Ukraine’s Recent Historical Context – Part I
As I do my research each week on the Russian-Ukrainian war, it is clear to me that my graduate education, which focused on European and Russian/Soviet history, offered no substantive insights into Ukrainian history and culture. Ukraine was simply a part of the Soviet Union, and the distinctive cultures of the other fourteen republics that made up the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics rarely got any attention. I learned all about the Russian Republic and its two major urban centers in St. Petersburg and Moscow and studied the Romanov tsars and their Communist successors after World War I -- but I knew almost nothing about its large southern neighbor Ukraine.
If it is a challenge for me to understand what is happening in this conflict between Russia and Ukraine, it must also be a challenge for my readers of these essays. Many of us knew very little about Ukraine until this war broke out in February 2022 and might have struggled even to locate the country on a map. Rather than try to provide an historical overview of Ukraine’s 1,500-year history, which Putin distorts in his speeches on the war, I have decided to share insights on several key events in Ukraine since its independence in 1991. My hope is that these reflections will help us to understand both the challenges and the extraordinary opportunities that face this nation.
As a professor of history with a primary focus on international relations, I am going to share these brief sketches without adding the complex names of Ukrainian leaders and their political movements – even though this is a difficult restraint, as a teacher! My goal is to give some context to help you understand what is happening without losing you in the details, which you can study on your own if you are interested. These sketches will also provide an explanation for why they are important in the current context of this brutal war.
First, a few historical landmarks in Ukraine’s tumultuous history in the 20th century. Unlike anything most of us have experienced, Ukrainians witnessed the collapse of the Romanov dynasty in 1917 and subsequent Russian civil war with its massive loss of lives. When the Communist Party took control, Ukraine was made one of fifteen republics and then suffered a famine in 1931-33 that cost them 5 million lives. Of these lost lives, 3 million people were deliberately starved to death by Stalin’s government, which decided to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry by taking their agricultural production and then sealing Ukraine’s borders so they could not leave.
Less than ten years later, Ukraine became a bloody World War II battlefield caught between Hitler’s Nazis and Stalin’s Red Army. This painful chapter of Stalinist rule -- during which Solzhenitsyn estimated the loss of 60-80 million lives, the vast majority at the hands of their own government -- lasted until 1991, when the Soviet Union imploded. Ukraine responded to this opportunity by securing their independent status as a nation, with an overwhelming vote of 92% of the electorate on December 1, 1991, in favor of becoming a sovereign nation.
The current chapter in Ukraine’s history is another difficult period in the country’s history, one that many in the West simply don’t understand. Jack Matlock, Jr., the former American ambassador to Russia from 1987 to 1991, compared the challenge of managing the transition from Communism to a more democratic society to that of converting “a submarine to an aircraft, while keeping it functioning with the same crew throughout the process.”
There are no guidelines for converting a top-down, centrally controlled political and economic system to a democracy with a free market economy; each of the fifteen former republics of the Soviet Union struggled with this transition. Ukraine’s economic slowdown was devastating – it lost 60% of its GDP and suffered from hyperinflation that went as high as 10,000% in 1993. Like in other post-Soviet states, state property was privatized by a small number of well-placed elites who became extremely powerful and wealthy. Ukraine’s economy subsequently underperformed due to massive corruption and mismanagement and, after Putin came to power in Russia, he immediately began to intervene in Ukraine’s political life.
The Orange Revolution of 2004
The increasing economic and political chaos in Ukraine led to a massive emigration of 3 million people in the 1990s. When Ukraine’s president for ten years tried to consolidate his personal power and marginalize the parliament, and then was tape-recorded ordering the murder of one of his harshest critics, the opposition (unlike in Russia) demanded an end to government corruption, improved relations with the West, and integration into the European Union. A presidential election was held in October 2004 to choose between 24 presidential candidates and one of the two finalists was strongly backed by Putin, while the other had the support of the diverse oppositional movement. When it was discovered that the official results of the second election were rigged by the supporters of the pro-Putin candidate, an estimated 200,000 Kyivans poured into Maidan, the capital city’s Independence Square, to protest election fraud, and protests spread across the country. Rallies totaling more than 500,000 people protested the fraud and forced another election, which the reformers’ candidate won 52% to 44%.
The “Orange Revolution” – named after the color of the reformer’s presidential campaign – secured the presidency, and Ukraine seemed ready to end its massive corruption and seek its future through closer ties to the European Union. These events signaled an important change in Ukraine, and it angered Putin, who had assumed his candidate would win and give him significant influence in Kyiv. Ukrainians made it clear that they wanted a future tied to Europe and no longer under the repressive influence of Moscow. This was a game-changer, an important turning point in Ukraine’s history as an independent nation.