Ukraine’s Complex, Tragic History
With Ukrainian cities being bombed flat and tens of thousands killed, including in obvious war crimes, stopping Russia’s war and helping its victims are primary. To find a long-term strategy, however, we have to recognize Ukraine’s intricate history, multicultural breadth and monumental suffering, which is not well known. In fact, this is the NINTH major war, mass killing or genocide “event” Ukraine has endured in the last century.
Coveted for its flat, fertile earth and lucrative trade routes, Ukraine has long been a “borderland” — which is what “ukraine” means and why it was called “The Ukraine” — between empires, which makes issues about N.A.T.O. almost inevitable. It is also Europe’s “breadbasket,” growing up to 30% of its wheat and meaning war will bring food scarcity.
Russian territorial claims date to Vladimir the Great of Kyiv, who actually was Ukrainian but started the Russian tribal confederation around 1000 AD and led its conversion to Christianity. But a millennium is a long time. The land was conquered in turn by Mongols, Poles, Lithuanians, Ottomans, Russians again, Soviets and Nazis.
Hence, Ukrainians range in ethnicity from majority Ukrainians and one third Russians to minority Poles, Jews, Cossacks, Greeks, Roma, Germans, Tatars and other Muslim groups, who intermarried to some degree. A multiethnic community is not an easy fit for nationalism, explaining why some people accept Putin’s postulate Ukraine is not an actual country.
Imperial Russia repressed Ukrainian culture, even outlawing its language, but its 19th century poets had romantic dreams of independence, like their counterparts in Poland, Greece and elsewhere. Taras Shevchenko was born an enslaved serf near Kyiv but became a folklorist and painter as well as poet and founder of modern Ukrainian literature.
Thus inspired, many Ukrainians fought a fierce, five-year war of independence during and after World War One, first against the Austro-Hungarians and Germans, with whom they made a separate peace, in exchange for massive amounts of wheat, then in the bloody, chaotic Russian Civil War. Indeed, four different Ukraines operated between 1917 and ’22. Their west was eastern Poland, generating a zero-sum battle between two sets of nationalists, although the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918–19 caused only 25,000 casualties.
The Red Army, led by the Jewish Ukrainian Leon Trotsky, had to invade Ukraine three times to defeat an array of opponents in a kaleidoscope of alliances: Ukrainian nationalists, the White Army of czarists and Cossacks, the anarchist Black Army, and the peasant Green Army but also an English-French-Greek expeditionary force and German and Polish armies. Many resorted to atrocities. Rationalizing that revolutions require killing, Lenin ordered his secret police to enact the “red terror,” which put to death hundreds of thousands. Although he finally relaxed a bit on the Ukrainians, he maintained staunch opposition to their self-governance.
Despite the organizational limits of anarchy, the Blacks were popular and brought together Ukraine’s industrious peasants, worldly traders and dreamy intellectuals better than the Reds. One storied commander, Maria Nikiforova, was a seasoned revolutionary, gorgeous or ugly, depending on accounts, and possible user of cocaine, then popular among European literati. She fought valiantly, sometimes using terror tactics, until her capture by the Whites, trial and execution, along with her husband and fellow commander, in 1919.
After centuries of repression, Ukrainian Jews, Europe’s largest community after Poland, emerged as full citizens. The socialist Ukrainian People’s Republic (1917–20) made Yiddish an official language, many Jews joined the Russian Revolution, and a Jewish gangster from the cosmopolitan seaport of Odessa, Mishka Yaponchik, became a Red general.
Alas, the modern practice of pogroming Jews also started in Ukraine, when 50 people were massacred in 1881 and another few thousand in 1903. In the Civil War, however, Jews were butchered by the thousands by all factions, including the Reds but mostly the nationalists and the Whites. About 100,000 were killed in over 1000 incidents, setting a tragic precedent for European Jewry, according to professor Jeffrey Veidlinger, author of “In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust” (2021).
The pogroms triggered some emigration, including the forbears of Bob Dylan and Noam Chomsky to the United States, but some two million Jews continued to live in Ukraine. They contributed disproportionately to its cultural renaissance in the 1920s as well as the building of the Soviet Union. The horror of the pogroms was eclipsed by the Revolution itself, which killed about nine million across the country, and the Russian famine of 1922, which added two to five million.
Dominating Ukraine was central to Soviet strategy, given the proximity of the Russian and Ukrainian languages and histories and presumed Russian superiority — Ukrainians are known as “little Russians.” As Russia’s southern lands and sea ports and Europe’s eastern flank, Ukraine was more romantic, open, diversely civilized, and rich than its northern neighbor, making it the prize possession between feuding cousins. Stalin began arresting Ukrainian intellectuals en masse at the end of the ’20s, the so-called “executed renaissance” and a tragic foretelling of what was to come. Ukraine soon suffered not one but two genocides.
Also in the ’20s, Soviets tried to collectivize work. They were especially hard on the prosperous peasant farmers, or “kulaks,” and killed about a half a million nationwide. When Ukraine’s kulaks refused to nationalize their harvest in 1932, authorities confiscated it, triggering a years-long famine. Stalin wanted to break the kulaks and bourgeoisie but also Ukrainian dreams of independence.
Holodomor means “death by hunger” in Ukrainian but oddly parallels “holocaust,” from the Greek for “burnt offering.” While it’s tricky drawing comparisons to the Holocaust, which also hit Ukraine hard, the Holodomor rates. Death tolls range from three and a half to ten million, a horrific national trauma by any measure but exacerbated by its erasure by Soviet censorship and propaganda — indeed, many Russians deny it to this day — and international ignorance. Eventually investigated, it was finally recognized by Russian institutions and the U.N., a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Diana Soline Chornenkaya, a Ukrainian-Russian-American friend of mine, told me stories she heard from her grandmother, Vera, who was a teen during the manufactured famine and the descent of its sufferers into cannibalism. While visiting a friend, Vera was trapped by the girl’s mother, but the friend helped her escape. Another girlfriend, after giving birth, ate the infant to survive. Another girlfriend, while hiking to Kyiv, said, “I don’t feel well,” and lay down and died. There were bodies everywhere. Vera found babysitting work and safety in Kyiv but lost two younger brothers, other family and many community members.
Recent studies estimate four million Ukrainians were starved to death, with another six million lost to “birth deficits.” Ever resilient, Ukrainians attempted to recover and rebuild their society within the socialist system — Vera’s friend, who ate her newborn, went on to raise two healthy children — despite Soviet propaganda portraying them as cannibals or, conversely, claiming they faked the famine. Unfortunately, the Holodomor was immediately followed by more mass murder events.
Stalin’s “great terror” or “purge” started in 1936. About a million Soviet citizens were executed, sometimes after show trials, and many more were sent to the gulags, where a large percent expired. Some estimates put Great Terror casualties at four million or more, including many Ukrainians, all for naught, since almost no conspiracies were uncovered. As if the Holodomor and Great Terror weren’t socially and psychologically annihilating enough, World War Two started, making 1914 to ’45 in Eastern Europe the most pernicious period in history, bar none. It centered on Ukraine.
Germany’s Operation Barbarossa, the biggest invasion in history, brought blitzkrieg and total war but also the Holocaust in late-June ’41. In lieu of their practices in Western Europe and Poland, where the Nazis organized a comparatively efficient and discrete herding of Jews into ghettos, cattle cars and death camps, they used bullets and mass graves.
In two days in September, they slaughtered 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar, a ravine in a Kyiv suburb, considered a record. Over 100,000 Christian Ukrainians and Russians soon joined them. Around one and half million Ukrainian Jews were eventually murdered, including tens of thousands by Ukrainian police and nationalists, often affiliated with the powerful Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
The more radical wing of the O.U.N. was led by Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with Germans before the war but was interred in a concentration camp during it for declaring Ukrainian independence. Despite the O.U.N.’s monoethnic authoritarianism, they tolerated a few Jews, especially as wives, while still practicing eliminationist nationalism. They butchered tens of thousands of Poles and Russians, as well as many Jews, especially communists, although they moderated some policies after the war.
Still a polarizing figure among Ukrainians, Bandera is honored as one of the nation’s founding fathers by many rightwingers but also some liberals, including the current president Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish but recognizes Ukraine’s need for a big-tent society. The O.U.N. provides the grains of truth behind the “Ukraine is controlled by Nazis” conspiracy theory promulgated by Putin.
Yes, many Ukrainians joined the German army or Waffen SS, as did fascists from France and Sweden to Croatia and Romania, and a few became notorious concentration camps guards in nearby Poland. John Demjanjuk, who raised a family in Ohio but was finally deported in 1993, to stand trial in Germany, worked in three extermination camps, Sobibor, Majdanek and Treblinka, where he was known as the sadist “Ivan the Terrible.” After the grotesqueries of the Holodomor and Terror, however, many Ukrainians wanted to expel the Soviets and win independence in Nazi Europe, as had the Croatians.
On the other hand, over a thousand Ukrainians are honored as “righteous gentiles,” by Israel’s Yad Vashem, and many more hid or helped Jews. Millions more joined the partisans or Soviet army, where four and a half million Ukrainians fought the Nazis in some of the most sanguineous battles of World War Two. A Ukrainian SS battalion of mixed ethnicity was sent to fight the Allies on the Western Front but killed their commanders and joined the French resistance.
Estimates differ but about 25 million Soviets died during the war, albeit only a third fighting, sometimes sacrificed by commanders who marched them through unswept mine fields or into machine gun nests. The remainder was from famine, due to Germans confiscating food, or being deported to Germany, where they were worked to death, or disease and reprisals against collaborators. A fourth of those victims were Ukrainians.
Stuck between the genocidal Nazis and mass murderous Soviets, Ukrainians suffered history’s greatest hell. I have long awarded that horrific honor to Poland, given its proximity to Germany, the presence of all the death camps, and I am of Polish-Jewish descent, but we lost six million to Ukraine’s seven. From the Black Sea to the Baltic is called “bloodlands” by scholar Timothy Synder, in his 2010 book of the same name, because both Hitler and Stalin wanted to depopulate it. From 1932 to ’45, about 14 million civilians in a half-a-dozen countries were murdered.
For someone like me, who lives in California, which has had only one mass killing event, the genociding of its first people, it is almost impossible to imagine the healing, rebuilding and kindness needed to recover from eight nationwide and years-long atrocities in three decades: World War One, the Russian Revolution, the Red Terror, the Pogroms, the Holodomor, the Great Terror, World War Two and the Holocaust.
At the end of the “great war,” Ukrainians finally had peace. Although nationalists kept up guerilla attacks from the Carpathians, Ukraine’s one mountain range, and Soviets carried on arresting people for “crimes against the state,” Ukraine became a central Soviet state, the site of many civic projects, universities, factories, resort towns, heritage site cities, and nuclear missile silos and reactors, including Chernobyl, which suffered history’s worst melt down in 1986. It was also the birthplace of Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev and the many professionals who moved to Moscow.
But when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 and a plebiscite was held, over 90% of Ukrainians voted for independence, despite 30% being Russian speakers. Although they elected a Communist Party apparatchik, the vast majority welcomed democracy and the opportunity to join the European Union or perhaps N.A.T.O. as well as improved consumer goods. Betting on peace, their new legislature renounced nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees from Russia and the U.S., no less, as per the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.
Like all former Soviet states, Ukraine endured the dislocating turmoil of “perestroika” economic reform, from disappearing staples to looting oligarchs, which was almost inevitable, given the difficulty of transitioning to capitalism and how people close to power could take advantage of it. “Glasnost” brought welcome freedoms of expression and movement but also a cacophony of news and political parties, from communists and nationalists to reformers and charlatans.
Like Russia, Ukraine had assassinations. In 2000, the muckraking journalist and publisher of an anti-corruption news site, Georgiy Gongadze, was murdered. Four years later, there was an attempt on the life of reform candidate Viktor Yushchenko using poison. An ancient Russian tradition, Russian agents think poison is undetectable and plausibly deniable, despite easily traceable toxins and their trademark use of them.
The poisoners were not identified, but Ukrainians took to the streets to protest the electoral fraud noted by local and foreign observers. Although Yushchenko was up double digits in the polls, his opponent, Viktor Yanukovych, the anointed successor of the disgraced previous president, won by three points. Thousands of young people joined peaceful strikes, sit-ins and marches in what was called the Orange Revolution, the second of Eastern Europe’s half-a-dozen “colored revolutions,” after neighboring Georgia’s a year earlier.
Ukraine’s young democracy pulled through when its Supreme Court ruled for Yushchenko, who recovered, although his face was disfigured for years, and set about integrating Ukraine with the West. His wife is Ukrainian-American. He also compromised with the former communists and Russophiles by appointing as prime minister none other than Yanukovych, despite Yanukovych’s campaign claim he was a Nazi.
In point of fact, Yushchenko was embraced by Ukraine’s Jewish community of about 150,000, Europe’s second largest after France; his mother hid three Jewish girls during the Holocaust; and his father was a Red Army soldier incarcerated in Auschwitz.
The Orange Revolution was opposed by older people, Russian speakers, conservatives and nationalists, as well as those concerned Ukraine joining N.A.T.O. was provocative, even though all of its western neighbors had by 2004 — not to mention an increasingly belligerent Russia. Putin began killing journalists and opponents in 2006, airing “lost empire” grievances the following year, and launching brutal wars, supposedly to protect Russian minorities, starting in Georgia in 2008.
While Yushchenko walked that tightrope, Ukrainians flip-flopped. In the next election, they handed power back to Yanukovych, who slowed his predecessor’s reforms, emphasized religion and honored nationalist heroes like Bandera even as he favored Russia. When Yanukovych refused to ratify a treaty with the European Union and instead joined the Eurasian Economic Union established by Russia, which offered him an enormous aid package, Ukrainians took to the streets again.
It was called the Revolution of Dignity or Maidan Revolution, after the Kyiv’s central square — “maidan” means independence — which was occupied for months in late 2013. The massive “Euromaidan” protests were driven by a new wave of nationalist youth, including some skinheads, but also hipsters and progressives. “Young people realized that they needed to do something for themselves and not depend on the government,” according to Miriam Dragina, a journalist who launched the Kyiv (flea) Market a year later to raise funds for the Ukrainian Army.
Yanukovych got his allies in parliament to pass laws restricting the protests, but they only increased. Indeed, demonstrators soon occupied government buildings across Ukraine. After a few were killed on January 18th, 2014, the entire opposition, from the rightwing Right Sector to the anti-corruption Maidan People’s Union and various student groups, organized a “peace offensive” on February 18th.
With columns of protesters advancing on the Rada Parliament, which was about to vote on rewriting the constitution, a suitable-for-cinema struggle ensued. Protesters threw Molotov cocktails and paving stones and stormed buildings, setting some alight, including the office of a pro-Russia party. Police responded with batons, stun grenades, tear gas and, finally, bullets. Nationalist protestors were also accused of firing shots. Over a hundred demonstrators were killed, along with a dozen police. Yanukovych fled to Russia.
Outraged by so much ‘60s-style democracy on his doorstep as well as their interest in joining N.A.T.O., Putin called it a rightwing coup and ordered an invasion. By February 27th, unmarked and masked Russian troops captured strategic locations across the state of Crimea, including the massive, Soviet-era naval port. In nearby Odessa on May 2nd, rightwing activists trapped pro-Russian counter-protestors in a building, spray-painted it with swastika-like symbols and set it alight. Forty-two died. Four months later, Russophile Ukrainians and out-of-uniform Russian soldiers seized parts of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk states, starting a war which killed 14,000 people. It is the main battle front today.
Among those fighting the Russians is the Azov Brigade, understandably labelled neo-Nazi for their swastika-like logo, connection to an ultra-nationalist party, and white supremacist leaders and members, about a fifth of their total. Alas, it is not unlike some American militias, and Ukraine also has freedom of speech. Moreover, they are fighting to defend their nation’s government not against it, as with some American militias, and they reportedly came to accept some Muslims and Jews. The Azov Brigade is now among the defenders of Mariupol in a battle to the death with Russian forces.
The vast majority of soldiers fighting the Russian invasion, however, were typical young men, including some anarchists and artists, who were also inspired to defend their nation during the Maidan Revolution, which galvanized Ukrainian youth and spirit of renewal. Culture in general and youth culture in particular exploded.
Kyiv and most other cities saw increases in coffee houses, clubs, galleries and youth hostels, earning buzz on the world traveler circuit as Eastern Europe’s new Prague. Ukraine’s myriad cultural institutions expanded, while established music, art and film scenes developed avant-gardes. Famously beautiful women made it a go-to location for ad agencies. Good facilities at lower cost attracted students from Africa, Asia and the U.S.
One artist riding that wave was comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. Ukrainians love comedy, especially gallows’ humor, due to their brutal history. A talented producer as well as entertainer and actor, Zelensky started the popular comedy troupe Kvartal 95, won Ukraine’s “Dancing with the Stars” in 2006, toured Russia doing standup (he’s a native Russian speaker), and founded Studio Kvartal, a successful film and television company. After appearing in eight movies, he starred in the hit TV series, “Servant of the People” (2015–19), about a teacher whose anti-corruption rant was filmed, went viral, and propelled him to the presidency.
“Servant of the People” was so spot on, Zelensky was soon president himself, in 2019, after winning over 70% of the vote, the biggest landslide in Ukraine’s young democracy. During the campaign, Zelensky didn’t emphasize he was Jewish or losing most of his father’s family in the Holocaust. But that and the fact that no ultra-nationalist parties got enough votes to earn representation in the Rada, indicates most Ukrainians have matured beyond antique notions of nationalism toward those of a modern, multicultural state.
Shifting from entertainment to politics is not easy, however, and Zelensky’s approval ratings slid to almost 30%. Accusations of nepotism emerged after he appointed fellow entertainers to head ministries. As a studio head, he had many dealings with media oligarchs, leading people to wonder why he didn’t sanction them, save for attacking his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko. One of Ukraine’s biggest oligarchs, the so-called “chocolate king,” Poroshenko was charged with multiple counts of corruption and fled the country.
Zelensky also entered into bizarre negotiations with the president of the United States, whose campaign manager worked for Yanukovych and who allied himself with Putin, claimed Ukraine was completely corrupt, and even tried to blackmail Zelensky by withholding essential weaponry into digging up dirt on the Bidens. Zelensky held his own, however, having studied law before going into comedy. Moreover, despite also coming to politics from entertainment, he is Trump’s moral and temperamental opposite.
Everything changed on February 24th as Zelensky evolved into a leader of historic proportions, and Ukrainians of all political persuasions and ethnicities — from anarchists to ultranationalists, from Jews to descendants of Cossacks — joined together. Three decades of democracy inspired both a profound love for each other and revulsion at returning to Russian autocracy. Even Poroshenko flew back to help.
In addition to drawing on all aspects of society, Ukrainians are fighting with every conceivable weapon. Their army, redesigned into nimble squads of equals by the old defense minister, Andriy Zagorodnyuk, has mastered small force tactics, handheld missiles and drones. Their young Minister of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, is using everything from hackers and YouTube live streams to cryptocurrency, TikTok influencers, texting Russian soldiers or calling their families. Diplomats and parliamentarians reach out relentlessly. Zelensky addressed almost one national congress a day in March, the Grammy Awards on April 2nd, and the United Nations on April 5th.
“They cut off limbs, cut their throats,” Zelensky told the U.N. General Assembly from Kyiv, referring to the atrocities reported on April 2nd from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. “Women were raped and killed in front of their children. Their tongues were pulled out only because their aggressor did not hear what they wanted to hear from them.”
When rebuttals of “false,” “staged” and “fake dead bodies” were made by Russia’s foreign minister and its ambassador to the U.S., they proved how Russia, which they say is standing up to the decadent West, maintaining Christian values and rooting out Nazis, is in free fall. In addition to suffering deindustrialization, depopulation, emigrating young people and intelligentsia, accelerated by the war, and severe alcohol and heroin addiction, Russians are suffused with “false narratives.”
Putin and Trump are more than friends or allies, they are fellow high priests in the cult of conspiracism, the former drawing on conspiracy theories dating back to the czarist police’s “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, the latter as a disciple of Roy Cohn and Joseph McCarthy. Indeed, Putin and Trump are not just helping each other by influencing elections or dismantling N.A.T.O., they are encouraging their bases to believe the two biggest Big Lies in recent memory: the election steal and Ukrainian Nazis.
Many more Buchas will tragically emerge, as Putin tries to terrorize Ukrainians, Europeans, and the world into accepting his conquest in lieu of World War Three, meaning we have arrived at Ukraine’s ninth mass murder event in a century. Six weeks in, it has trashed the country, involved dozens of war crimes, and killed tens of thousands.
One conciliation prize: Ukrainians have the spirit, unity and leadership to prevail. Indeed, a functional democracy can unify a diverse population, which can sustain a long struggle. Although they will pay a terrible price — and we must accelerate all possible efforts to offset that — by the same token, they may come to be a Christ among nations, winning not only their freedom but helping to restore democratic ascendancy and lead us out of Putin and Trump’s cynical, conspiratorial age.