerable amount of the world’s black soils are found in Ukraine’s forest-steppe zone. These soils are exceptionally well suited for the cultivation of sugar beets, an important industrial crop, and wheat. Besides wheat (almost all of it fall-sown), Ukraine produces such grains as barley (mostly for animal feed), corn (maize, for feed), leguminous grains (also feed), oats, rye, millet, buckwheat, and rice (irrigated, in Crimea). Potatoes are a major crop in the cooler regions in the north and in the Carpathian foothills. Sunflower seeds, the principal oil crop, are most common in the steppe zone, where castor beans, mustard, rape, flax, hemp, and poppy seeds also are grown for oil. In the southern steppes, especially where irrigation is used, tomatoes, peppers, and melons are grown as well. Truck farming or market gardening is particularly notable on the outskirts of such large cities as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhya, and the conurbation of the Donets Basin. Fruit is grown throughout Ukraine, notably in the forest-steppe, Transcarpathia (in southwestern Ukraine), and especially Crimea. Vineyards are common in the southern part of Ukraine, particularly in Transcarpathia and Crimea.

Cattle and pigs are raised throughout Ukraine. Concentrations of dairy herds occur primarily in the forest-steppe, especially in the vicinity of large cities, while beef cattle are more common in areas of natural pastures and hay fields, as in the Polissya and the Carpathian foothills. Sheep and goats are raised in the Carpathian Mountains and in parts of the southern steppe and Crimea. Chickens, geese, and turkeys are kept throughout Ukraine for meat and egg production, but large-scale broiler and egg-laying operations are concentrated close to the large cities. Bees are kept in all parts of Ukraine for pollination and the production of honey and wax; silkworm raising occurs in Transcarpathia.

Whereas field crop production and large-scale livestock and poultry operations were developed on collective and state farms in the Soviet period, small-scale gardening, fruit growing, and livestock raising traditionally have been carried on by private households. With the agricultural restructuring initiated by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s, the theretofore small private plots were allowed to expand, while collective and state farms were allowed to undergo some reorganization on the basis of group or family contract farming. Since independence, the declared intent of the Ukrainian government has been to bring about a gradual privatization of farming, but the agricultural infrastructure, which developed around collective and state farms, made the conversion difficult and costly. In December 1999 the collective farm system was abolished by presidential decree, and land reform remained a subject of concern for subsequent leaders. One of the most politically divisive aspects of privatization, however, was the proposed sale of agricultural land. The practice, prohibited by law in 1992, was seen by many as a crucial step in the liberalization of the agricultural sector.

 

The majority of Ukraine’s woodlands are managed by the State Forest Resources Agency. Although efforts to improve the country’s growing stock were hampered by contamination from the Chernobyl accident of 1986, Ukraine’s economically productive forested areas expanded dramatically in the years following independence and in the early 21st century. The Black Sea estuaries and the Sea of Azov are Ukraine’s main fishing grounds. Among the major rivers for fishing are the Dnieper, Danube, Dniester, Southern Buh, and Donets. Fish catches have declined because of heavy pollution.

Resources and power

Ukraine has extremely rich and complementary mineral resources in high concentrations and close proximity to each other. Rich iron ore reserves located in the vicinity of Kryvyy Rih, Kremenchuk, Bilozerka, Mariupol, and Kerch form the basis of Ukraine’s large iron-and-steel industry. One of the richest areas of manganese-bearing ores in the world is located near Nikopol. Bituminous and anthracite coal used for coke are mined in the Donets Basin. Energy for thermal power stations is obtained using the large reserves of brown coal found in the Dnieper River basin (north of Kryvyy Rih) and the bituminous coal deposits of the Lviv-Volyn basin. The coal mines of Ukraine are among the deepest in Europe. Many of them are considered dangerous because their depth contributes to increased levels of methane; methane-related explosions have killed numerous Ukrainian miners.

Ukraine also has important deposits of titanium ore, bauxite, nepheline (a source of soda), alunite (a source of potash), and mercury (cinnabar, or mercuric sulfide) ores. A large deposit of ozokerite (a natural paraffin wax) occurs near the city of Boryslav. Subcarpathia possesses potassium salt deposits, and both Subcarpathia and the Donets Basin have large deposits of rock salt. Some phosphorites as well as natural sulfur are found in Ukraine.

The three major areas producing natural gas and petroleum in Ukraine are the Subcarpathian region, exploited since the late 19th–early 20th century, and the Dnieper-Donets and Crimean regions, both developed since World War II. Following World War II, the extraction of natural gas in Ukraine soared until it accounted for one-third of the Soviet Union’s total output in the early 1960s. Natural gas production declined after 1975, however, and a similar pattern of growth and exhaustion occurred with Ukraine’s petroleum, ultimately making the republic a net importer of these fuels.

The exploitation of petroleum and natural gas in Ukraine necessitated the creation of an extensive pipeline transport system. One of the first natural gas pipelines in the region opened in the 1920s, linking Dashava to Lviv and then to Kyiv. As a result of the Soviet Union’s commitment to major gas exporting in the late 1960s and early ’70s, two trunk pipelines were laid across Ukraine to bring gas to eastern and western Europe from Siberia and Orenburg in Russia. Petroleum from the Dolyna oil field in western Ukraine is piped some 40 miles (65 km) to a refinery at Drohobych, and oil from fields in eastern Ukraine is piped to a refinery in Kremenchuk. Subsequently, larger petroleum trunk lines were added (some 700 miles [1,100 km]) to supply petroleum from western Siberia to refineries at Lysychansk, Kremenchuk, Kherson, and Odessa, as well as a 420-mile (675-km) segment of the Druzhba (“Friendship”) pipeline, which crosses western Ukraine to supply Siberian oil to other European countries. The pipelines connecting the Siberian oil and gas fields with Europe are a major economic asset for Ukraine, as their importance to Russia gives Ukraine leverage in negotiations over oil and gas imports. However, disputes between Ukraine and Russia have in the past led the latter to cut off its supply temporarily—negatively affecting Ukraine as well as the European Union, which depends on gas and oil from these pipelines.

Ukraine is heavily dependent on fossil fuels and nuclear power for its energy needs. Hydroelectricity accounts for less than 10 percent of the country’s electricity production, and the contribution of other renewable sources is negligible. Although coal production is substantial, Ukraine relies on imported oil and natural gas to satisfy its energy requirements. Thermal power stations are found in all parts of the country, though the largest are in the Donets Basin and along the Dnieper. A third electric energy-producing area is in the vicinity of the Lviv-Volyn coal basin, and in the Transcarpathian region there is a group of several power stations. Nuclear power stations are located near the cities of Khmelnytskyy, Rivne, and Zaporizhzhya, as well as along the Southern Buh River. The severe nuclear accident at one of the Chernobyl reactors in 1986 triggered a powerful environmental movement in Ukraine and spurred the drive toward political independence from the Soviet Union. The last working reactor at Chernobyl was closed in 2000.

Manufacturing

Manufacturing is an extremely important sector of the Ukrainian economy, in terms of productivity and revenue earned. Products manufactured in the country include ferrous metals, transportation equipment and other types of heavy machinery, a variety of chemicals, food products, and other goods.

Ukraine has a major ferrous metals industry and ranks among the top steel producers in the world. Cast iron, rolled steel, and steel pipe are produced mainly in the Donets Basin, which is the industrial heartland of the country.

The country’s heavy industries produce trucks, other automobiles, railway locomotives and freight cars, seagoing vessels, hydroelectric and thermal steam and gas turbines, and electric generators. In addition, residential and industrial construction demands hoisting and transportation equipment and other machinery for the building trades. Dozens of factories, found chiefly in Kharkiv, Odessa, Lviv, and Kherson, produce a wide range of agricultural equipment as well. During the Soviet period, plants in Ukraine assembled rockets and constructed naval vessels, including aircraft carriers. Subsequently, Ukraine emerged as an arms producer in its own right, although efforts have been made since 1991 to convert defense facilities to nonmilitary production. For instance, the Yuzhmash manufacturing concern, which once operated the world’s largest missile plant, in Dnipropetrovsk, now produces civilian agricultural machinery and aerospace technology as well as strategic missile systems.

The Ukrainian chemical-equipment industry, accounting for one-third of former Soviet production, is mainly concentrated in Kyiv, Sumy, Fastiv, and Korosten. The chemical industry includes coking and the manufacture of coke products, as well as the manufacture of mineral fertilizers, sulfuric acid, synthetic fibres, caustic soda, petrochemicals, photographic chemicals, and pesticides.

One of the most important products of the Ukrainian food-processing industry is sugar (from sugar beets). The production of vegetable oil, mainly from sunflower seeds, is significant as well. Other processed foods include meat, grain, fruit, and dairy products; local fish-processing industries are found in the coastal cities, such as Odessa. Wine comes from the Transcarpathian region and Crimea, where the vintners of the Massandra group are established near Yalta. Ukraine also produces vodka, beer, and other beverages.

Some of the principal products of light industry are textiles (both knitted and woven), ready-to-wear garments, and shoes. In addition, such consumer goods as television sets, refrigerators, and washing machines are produced. Machine-tool and instrument-manufacturing industries also have been developed.

Finance of Ukraine

The National Bank of Ukraine serves as the country’s central bank. It works to ensure the stability of the national currency, the hryvnya, which was introduced in 1996. A number of commercial banks provide financial services to companies and individuals, and securities are traded at Ukrainian stock exchanges. Legislation passed since independence encourages foreign investment, but complex business regulations and corruption problems have kept the level of investment relatively low.

Trade

Russia remains Ukraine’s most important trade partner. Ukraine also conducts a significant volume of trade with Germany, Italy, Poland, and other EU countries. Additional trade partners include China, Turkey, and the United States. From Russia, Ukraine imports petroleum, petroleum products, and natural gas, as well as fabrics, footwear, printed matter, and many other products. Machinery, transportation equipment, and chemicals are both imported and exported. By sea, Ukraine exports its grain, sugar, iron ore, coal, and manganese.

Services

Service industries constitute an increasingly important portion of the economy; their value accounts for more than half of Ukraine’s GDP. Among the leading service industries are those dealing with transportation and communications. Ukraine also exports certain services, particularly those related to transportation. Tourism has long been a key service industry on the southern shore of Crimea. The beautiful environment and warm climate have attracted vacationers and health seekers for more than a century. Perhaps the country’s most unorthodox tourist destination was the area affected by the Chernobyl disaster. Beginning in 2011, the Ukrainian government allowed visitors to tour the abandoned city of Pryp’yat and the “exclusion zone” around the failed Unit 4 reactor.

Labour and taxation

Services now employ the largest number of Ukrainian workers, though a significant number of labourers continue to work in agriculture and manufacturing. Nearly half the women are economically active; however, employer discrimination against women has been a problem. More than half of all workers belong to trade unions, many of which are grouped into large labour federations.

The Ukrainian government levies corporate and individual income taxes. It also collects value-added tax and excise taxes. In an effort to simplify and improve a taxation system that had been criticized by international financial professionals as confusing and opaque, Ukrainian legislators unveiled a new unified tax code in December 2010. The new code, which was implemented in 2011, was designed to boost foreign investment, make revenue collection more efficient, and spark growth in targeted industries.

Transportation and telecommunications

The flat relief of most of Ukraine presents few obstacles to transportation. Although by European standards the density of the country’s hard-surface road network is low, asphalt-paved highways connect all the regions and large industrial centres. The links between Kyiv and Moscow, Odessa–Kyiv–St. Petersburg, Moscow–Kharkiv–Simferopol, Uzhhorod–Lviv–Rivne–Kyiv, and Kyiv–Kharkiv–Rostov-na-Donu (Russia) are highways of particular importance.

The heaviest concentration of railroad trackage is in the Donets Basin and near the Dnieper River, especially its west bank. The largest railroad centres are Kharkiv, Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Bakhmach, Yasynuvata, Debaltseve, Lviv, Kovel, and Kup’yansk-Vuzlovyy.

Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov are found at Odessa, Illichivsk, Mykolayiv, Kherson, Feodosiya, Kerch, and Mariupol. River shipping is conducted primarily on the Dnieper and its tributaries (the Pripet and Desna), on the Southern Buh, and on the Danube, which is important in trade with other European countries. Ships on the Danube call at the port of Izmayil, which is accessible to oceangoing freighters and passenger liners. Through the Dnieper-Bug Canal, in Belarus, the inland waterways of Ukraine are joined to the Vistula River basin of Poland and to the Baltic Sea. Efforts to transform the Dnieper into a continuous deep waterway have been furthered by the creation of large reservoirs at hydroelectric stations. The largest ports on the Dnieper are Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson.

Kyiv is connected by air with all the regional centres of the country and with major cities throughout Europe and Asia, as well as with cities in North America and Australia. International airports in Ukraine include Boryspil near Kyiv and those at Kharkiv, Lviv, and Odessa.

Since independence, Ukraine has worked to improve its inadequate Soviet-era telephone system. The country is now linked to international fibre-optic and satellite systems. Meanwhile, cellular telephone usage has risen dramatically, and by 2010, cellular subscriptions outnumbered people in Ukraine by almost 20 percent. The rates of Internet use and personal computer ownership lagged behind those of neighbouring countries.

Government and society

The government of Ukraine underwent rapid change in the early 1990s. Before its declaration of independence in 1991, Ukraine was officially called the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (S.S.R.) and was part of the Soviet Union. According to the 1937 Soviet constitution as amended in 1944, Ukraine had the right to “enter into direct relations with foreign states, to conclude agreements, and to exchange diplomatic and consular representatives with them” and to maintain its own military forces. The only real expression of these constitutional prerogatives in international affairs, however, was Ukraine’s charter membership in the United Nations (UN) and consequently in some 70 other international organizations. (The Ukrainian S.S.R. and the Belorussian S.S.R. [now Belarus] were the only two UN members that were not fully sovereign countries.) The revised Soviet constitution of 1977 further limited the prerogatives of the Ukrainian S.S.R. Within days of the failed coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Ukraine proclaimed its independence on August 24, 1991, and won overwhelming popular approval for this act in a referendum on December 1, 1991. Ukraine was subsequently recognized by other governments, and many international agreements were signed, notably with neighbouring countries. In addition, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia formed the Commonwealth of Independent States, which was then joined by eight other former republics of the defunct Soviet Union.

Constitutional framework

Ukraine adopted a new constitution in 1996. Until that time, the Soviet-era constitution had remained in force, albeit with numerous adjustments.

The highest legislative unit of the Ukrainian government is the unicameral Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council of Ukraine), which succeeded the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian S.S.R. Changes to electoral laws in 1997 stipulated that half of the legislative seats would be apportioned among members of the various political parties according to their relative share of the popular vote. The other half of the legislators were to be elected from single-seat constituencies by a simple majority vote. This system remained in place until 2004, when the constitution was amended to abolish the mixed legislative structure in favour of a system of proportional representation based on political party lists.

The president, elected by direct popular vote for a five-year term, is the head of state. The president acts as the commander in chief of the armed forces, oversees executive ministries, and has the power to initiate and to veto legislation, though vetoes may be overturned. The president also chairs the National Security and Defense Council and determines its composition.

The early period of Ukrainian independence was marked by a weak presidency and a strong parliament. In fact, Leonid Kravchuk, Ukraine’s first democratically elected president, almost seemed to downplay his role. After his election in 1994, Pres. Leonid Kuchma set out to redefine the structures of power in Ukraine. In 1995 the parliament agreed to the so-called “Law on Power,” which substantially enhanced the role of the executive branch of government, and in 1996 the new constitution gave the presidency considerably more power. A 2004 constitutional reform, which took effect in 2006, shifted some power away from the president to the prime minister, but in 2010 Ukraine’s Constitutional Court declared that reform unconstitutional. The strong presidential powers outlined in the 1996 constitution were thus restored. Those changes were repealed in February 2014, after months of popular protest toppled the government of Pres. Viktor Yanukovych, and the 2004 constitution was reinstated.

The head of government is the prime minister, who is appointed by the president with the consent of the legislature. The president, with the consent of the prime minister, also appoints the members of the cabinet. The cabinet, headed by the prime minister, coordinates the day-to-day administration of the government and may introduce legislation to the Supreme Council. The president has the power to dismiss the prime minister and the cabinet.

Local government

Ukraine is a unitary republic, not a federal state. The country is divided administratively into a number of provinces called oblasti; two cities—Kyiv and Sevastopol—carry the same status as an oblast. Crimea is an autonomous republic within Ukraine. In 2014 Crimea was occupied and annexed by Russia, but few countries and international organizations recognized the legality or legitimacy of the move.

Justice

The highest court in the judicial system is the Supreme Court of Ukraine. The court’s function is to supervise judicial activities. Constitutional matters are determined by the Constitutional Court.

Political process

Citizens 18 years of age and older have the right to vote. Until 1990 the only legal political party in Ukraine was the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU), which was a branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Major legislation approved by the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet originated in, or was approved by, the CPU. A change to the Ukrainian constitution in October 1990 allowed nascent political parties to be officially recognized. Subsequently, a wide array of parties emerged. Many parties, however, have lacked strong organizational bases and coherent platforms, and individual parties have tended to join together in parliament as blocs.

The centre-right, nationalistic Popular Movement of Ukraine, or Rukh, founded in 1989, was instrumental in the campaign for Ukrainian independence but afterward lost strength. The CPU—re-formed in 1993 after a 1991 ban on the Soviet-era CPU was lifted—retains support, mainly in the industrialized and Russophone reaches of eastern Ukraine and among older voters. Several other parties, such as the Socialist Party of Ukraine and the Social Democratic Party of Ukraine, have had socialist, if not Marxist-Leninist, orientations. During the Kuchma presidency (1994–2005), a number of opposition parties coalesced. These parties supported the 2004 Orange Revolution, a series of mass protests that helped to bring Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency in 2005. The most important of these pro-Western “Orange” parties were Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine (known from 2007 as Our Ukraine–People’s Self-Defense) and the eponymous bloc of Yuliya Tymoshenko, leader of the Fatherland party. Viktor Yanukovych—who succeeded Yushchenko as president in 2010—headed the popular Party of Regions, which supported stronger ties to Russia. Among the parties that forced Yanukovych from power in 2014 were Fatherland, Vitali Klitschko’s Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reforms (UDAR), and the ultranationalist Svoboda (“Freedom”) party.

Security

In 1991, at the time of independence, approximately 750,000 members of the Soviet armed forces were stationed within Ukraine’s borders. In addition, Ukraine inherited some 5,000 strategic and tactical nuclear weapons as well as vast stores of small arms and conventional ammunition. The Ukrainian government quickly brought these forces under its command. Early in 1992 the military personnel on Ukrainian soil were required to swear an oath of allegiance to the new Ukrainian state; if they refused, they were provided with funds to leave the country. In the subsequent years, Ukraine reduced the size of its armed forces by several hundred thousand troops. With assistance from Russia and the United States, the Soviet-era nuclear arsenal was decommissioned, and in 1994 Ukraine became a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Ukraine also launched what was billed as the world’s largest demilitarization project, the goal of which was the destruction of more than 1,000,000 small arms, 3,000,000 antipersonnel mines, more than 100,000 tons of ammunition, and 1,000 shoulder-mounted surface-to-air missile systems.

On paper, Ukraine’s military—consisting of army, air force, and navy branches and a substantial reserve force—remains one of the largest in Europe. Traditionally, its size was maintained through conscription, with a period of military service being compulsory for men between the ages of 18 and 25. Conscription was abolished in 2013 but reintroduced the following year in response to the pro-Russian separatist movement in eastern Ukraine. Although Ukraine had a robust defense industry, much of its military manufacturing was focused on the export market—chiefly to Russia—and the equipment fielded by its armed forces was generally outdated. Budgetary neglect and corruption, particularly during the Yanukovych administration (2010–14), hobbled the armed forces, and only about 6,000 of the country’s 140,000 personnel under arms in 2014 were generally judged to be combat-ready. In March 2014 the situation was considered to be so dire that the Ministry of Defense appealed directly to the Ukrainian public for support, launching a fund-raising campaign that raised $1 million in three days.

Ukraine is a member of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. In the early 21st century it sought membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization but then reversed its intention. Ukraine and NATO maintained close ties, however, and Ukraine contributed troops and matériel to NATO-led missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan. Beginning in 2010, Ukraine also participated in maneuvers with the NATO Response Force, a multinational command that was designed to enhance the alliance’s quick reaction capabilities. During the 2014 crisis in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, NATO was consistently vocal in its support for the government in Kyiv, and NATO commanders offered evidence that the pro-Russian militias active in both regions were in fact Russian troops.

The Crimean port of Sevastopol serves as the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea fleet. The Russian naval presence in the city dates to the tsarist era, as it represented the realization of Russia’s long-desired goal to establish a warm-water port on the Black Sea. After independence, the facilities became a source of tension between the two countries, when Pres. Viktor Yushchenko stated that Russia’s lease on the base would not be renewed. His successor, Viktor Yanukovych, however, extended the lease until 2042 in exchange for a lower price on Russian natural gas. After occupying and annexing the Crimean Peninsula, Russia voided the lease in April 2014, basing that action on its claim that Sevastopol was now Russian territory and that the lease therefore no longer applied. Authorities in Kyiv bitterly disputed the claim.

Health and welfare

In theory, all citizens of Ukraine are constitutionally guaranteed free and effective health care. In practice, health care is financed through a combination of state and private funding, and money for improvement in the system remains scarce. Prepaid sickness funds provide their members with some measure of insurance, but a sizable percentage of health care costs are incurred as out-of-pocket expenses. Ukraine emerged from the Soviet period with an extensive infrastructure of health care facilities, including hospitals, workplace- and school-based medical centres, retirement communities, and women’s clinics, but these facilities deteriorated badly during the postindependence economic downturn. A lack of medicine and equipment, underfunded medical schools, and low wages for health care providers also have contributed to a significant decline in the quality of health care. Of particular concern was the spread of HIV/AIDS, especially among the country’s intravenous drug users.

Following independence, the social welfare system of the Soviet period was restructured and expanded. Benefits were partially linked to inflation, and measures were adopted to assist workers displaced by the transition to a market-oriented economy. Other components of the social insurance system include family allowances for households with children, birth and maternity benefits, and disability pay. The welfare system is financed through a payroll tax. This system came under increasing pressure as the ratio of workers to retirees narrowed in the early 21st century, and pension funding consumed an increasingly large portion of the government’s budget. A small but growing percentage of Ukrainians participated in private pension funds.

Housing

During the Soviet era, housing shortages were common in urban areas, and construction was often of poor quality. Ukraine’s urban real estate market grew dramatically in the years following independence, only to suffer a dramatic collapse as the global economy contracted in 2008. With credit frozen, many prospective homeowners found themselves unable to obtain a mortgage. An array of nongovernmental organizations and regional groups responded by sponsoring microcredit schemes that encouraged home ownership in both urban and rural areas.

Education

In the 17th century an impressive degree of literacy (for the time) could be found in Ukraine. With Ukraine’s declining political fortunes, however, the rate of popular literacy dropped. By the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917, more than 70 percent of Ukraine’s population was illiterate. The Soviets’ policy of compulsory education helped to wipe out illiteracy in the younger generation, and virtually the entire adult population can now read and write.

Children must attend school for 11 years. About three-fourths of the teachers are women. The student-teacher ratio is low. Since independence, the curriculum has increasingly emphasized Ukrainian history and literature. Private and religious schools, virtually nonexistent in the Soviet era, began to appear in the 1990s. In addition, general and correspondence schools allow young industrial and agricultural workers to receive an education without interrupting their work.

The first institution of higher learning in Ukraine, the Kyivan Mohyla Academy, was established in 1615; it was an important intellectual centre for the Orthodox world until its closing in 1817. Ukraine’s educated classes were also well served by the establishment of universities in Kharkiv (1805), Kyiv (1834), and Odessa (1865), as well as Lviv (1784) and Chernivtsi (1875) in western Ukraine. After Ukraine’s independence in 1991, those institutions became state universities, and the Mohyla Academy was reestablished as a university. Today the extensive system of higher education also includes state universities at Dnipropetrovsk, Uzhhorod, and Donetsk.

The largest single scientific organization is the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Founded in 1918 (when Ukraine was briefly an independent state), the academy grew as an institution of research and learning during the Soviet period. Following Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, the academy’s humanities and social science sections were mobilized to further the twin goals of Soviet social engineering and Russification, and they continued to follow this policy more or less until the demise of the Soviet Union. Today the academy governs a host of research institutions and scientific workers. Among the specialized scientific facilities available in Ukraine are a number of oceanographic research vessels, based in Odessa and Sevastopol, which support research in the fields of mineral resources, marine biology, and desalinization of seawater. Elsewhere in the country can be found a large cyclotron and one of the finest experimental nuclear reactors in the world, astronomical observatories, and botanical gardens.

 

Cultural life

Cultural milieu

Ukraine possesses a wealth of cultural talent and a considerable cultural legacy. Numerous writers have contributed to the country’s rich literary history. Impressive monuments of architecture and museums displaying works by generations of Ukrainian artists can be found throughout the country, and art galleries featuring contemporary Ukrainian artists have become commonplace in larger urban centres. The country’s strong tradition of folk art also continues to this day. In addition, high-calibre performing artists and ensembles appear regularly in Ukraine’s numerous theatres and concert halls.

Because of the country’s geographical location, Ukrainian culture has been influenced by the cultures of both western Europe and Russia. Although these influences are particularly evident in the western and eastern halves of the country, respectively, there is no strict geographical division. For example, Russian is spoken in the streets and in many homes and institutions throughout the country; it also is used in national publications, radio broadcasts, and popular music. The country’s other ethnic minorities contribute to a measure of cultural diversity as well.

Daily life and social customs

The social changes brought about by Ukrainian independence are most evident in the cities, particularly Kyiv. The country’s capital now boasts high-end stores catering to a moneyed class, and a fashionable strip of contemporary art galleries and cafés winds its way down the historical street of Andriyivskyi Uzviz. The capital’s renovated airport stands in striking contrast to its decidedly dour appearance in Soviet times.

The cities, with their broad sidewalks and extensive greenery, are eminently suited for walking. Ukrainians generally do a considerable amount of walking, either to get around or simply for enjoyment. Parks are plentiful and popular for strolling or picnicking, a common pastime among city dwellers, most of whom live in apartments. The cities also feature numerous kiosks, which sell all manner of wares.

Cultural pursuits and entertainment are widespread. Most of Ukraine’s major cities have ornate theatres with their own opera or ballet companies. Song-and-dance ensembles, most notably the Verovka State Chorus and the Virsky Dance Ensemble, have made Ukrainian folk music and dance into an impressive stage art. Though classical music remains popular, contemporary Western-style music has expanded its audience considerably and now dominates the airwaves on numerous commercial radio stations. Street concerts and club performances are common, as are dance clubs and cabarets. Imported television soap operas have developed a dedicated following, and cinemas show American blockbusters.

The country offers a variety of restaurants that serve Chinese, Greek, Continental, or other foreign cuisine. Pizza bars and other fast-food restaurants are increasingly common as well. Many Ukrainians, however, still prefer such traditional Ukrainian foods as borscht, cabbage rolls, varenyky (dumplings), studynets (a form of headcheese), and shashlyky (kebabs). On festive occasions these dishes are accompanied by vodka or champagne and eloquent toasts. The dish known as chicken Kiev, though commonly served in Ukraine, likely originated elsewhere.

In the countryside, horse-drawn carts with rubber wheels have not quite disappeared. The khata (“house”), made of mud and thatch and typically whitewashed, is still found as well. These homes often contain such traditional handiwork as embroideries, weavings, and handmade feather duvets and oversized pillows. Their inhabitants are predominantly elderly Ukrainians.

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The arts of Ukraine

Literature

Written Ukrainian literature began with Christianization and the introduction of Old Church Slavonic as a liturgical and literary language. The literary heritage of the Ukrainian people in the early period, from the 11th to the 13th centuries, is that of Kyivan (Kievan) Rus; sermons, tales, and lives of the saints were the major genres. After the Mongol destruction of Kyivan Rus in the 13th century, literary activity in Ukraine declined. A revival began in the 14th century and was spurred further in the 16th century with the introduction of printing, the Reformation ferment, and the advance of the Counter-Reformation into Polish-dominated Ukrainian lands.

The Ukrainian vernacular gradually became more prominent in writings in the 16th century, but this process was set back in the 17th and 18th centuries, when many Ukrainian authors wrote in Russian or Polish. At the end of the 18th century, modern literary Ukrainian finally emerged out of the colloquial Ukrainian tongue.

Nineteenth-century Ukrainian writers greatly contributed to the reawakening of Ukrainian national consciousness under the Russian Empire. The classicist poet and playwright Ivan Kotlyarevsky may be considered the first modern Ukrainian author. In his work Eneyida (1798), he transformed the heroes of Virgil’s Aeneid into Ukrainian Cossacks. Classicist prose appeared only with Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko’s novel Marusya (1834).

In the 1830s Ukrainian Romanticism developed, and such authors as Izmail Sreznevsky, Levko Borovykovsky, Amvrosii Metlynsky, and Mykola Kostomarov published works that recognized a particular Ukrainian culture and history. In western Ukraine, Markiian Shashkevych, Yakiv Holovatsky, and Ivan Vahylevych constituted the so-called “Ruthenian Triad” of Ukrainian Romanticism. A markedly different approach was taken by Nikolay Gogol (Ukrainian: Mykola Hohol), who wrote Romantic works with Ukrainian themes in Russian and with a “pan-Russian” spirit.

The most important 19th-century Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, treated Ukrainian history and Russian oppression, as well as broader themes. Panteleymon Kulish was another significant poet of the period.

Marko Vovchok, who wrote Narodni opovidannia (1857; “Tales of the People”), ushered in Ukrainian Realism. Many Realist works depicted village life and contemporary society; some touched on populist themes. Panas Myrny, with his works on social injustice, became the major representative of Ukrainian Realism, but the novelists Ivan Nechuy-Levytsky and Ivan Franko were prominent as well.

A number of competing literary movements emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, though Realism, exemplified by the prose of Volodymyr Vynnychenko, remained important. Lesia Ukrainka was a leading modernist author. The poet Pavlo Tychyna followed the Symbolist movement; Mykola Bazhan, one of Ukraine’s greatest 20th-century poets, employed elements of Futurism; and Mykola Zerov, Maksym Rylsky, and Mykhaylo Dray-Khmara wrote Neoclassicist poetry (see Classicism and Neoclassicism).

During the early years of Bolshevik rule, talented Ukrainian writers proliferated. Mykola Khvylovy’s prose was imbued with revolutionary and national Romanticism, Hryhory Kosynka’s prose was impressionistic, Yury Yanovsky’s stories and novels were unabashedly romantic, and Valeriyan Pidmohylny’s work adhered to the principles of realism.

In 1932, however, the Communist Party began requiring writers to follow the theory of Socialist Realism. Many Ukrainian writers who did not adhere to the official style were imprisoned or executed, particularly during Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. A new generation of writers, known as the “Writers of the ’60s,” broke with Socialist Realism in the post-Stalinist period, but in the 1970s the Communist Party took new measures to repress literature that deviated from the approved style.

With Ukraine’s independence in 1991 came a rebirth of free literary expression. Many of the established literary journals continued to publish, although with far-more-open editorial policies, and a plethora of new journals appeared as well. Literary journals have provided a valuable outlet for the work of writers in Ukraine, particularly younger ones, as the postindependence economic difficulties substantially limited the publication of books, especially in the realm of belles lettres. Among the literary talents of independent Ukraine, novelist Valerii Shevchuk and poet Yury Andrukhovych stand out.

 

Visual arts

Over the centuries the Ukrainian people have evolved a varied folk art. Embroidery, wood carving, ceramics, and weaving are highly developed, with stylized ornamentation that represents many regional styles. Intricately patterned Easter eggs (pysanky) have become popular in many countries that have Ukrainian immigrant populations.

With the introduction of Christianity in the 10th century, the various forms of Byzantine art (e.g., architecture, mosaics, frescoes, manuscript illumination, and icon painting) spread rapidly and remained the dominant art forms through the 16th century. The mosaics and frescoes of the churches of Kyiv, notably the cathedral of St. Sophia (11th–12th century), and the icons of the more distinctively Ukrainian school in Galicia (15th–16th century) are particularly noteworthy. A number of outstanding churches of this period, notably the cathedral of St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery (early 12th century), were demolished by the Soviet authorities in the 1930s; only international protests saved the cathedral of St. Sophia from the same fate.

Baroque architecture had a pronounced impact in Ukraine, and a distinctive “Cossack Baroque” style developed there. Western European influences in the 17th and 18th centuries also affected iconography and stimulated portrait painting, engraving, and sculpture.

Western trends were carried to Russia by Ukrainian artists working there from the 18th century. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries the Ukrainian-born sculptor and rector of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, Ivan Martos, and the Ukrainian-born portraitists Dmytro Levytsky and Volodymyr Borovykovsky were among the leading figures of the St. Petersburg Classical school of painting.

The classicism and the emergent realism of the 19th century are best exemplified by the poet-painter Taras Shevchenko. New art movements are evident in the work of such 19th-century painters as the Impressionists Ivan Trush, Mykola Burachek, and Aleksander Murashko; the Post-Impressionist Mykola Hlushchenko; and the Expressionists Oleksander Novakivsky, Alexis Gritchenko (Ukrainian: Oleksa Hryshchenko), and Anatoly Petrytsky (see Impressionism; Post-Impressionism; Expressionism).

The brief renewal of Ukrainian independence in 1918 further fostered avant-garde trends that reflected a resurgence of Ukrainian national traditions. Two schools developed: in painting, the Monumentalism of Mykhaylo Boychuk, Ivan Padalka, and Vasyl Sedliar, consisting of a blend of Ukrainian Byzantine and Early Renaissance styles; and, in the graphic arts, the Neo-Baroque of Heorhii Narbut. Modernist experimentation ended in Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s, however, when both these schools were suppressed and Socialist Realism became the only officially permitted style.

The Ukrainian avant-garde was rejuvenated following Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaigns of the late 1950s; it consisted mostly of Expressionists who wanted to illustrate Ukraine’s tragic modern history. These artists, who included Alla Horska, Opanas Zalyvakha, and Feodosy Humenyuk, were again suppressed by the Soviet authorities in the 1970s and ’80s.

A number of Ukrainian artists have won considerable renown in the West, among them Gritchenko, who began with Cubism and then turned to a dynamic form of Expressionism, and the painter and engraver Jacques Hnizdovsky, who developed a simplified style of realism. The sculptor Alexander Archipenko (Ukrainian: Oleksander Arkhypenko), one of the pioneers of Cubism who later experimented in Constructivism and Expressionism, was a major figure of 20th-century European art.

Music of Ukraine

Folk music in Ukraine retains great vitality to this day. Ritual songs, ballads, and historical songs (dumy) were sung a cappella or accompanied by folk instruments, of which the bandura (a multistringed lutelike instrument) is the most popular. Itinerant blind musicians known as kobzars or lirnyks (depending on their instrument of choice) were a common feature of the Ukrainian countryside until the 20th century. The hopak, an energetic folk dance composed of leaps and kicks, received renewed attention in the 21st century as martial arts practitioners integrated its movements into a self-defense technique based on ethnic Ukrainian traditions.

Church music was patterned on Byzantine and Bulgarian models with local variations evolving in Kyiv in the early period. Polyphonic singing had developed by the 16th century and subsequently was transmitted in the 17th century to Russia, where Ukrainian singers and musical culture soon won a dominant position. The 17th-century composer Mykola Dyletsky introduced soprano singers to church choirs and emphasized emotional expression in his compositions. Ukrainian choral music reached its peak in the 18th and early 19th centuries in the works of Maksym Berezovsky, Dmytro Bortnyansky, and Artem Vedel.

Secular music became ascendant in the 19th century. The opera Zaporozhets za Dunayem (1863; “A Zaporozhian [Cossack] Beyond the Danube”) by Semen Hulak-Artemovsky gained great popularity, as did Kateryna by Mykola Arkas and the compositions of Petro Nishchynsky and Mykhaylo Verbytsky. At the turn of the 20th century, Ukrainian musical life was dominated by Mykola Lysenko, whose output encompassed vocal and choral settings, piano compositions, and operas, including Natalka Poltavka, Utoplena (“The Drowned Girl”), and Taras Bulba. Other major composers of the period were Kyrylo Stetsenko, Yakiv Stepovy, and Mykola Leontovych, the latter excelling in polyphonic arrangements of ancient folk music.

In the early years of the Soviet period, several composers produced works of high artistic merit, particularly Lev Revutsky and Borys Lyatoshynsky and their contemporary in western Ukraine, Stanyslav Lyudkevych. From the mid-1930s, however, political regimentation dampened individual expression and innovation in musical language. Typical among composers of Soviet Ukraine were Kostyantyn Dankevych, Yuly Meytus, and the brothers Yury and Platon Mayboroda. An innovative group of modernist musicians, known as the Kyiv Avant-garde, emerged as a musical force in the 1960s and ’70s. The best-known composer of the group was Valentyn Sylvestrov, who composed in the postindependence period as well.

Popular music grew in importance during the last three decades of the 20th century. The songs of popular composer Volodymyr Ivasiuk, as performed by the chanteuse Sofiya Rotaru, received wide applause. A form of popular music known as estrada (stage entertainment) also grew in popularity. Stage ensembles generally maintained a Europop sound. In the 1980s the Braty Hadiukiny (“Snake Brothers”) band started incorporating a broader range of contemporary influences into their music. By the 1990s rock, ska, punk, and other popular musical styles were commonplace in Ukraine. Ruslana Lyzhichko, winner of the Eurovision Song Contest in 2004, emerged as the country’s first international star of the 21st century.

Theatre and motion pictures

The theatre originated in Ukraine under Western influence in the 17th century. Verse dialogue (intermedia) rapidly developed into a specific genre, the school theatre, whose repertoire expanded to encompass dramatization of Christian legends, historical drama, and puppet theatre (vertep) performed on a stage of two levels. The best example of the Cossack Baroque theatre was the historical play Vladimir (1705) by Feofan Prokopovich (Ukrainian: Teofan Prokopovych). After a period of decline, a Ukrainian ethnographic theatre developed in the 19th century. Folk plays and vaudeville were raised to a high level of artistry by such actors as Mykola Sadovsky and Mariia Zankovetska in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A lifting of censorship in 1905 permitted a significant expansion of the repertoire to include modern dramas by Lesia Ukrainka (who introduced to the Ukrainian stage both ancient Greek and Shakespearian techniques), Volodymyr Vynnychenko, and Oleksander Oles (an innovator in symbolic plays), as well as translated plays.

The real flowering of the Ukrainian theatre occurred between 1917 and 1933. The Berezil Theatre (1922–33) in Kharkiv, under the artistic director Les Kurbas, was the most distinguished troupe. Preeminent among the playwrights was Mykola Kulish, whose Patetychna Sonata (“Sonata Pathétique”) combined Expressionist techniques with the forms of the Ukrainian vertep. From the mid-1930s, however, the theatre in Ukraine was dominated by Socialist Realism, the style enforced by the Communist Party. Oleksander Korniychuk was the most favoured of the playwrights writing in the approved manner.

Ukrainian film has achieved some marked successes. The director and scenarist Aleksandr Dovzhenko (Ukrainian: Oleksander Dovzhenko) was an important innovator in world cinematography. Several of his works produced in the 1920s and ’30s are considered classics of the silent film era. In later years, Tini zabutykh predkiv (1964; Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors) won critical acclaim in the West. In the postindependence era, Western films, dubbed in Ukrainian, were increasingly popular. Ukrainian directors, on the other hand, achieved particular recognition in the early 21st century for their work on short films. Among the most accomplished of those directors are Taras Tomenko, Ihor Strembytsky, and Maryna Vroda. The Ukrainian motion picture industry is centred in Kyiv and Odessa.

Cultural institutions

There are numerous professional theatres in Ukraine, notably the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theatre in Kyiv and the Mariia Zankovetska National Academic Ukrainian Drama Theatre in Lviv. Ukraine also has several opera theatres, numerous symphony orchestras, academic and folk choirs, and other performing ensembles. Amateur groups of song and dance are very popular as well.

The Shevchenko Scientific Society, established in 1873, was the main Ukrainian scholarly body in western Ukraine until it was forcibly dissolved in 1940, after the Soviet Union occupied the region. It reestablished itself in western Europe and the United States in 1947, and in 1989 the society resumed operations in Ukraine. Among its many activities, the society sponsors conferences and lectures, awards research grants, and publishes scholarly works, particularly in the field of Ukrainian studies.

Among the notable museums in the country are the Museum of the History of Ukraine and the Museum of the Art of Ukraine (both in Kyiv). The Museum of Folk Architecture and Folkways of Ukraine, an open-air museum in the village of Pyronovo, preserves elements of 17th- and 18th-century village life. The National Museum of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 is part of a memorial complex near the Dnieper in Kyiv that includes the iconic statue Motherland-Mother, which is more than 328 feet (100 metres) tall.

Sports and recreation

Ukraine benefited immensely from the Soviet emphasis on sports and physical education, which left the country with hundreds of stadiums, swimming pools, gymnasiums, and other athletic facilities. Popular sports include track and field, volleyball, shooting, basketball, swimming, and gymnastics. Football (soccer), however, is by far the favourite sport, and archrivals Shakhtar Donetsk and Dynamo Kyiv are two of the country’s most popular clubs. Ukraine was the cohost of football’s European Championship tournament in 2012. Chess is also considered a sport.

 Ukrainian athletes excelled in international competitions while representing the U.S.S.R. Since independence, Ukraine has fielded its own Olympic teams, featuring such notable gold medal winners as figure skater Oksana Baiul, heavyweight boxer Wladimir Klitschko (Ukrainian: Volodymyr Klichko), weightlifter Timur Taimazov, gymnast Liliya Podkopayeva, and swimmer Yana Klochkova. Klitschko, along with his brother Vitali, dominated the heavyweight ranks of professional boxing in the early 21st century, and Vitali used his popularity to launch a political career.

The country has several national parks, including the Carpathian National Park and the Shatskyy National Park. Forest parks, located near major cities, offer picnicking, swimming, hiking, and cross-country skiing. Some of the larger cities have urban “culture and recreation” parks, where theatres, lecture halls, reading rooms, and playgrounds are found amid gardens and wooded areas. Near the city of Yalta is located the Nikitsky Botanical Garden, in which plants from almost every country in the world are found.

In Transcarpathia and near the cities of Lviv, Vinnytsya, Zhytomyr, Bila Tserkva, Poltava, and Kharkiv are health spas noted for their mineral springs. Spas near the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov specialize in mud baths.

Media and publishing

The demise of the Soviet Union brought fundamental changes to publishing and broadcasting in Ukraine. The Communist Party’s influence was no longer a factor, and state control—and funding—receded. As a result, many established newspapers and journals ceased publication. The print runs of those that did continue, as private ventures, were in general considerably smaller. At the same time, numerous new publications and private television and radio stations emerged during the 1990s. Although Soviet-era restrictions on content were lifted, publications that were critical of the local or national administration were subjected to various forms of harassment—for example, tax inspections, detailed examinations of registration documents, or libel suits of dubious credibility. In addition, state broadcasters provided slanted coverage of political events. Much of this changed in the wake of the Orange Revolution in 2004. Amid the political turmoil that marked that event and the period that followed, press freedoms expanded. The election of Yanukovych as president in 2010, however, led to an increase in official pressure on journalists, and preferential coverage of the ruling party was the norm. On the whole, however, the media remain much more open and credible than they were in Soviet times.

The official news agency is the Ukrainian National Information Agency (UkrInform), which covers political, economic, cultural, and sports information. Independent news agencies include Respublika Ukrainian Independent Information Agency (UNIAR) and the Ukrainian Independent Information and News Agency (UNIAN).

Official publications include the Supreme Council’s Holos Ukrainy (“Voice of Ukraine”) and the cabinet’s Uryadovy Kur’yer (“Administrative Courier”). The largest newspapers include Silski Visti (“Rural News”), a former organ of the Communist Party; Robitnycha Hazeta (“Workers’ Gazette”); Ukrainya Moloda (“Ukraine the Young”); and Pravda Ukrayiny (“Truth of Ukraine”). Other noteworthy periodicals include Den’ (“The Day”), which publishes editions in Ukrainian and Russian; the influential Zerkalo Nedeli (“Weekly Mirror”); the English-language Kyiv Post; the weekly journal Polityka i Kul’tura (“Politics and Culture”); and the high-calibre literary and cultural review Krytyka (“Critique”).

The National Television and Radio Broadcasting Council of Ukraine regulates and monitors major television and radio broadcasting companies. Dozens of television networks are available, either as terrestrial signals or via cable or satellite. Beginning in 2011, Ukraine’s national networks switched from an analog television signal to a higher definition digital signal. Most commercial radio stations are local or regional in nature and usually feature a contemporary music and talk format.

History of Ukraine

Prehistory

From prehistoric times, migration and settlement patterns in the territories of present-day Ukraine varied fundamentally along the lines of three geographic zones. The Black Sea coast was for centuries in the sphere of the contemporary Mediterranean maritime powers. The open steppe, funneling from the east across southern Ukraine and toward the mouth of the Danube River, formed a natural gateway to Europe for successive waves of nomadic horsemen from Central Asia. And the mixed forest-steppe and forest belt of north-central and western Ukraine supported an agricultural population (most notably the Trypillya culture of the mid-5th to 3rd millennia bce), linked by waterways to northern and central Europe. The marshlands of these zones were frequent areas of both military conflict and cultural transmission.

A period of great migrations began with the descent of the Goths from the Baltic region into Ukraine about 200 ce. They displaced the Sarmatians, but their own power was broken about 375 by the invading Huns from the east, who were followed in the 5th–6th centuries by the Bulgars and Avars. Between the 7th and 9th centuries, the Ukrainian steppe formed part of the Turkic Khazar mercantile empire, which was centred on the lower Volga River. Khazar control of the steppe was breached in the late 9th century by the Magyars (Hungarians). The Pechenegs, who followed, dominated much of southern Ukraine in the 10th and 11th centuries, and they were in turn succeeded by the Polovtsians (Cumans). Throughout this period of nomadic invasions, only a few of the Greek settlements on the Crimean Peninsula, notably Chersonesus (see Tauric Chersonese), maintained a precarious existence, relying on the support of the Byzantine Empire.

In the meantime, under the impact of Germanic migrations, the movement of Slavic tribes from their primordial homeland north of the Carpathians began in the 5th and 6th centuries. While some Slavs migrated westward and others south into the Balkans, the East Slavs occupied the forest and forest-steppe regions of what are now western and north-central Ukraine and southern Belarus; they expanded farther north and to the northeast into territories of the future Russian state centred on Moscow. The East Slavs practiced agriculture and animal husbandry, engaged in such domestic industries as cloth making and ceramics, and built fortified settlements, many of which later developed into important commercial and political centres. Among such early settlements was Kyiv (Kiev), on the high right (western) bank of the Dnieper River.

Kyivan (Kievan) Rus

The formation of the Kyivan state that began in the mid-9th century, the role of the Varangians (Vikings) in this process, and the name Rus by which this state came to be known are all matters of controversy among historians. It is clear, however, that this formation was connected with developments in international trade and the new prominence of the Dnieper route from the Baltic to Byzantium, on which Kyiv was strategically sited. Trade along this route was controlled by Varangian merchant-warriors, and from their ranks came the progenitors of the Kyivan princes, who were, however, soon Slavicized. In the early chronicles the Varangians were also called Rus, and this corporate name became a territorial designation for the Kyivan region—the basic territory of the Rus; later, by extension, it was applied to the entire territory ruled by members of the Kyivan dynasty.

By the end of the 10th century, the Kyivan domain covered a vast area from the edge of the open steppe in Ukraine as far north as Lake Ladoga and the upper Volga basin. Like other medieval states, it did not develop central political institutions but remained a loose aggregation of principalities ruling what was a dynastic clan enterprise. Kyiv reached its apogee in the reigns of Volodymyr the Great (Vladimir I) and his son Yaroslav I (the Wise). In 988 Volodymyr adopted Christianity as the religion of his realm and had the inhabitants of Kyiv baptized. Rus entered the orbit of Byzantine (later, Orthodox) Christianity and culture. A church hierarchy was established, headed (at least since 1037) by the metropolitan of Kyiv, who was usually appointed by the patriarch of Constantinople. With the new religion came new forms of architecture, art, and music, a written language (Old Church Slavonic), and the beginnings of a literary culture. All these were vigorously promoted by Yaroslav, who also promulgated a code of laws, the first in Slavdom. Although Byzantium and the steppe remained his main preoccupations in external policy, Yaroslav maintained friendly relations with European rulers, with whom he established marital alliances for his progeny.

Following Yaroslav’s death, Kyiv entered a long period of decline, only briefly stemmed in the 12th century under Volodymyr II Monomakh (Vladimir II Monomakh). Shifts in trade routes undermined Kyiv’s economic importance, while warfare with the Polovtsians in the steppe sapped its wealth and energies. Succession struggles and princely rivalries eroded Kyiv’s political hegemony. The ascendancy of new centres and the clustering of principalities around them reflected regional cleavages—historical, economic, and tribal ethnic—that had persisted even in the period of Kyiv’s predominance. These differences were accentuated by the Mongol-Tatar invasions that began in the 1220s and culminated in the devastating sack of Kyiv in 1240.

The territory that largely coincides with modern Belarus, with Polotsk as the most important centre, was one such emerging region. The land of Novgorod to its north was another. In the northeast, Vladimir-Suzdal (and later Moscow) formed the core from which developed the future Russian state (see also Grand Principality of Moscow). On Ukrainian territory, in the southwestern part of Rus, Galicia-Volhynia emerged as the leading principality.

Volodymyr (modern Volodymyr-Volynskyy) in Volhynia had been an important princely seat in Kyivan Rus, and Galicia, with its seat at Halych, on the Dniester River, became a principality in the 12th century. In 1199 the two principalities were united by Prince Roman Mstyslavych to form a powerful and rich state that at times included the domains of Kyiv. Galicia-Volhynia reached its highest eminence under Roman’s son Danylo (Daniel Romanovich). New cities were founded, most importantly Lviv; trade—especially with Poland and Hungary, as well as Byzantium—brought considerable prosperity; and culture flourished, with marked new influences from the West. In 1253 Danylo (in a bid for aid from the West) even accepted the royal crown from Pope Innocent IV and recognized him as head of the church, although nothing substantial came from this. Danylo’s reign also witnessed the rise of boyar-magnate unrest, debilitating dynastic involvements with Poland and Hungary, and the Mongol invasion of 1240–41. These marked the onset of Galicia-Volhynia’s decline, which continued until the extinction of Roman’s dynasty in 1340.

Lithuanian and Polish rule

By the middle of the 14th century, Ukrainian territories were under the rule of three external powers—the Golden Horde, the grand duchy of Lithuania, and the kingdom of Poland.

The steppe and Crimea, whose coastal towns and maritime trade were now in the hands of the Venetians and Genoese, formed part of the direct domains of the Tatar Golden Horde. This was the westernmost successor of Genghis Khan’s Mongol empire, whose khan resided at Sarai on the Volga River. By the mid-15th century the Golden Horde was in a process of disintegration. One of its successor states was the Crimean khanate, which after 1475 accepted the suzerainty of the sultans of the Ottoman Empire. Both the Crimean Peninsula and large areas of the adjoining steppe continued under the khanate’s rule until its annexation to the Russian Empire in 1783.

Elsewhere in Ukraine, Mongol rule was largely indirect, limited to exactions of taxes and tribute whose collection was delegated to the local princes. It was also relatively short-lived; northwestern and central Ukraine became an arena of expansion for a new power that had arisen in the 13th century, the grand duchy of Lithuania.

Having already over the course of a century incorporated all the lands of Belarus, Lithuania under Grand Duke Algirdas advanced rapidly into Ukraine. In the 1350s Chernihiv and adjacent areas—and in the 1360s the regions of Kyiv and, to its south, Pereyaslav and Podolia (Podillya)—were occupied by Lithuania. Competition with Poland over the former Galician-Volhynian principality ended in the 1380s in partition, by which Lithuania gained Volhynia and Poland was confirmed in its possession of Galicia. Thus, Lithuanian control extended over virtually all the Ukrainian lands as far as the open steppe and even, briefly, to the Black Sea.

Within the grand duchy the Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) lands initially retained considerable autonomy. The pagan Lithuanians themselves were increasingly converting to Orthodoxy and assimilating into Ruthenian culture. The grand duchy’s administrative practices and legal system drew heavily on Slavic customs, and an official Ruthenian state language (also known as Rusyn) developed over time from the language used in Rus.

Direct Polish rule in Ukraine in the 1340s and for two centuries thereafter was limited to Galicia. There, changes in such areas as administration, law, and land tenure proceeded more rapidly than in Ukrainian territories under Lithuania. However, Lithuania itself was soon drawn into the orbit of Poland following the dynastic linkage of the two states in 1385/86 and the baptism of the Lithuanians into the Latin (Roman Catholic) church. The spread of Catholicism among the Lithuanians and the attendant diffusion of the Polish language, culture, and notions of political and social order among the Lithuanian nobility eroded the position of the Orthodox Ruthenians, as had happened earlier in Galicia. In 1569, by the Union of Lublin, the dynastic link between Poland and Lithuania was transformed into a constitutional union of the two states as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. At the same time, the greater part of the Ukrainian territories was detached from Lithuania and annexed directly to Poland. This act hastened the differentiation of Ukrainians and Belarusians (the latter of whom remained within the grand duchy) and, by eliminating the political frontier between them, promoted the closer integration of Galicia and the eastern Ukrainian lands. For the next century, virtually all ethnically Ukrainian lands experienced in common the direct impact of Polish political and cultural predominance.

Social changes

Over three centuries of Lithuanian and Polish rule, Ukraine by the middle of the 17th century had undergone substantial social evolution. The princely and boyar families tracing their roots to Kyivan Rus had largely merged and become part of the privileged noble estate of Lithuania and Poland. Long attached to the Orthodox religion and the Ruthenian language and customs, the Ruthenian nobility in the late 16th century became increasingly prone to Polonization, a process often initiated by education in Jesuit schools and conversion to Roman Catholicism.

With the growth of towns and urban trades, especially in western Ukraine, the burghers became an important social stratum. They were divided both in terms of an internal social hierarchy associated with the guild system and by religion and ethnicity. Since the 13th century many Poles, Armenians, Germans, and Jews had settled in the cities and towns, where the Ukrainians were often reduced to a minority. Although the burghers came to play an influential role within the Ukrainian community, legal disabilities imposed on non-Catholics progressively limited their participation in the municipal self-government enjoyed by many cities and towns under Magdeburg Law.

In the period of Polish rule the conditions of the peasantry steadily deteriorated. The free peasantry that had still existed into the late Lithuanian period underwent rapid enserfment, while serf obligations themselves became more onerous (see serfdom). Peasant unrest increased toward the end of the 16th century, especially in eastern Ukraine. The sparsely settled lands were opened to Polish proprietorship for the first time, and large latifundia (agricultural estates worked by a large number of peasants) were established through royal grants to meet the demands for grain on the European markets. To attract labour to the new estates, peasants were granted temporary exemptions from serf obligations; the expiration of these exemptions and the reintroduction of servitude among a population grown accustomed to freedom led to much discontent and peasant flight into the “wild fields”—the steppe lands to the east and south. Tensions were exacerbated by the fact that, while the peasants were Ukrainian and Orthodox, the landlords were largely Polish (or Polonized) and Roman Catholic, and the estate stewards or leaseholders for absentee proprietors frequently were Jewish. Thus, social discontent tended to coalesce with national and religious grievances.

Religious developments

As social conditions among the Ukrainian population in Lithuania and Poland progressively deteriorated, so did the situation of the Ruthenian church. The Roman Catholic Church, steadily expanding eastward into Ukraine, enjoyed the support of the state and legal superiority over the Orthodox. External pressures and restrictions were accompanied by a serious internal decline in the Ruthenian church. From the mid-16th century, both Catholicism, newly reinvigorated by the Counter-Reformation and the arrival of Jesuits in Poland, and Protestantism (albeit temporarily) made inroads, especially among the Ruthenian nobility.

Attempts to revive the fortunes of the Ruthenian church gathered strength in the last decades of the 16th century. About 1580 Prince Konstantyn Ostrozky founded at Ostroh in Volhynia a cultural centre that included an academy and a printing press and attracted leading scholars of the day; among its major achievements was the publication of the first complete text of the Bible in Slavonic. Lay brotherhoods, established by burghers in Lviv and other cities, maintained churches, supported schools and printing presses, and promoted charitable activities. The brotherhoods were frequently in conflict with the Orthodox hierarchy, however, on questions of authority over their institutions and clerical reforms.

Religious developments took a radical turn in 1596 when, at a synod in Brest, the Kyivan metropolitan and the majority of bishops signed an act of union with Rome. By this act the Ruthenian church recognized papal primacy but retained the Eastern rite and the Slavonic liturgical language, as well as its administrative autonomy and traditional discipline, including a married clergy.

This so-called Uniate church was unsuccessful in gaining the legal equality with the Latin church foreseen by the agreement. Nor was it able to stem the process of Polonization and Latinization of the nobility. At the same time, the Union of Brest-Litovsk caused a deep split in the Ruthenian church and society. This was reflected in a sizable polemical literature, struggles over the control of bishoprics and church properties that intensified after the restoration of an Orthodox hierarchy in 1620, and numerous acts of violence. Efforts to heal the breach in the 1620s and ’30s were ultimately fruitless. (See also Eastern Rite church.)

The Cossacks of Ukraine

In the 15th century a new martial society—the Cossacks (from the Turkic kazak, meaning “adventurer” or “free man”)—was beginning to evolve in Ukraine’s southern steppe frontier. The term was applied initially to venturesome men who entered the steppe seasonally for hunting, fishing, and the gathering of honey. Their numbers were continually augmented by peasants fleeing serfdom and adventurers from other social strata, including the nobility. Banding together for mutual protection, the Cossacks by the mid-16th century had developed a military organization of a peculiarly democratic kind, with a general assembly (rada) as the supreme authority and elected officers, including the commander in chief, or hetman. Their centre was the Sich, an armed camp in the lands of the lower Dnieper “beyond the rapids” (za porohy)—hence, Zaporozhia (in contemporary usage, Zaporizhzhya).

The Cossacks defended Ukraine’s frontier population from Tatar incursions, conducted their own campaigns into Crimean territory, and, in their flotillas of light craft, even raided Turkish coastal cities in Anatolia. The Polish government found the Cossacks a useful fighting force in wars with the Tatars, Turks, and Muscovites but in peacetime viewed them as a dangerously volatile element. Attempts to control them institutionally and to limit their numbers through an official register created serious discontent among the Cossacks, who increasingly perceived themselves as forming a distinct estate with inherent rights and liberties. Sporadically over a half century starting in 1591, the Cossacks rose up in revolts that were put down only with great difficulty.

In the first half of the 17th century, the Cossacks also became involved in the raging religious conflict. In 1620 the entire Zaporozhian host joined the Kyivan Orthodox brotherhood; in the same year, a new Orthodox hierarchy was consecrated in Kyiv under their military protection. Thus, in the great religious divide, the Cossacks became identified with staunch support of Orthodoxy and uncompromising opposition to the Uniate church. Under the protection afforded by the Cossacks and the dynamic leadership of a new metropolitan of Kyiv, Peter Mogila (Ukrainian: Petro Mohyla), Orthodoxy flourished in Ukraine; it became the driving force behind a cultural revival that included the establishment of the Kyivan Mohyla Academy, the first Ukrainian institution of higher learning.

The Khmelnytsky insurrection

Tensions stemming from social discontent, religious strife, and Cossack resentment of Polish authority finally coalesced and came to a head in 1648. Beginning with a seemingly typical Cossack revolt, under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Ukraine was quickly engulfed in an unprecedented war and revolution.

Khmelnytsky was a petty nobleman and Cossack officer who, unable to obtain justice for wrongs suffered at Polish hands, fled to the Sich in late 1647 and was soon elected hetman. In early 1648 he began preparations for an insurrection, securing for this purpose Tatar military support. A Polish army sent into Ukraine to forestall the rebellion was shattered in two battles in May. This victory gave signal to a massive popular uprising. Violence spread throughout Ukraine as Cossacks and peasants vented their fury on those they associated with Polish tyranny and social oppression—landlords, officials, Latin and Uniate clergy, and Jews. The Poles in turn took bloody reprisals against the rebellious population. In September Khmelnytsky inflicted another crushing defeat on a newly raised Polish army, marched westward through Galicia, and finally besieged Zamość in Poland proper. He did not press his advantage, however, and, with the election of a new Polish king in November, he returned to central Ukraine. In January 1649 Khmelnytsky entered Kyiv to triumphal acclaim as liberator.

Although initially seeking only a redress of grievances from the Polish crown, Khmelnytsky, following his arrival in Kyiv, began to conceive of Ukraine as an independent Cossack state. He set about establishing a system of government and state finances, created a local administration under a new governing elite drawn from the Cossack officers, and initiated relations with foreign states. Still prepared to recognize royal sovereignty, however, he entered into negotiations with the Poles. But neither the Treaty of Zboriv (August 1649) nor a less favourable agreement two years later proved acceptable—either to the Polish nobility or to the Cossack rank and file and the radicalized masses on the Ukrainian side.

While military operations continued inconclusively, and because Tatar support proved undependable at crucial moments, Khmelnytsky began to search for other allies. In 1654 at Pereyaslav he concluded with Moscow an agreement whose precise nature has generated enormous controversy: Russian historians have emphasized Ukraine’s acceptance of the tsar’s suzerainty, which subsequently legitimized Russian rule, but Ukrainian historiography has stressed Moscow’s recognition of Ukraine’s autonomy (including an elective hetmancy, self-government, and the right to conduct foreign relations) that was virtually tantamount to independence (see Pereyaslav Agreement). Moscow now entered the war against Poland. No decisive breakthrough occurred, however, despite occasional joint victories, and Khmelnytsky became increasingly disillusioned with the Muscovite alliance. There were disputes over control of conquered territory in Belarus and conflicts over Russian interference in internal Ukrainian affairs. Especially galling to the hetman was the Russo-Polish rapprochement that followed the invasion in 1655 of Poland by Sweden, Moscow’s adversary but Ukraine’s potential ally (see First Northern War). Khmelnytsky again cast about for new alliances and coalitions involving Sweden, Transylvania, Brandenburg, Moldavia, and Walachia, and there were indications that the hetman planned to sever the Muscovite connection but died before he could do so.

The Ruin

Khmelnytsky’s successor, Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky, broke with Moscow and in 1658 concluded the new Treaty of Hadyach with Poland. By its terms, central Ukraine (attempts to include Volhynia and Galicia were unsuccessful) was to constitute—under the hetman and a ruling elite of nobles and officers—the self-governing grand duchy of Rus, joined with Poland and Lithuania as an equal member of a tripartite commonwealth. Distasteful to the Polish magnates for its concessions to the hated Cossacks, repugnant to the Cossacks and the peasant masses for its conservative social cast and Polish connection, and a provocation to Moscow, the Treaty of Hadyach was never implemented. Faced with mounting opposition, Vyhovsky resigned the hetmancy and fled to Poland.

After Vyhovsky, Ukraine began a rapid descent into a prolonged state of chaos that contemporaries called “the Ruin.” Tensions increased between the Cossack officers, who were undergoing a transformation into a hereditary landowning class, and rank-and-file Cossacks and the peasantry, who were the expected supply of labour. From 1663, rival hetmans rose and fell in the competing Polish and Russian spheres of influence. In 1667, by the Truce of Andrusovo, Ukraine was partitioned along the Dnieper River: the west, known as the Right Bank, reverted to Poland, while Russia was confirmed in its possession of the east, known as the Left Bank, together with Kyiv (which actually was located west of the river); the arrangement was confirmed in 1686 by the Treaty of Eternal Peace between Poland and Russia.

The partition of Ukraine caused a patriotic reaction. The hetman of the Right Bank, Petro Doroshenko, briefly occupied the Left Bank and sought to re-create a unified Ukrainian state under the vassalage of the Ottoman Empire. A massive Ottoman military intervention in 1672 had as its primary effect the outright annexation of Podolia as an Ottoman province for a quarter century. Doroshenko’s hopes—and popularity—evaporated as further Ottoman operations failed to establish his rule and led to devastation, especially after Russia was drawn into the war. Mass flight of the populace to the Left Bank, and even beyond, depopulated large tracts of Right Bank Ukraine. Two large-scale Ottoman campaigns followed Doroshenko’s abdication, but a truce in 1681 put an end to further direct Turkish military involvement. Ottoman power was soon on the wane in Europe, and in 1699 the province of Podolia reverted to Polish rule.

The autonomous hetman state and Sloboda Ukraine

After the partition of 1667, the autonomous hetman state, or Hetmanate, was limited territorially to the east, in Left Bank Ukraine. (The hetman state in Right Bank Ukraine, under at least nominal Polish control, was abolished by the Poles at the turn of the 18th century.) At the head of the state stood the hetman, elected theoretically by a general Cossack assembly but in effect by senior officers, who in turn were largely swayed by the tsar’s preference. The terms of autonomy were renegotiated at each election of a new hetman, and this led over time to a steady erosion of his prerogatives. Nevertheless, for a century the Hetmanate enjoyed a large measure of self-government, as well as considerable economic and cultural development.

The ruling elite in the Hetmanate was composed of the senior Cossack officers, starshyna, who had evolved into a hereditary class approximating the Polish nobility in its privileges. The common Cossacks too were undergoing stratification, the more impoverished hardly distinguished, except in legal status, from the peasantry. The conditions of the free peasantry worsened over time, their growing obligations tending increasingly toward serfdom. Urban life flourished, however, and the larger cities and some towns continued to enjoy municipal self-government; the burghers largely maintained the rights of their social estate.

In the ecclesiastical realm, the Uniate church disappeared from the Cossack-controlled territory, and the Orthodox Kyivan metropolitanate itself was transferred in 1686 from the patriarchal authority of Constantinople to that of Moscow. Although Ukrainian churchmen eventually gained enormous influence in Russia, within the Hetmanate itself in the course of the 18th century the church progressively lost its traditional autonomy and distinctive Ukrainian character.

The hetman state reached its zenith in the hetmancy of Ivan Mazepa. Relying at first on the support of Tsar Peter I (the Great), Mazepa exercised near monarchical powers in the Hetmanate. Literature, art, and architecture in the distinctive Cossack Baroque style flourished under his patronage, and the Kyivan Mohyla Academy experienced its golden age. Mazepa aspired to annex the Right Bank and re-create a united Ukrainian state, initially still under the tsar’s sovereignty. But Peter’s centralizing reforms and the exactions imposed on the Hetmanate in connection with the Second Northern War appeared to threaten Ukrainian autonomy. In 1708, in furtherance of his plans for independence, Mazepa made a secret alliance with Charles XII of Sweden, but in the decisive Battle of Poltava (1709) their allied forces were defeated. Mazepa fled to Moldavia, where he died shortly thereafter.

Although Peter allowed the election of a successor to Mazepa, the Hetmanate’s autonomous prerogatives were severely curtailed and underwent further weakening over the remaining decades of the 18th century. From 1722 to 1727 and again from 1734 to 1750, the office of hetman was in abeyance, as the Russian imperial regime introduced new institutions to oversee the country’s governance. In 1750 Empress Elizabeth revived the hetmancy for Kyrylo Rozumovsky, the brother of her favourite. On the accession of Catherine II (the Great) in 1762, the hetman and the starshyna petitioned for the restoration of the Hetmanate’s previous status; instead, in 1764 Catherine forced Rozumovsky’s resignation. Over the next 20 years all vestiges of Ukrainian autonomy were eliminated, and in 1775 the Zaporozhian Sich, the bastion of the Cossacks, was destroyed by Russian troops.

To the east of the Hetmanate lay lands that until the 17th century had remained largely unpopulated—part of the “wild fields” since the Mongol invasion. Into this area, starting in the late 16th century, the Muscovite government gradually extended its line of fortifications against the Tatars. In the 17th century this territory became an area of colonization by Ukrainian peasants and Cossacks fleeing Polish rule and, later, the ravages of the Ruin period. The newcomers established free, nonserf settlements called slobodas that gave the area the name of Sloboda Ukraine. Kharkiv developed into the region’s main centre. Like the Hetmanate, Sloboda Ukraine enjoyed extensive internal autonomy, though under officials appointed by the Russian imperial government. The autonomy of Sloboda Ukraine was abolished under Catherine in 1765.

Right Bank and western Ukraine until the Partitions of Poland

The western Ukrainian lands of Galicia and Volhynia, though part of the theatre of war during the Khmelnytsky insurrection, remained in its aftermath still firmly under Polish control. The Right Bank, after the abatement of the Ruin and the retrocession of Podolia by the Turks, also reverted to Polish sovereignty. However, only in 1714, after further dislocations connected with the Second Northern War, was control reestablished over the area by a greatly weakened Poland.

The society that reemerged in Ukrainian territories under Polish rule in the 18th century differed markedly from that in the Hetmanate. The Cossacks virtually disappeared as a significant organized force. Cities and towns experienced a serious decline, and their populations became more heavily Polish and, especially in the Right Bank, Jewish. Roman Catholicism maintained and even enhanced its earlier privileged status; the Uniate church, however, became predominant among Ukrainians, with Orthodoxy claiming a smaller number of adherents.

In the absence of strong central authority and with the elimination of the Cossacks as a countervailing force, the Right Bank was dominated by the Polish nobility. Especially influential were a few magnate families whose huge estates formed virtually independent fiefdoms, with their own privately armed militias. The desolated lands were slowly repopulated through peasant migrations (frequently organized by the nobility) from Galicia and, especially, Volhynia. The extreme exploitation of the enserfed peasantry bred discontent that led sporadically to uprisings by bands of rebels called haydamaks (Turkish: “freebooters” or “marauders”). The most violent, known as the Koliivshchyna, occurred in 1768 and was put down only with the help of Russian troops.

Polish rule in Ukrainian territories came to an end with the extinction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in three partitions—in 1772, 1793, and 1795 (see Partitions of Poland). In the first partition, Galicia was annexed by Habsburg Austria. In the second, Russia took the Right Bank and eastern Volhynia; it absorbed the rest of Volhynia in the third.

Ukraine under direct imperial Russian rule

Following the abolition of autonomy in the Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine and the annexation of the Right Bank and Volhynia, Ukrainian lands in the Russian Empire formally lost all traces of their national distinctiveness. The territories were reorganized into regular Russian provinces (guberniyas) administered by governors appointed from St. Petersburg. The Right Bank, along with some adjoining territories, formed part of the Pale of Settlement, to which the Jewish population of the empire was residentially restricted (see pale). With the liquidation of the Sich and the annexation of the Crimean khanate in 1783, the sparsely settled southern lands (named Novorossiya, or New Russia) were colonized by migrants from other parts of Ukraine, as well as smaller numbers from Russia, the Balkans, and Germany. This colonization movement greatly expanded Ukrainian ethnic territory. The new Black Sea port of Odessa (Odesa) grew into a large and cosmopolitan metropolis.

Equally important developments occurred in the social sphere. As compensation for their lost rights as a ruling elite in the Hetmanate, the Cossack starshyna were equalized with the Russian nobility; many entered imperial service, and some achieved the highest government ranks. Through education, intermarriage, and government service, the Ukrainian nobility gradually became Russified—as the earlier Ruthenian nobility had been Polonized—though many retained a sentimental attachment to the land and its folklore. The Polish nobility in the Right Bank continued as the dominant landowning class, although its status eroded over time, particularly after the Polish insurrections of 1830–31 and 1863–64 (see November Insurrection; January Insurrection). The large Jewish population was bound by numerous legal disabilities and, from 1881, victimized by recurrent waves of pogroms. The gradual process of enserfment of the peasantry in the Left Bank culminated in 1783 under Catherine II. The obligations there, however, were less onerous than in the Right Bank. Agitation among the peasant class, coupled with the Russian defeat in the Crimean War (1853–56), hastened the decline of serfdom, but it remained the dominant lot of the peasantry until the emancipation of 1861. After emancipation, the peasants were still burdened by inadequate land allotments and heavy redemption payments that led to the impoverishment of many.

Nevertheless, the reforms stimulated the development of industry within the Russian Empire by releasing labour from the land. Industrial development was especially marked in eastern Ukraine, notably the Donbas region (Donets Basin). However, the workers attracted to the growing metallurgical industry and other industrial concerns generally came from other parts of the empire; the Ukrainian population seeking economic improvement more commonly emigrated to agricultural lands. As a result, the emerging working class and the growing urban centres in Ukraine became highly Russified islands in a Ukrainian rural sea.

As in the political and social realms, in religious policy the tsarist regime promoted the elimination of Ukrainian peculiarities. Although the largely Polish Roman Catholic Church was allowed to continue, Catherine launched a program of administrative conversion of Ukrainians from the Uniate church. The anti-Uniate campaign was partially reversed by her immediate successors but was renewed with vigour by Nicholas I. In 1839 the Uniate metropolitanate was abolished, the Union of Brest-Litovsk declared null and void, and the Uniates finally absorbed into the Russian Orthodox Church, while the recalcitrant clergy were harshly punished. The Russian Orthodox Church became an important vehicle for the Russification policies of the imperial regime in Ukraine.

In the 19th century the development of Ukrainian cultural life was closely connected with academic circles. The first modern university in Ukraine was established in 1805 at Kharkiv, and for 30 years Sloboda Ukraine was the major centre for Ukrainian scholarship and publishing activities. In 1834 a university was founded in Kyiv and in 1865 at Odessa. Though Russian institutions, they did much to promote the study of local history and ethnography, which in turn had a stimulative effect on the Ukrainian national movement.

Literature, however, became the primary vehicle for the 19th-century Ukrainian national revival. The most important writer—and unquestionably the most significant figure in the development of a modern Ukrainian national consciousness—was Taras Shevchenko. Born a serf, Shevchenko was bought out of servitude by a group of artists who recognized his talent for painting. Though considered by many to be the father of modern Ukrainian painting, Shevchenko made his unique mark as a poet. His poetry spanned themes from the fantastic in folklike ballads to epic romanticization of Cossack glory, from wrathful indictments of social and national oppression under the tsars to mystical reflections based on the biblical prophets. Apart from its seminal impact on the subsequent course of Ukrainian literature, Shevchenko’s poetry reflected a conception of Ukraine as a free and democratic society that had a profound influence on the development of Ukrainian political thought.

By the mid-19th century the cultural and literary stirrings in Ukraine aroused concern in tsarist ruling circles. In the official view, dominant also in Russian historiography, the Ukrainians were a subdivision, or “tribe,” of Russians—“Little Russians”—torn from the unity of Rus by the Mongol-Tatars and deflected from their proper historical course by the baneful influence of Poland. Thus, it was deemed essential to reintegrate Ukraine fully into the Russian body politic. Shevchenko’s patriotic verse earned him arrest and years of exile in Central Asia. In 1863 the minister of the interior, Pyotr Valuev, banned virtually all publications in Ukrainian, with the exception of belles lettres. The ban was reinforced by a secret imperial decree, the Ems Ukaz, of Alexander II in 1876 and extended to the publication of belles lettres in Ukrainian, the importation of Ukrainian-language books, and public readings and stage performances in the language. The prohibition even extended to education—a major contributing factor to the low rate of literacy among Ukrainians (only 13 percent in 1897). With such restrictions, writers from Russian-ruled Ukraine could see their works published only in Austrian Galicia, and many figures in the national movement shifted their activities there.

Tsarist repression and the still premodern, largely rural character of Ukrainian society in the Russian Empire impeded the growth of a political movement. A secret society, the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, existed briefly in 1845–47. Its program advocated social equality, an end to national oppression, and a federation of Slavic states under the leadership of Ukraine. The brotherhood was quickly uncovered and suppressed and its leaders arrested and punished. In the second half of the 19th century, clandestine societies called hromadas (“communities”) were formed in various cities to promote Ukrainian culture, education, and publishing under conditions of illegality. Originally associated with the Kyiv hromada was the leading political thinker of the time, Mykhaylo Drahomanov, who advocated the transformation of the tsarist empire into a federative republic in which Ukrainian national rights would be assured. Toward the end of the century, younger, primarily student-led hromadas became involved in more overtly political activities. One such group in Kharkiv developed into the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party, which in a pamphlet published in 1900 advanced for the first time as a political goal “one, single, indivisible, free, independent Ukraine.”

The revolution that shook the Russian Empire in 1905 spawned worker strikes and peasant unrest in Ukraine as well (see Russian Revolution of 1905). The consequent transformation of the tsarist autocracy into a semiconstitutional monarchy led to some easing in Ukrainian national life. The ban on Ukrainian-language publishing lapsed, and societies to foster popular enlightenment and scholarship proliferated, as did theatrical troupes and musical ensembles. Nevertheless, the population affected by these cultural endeavours remained small, and the Ukrainian language was still excluded from schools.

In the political arena the introduction of an elected assembly, or Duma, in 1906 initially provided Ukrainians with a new forum to press their national concerns. In the short-lived First and Second Dumas, Ukrainians had a sizable representation and formed their own caucus. Changes in the electoral law to the detriment of the peasantry and national minorities, however, severely limited Ukrainian representation and effectiveness in the Third and Fourth Dumas. Until the Russian Revolution of 1917, the agenda of nationally conscious, politically active Ukrainians seldom exceeded demands for language and cultural rights and some form of local autonomy.

Western Ukraine under the Habsburg monarchy

The Habsburgs’ annexation of Galicia from Poland in 1772 was followed two years later by their acquisition of Bukovina, a partly Ukrainian (predominantly in its northern reaches) and partly Romanian territory, from Moldavia. Already under Habsburg rule, as part of the Hungarian crown, was a third ethnically Ukrainian region—Transcarpathia. Within the Habsburg realm these three territories underwent many experiences in common, but they were distinguished also by differences stemming from their specific ethnic environments and earlier histories.

Galicia

Under Austria, ethnically Ukrainian Galicia was joined administratively with purely Polish areas to its west into a single province, with Lviv (German: Lemberg) as the provincial capital. This and the fact that, in the province’s Ukrainian half, the Poles constituted overwhelmingly the landlord class and dominated the major cities (though many towns were largely Jewish) made Polish-Ukrainian rivalry a crucial feature of Galician life. Although, on balance, Habsburg policies favoured the Poles, Ukrainians (Ruthenians in the contemporary terminology) in Austria enjoyed far greater opportunities for their national development and made far greater progress than did Ukrainians in tsarist Russia.

The reforms initiated by the Austrian rulers Maria Theresa and Joseph II and the introduction of the imperial bureaucracy in Galicia improved the position of Ukrainians. The peasantry benefited from the limitation of the corvée and the abolition of personal bondage to the landlord in the 1780s, as well as from new methods in agriculture promoted by the “enlightened monarchs.” Municipal reforms reversed the decline of cities and led to an improvement in the legal and social position of the Ukrainian urban population. Undertaken as early as 1775, educational reforms allowed for instruction in the native language, although in practice Ukrainian-language teaching was limited largely to low-level parochial schools until the mid-19th century.

The fortunes of the Uniate church also rose. Renamed the Greek Catholic church in 1774, it was, by imperial decree, equalized in status with the Roman Catholic Church, and in 1807 a metropolitanate was established, with its seat in Lviv. Imperial authorities took pains to raise the educational standards of the clergy. In the early decades of the 19th century, the clergy trained at newly established institutions almost exclusively formed the educated class, and their children, beginning to enter secular professions, gave rise to a Ukrainian intelligentsia. In the course of the 19th century, the Greek Catholic church became a major national, as well as religious, institution.

The revolution of 1848 that swept the Austrian Empire politicized the Ukrainians of Galicia (see Revolutions of 1848). The Supreme Ruthenian Council, established to articulate Ukrainian concerns, proclaimed the identity of Austria’s Ruthenians with the Ukrainians under Russian rule; demanded the division of Galicia into separate Polish and Ukrainian provinces, the latter to include Bukovina and Transcarpathia; organized a national guard and other small military units; and published the first Ukrainian-language newspaper.

Although suppressed, the revolution set in motion important transformations in Galician society. The corvée was abolished in 1848. Impoverishment of the Ukrainian peasantry increased, however, due to lack of land reform, rural overpopulation, and a near total absence of industry to absorb the excess labour force. Large-scale emigration to the Americas (specifically the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina) began in the 1880s and continued until World War I.

Also in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, the imperial regime reached an accommodation with the Polish nobility that in effect ceded political control of Galicia to the Poles. The local Polish hegemony was little affected by the reforms of the 1860s that gave Austria a constitution and parliament and Galicia its provincial autonomy and diet. The governors appointed by Vienna were exclusively Polish aristocrats. The civil service and Lviv University, which had been Germanized in the early years of Habsburg rule, were Polonized. Elections to the parliament and diet inevitably produced commanding Polish majorities, as voting was based on a curial system that favoured the landowning and urban classes. (Curiae were the political groups, representing various communities and classes of people, that cast the votes.) The occasional efforts by imperial authorities to promote a Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation failed to gain more than minor concessions in the fields of culture and education. The major demands of Ukrainian parliamentary representatives—including the partition of Galicia along ethnic lines, the replacement of the curial electoral system by universal suffrage, and the creation of a Ukrainian university in Lviv—were not met.

Disappointment with the Habsburgs and concern over the new Polish ascendancy gave rise in the 1860s to pro-Russian sympathies among the older, more conservative, clerical intelligentsia. The Russophiles promoted a bookish hybrid Ukrainian-Russian language (derogatorily dubbed yazychiie by its critics) and a cultural and political orientation toward Russia. From the 1870s they consistently lost ground to the narodovtsi (populists), who fostered the use of the vernacular and stressed the ethnic identity of Ukrainians in Austria-Hungary and in the Russian Empire. The narodovtsi developed an extensive press and founded numerous associations (starting with the Prosvita society in 1868) that provided an important outlet for writers and scholars in Russian-ruled Ukraine. Self-organization in the late 19th century extended to women’s and youth groups, performing ensembles, cooperatives and credit unions, and, in the 1890s, political parties. By this time, however, the Russophiles had been largely discredited (although they retained control of many key Ukrainian institutions in Galicia), and the leading role of the narodovtsi in the emerging Ukrainian national movement in Galicia was being challenged, though never eclipsed, by a patriotically minded radical movement, whose leading figures included Ivan Franko and Mykhailo Pavlyk.

At the turn of the century, the ethnic conflict in Galicia deepened. Massive peasant strikes against the Polish landlords occurred in 1902. Ukrainian university students engaged in demonstrations and clashes with the Poles, and in 1908 a student assassinated the Galician governor. The introduction in 1907 of universal manhood suffrage in elections to the Austrian parliament strengthened Ukrainian representation in Vienna and intensified pressures for a similar reform on the provincial level. Growing tensions with Russia prompted Vienna to seek a Ukrainian-Polish compromise, but Polish opposition kept the old curial electoral system in effect to the end.

By the outbreak of World War I, Ukrainians in Austrian Galicia were still an overwhelmingly agrarian and politically disadvantaged society. Nevertheless, they had made impressive educational and cultural advances, possessed a large native intelligentsia and an extensive institutional infrastructure, and had achieved a high level of national consciousness, all of which contrasted sharply with the situation prevailing in Russian-ruled Ukraine.

Bukovina of Ukraine

A small territory between the middle Dniester River and the main range of the Carpathians, Bukovina had formed part of Kyivan Rus and the Galician-Volhynian principality. In the 14th Ukraine.

Bukovina of Ukraine

A small territory between the middle Dniester River and the main range of the Carpathians, Bukovina had formed part of Kyivan Rus and the Galician-Volhynian principality. In the 14th century it was incorporated into Moldavia, which in the 16th century became a vassal of the Ottoman Empire. At the time of its annexation by Austria in 1774, the population, Orthodox in religion, was binational, with Ukrainians predominating in the north and Romanians in the south.

The Habsburgs quickly instituted reforms similar to those in Galicia. Bukovina was joined to Galicia as a discrete district from 1787 to 1849, when it became a separate crownland; it achieved full autonomy in 1861. In the 19th century, sizable Jewish and German communities came into being as a result of immigration. German was the province’s official language; however, both Ukrainian and Romanian had currency in public life and, in certain disciplines, at the local university. Romanian-Ukrainian friction grew toward the end of the century over such issues as the Ukrainian attempts to gain parity in the Orthodox church administration, but it did not reach the level of hostility prevailing in Galicia.

From the late 1860s the Ukrainian national movement in Bukovina paralleled the developments in Galicia, with which there were close connections; a similar network of cultural and civic organizations and publishing enterprises was created. The provision of Ukrainian schools and educational facilities was superior to that of any other Ukrainian territory.

Transcarpathia

Lying south of the Carpathian Mountains, Transcarpathia was long isolated, both geographically and politically, from other ethnically Ukrainian lands. A domain of Kyivan Rus, after 1015 Transcarpathia was absorbed by Hungary, of which it remained a part for almost a millennium. With Hungary, it came in the 16th–17th centuries under the Habsburg dynasty. After the Union of Uzhhorod in 1646, on terms similar to the Union of Brest-Litovsk, the Uniate church became dominant in the religious sphere. Overwhelmingly rural in character, Transcarpathia had a Ukrainian (Ruthenian) peasantry, a powerful Hungarian landowning nobility, and a substantial number of urban and rural Jews. Under Hungary, Transcarpathia did not constitute a single administrative unit but was divided into counties governed by officials appointed from Budapest.

Social reforms initiated by Vienna in the late 18th century soon foundered on the shoals of Hungarian nobiliary opposition, and educational levels—at the time higher than in Galicia—began to decline in the early 19th century. However, ecclesiastical and cultural ties with Galicia remained strong until mid-century.

The 1848 revolution took a sharply nationalistic turn in Hungary, alienating many among its Slav minorities. Its suppression by Russian troops in 1849 stimulated pro-Russian sentiments among Transcarpathia’s intelligentsia and led to the emergence of Russophilism as the territory’s main cultural and political orientation. However, the political arrangement of 1867 (the Ausgleich) that created the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy ceded control over internal policies to the Hungarian oligarchy. Increasing restrictions on the Ruthenian language in schools and publishing resulted in a growing tendency to Magyarization. Not until the turn of the 20th century did a Ukrainophile populist movement develop as a counterpoint to Russophilism and Magyarization. By the outbreak of World War I, Ukrainian national consciousness was still at a low level of development in Transcarpathia.

World War I and the struggle for independence

The outbreak of World War I and the onset of hostilities between Russia and Austria-Hungary on August 1, 1914, had immediate repercussions for the Ukrainian subjects of both belligerent powers. In the Russian Empire, Ukrainian publications and cultural organizations were directly suppressed and prominent figures arrested or exiled. As Russian forces advanced into Galicia in September, the retreating Austrians executed thousands for suspected pro-Russian sympathies. After occupying Galicia, tsarist authorities took steps toward its total incorporation into the Russian Empire. They prohibited the Ukrainian language, closed down institutions, and prepared to liquidate the Greek Catholic church. The Russification campaign was cut short by the Austrian reconquest in spring 1915. Western Ukraine, however, continued to be a theatre of military operations and suffered great depredation.

The Russian Revolution of February 1917 brought into power the Provisional Government, which promptly introduced freedom of speech and assembly and lifted the tsarist restrictions on minorities. National life in Ukraine quickened with the revival of a Ukrainian press and the formation of numerous cultural and professional associations, as well as political parties. In March, on the initiative of these new organizations, the Central Rada (“Council”) was formed in Kyiv as a Ukrainian representative body. In April the more broadly convened All-Ukrainian National Congress declared the Central Rada to be the highest national authority in Ukraine and elected the historian Mykhaylo Hrushevsky as its head. The stated goal of the Central Rada was territorial autonomy for Ukraine and the transformation of Russia into a democratic, federative republic. Although the Provisional Government recognized Ukraine’s right to autonomy and the Central Rada as a legitimate representative body, there were unresolved disputes over its territorial jurisdiction and political prerogatives. Locally, especially in the Russified cities of eastern Ukraine, the Rada also had to compete with the increasingly radical soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies, whose support in the Ukrainian population, however, was quite limited.

Ukrainian-Russian relations deteriorated rapidly following the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) on November 7, 1917. The Central Rada refused to accept the new regime’s authority over Ukraine and on November 20 proclaimed the creation of the Ukrainian National Republic, though still in federation with the new democratic Russia that was expected to emerge from the impending Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks, in turn, at the first All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets, held in Kharkiv in December, declared Ukraine to be a Soviet republic and formed a rival government. In January 1918 the Bolsheviks launched an offensive in the Left Bank and advanced on Kyiv. The Central Rada, already engaged in peace negotiations with the Central Powers, from whom it hoped for military assistance, proclaimed the total independence of Ukraine on January 22; on the same day, it passed a law establishing national autonomy for Ukraine’s Jewish, Russian, and Polish minorities. Almost immediately, however, the government had to evacuate to the Right Bank, as Soviet troops occupied Kyiv. On February 9 Ukraine and the Central Powers signed the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (see treaties of Brest-Litovsk). A German-Austrian offensive dislodged the Bolsheviks from Kyiv in early March, and the Rada government returned to the capital. In April the Red Army retreated from Ukraine.

The socialist policies of the Ukrainian government, especially land nationalization, conflicted with the interest of the German high command to maximize the production of foodstuffs for its own war effort. On April 29, 1918, the Rada government was overthrown in a German-supported coup by Gen. Pavlo Skoropadsky. A collateral descendant of an 18th-century Cossack hetman, Skoropadsky assumed the title “hetman of Ukraine” (which he intended to become hereditary), abrogated all laws passed by the Rada, and established a conservative regime that relied on the support of landowners and the largely Russian urban middle class. The new government aroused intense opposition among Ukrainian nationalists, socialists, and the peasantry. To coordinate political opposition, the Ukrainian National Union was formed by the main parties and civic organizations, while the peasants manifested their hostility through rebellions and partisan warfare. The capitulation of Germany and Austria in November removed the main prop of Skoropadsky’s regime, and the Ukrainian National Union formed the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic to prepare for his overthrow. In a bid for the support of the Allied powers, Skoropadsky announced his intention to join in federation with a future non-Bolshevik Russia, triggering an uprising. On December 14 the hetman abdicated, and the Directory assumed control of government in Kyiv.

Even before the collapse of Austria-Hungary, an assembly of western Ukrainian political leaders in October 1918 declared the formation of a state, shortly thereafter named the Western Ukrainian National Republic, embracing Galicia, northern Bukovina, and Transcarpathia. On November 1 Ukrainian forces occupied Lviv. This act touched off a war with the Poles, who were themselves resolved to incorporate Galicia into a reconstituted Polish state. The Poles took Lviv on November 21, but most of Galicia remained under Ukrainian control, and the government, headed by Yevhen Petrushevych, transferred its seat to Stanyslaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk). On January 22, 1919, an act of union of the two Ukrainian states was proclaimed in Kyiv, but actual political integration was prevented by the ongoing hostilities. These ultimately took an unfavourable turn for the Ukrainians, and by late July the Poles were in full control of Galicia. Petrushevych and his government evacuated to Right Bank Ukraine and in the autumn went into exile in Vienna, where they continued diplomatic efforts against recognition of the Polish occupation.

In Kyiv the Directory that had taken power in December 1918—initially headed by Volodymyr Vynnychenko and from February 1919 by Symon Petlyura, who was also the commander in chief—officially restored the Ukrainian National Republic and revived the legislation of the Central Rada. Its attempts to establish an effective administration and to cope with the mounting economic and social problems were stymied, however, by the increasingly chaotic domestic situation and a hostile foreign environment. As the peasants became restless and the army demoralized, partisan movements led by unruly chieftains (commonly known as otamany) escalated in scope and violence. In addition, a substantial irregular force emerged under the command of the charismatic anarchist leader Nestor Makhno. In many places the government’s authority was nominal or nonexistent. The Allied powers, including France, whose expeditionary force held Odessa, supported the Russian Whites, whose army was grouping around Gen. Anton Denikin in southern Russia.

As authority broke down in Ukraine, random violence increased. In particular, a ferocious wave of pogroms against the Jewish population left tens of thousands dead. The majority of the pogroms occurred in 1919, perpetrated by virtually all regular and irregular forces fighting in Ukraine—including Directory troops, the otamany, the White forces, and the Red Army—as well as civilians from both the peasant and landowning classes.

The Bolsheviks had already launched a new offensive in eastern Ukraine in December 1918. In February 1919 they again seized Kyiv. The Directory moved to the Right Bank and continued the struggle. In May Denikin launched his campaign against the Bolsheviks in the Left Bank; his progress westward through Ukraine was marked by terror, restoration of gentry landownership, and the destruction of all manifestations of Ukrainian national life. As the Bolsheviks retreated yet again, Petlyura’s Ukrainian forces and Denikin’s White regiments both entered Kyiv on August 31, though the Ukrainians soon withdrew to avoid overt hostilities. From September to December the Ukrainian army fought with Denikin but, losing ground, began a retreat northwestward into Volhynia. There, confronted by the Poles in the west, the returning Red Army in the north, and the Whites in the south, the Ukrainian forces ceased regular military operations and turned to guerrilla warfare. In December Petlyura went to Warsaw to seek outside support. At the same time, the Bolsheviks were beating back Denikin’s forces, and on December 16 they recaptured Kyiv. By February 1920 the Whites had been expelled from Ukrainian territory.

Petlyura’s negotiations with the Polish government of Józef Piłsudski culminated in the Treaty of Warsaw, signed in April 1920; by the terms of the agreement, in return for Polish military aid, Petlyura surrendered Ukraine’s claim to Galicia and western Volhynia. A Polish-Ukrainian campaign opened two days later, and on May 6 the joint forces occupied Kyiv. A counteroffensive mounted by the Bolsheviks brought them to the outskirts of Warsaw in August. The tides of war turned again as the Polish and Ukrainian armies drove back the Soviets and reentered the Right Bank. In October, however, Poland made a truce with the Soviets, and in March 1921 the Polish and Soviet sides signed the Treaty of Riga. Poland extended recognition to Soviet Ukraine and retained the annexed western Ukrainian lands. (See also Russian Civil War; Russo-Polish War.)

Ukraine in the interwar period

In the aftermath of World War I and the revolutionary upheavals that followed, Ukrainian territories were divided among four states. Bukovina was annexed to Romania. Transcarpathia was joined to the new country of Czechoslovakia. Poland incorporated Galicia and western Volhynia, together with smaller adjacent areas in the northwest. The lands east of the Polish border constituted Soviet Ukraine.

Soviet Ukraine

The territories under Bolshevik control were formally organized as the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic [S.S.R.] from 1937). Under Bolshevik tutelage, the first All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets in December 1917 had formed a Soviet government for Ukraine; the second, in March 1918, had declared Soviet Ukraine independent; and the third, in March 1919, had adopted Soviet Ukraine’s first constitution. These moves, however, were essentially a tactical response to the demonstrable challenge of rising Ukrainian nationalism. With the consolidation of Bolshevik rule, Soviet Ukraine progressively ceded to Russia its rights in such areas as foreign relations and foreign trade. On December 30, 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.)—a federation of Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, and the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (S.F.S.R.)—was proclaimed. The first constitution for the new multinational federation was ratified in January 1924. Although the constituent republics retained the formal right of secession, their jurisdiction was limited to domestic affairs, while authority over foreign relations, the military, commerce, and transportation was vested in the Communist Party organs in Moscow. In point of fact, after the defeat of the Bolsheviks’ opponents, paramount power was exercised over all levels of government, as over the military and the secret police, by the Bolsheviks and their Communist Party apparatus (see Communist Party of the Soviet Union [CPSU]).

The Communist Party itself brooked no concessions to the principles of independence or federalism and remained a highly centralized entity. Thus, at its founding congress in Moscow in July 1918, the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, or CP(B)U, proclaimed itself to be an integral part of a single Russian (after 1924, All-Union) Communist Party and subordinated to its congresses and central committee, despite the efforts of such national-minded Bolsheviks as Mykola Skrypnyk to declare the CP(B)U an independent organization. As well as being subordinate to Moscow, the CP(B)U was overwhelmingly non-Ukrainian in ethnic composition: at the time of its founding, the membership of fewer than 5,000 was 7 percent Ukrainian. The Ukrainian component in the CP(B)U was strengthened in 1920 with the accession of the Borotbists, members of the “independist” and non-Bolshevik Ukrainian Communist Party that was formed in 1919. Still, in late 1920, Ukrainians constituted less than 20 percent of the CP(B)U’s membership. Largely alien in nationality and ideologically prepossessed in favour of the proletariat, the Bolsheviks enjoyed scant support in a population that was 80 percent Ukrainian, of which more than 90 percent were peasants.

The New Economic Policy and Ukrainization

Two main tasks faced the Bolsheviks in the 1920s—to rebuild the economy and to conciliate the non-Russian nationalities. The policy of War Communism—based on nationalization of all enterprises and the forcible requisition of food—wreaked economic havoc. Compounded by drought, it contributed to a famine in 1921–22 that claimed a million lives in Ukraine. In 1921 Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP), which partially restored private enterprise in industry and trade and replaced grain requisitions with a fixed tax and the right to dispose of the surplus on the free market. By 1927 the Ukrainian economy recovered to the prewar level, and segments of the population enjoyed a measure of prosperity.

In parallel with the NEP, the Bolsheviks took steps to appease, and at the same time to penetrate, the non-Russian nationalities. In 1923 a policy of “indigenization” was announced, including the promotion of native languages in education and publishing, at the workplace, and in government; the fostering of national cultures; and the recruitment of cadres from the indigenous populations. In Ukraine this program inaugurated a decade of rapid Ukrainization and cultural efflorescence. Within the CP(B)U itself, the proportion of Ukrainians in the rank-and-file membership exceeded 50 percent by the late 1920s. Enrollments in Ukrainian-language schools and the publication of Ukrainian books increased dramatically. Lively debates developed about the course of Ukrainian literature, in which the writer Mykola Khvylovy employed the slogan “Away from Moscow!” and urged a cultural orientation toward Europe. An important factor in the national revival, despite antireligious propaganda and harassment, was the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, which had gained a wide following among the Ukrainian intelligentsia and peasantry since its formation in 1921.

Ukrainization was vigorously promoted by the “national communists,” including such Ukrainian Bolsheviks as Skrypnyk and Khvylovy, and especially by the former Borotbists, most prominently the people’s commissar of education, Oleksander Shumsky. The policy, however, encountered strong resistance from the non-Ukrainian leaders of the CP(B)U and party functionaries. The national revival also aroused concern in Moscow, where Joseph Stalin was strengthening his grip over the party apparatus. In 1925 Stalin dispatched his trusted lieutenant Lazar Kaganovich to head the CP(B)U. Within a year, Kaganovich engineered a split among the “national communists,” Khvylovy’s recantation, and the expulsion of Shumsky and his followers from the party. Nevertheless, with Skrypnyk as the new commissar of education, Ukrainization continued to advance.

Industrialization and collectivization

By the end of the 1920s, Stalin had launched a new “revolution from above.” The introduction of his first five-year plan in 1928 marked the end of the NEP and the onset of breakneck and the onset of breakneck industrialization. In Ukraine this led to rapid economic and social transformation. By the outbreak of World War II, industrial output had increased fourfold, the number of workers had tripled, and the urban population had grown from 19 to 34 percent of the total. Though with a sectoral bias toward heavy industry and a regional concentration in the Donets Basin (Donbas) and central Dnieper area, Ukraine had undergone a remarkable industrial development.

The cost of the accelerated industrialization was borne by the peasantry. In 1928 the regime introduced special measures against the kulaks (arbitrarily defined “wealthy” peasants). These progressed from escalating taxes and grain-delivery quotas to dispossession of all property and finally to the deportation, by the mid-1930s, of some 100,000 families to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Wholesale collectivization began in 1929, under duress from party activists and under threat of economic sanctions. The percentage of farms collectivized rose from 9 to 65 percent from October 1929 to March 1930 and exceeded 90 percent by the end of 1935. Mass resistance to collectivization—in the form of revolts, slaughter of cattle, and destruction of machinery—was answered by the imposition of ever higher delivery quotas and confiscation of foodstuffs.

The famine of 1932–33 (Holodomor)

The result of Stalin’s policies was the Great Famine (Holodomor) of 1932–33—a man-made demographic catastrophe unprecedented in peacetime. Of the estimated five million people who died in the Soviet Union, almost four million were Ukrainians. The famine was a direct assault on the Ukrainian peasantry, which had stubbornly continued to resist collectivization; indirectly, it was an attack on the Ukrainian village, which traditionally had been a key element of Ukrainian national culture. Its deliberate nature is underscored by the fact that no physical basis for famine existed in Ukraine. The Ukrainian grain harvest of 1932 had resulted in below-average yields (in part because of the chaos wreaked by the collectivization campaign), but it was more than sufficient to sustain the population. Nevertheless, Soviet authorities set requisition quotas for Ukraine at an impossibly high level. Brigades of special agents were dispatched to Ukraine to assist in procurement, and homes were routinely searched and foodstuffs confiscated. At the same time, a law was passed in August 1932 making the theft of socialist property a capital crime, leading to scenes in which peasants faced the firing squad for stealing as little as a sack of wheat from state storehouses. The rural population was left with insufficient food to feed itself. The ensuing starvation grew to a massive scale by the spring of 1933, but Moscow refused to provide relief. In fact, the Soviet Union exported more than a million tons of grain to the West during this period. The famine subsided only after the 1933 harvest had been completed. The traditional Ukrainian village had been essentially destroyed, and settlers from Russia were brought in to repopulate the devastated countryside. Soviet authorities flatly denied the existence of the famine both at the time it was raging and after it was over. It was only in the late 1980s that officials made a guarded acknowledgement that something had been amiss in Ukraine at this time.

Russification

In parallel with the industrialization and collectivization drives, the Soviet regime commenced a campaign against “nationalist deviations” that escalated into a virtual assault on Ukrainian culture. Repression of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church culminated in the liquidation of the church in 1930 and the arrest and exile of its hierarchy and clergy. A clandestine organization, the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, was purportedly uncovered by the secret police in 1929. In 1930 its alleged leaders—including the foremost Ukrainian literary critic of his time, Serhii (Serhy) Yefremov—faced a show trial and were sentenced to terms in labour camps. Arrests, followed by imprisonment, exile, or execution, decimated the ranks of intellectuals, writers, and artists; some, like Khvylovy, committed suicide in protest. In all, some four-fifths of the Ukrainian cultural elite was repressed or perished in the course of the 1930s. By late 1933 Ukrainization had come to a halt, and a policy of Russification commenced.

The CP(B)U itself emerged from the Stalinist upheavals greatly altered in composition and character. Kaganovich returned in 1928 to Moscow; his place as party chief was taken by Stanislav Kosior, who was joined in 1933 by Pavel Postyshev as second secretary, who was sent from Moscow with a large contingent of Russian cadres. A series of purges from 1929 to 1934 largely eliminated from the party the generation of revolutionaries, supporters of Ukrainization, and those who questioned the excesses of collectivization. Mykola Skrypnyk, the most prominent Ukrainian Old Bolshevik, committed suicide in 1933. Though party ranks and leadership positions were now filled by Stalin loyalists, a new wave of purges during 1936–38 halved the CP(B)U’s membership, while 99 of 102 members of the party’s Central Committee were shot. Postyshev and Kosior were removed from their party posts and subsequently executed. In 1938 Nikita Khrushchev arrived from Moscow with a large number of Russian communists to take over the leadership of the CP(B)U. Finally, on the eve of World War II, both the terror and the turmoil in the party began to subside. (See also purge trials.)

Western Ukraine under Polish rule

Important differences marked the two main regions that found themselves in the confines of reconstituted Poland. Galicia was the less ethnically homogeneous. From the Austrian period, however, the Galician Ukrainians brought a long history of self-organization and political participation and inherited a broad network of cultural and civic associations, educational establishments, and publishing enterprises. And in the Greek Catholic church they possessed an influential national, as well as religious, institution. The population of Volhynia was more heavily Ukrainian; nevertheless, as a consequence of imperial Russian rule since 1795, there was little tradition of organized national life, native education, or political experience. As a legacy of tsarist rule, the dominant Orthodox church was initially a bastion of Russian influence. Still, in the course of the two decades before World War II, considerable national integration between Galician and Volhynian Ukrainians took place, despite Polish efforts to forestall such a development.

As individuals, all citizens of Poland enjoyed equal rights under the 1921 constitution; in practice, discrimination on the basis of nationality and religion greatly limited the Ukrainians’ opportunities. Although the Allied powers in 1923 accepted the Polish annexation of Galicia on the basis of its regional autonomy, the government in the early 1920s proceeded to dismantle the institutions of local self-government inherited from Habsburg times. Ukrainian Galicia, officially termed “Eastern Little Poland,” was administered by governors and local prefects appointed by Warsaw. A special administrative frontier, the so-called Sokal border, was established between Galicia and Volhynia to prevent the spread of Ukrainian publications and institutions from Galicia to the northeast. In 1924 the Ukrainian language was eliminated from use in state institutions and government agencies. In the face of economic stagnation, scant industrial development, and vast rural overpopulation, the government promoted Polish agricultural settlement, further exacerbating ethnic tensions. As Ukrainian nationalist activities quickened toward the end of the 1920s and in the ’30s, the regime resorted to more repressive measures. Some organizations were banned, and in 1930 a military and police pacification campaign led to numerous arrests, widespread brutality and intimidation, and destruction of property.

Much of the Ukrainian-Polish conflict centred on the schools. Initially, the government concentrated on establishing a centralized educational system and expanding the network of Polish schools; however, by the 1930s, overt Polonization of education was being promoted. The number of Ukrainian schools declined drastically. In higher education the existing Ukrainian chairs at Lviv were abolished, and a promised separate Ukrainian university was never allowed to be established. An underground Ukrainian university functioned in Lviv from 1921 to 1925.

In a society where nationality and religion were almost inextricably bound, the church played an extraordinarily large role. In Galicia, under the leadership of the highly revered metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, the Greek Catholic church conducted its religious mission through numerous clergy and monastic orders. The church also ran a network of seminaries, schools, charitable and social service institutions, museums, and publications. Although Catholicism of the Roman rite remained privileged, the Greek Catholic church was made relatively secure from overt state interference by the Vatican-Polish Concordat of 1925; however, it was not allowed to extend its activities beyond the Sokal border.

In the northwestern Ukrainian areas, Orthodoxy remained the dominant religion. A nationally conscious clergy and lay intelligentsia played an important role in Ukrainian life in Volhynia, although Russian influences continued at the level of ecclesiastical administration. In the 1930s Polish authorities promoted, sometimes by force, the conversion of the Orthodox to Roman Catholicism and, in a campaign that lasted until World War II, seized hundreds of Orthodox churches for closure, destruction, or transfer to the Roman Catholic Church.

Despite official obstruction and harassment, organized community life continued to develop on the foundations established in the Austrian period in Galicia. Cultural, scholarly, professional, women’s, and youth associations flourished. In circumstances of economic depression and discrimination in public employment, a large-scale development of the cooperative movement was highly successful. Much progress was also achieved in Volhynia; most difficult, however, was the situation in ethnically mixed border areas in the northwest, where by the 1930s all Ukrainian organizations were suppressed and schooling was conducted exclusively in Polish.

Ukrainian political life was dominated by conflict with the Poles. The first elections to the Polish Sejm (diet) and Senate, in 1922, were boycotted by the Galician Ukrainians. In Volhynia the Ukrainians participated and, in a bloc with the Jews and other minorities, won overwhelmingly against Polish candidates. Both Galician and Volhynian Ukrainians took part in subsequent elections, which, however, were increasingly marred by abuses, intimidation, and violence. Of the political parties, most influential in Galicia was the centrist Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance, which tried to extract concessions from the Polish government and to inform public opinion. Left-wing parties (socialists and communist front organizations) had considerably more strength in Volhynia.

Revolutionary nationalism became an influential current under Polish rule. In 1920 the clandestine Ukrainian Military Organization was founded by veterans of the independence struggle, headed by Yevhen Konovalets. In 1929 this was transformed into a broader underground movement, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Authoritarian in structure, conspiratorial in its methods, and influenced by political theories that stressed the primacy of the nation over the individual and will over reason, the OUN carried out acts of sabotage and assassinations of Polish officials. Although these activities were opposed by the Ukrainian democratic parties as politically counterproductive and by the Greek Catholic hierarchy on moral grounds, the OUN gained a wide following in the 1930s among students and peasant youth, more in Galicia than in Volhynia.

Bukovina under Romanian rule

In the formerly Austrian province of Bukovina, Ukrainians constituted two-fifths of the total population but two-thirds in the northern half (in 1931). Following the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, northern Bukovina was briefly proclaimed part of the Western Ukrainian National Republic, before the entire province was occupied by the Romanian army in November 1918. Under a state of emergency that lasted from 1919 to 1928, Bukovina was subjected to strong assimilationist pressures. Provincial self-government was abolished and the Ukrainian language removed from administrative use. The extensive Ukrainian school system and the university chairs at Chernivtsi were liquidated, and the Ukrainian press and most organizations were banned. Assimilationist measures were relaxed beginning in 1928, but, with the institution of the royal dictatorship of Carol II in 1938, Ukrainian culture was suppressed once again.

Transcarpathia in Czechoslovakia

On the basis of a negotiated agreement, Transcarpathia voluntarily joined the new country of Czechoslovakia in 1919 under the official name of Subcarpathian Ruthenia (see Czechoslovak history). Its promised autonomy, however, was not implemented until 1938, and the region was administered largely by officials sent from Prague. Nevertheless, in democratic Czechoslovakia, Transcarpathia enjoyed the freest development of any Ukrainian territory in the interwar period.

Reforms improved social and economic conditions in the previously underdeveloped area, and substantial progress was achieved in education and culture, while political life developed freely. The dominant political issue in interwar Transcarpathia was the national orientation of a population whose identity had not yet crystallized. The competition for national allegiance pitted three main movements against each other, each with its own organizations and publications: the Russophiles, dominant among the older intelligentsia; an indigenous Ruthenian current; and the populist Ukrainophiles, who attracted members from among the younger intelligentsia and who, by the end of the 1930s, were gaining in ascendancy.

In the wake of the Munich Agreement, which allowed Germany’s annexation of a portion of western Czechoslovakia, in October 1938 Prague finally granted autonomy to Transcarpathia, officially renamed Carpatho-Ukraine. In November Hungary occupied a strip of territory including the Carpatho-Ukrainian capital of Uzhhorod, and the autonomous government transferred its seat to Khust. On March 15, 1939, the diet proclaimed the independence of Carpatho-Ukraine while the country was already in the midst of occupation by Hungarian troops. For the duration of World War II, Transcarpathia was again under the control of Hungary.

World War II and its aftermath

Western Ukraine under Soviet and Nazi rule

The Nazi German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, marked the beginning of World War II. By mid-September, in accordance with the secret protocols of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), western Volhynia and most of Galicia, both previously under Polish rule, were occupied by Soviet troops and soon officially incorporated into the Ukrainian S.S.R. In June 1940 northern Bukovina was occupied and shortly annexed to Soviet Ukraine from Romania (which sided with Germany during the war). The replacement of Polish and Romanian by the Ukrainian language in state administration and education was offset by a suppression of all existing organizations, Sovietization of institutional life, and arrests of political leaders and community activists. By mid-1941 more than one million people had been deported to the east, including large numbers of Poles and Jews.

The ethnically mixed western borderlands, with more than 500,000 Ukrainians, were included in the administrative region of Poland established by the Nazis. A limited linguistic and cultural revival in the heavily Polonized area was permitted under German oversight, but political activities were banned, except for the OUN. The OUN itself was rent by factional strife between the followers of Andry Melnyk, who headed the organization from abroad after the assassination of Konovalets by a Soviet agent in 1938, and the younger supporters of Stepan Bandera with actual experience in the conspiratorial underground. The split became permanent after a congress held in Kraków in February 1940, when the Melnyk and Bandera factions developed into separate organizations (OUN-M and OUN-B, respectively) differing in ideology, strategy, and tactics.

The Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine

The surprise German invasion of the U.S.S.R. began on June 22, 1941. The Soviets, during their hasty retreat, shot their political prisoners and, whenever possible, evacuated personnel, dismantled and removed industrial plants, and conducted a scorched-earth policy—blowing up buildings and installations, destroying crops and food reserves, and flooding mines. Almost four million people were evacuated east of the Urals for the duration of the war. The Germans moved swiftly, however, and by the end of November virtually all of Ukraine was under their control.

Initially, the Germans were greeted as liberators by some of the Ukrainian populace. In Galicia especially, there had long been a widespread belief that Germany, as the avowed enemy of Poland and the U.S.S.R., was the Ukrainians’ natural ally for the attainment of their independence. The illusion was quickly shattered. The Germans were accompanied on their entry into Lviv on June 30 by members of OUN-B, who that same day proclaimed the restoration of Ukrainian statehood and the formation of a provisional state administration; within days the organizers of this action were arrested and interned in concentration camps (as were both Bandera and, later, Melnyk). Far from supporting Ukrainian political aspirations, the Nazis in August attached Galicia administratively to Poland, returned Bukovina to Romania, and gave Romania control over the area between the Dniester and Southern Buh rivers as the province of Transnistria, with its capital at Odessa. The remainder was organized as the Reichskommissariat Ukraine.

In the occupied territories, the Nazis sought to implement their “racial” policies. In the fall of 1941 began the mass killings of Jews that continued through 1944. An estimated 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews perished, and over 800,000 were displaced to the east; at Baby Yar (Ukrainian: Babyn Yar) in Kyiv, nearly 34,000 were killed in just the first two days of massacre in the city. The Nazis were aided at times by auxiliary forces recruited from the local population. (See also Holocaust: The Einsatzgruppen.)

In the Reichskommissariat, ruthlessly administered by Erich Koch, Ukrainians were slated for servitude. The collective farms, whose dissolution was the fervent hope of the peasantry, were left intact, industry was allowed to deteriorate, and the cities were deprived of foodstuffs as all available resources were directed to support the German war effort. Some 2.2 million people were taken from Ukraine to Germany as slave labourers (Ostarbeiter, or “eastern workers”). Cultural activities were repressed, and education was limited to the elementary level. Only the revived Ukrainian Orthodox Church was permitted to resume its work as a national institution. Somewhat better was the situation of Ukrainians in Galicia, where restricted cultural, civic, and relief activities were permitted under centralized control.

Under such conditions of brutality, Ukrainian political activity, predicated originally on cooperation with the Germans, increasingly turned to underground organizational work and resistance. The OUN groups that streamed eastward in 1941 were soon subjected by the German authorities to repressive measures, including execution, so they propagated their nationalist views clandestinely and, through their contact with the local population, began to revise their ideology in a more democratic, pluralist direction. In eastern and central Ukraine, secret Communist Party cells maintained an underground existence, and a Soviet partisan movement developed in the northern forests. Early in 1942 began the formation of nationalist partisan units in Volhynia, and later in Galicia, that became known as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska Povstanska Armiia; UPA). As well as conducting guerrilla warfare with the Germans, the Soviet partisans and the UPA fought each other.

Ukraine reunited under Soviet rule

After their victory over the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad in early 1943, the Soviets launched a counteroffensive westward. In mid-1943 the Germans began their slow retreat from Ukraine, leaving wholesale destruction in their wake. In November the Soviets reentered Kyiv. With the approach of the front, guerrilla activity in western Ukraine intensified, and bloody clashes that claimed large numbers of civilian victims occurred between Ukrainians and Poles. In spring 1944 the Red Army began to penetrate into Galicia, and by the end of October all of Ukraine was again under Soviet control.

The Soviet victory, the Red Army’s occupation of eastern Europe, and Allied diplomacy resulted in a permanent redrawing of Ukraine’s western frontiers. With compensation of German territories in the west, Poland agreed to the cession of Volhynia and Galicia; a mutual population exchange—and the subsequent deportation of the remaining Ukrainian population by Poland to its new western territories—created for the first time in centuries a clear ethnic, as well as political, Polish-Ukrainian border. Northern Bukovina was reoccupied in 1944 and recognized as part of Ukraine in the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947. Transcarpathia, which had reverted from Hungary to Czechoslovakia in 1944, was ceded to Ukraine in 1945 by a Czech-Soviet government agreement. In 1945 Ukraine became a charter member of the United Nations and subsequently became a signatory of peace treaties with Germany’s wartime allies—Italy, Finland, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria.

Ukraine’s human and material losses during World War II were enormous. Some 5 to 7 million people perished. Even with the return of evacuees from the east and the repatriation of forced labourers from Germany, Ukraine’s estimated population of 36 million in 1947 was almost 5 million less than before the war. Because more than 700 cities and towns and 28,000 villages had been destroyed, 10 million people were left homeless. Only 20 percent of the industrial enterprises and 15 percent of agricultural equipment and machinery remained intact, and the transportation network was severely damaged. The material losses constituted an estimated 40 percent of Ukraine’s national wealth.

Soviet Ukraine in the postwar period

The last years of Stalin’s rule

Postwar reconstruction, the reimposition of totalitarian controls and terror, and the Sovietization of western Ukraine were the hallmarks of the last years of Stalin’s rule. Economic reconstruction was undertaken immediately as Soviet authorities reestablished control over the recovered territories. The fourth five-year plan, as in the prewar years, stressed heavy industry to the detriment of consumer needs. By 1950, Ukraine’s industrial output exceeded the prewar level. In agriculture, recovery proceeded much more slowly, and prewar levels of production were not reached until the 1960s. A famine in 1946–47 resulting from postwar dislocations and drought claimed nearly one million casualties.

The prewar system of totalitarian control exercised through the Communist Party and the secret police was quickly reimposed. Khrushchev continued to head the CP(B)U as first secretary—except briefly from March to December 1947—until his promotion to secretary of the Central Committee in Moscow in December 1949; he was succeeded by Leonid Melnikov. Purges in party ranks were relatively mild. However, real and alleged Nazi collaborators, former German prisoners of war and repatriated slave workers, Ukrainian “bourgeois nationalists,” and others suspected of disloyalty—essentially hundreds of thousands of people—were sent to concentration camps in the far north and Siberia. A hard-line ideological campaign to stamp out Western influences went hand in hand with a renewed Russification drive. Ukrainian writers, artists, and scholars, who in the wartime years had been permitted to develop patriotic themes and sentiments in a mobilization effort against the Germans, were now accused of Ukrainian nationalism and subjected to persecution and repression. An “anticosmopolitan” campaign destroyed the remaining vestiges of cultural institutions of a Jewish community decimated by the Holocaust.

The Sovietization of western Ukraine was a prolonged and violent process. The UPA, under the leadership of Roman Shukhevych (killed 1950), continued effective military operations against Soviet troops until the early 1950s. The armed resistance received covert support from the local rural population, embittered by the concurrent forced collectivization drive, reminiscent of the 1930s in eastern Ukraine. Also accused of abetting the partisans, and Ukrainian nationalism in general, was the Greek Catholic church. In April 1945 Metropolitan Yosyf Slipy and the entire hierarchy in Galicia were arrested and later sentenced to long imprisonment (only Slipy survived, to be released in 1963 and sent into exile in Rome). After arrests and intimidation of the clergy, a synod held in Lviv in March 1946—in fact, on Stalin’s orders—proclaimed the “reunification” of the Ukrainian Greek Catholics with the Russian Orthodox Church. By analogous means, the Greek Catholic church in Transcarpathia was abolished in 1949. Officially declared “self-liquidated,” the Greek Catholic church maintained a clandestine existence through subsequent decades of Soviet rule. Overall, approximately half a million people were deported from western Ukraine in connection with the suppression of the insurgency and nationalist activity, religious persecution, and collectivization.

The period of Khrushchev

Khrushchev’s ascendancy over his rivals in Moscow after Stalin’s death in 1953 was of particular significance for Ukraine. As first secretary of the CP(B)U, Khrushchev had gained intimate knowledge of Ukraine, staffed party and government posts with his own trusted appointees, and become familiar with Ukrainian cultural elites. In contrast to Stalin’s anti-Ukrainian paranoia, Khrushchev harboured few prejudices against Ukrainians who adhered to the party line and served the Soviet state with loyalty.

Shortly after the death of Stalin, Melnikov was removed as first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, or CPU—as the CP(B)U was renamed in 1952—for “deviations in nationality policy,” specifically, promotion of nonnative cadres and Russification of higher education in western Ukraine. His replacement was Oleksy Kyrychenko, only the second Ukrainian to fill the post. This and accompanying changes in personnel in the party and government boosted morale and confidence, especially as their sphere of competence was also steadily increased. Unionwide celebrations in 1954 of the 300th anniversary of the “reunification” of Ukraine with Russia were another sign of the Ukrainians’ rising (though clearly junior) status; on the occasion, the Crimean Peninsula, from which the indigenous Tatar population had been deported en masse at the end of World War II, was transferred from the Russian S.F.S.R. to Ukraine. Ukrainian party officials began to receive promotions to central party organs in Moscow close to the levers of power. In 1957 Kyrychenko was transferred to Moscow as a secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU; his place as first secretary of the CPU was taken by Mykola Pidhorny (Nikolay Podgorny), who moved to Moscow as a secretary of the Central Committee in 1963. There was a steady expansion of party membership, which by the end of 1958 exceeded one million, of whom 60.3 percent were Ukrainians and 28.2 percent Russians; more than 40 percent had joined the party after the war.

Khrushchev also introduced a limited decentralization in government administration and economic management. These measures enhanced the powers and stoked the ambitions of the Ukrainian party and government leaders and bureaucracy, and this in turn elicited warnings against “localism” from Moscow. Economic recovery in Ukraine continued, with impressive—though diminishing over time—rates of growth in industry. Some concessions were made in the provision of consumer goods. Agriculture lagged, however, despite reforms in the administration of collective farms to increase productivity.

By 1953 mass terror had abated, and repression came to be applied more discriminately. An amnesty in 1955–56 released the majority of concentration camp inmates, and several hundred thousand returned to Ukraine, though many political prisoners continued to serve their long sentences. During the cultural thaw and the de-Stalinization campaign that followed Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956, Ukrainian cultural elites pressed more boldly for concessions. Writers who had suffered under Stalin received praise and honours. Qualified rehabilitation was extended to condemned figures from the 1920s and ’30s, and historians began to treat previously forbidden topics. Some proscribed literary works were republished, and a number of new periodicals made their appearance, including the first journal since the 1930s devoted to Ukrainian history.

In the latter half of Khrushchev’s reign, however, a distinct trend toward Russification reemerged. An educational reform adopted in 1959 initiated a long process of curtailment of Ukrainian-language instruction in schools. In 1961 the new party program emphasized the importance of the Russian language for the integration of the Soviet peoples and spoke of the diminishing significance of borders between Soviet republics. Party theoreticians evolved the theory of “fusion of nations” that would be accompanied by the disappearance of national languages as Soviet society progressed toward communism.

Small, clandestine dissident groups began to form in the late 1950s, primarily as discussion circles on Ukrainian political and cultural alternatives. Some dozen such groups were uncovered by the secret police and their members imprisoned between 1958 and 1964. With open opposition to the party line impossible, defense of the Ukrainian language and culture was usually expressed indirectly—through poetry extolling the mother tongue, complaints about the unavailability of Ukrainian-language textbooks, and calls for subscription to Ukrainian periodicals.

Khrushchev’s last years in power witnessed the rise to prominence of two figures—Petro Shelest and Volodymyr Shcherbytsky—who between them dominated Ukraine’s political landscape for almost 30 years. The earlier careers of both encompassed party work in regional party organizations. In 1961 Shcherbytsky became chairman of the Council of Ministers (premier) of Ukraine. Upon the elevation of Pidhorny to Moscow, in June 1963 Shelest succeeded him as party leader in Ukraine, and simultaneously Shcherbytsky lost the premiership and went into eclipse.

Ukraine under Shelest

Until Leonid Brezhnev achieved preeminence by the mid-1970s, power in Moscow after Khrushchev’s ouster was shared by a collective leadership headed by a triumvirate consisting of Brezhnev, Aleksey Kosygin, and Pidhorny. Shelest, Pidhorny’s protégé, became a full member of the Politburo within a month of Khrushchev’s ouster. However, Brezhnev’s client, Shcherbytsky, shortly reemerged from relative obscurity; he reassumed the premiership in Kyiv in 1965 and became a candidate member of the Politburo in Moscow in 1966.

Although the new leadership in Moscow quickly reversed many of Khrushchev’s decentralizing measures, it initially showed greater sensitivity toward the non-Russians. The seeming retreat in Moscow’s nationalities policy, connected with the leadership’s preoccupation with the succession struggle, facilitated the three main trends that characterize the Shelest era in Ukraine: the growing cultural revival, greater assertiveness by Kyiv’s political elite, and the development of a large-scale dissident movement.

The cultural revival was built on the hard-won, though necessarily limited, achievements of the de-Stalinization thaw. It was spearheaded by a younger “generation of the ’60s” (shestydesyatnyky) who, without the formative firsthand experience of Stalin’s reign of terror, experimented with themes and forms that at times provoked the ire of the preceding generation. More proscribed figures from the past were rehabilitated as literary scholars, and historians explored previously forbidden topics. New journals and serials devoted to Ukrainian history made their appearance, and monumental encyclopaedic publications were launched. Such efforts came under severe attack from party ideologues and the conservative cultural establishment. Announced publications failed to appear, published works were withdrawn from circulation, and numerous works of art were destroyed. Plans prepared on the ministerial level in Kyiv for a partial de-Russification of higher education were never implemented.

Nevertheless, the cultural achievements were unparalleled since the Ukrainization period in the 1920s. They were made possible by the support of influential segments of the party leadership, most notably Shelest himself. In addition to supporting Ukrainian culture, Shelest defended the economic interests of Ukraine, pressing for a larger share in the U.S.S.R.’s allocation of investment and greater republican control in economic management. These efforts were aimed in part at strengthening the party’s legitimacy in the eyes of the Ukrainian population. During Shelest’s tenure, Communist Party membership in Ukraine grew at a rate double the all-union average to reach 2.5 million by 1971.

From its embryonic beginnings in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the dissident movement continued to develop under Shelest. In 1965 the first arrests and trials of 20 dissidents occurred; profiles of these dissenters were circulated clandestinely, and their compiler, the journalist Vyacheslav Chornovil, was also arrested and imprisoned. The national dissent movement grew rapidly thereafter. It took the form of protest letters and petitions to the authorities, the formation of informal clubs and discussion circles, and public meetings and demonstrations. Increasingly the materials prepared by the dissidents were circulated through samvydav (“self-publication”—the Ukrainian equivalent of Russian samizdat), some of which made its way abroad and was published. An outstanding work in this regard was Ivan Dziuba’s “Internationalism or Russification?”; it was translated and published in several languages. Throughout the 1960s, however, reprisals for dissident activity were generally mild.

Beginning in 1970, there were signs that the relative permissiveness of the Shelest regime was drawing to a close. The head of the KGB in Ukraine was replaced. Harsh rhetoric about “anti-Soviet activities” and “bourgeois nationalism” increased; tribute was paid to “the great Russian people.” In 1971 Brezhnev’s protégé and Shelest’s rival, Shcherbytsky, was elevated to full member of the Politburo. Between January and April 1972, several hundred dissidents and cultural activists were arrested in a wave of repression that swept Ukraine. In May Shelest was removed as Ukraine’s party leader, succeeded by Shcherbytsky. Shelest continued for another year as a member of the Politburo and a deputy prime minister in Moscow, but in May 1973 he lost all his remaining party and government positions.

Ukraine under Shcherbytsky

Shcherbytsky’s promotion marked an important step in the consolidation of power in Moscow by his patron, Brezhnev, and a turning point in Ukrainian postwar politics. Shcherbytsky survived in office 17 years until his resignation in the fall of 1989, a few weeks before his death—long after the death of Brezhnev in 1982 and well into the tenure of Mikhail Gorbachev.

Personnel changes in the party and government followed gradually after Shcherbytsky’s accession to office; many of them involved the removal of Shelest’s supporters and the promotion of cadres associated with the site of Shcherbytsky’s (and Brezhnev’s) earlier career, the Dnipropetrovsk regional Communist Party organization. The most significant occurred in October 1972: Valentyn Malanchuk, who had previously conducted ideological work in the nationally highly charged Lviv region, was appointed secretary for ideology. A purge in 1973–75 removed almost 5 percent of the CPU members from party rolls.

Arrests of national and human rights activists continued through 1972–73. The bulk of samvydav literature was now produced in labour camps, and much of it made its way abroad, where it was published. Following the signing of the international Helsinki Accords, with their human rights provisions, in 1975, the Helsinki Watch Group was founded in Ukraine, headed by the poet Mykola Rudenko; by the end of the 1970s, its members were almost all in concentration camps or in exile abroad. The expirations of political prisoners’ sentences were increasingly followed by rearrest and new sentences on charges of criminal activity. Incarceration in psychiatric institutions became a new method of political repression.

Political repression was accompanied by a broad assault on Ukrainian culture and intensification of Russification. Immediately after Shelest’s fall, the circulation of the most popular Ukrainian periodicals was substantially reduced, and most of the new journals and serials started under Shelest ceased publication; a general decline in Ukrainian-language publishing and education continued during Shcherbytsky’s tenure. For two years after his appointment as secretary for ideology, Malanchuk supervised a purge of Ukrainian scholarly and cultural institutions, with numerous expulsions from the Academy of Sciences, universities, editorial boards, and the official organizations of writers, artists, and cinematographers. The general trend was unaffected by Malanchuk’s unexpected removal in 1979, which may have been a concession to the disaffected cultural intelligentsia, whose cooperation was needed in the upcoming celebrations of the 325th anniversary of the “reunification of Ukraine with Russia” that year and the 1,500th anniversary of the founding of Kyiv in 1982.

Ukraine’s economic performance continued to deteriorate throughout the 1970s and ’80s. The rates of growth declined, and serious problems beset especially the important ferrous metallurgy and coal mining industries. Agricultural production was adversely affected by a series of droughts, a lack of incentives, and excessive centralization in collective farm management. Soviet energy policy increasingly emphasized nuclear power, and in April 1986 one of the nuclear power plants in Ukraine, at Chernobyl just northwest of Kyiv, suffered the worst nuclear accident in history. Dozens died in the immediate aftermath, and tens of thousands were evacuated. An estimated 5 million people were exposed to elevated levels of radiation, and hundreds of thousands received doses that were sufficient to increase the risk of various cancers. Decades after the accident, the incidence of thyroid cancer remained sharply higher among residents of the Chernobyl area than among the general population. Nevertheless, and despite changes in the top leadership in Moscow since 1982, Shcherbytsky remained securely in office.

In its wake the Ukrainian parliament, in emergency session, declared the full independence of Ukraine on August 24. The declaration was made subject to popular ratification by a referendum on December 1, 1991. . A week after the independence referendum, the leaders of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus agreed to establish the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Shortly thereafter the U.S.S.R. was formally disbanded. --- In the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, antinuclear popular sentiment ran high in Ukraine; even prior to independence, Ukrainian leaders had committed themselves to divesting the country of nuclear weapons. But throughout this period, Ukrainians had not been aware of the size of the nuclear arsenal on their soil—Ukraine was effectively the third largest nuclear power in the world at the time—nor had they considered the high costs and logistical problems of nuclear divestment. After approximately half of the arsenal had been transferred to Russia early in 1992, the leaders of independent Ukraine began to question the wisdom of blindly handing over the weapons to a potential adversary that was now claiming portions of Ukraine’s territory (i.e., Crimea).---- Finally, in May 1992 Ukraine signed the Lisbon Protocol, which marked Ukraine’s accession to the START I treaty (see Strategic Arms Reduction Talks). Subsequent negotiations, brokered by the United States, resulted in a trilateral statement (between the United States, Russia, and Ukraine) in January 1994, which outlined a timetable for disarmament and dealt with the financial and security issues that Ukraine had raised. The interconnected issues of Crimea, Sevastopol, and the Black Sea Fleet not only constituted Ukraine’s thorniest postindependence problem but also posed a significant threat to peace in the region. In 1954 the Russian S.F.S.R. had transferred the administration of Crimea to the Ukrainian S.S.R. However, it was the one region of Ukraine where ethnic Russians constituted a majority of the population. In 1991 Crimea was granted the status of an autonomous republic, and Crimeans supported the vote for Ukrainian independence (albeit by a small majority). But disenchantment with an independent Ukraine soon followed, and a movement for greater autonomy or even secession developed in the peninsula.---- The separatists were encouraged in their efforts by routine pronouncements by prominent Russian politicians and the Russian Duma that Crimea was Russian territory that never should have been part of Ukraine. The situation was complicated by the arrival of about 250,000 Crimean Tatars in the peninsula—returning to the historic homeland from which they had been deported at the end of World War II—starting in the late 1980s.

Ukraine
UkraineEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Land

Ukraine is bordered by Belarus to the north, Russia to the east, the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea to the south, Moldova and Romania to the southwest, and Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland to the west. In the far southeast, Ukraine is separated from Russia by the Kerch Strait, which connects the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea.

 

Physical features of UkraineEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
 
 
 


 

 

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