History of Ukraine

A Brief History Of Ukraine

In The Beginning

Archeological finds show that the earliest inhabitants of Ukraine were Neolithic tribes in the Dnipro and Dniester valleys, who had settlements in the area of Kyiv 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. At that time, the area between the Black Sea and the glacial ice sheet of the last Ice Age was a level, fertile region with a cool, temperate climate: ideal for nomadic people and their flocks.

The first organized society in the region were the Scythians, who had tamed horses and used this mobility to rule most of the region north of the Black Sea. The Scythians flourished in the 8th to 1st century B.C. before succumbing to successive waves of migrating tribes sweeping in from the north and from Asia. In the 1st century BC to 6th century A.D. the region was overrun in turn by the Goths, Ostragoths, Visigoths, Huns, and Avars. The last such wave of migration were the Khazars, who ruled the region from the 7th to the 9th centuries. Their empire in turn started to crumble with the arrival of Kyivan Rus.

Rise Of The Kyivan Rus

The origin of Ukraine and its people dates from the late 600s when a Nordic people known as the Rus (from which we get the term “Russian”) first entered the region.

At first, the Rus were concerned mainly with reaching Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey) along a network of rivers and portage roads reaching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Down this route flowed furs, slaves and the priceless Baltic amber. In return, manufactured goods, wine, silks and gold flowed north.

To further this effort, the Rus established several small trading settlements along this “Amber Route”- notable among them being Kyiv (known as Kiev in the west); a point where several rivers meet.

The Rus settlers of Kyiv built their first citadel at the end of the 5th and the beginning of the 6th centuries on the steep right bank of the Dnipro River to protect themselves from the marauding nomadic tribes of the region. The evolution of Kyiv into a city was tied closely to the development of the Kyivan Rus feudal state. Later, Kyiv’s Grand Princes built their palaces and churches on Starokievska Hill, while artisans and merchants built their houses next to the wharf on the Dnipro.

Although vastly outnumbered, the warlike Norsemen used a combination of discipline, diplomacy and ruthless aggression to establish a strong, and ultimately dominant, position along the Amber Route. Within a few centuries, the Rus had evolved into three separate and distinct cultures: the Baltic Rus in the north, the Rus proper in the midlands around what later became Moscovy, and the Kyivan Rus in the south.

By the end of the 9th century, the Kyivan Rus princes had united the scattered Slavic tribes, with Kyiv as the political center of the Eastern Slavs. Legends and historical documents describe courageous Kyivites defending their city over the ages against the Khazars and Pechenegs, Polovtsi, Mongols, Lithuanian and Polish feudal lords, the Duchy of Muscovy, and the Russian Empire.

The Kyivan Rus reached their peak during the reign of Prince Volodymir the Great (980-1015). In 988, intent on strengthening his position, Volodymir introduced Christianity to improve political and cultural relations with the Byzantine Empire, the Bulgarians, and other countries of Western Europe and the Near East. By the 11th century, Kyiv was one of the largest centers of civilization in the Christian World. It boasted over 400 churches, eight markets and nearly 50,000 inhabitants. By comparison, London, Hamburg and Gdansk each had around 20,000.

After the death of the great Kyivan Prince Vladimir Monomakh (1125), the Kyivan Rus became involved in a long period of feudal wars. Foreign powers were quick to take advantage of this situation and the various Kyivan princelings spent as much time battling foreign aggressors as each other. But it soon developed that the Kyivan Rus, along with the rest of Europe, had a common, more pressing problem: the Mongols.

The Scourge Of The East

In the mid-13th century, the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan swept out of Asia like wildfire. The Mongols fielded an army only about 20,000 strong, but they were entirely highly trained horsemen who used tactics later copied by Heinz Gudaren and Erwin Rommel. Against the European’s press-ganged peasant mobs, it was no contest. The Golden Horde routinely crushed armies ten times their size. Were it not for the untimely death of the Genghis Khan, all of Europe might have been overrun.

Against this overwhelming “blitzkrieg”, not even the best defended cities could resist. In the autumn of 1240, the Mongols headed by Batu Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, finally captured Kyiv after a series of long and bloody battles. Thousands of people were killed and much of the city was razed. Kyiv fell into a prolonged period of decline. The Mongols (also known as the Tartars by westerners) ruled for almost a century.

Pawns Of Empire

Despite foreign rule, Kyiv retained its artisan, trade, and cultural traditions of the ancient Kiyvan-Rus and remained an important political, commercial and cultural center. The furocious Mongols, ill suited for city life, soon began to assimilate and lose much of their former aggressiveness. As they melted into the local culture, a new political structure, the Galician-Volynian principality, grew from the blending of Rus and Mongol.

The late 14th century brought a growing threat from the northwest. The Kingdom of Lithuania (the Baltic Rus) and Poland began to enlarge their territory at the expense of their eastern neighbors. Soon the Poles were pressing into the western part of Ukraine while the Lithuanians helped themselves to the area just to the north (in modern Belarus). This was not a large scale invasion as such, but more a series of small scale actions in which various feudal nobles were overthrown and their lands occupied in a sort of creeping conquest. At the same time, to the south and southeast, the Turks were making similar moves into the Crimea and along the Sea of Azov.

Unfortunately, the Galician-Volynian principality had lost much of the warrior spirit of their ancestors and proved too weak and decentralized to organize an effective defense. While nobles and religious factions feuded among themselves, the rot settled deeper into the principality and the foreign armies grew ever closer to Kyiv.

At the beginning of the 16th century, a new force appeared on the scene: the Ukrainian Kozaks (Cossacks). The Kozaks started as semi-autonomous slavic tribes settled in various regions of Ukraine. As the authority of Kyiv waned, these tribes took increasing control of their own affairs and were soon forming loose knit alliances. As the Galician-Volynian principality fell apart, this alliance rallied under the Zaporozhyan Sich, which became the military and political organization of the Ukrainian Kozaks and thus of Ukraine.

By the mid-17th century, the foreign erosion had taken over half of Ukraine, with the Poles finally occupying Kyiv itself. This led the Zaporozhyan Sich to war against Poland (in 1648-1654) to regain this lost territory. However, the Poles (then at the height of their military strength) proved to be too great a challenge. In desperation, Ukraine turned to their northern neighbor, the Duchy of Moscovy, for protection.

The Romanovs

Modern Russia came into being in the 1300s when a Rus Duke known as Ivan the Terrible began expanding his influence along the Amber Route from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. As part of this effort, he fortified the monastery at Moscovy (in Russian, the word Kremlin means “fortified city”) and made it his formal capital.