Preface

In 1991, a new state came into being - Ukraine. It was one of many new states formed in the wake of the Revolution of 1989, perhaps the most influential event in Europe’s political evolution since the French Revolution two centuries before. Ukraine may have achieved independence only in 1991, but it was hardly a new country. For thousands of years, prehistoric and historical civilizations had flourished on Ukrainian territory. Even the idea and realization of Ukrainian statehood was nothing new: it had existed, albeit briefly, during the second decade of the twentieth century.

Despite these realities, the world has generally known little of Ukraine. And what it has learned and remembered seems to be associated only with tragedy, whether the nuclear disaster at Chornobyl' in 1986, the Nazi massacre of civilians at Babi Yar in 1941, the death of millions of Ukrainian peasants in the Great Famine of 1933> or the pogroms againstjews in 1919. Yet there is certainly more to Ukraine than tragedy, and there is as well more to Ukraine than Ukrainians.

Ukraine is, after all, a land of many peoples and many cultures. It is the place where much of the treasure of Scythian gold was created during the half millennium before the common era; where Borodin’s imagined Polovtsian dances were performed before the twelfth-century Kievan Rus' prince Ihor; where Gogol’s Cossack, Taras Bul'ba, and the darling of the Romantic era, Ivan Mazepa, carried out their exploits; where Florence Nightingale did her early nursing work and Lord Tennyson found the subject for one of his most famous poems; where the Nobel Prize laureate and Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz set his trilogy about the decline of Poland in the second half of the seventeenth century; where life in the Galician countryside provided Leopold von Sacher-Masoch with lurid tales that became the source for the concept of masochism; where the Jewish Hasidic movement was born; and where the writer Shalom Aleichem re-created late nineteenth-century life in a Jewish shtetl, in a work that North Americans later came to know as Fiddler on the Roof. The contexts for these and many other stories are what is to be found on the pages of this book.

Until now, most histories of Ukraine have been histories of the Ukrainian people. While this book also traces tbe evolution of Ukrainians, it tries as well to give judicious treatment to the many other peoples who developed within the borders of Ukraine, including the Greeks, the Crimean Tatars, the Poles, the Russians, the Jews, the Germans, and the Romanians. Only through an understanding of all their cultures can one hope to gain an adequate introduction to Ukrainian history. In other words, this book is not simply a history of Ukrainians, but a survey of a wide variety of developments that have taken place during the past two and a half millennia on the territory encompassed by the boundaries of the contemporary state of Ukraine.

This book began as long ago as 1980-1981, in the form of a lecture course, at the University of Toronto, on Ukraine from earliest times to the present. The work has retained the structure of a textbook that can be used in a university survey course, whether a full-year course or two half-year courses. There are ten sections of roughly five chapters each, for a total of fifty chapters. The arrangement is essentially chronological, from the first millennium before the common era to the declaration of Ukrainian independence and its confirmation by national referendum during the second half of 1991. Within each of the ten sections, there has been an attempt to provide an equally balanced discussion of political, economic, and cultural developments. Dispersed throughout the narrative are sixty-six textual inserts that contain the texts of important documents, contemporary descriptions, or explanations of specific events, concepts, and historiographic problems. Unless otherwise indicated, the texts of documents and other cited material have been translated by the author. Interspersed as well are nineteen statistical tables and forty-two maps depicting the historical evolution of all or part of Ukraine.

In works about multicultural countries like Ukraine, it is impossible to avoid the problem of which linguistic form to use for personal names and place-names. For personal names, spellings are in the language of the nationality with which the person generally identified. In the case of individuals in the medieval period who were of East Slavic background, the modern Ukrainian spelling of their names is used. Transliterations from languages using the Cyrillic alphabet follow the Library of Congress system; names of Jewish figures follow the spellings used in the EncyclopediaJudaica. For towns, cities, provinces, and regions, the language used is determined by present-day international boundaries - thus, the Ukrainian form for L'viv, in Ukraine; the Belarusan form for Polatsk, in Belarus; and the Polish form for Przemysl, in Poland. In general, historic names are used on maps covering earlier periods: for example, Akkerman (today Bilhorod), Theodosia/Caffa/ Kefe (today Feodosiia), luzivka/Stalino (today Donets'k), and Katerynoslav (today Dnipropetrovs'k). A few Ukrainian geographic names and place-names are rendered in their commonly accepted English forms, such as Bukovina, Dnieper, Galicia, Podolia, Pripet, Volhynia, and Zaporozhia (for the historic region, but Zaporizhzhia for the modern city). Since the writing of this book, the government of Ukraine has adopted the form Kyiv as its official transliteration for the country’s capital city. The more traditional English form, Kiev, is used here.

No individual could hope to be fully informed about the entire range of Ukrainian history, which is vast in chronological and thematic scope. I am, therefore, deeply indebted to many colleagues who at different times during the past decade have read all or parts of the various drafts of this work: Henry Abramson (University of Toronto), Karel C. Berkhoff (University of Toronto), Bobdan Budurowycz (University of Toronto), John-Paul Himka (University of Alberta), Stella Hryniuk (University of Manitoba), laroslav Isaievych (Shevchenko Scientific Society, L'viv), Ivan S. Koropeckyj (Temple University), Lubomir Luciuk (Royal Military College of Ontario), James Mace (University of Illinois), Alexander Motyl (Columbia University), and Stephen Velychenko (University of Toronto).

I am also grateful to the many persons who contributed to preparing the manuscript for publication, including, at the first stage, the typists Maureen Harris, Nadia Diakun, Florence Pasquier, and Cindy Magocsi; and, at the latter stage, Darlene Zeleney of the University of Toronto Press and, in particular, Tessie Griffin, who did an outstanding editorial job. Special appreciation as well to Karel Berkhoff for his accuracy in preparing the index, and to Byron Moldofsky and his staff at the Cartographic Office of the University of Toronto for their elegant drafting of the maps. While the counsel and constructive criticism of all these persons have helped greatly to improve the text, I alone am responsible for the interpretations and for whatever factual errors may remain.