AU CONTRAIRE
Ukrainian Geography:
PART 1
A Short History of Czars, Commissars, and Crooks
LONG READ
The most egregious lie underlying the UniParty’s proxy war in Ukraine is the claim that the latter is just another innocent sovereign nation suffering unprovoked invasion and despoilment at the hands of the world latest land-grabbing tyrant.
In fact, however, no nation or state by the name of “Ukraine” ever existed on the maps of the world from the middle ages until the 20th century. Only 100 years ago did modern history’s real tyrants—Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev – arbitrarily draw its borders on the region north of the Black Sea. But the territories impressed into these borders did not serve the cause of nationhood – only the administrative convenience of their own totalitarian rule and similar map-making caprice across the entire 6,000 mile expanse of the Soviet Union.
Moreover, the current Washington narrative holding that Vladimir Putin’s Russian government in Moscow is laying siege to the freedom loving Ukrainian nation centered in Kiev embodies no small irony. That’s because Russia’s actual origin story starts in Kiev more than 1,000 years ago, when the like named “Vladimir the Great” declared the Kievan Rus for Christianity in 988 AD. The great Russian Orthodox extension of Christendom was thereby extended into central Eurasia and eventually became Czarist Russia.
As it happened, Kievan Rus had been the first major East Slavic polity, which took shape in the late 9th and 10th centuries. Viking warrior-traders known as the Rus’ established control over trade routes linking the Baltic to the Black Sea and Byzantium. By the early 10th century, under Prince Oleg and his successors, Kiev on the middle Dnieper River had become the dominant center of the incipient Russian nation.
But the Kievan Rus’ was never a tightly centralized state; rather, it was a loose federation of small principalities whose ruling elite belonged to one of history’s long forgotten dynasties called the Rurikid.
The populations they ruled was predominantly East Slavic, with Finnic, Baltic, and steppe nomadic elements on the periphery. The latter included primitive trading settlements to the northeast in the forested Volga region, which later became the center of Muscovy.
Over subsequent centuries the common language and culture of these East Slavs evolved into the distinct Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian branches which populated the yellow areas of the map below. Kiev itself remained the symbolic and ecclesiastical heart of Rus’ through the 11th and early 12th centuries, the period of its greatest prosperity and cultural flowering under Yaroslav the Wise.
Internal fragmentation, however, was already advanced by the mid-12th century. Rival Rurikid princes fought for seniority, and power shifted northward and eastward toward the forested principalities where new centers such as Vladimir and, later, Moscow arose.
The decisive blow came with the Mongol invasion of 1237–1240. Kiev was sacked in 1240, which devastated the southern principalities and left Kiev a shadow of its former self.
By contrast, the northeastern forest principalities (Vladimir-Suzdal and Moscow) proved more resilient: They adapted to Mongol overlordship by collecting tribute, expanded into less contested lands, and gradually accumulated military and fiscal power.
Moscow’s princes secured the title of Grand Prince of Vladimir and the right to gather the Mongol tax, which they used to strengthen their own position. After throwing off direct Golden Horde control in the late 15th century, Moscow’s rulers deliberately claimed the political and religious inheritance of Kievan Rus. This included relocating the metropolitan see from Kiev to Moscow, promoting the idea of Moscow as the “Third Rome,” and presenting themselves as the legitimate continuators of the Rurikid tradition.
This transfer was therefore both a practical consequence of geography and the Mongol catastrophe. And it was also a conscious ideological project that allowed the emerging Russian state to root its legitimacy in the earlier East Slavic polity centered on Kiev.
In any event, by the late 14th and 15th centuries the political center of gravity of the East Slavic world had migrated from the middle Dnieper (Kiev) to the upper Volga basin (Moscow). Kiev remained an important cultural and religious memory, but the emerging Russian state was built in the northeast under Moscow’s leadership.
Alas, history and its geography did not standstill after the retreat of the Mongols had left the region fragmented. Accordingly, the lands around Kiev and stretching toward the Black Sea entered the Polish sphere through a combination of Lithuanian conquest and later dynastic union.
To be specific, during the 14th century the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had expanded rapidly southward, absorbing most of the former Kievan Rus’ principalities, including Kiev itself. At roughly the same time, the Kingdom of Poland had seized the western region of Galicia (including Lviv) following the extinction of its local Rurikid rulers.
At length, the two states were merged in 1569 under the Union of Lublin, which combined the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania into what became known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. We show this historical entity in the yellow area of the map below.
Under the terms of the union, the vast territories which comprise present day Ukraine and which had previously been held by Lithuania—-Volhynia, Podolia, the Kiev palatinate, and adjacent lands—were detached from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and attached directly to the Polish Crown. Polish magnates and the Crown administration then extended colonization and military outposts farther south into the steppe (the “wild fields”), albeit the area on the rim of the Black Sea remained under the control of the Crimean Khanate.
The latter was a Turkic-Mongol successor state that emerged in the mid-15th century after the disintegration of the Golden Horde. Centered on the Crimean Peninsula and the adjacent Black Sea steppes, it was ruled by the Giray dynasty, who were descendants of Genghis Khan.
During most of its existence from roughly 1441 to 1783 the Khanate was a vassal of the Ottoman Empire, which provided military and diplomatic support in exchange for the khans’ acknowledgment of Ottoman suzerainty. As it happened, the Khanate’s military power relied on highly mobile Tatar cavalry—while its economy rested heavily on the provision of slaves to the Ottoman markets via raids to the northwest into the neighboring Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, to the northeast into the Grand Duchy of Moscow (Muscovy), and to the south into the Caucasus.
In any event, by the time that Columbus discovered the Americas in 1492, would be explorers and map-makers could not have discovered “Ukraine”. That’s because by then—
- the core areas of present-day Ukraine, including Kiev and Lviv, lay within the Polish-Lithuanian state (yellow area of the map).
- Along the eastern regions of today’s Donbas, the Rus’ successor state, the Grand Duchy of Moscow (green area), was pushing westward.
- The southern territories of present day Ukraine adjacent to the Black Sea and Sea of Azov were under the sway of the Mongol/Tartar remnant (pink area), which had become a vassal to the Ottoman Empire east and south of the Black Sea.
Needless to say, therefore, what lay in the present day territory of “Ukraine” was not a modern nation and state aborning, but, instead, the border lands of post-medieval empires. Thereafter these boundaries would be in a continuous flux of expansion and contraction as three regional powers depicted in yellow, green and brown clashed during the centuries which followed.
One essential element of that clash of empires, was the relentless westward expansion of the incipient Russian state, which grew out of the northeastern principality of Muscovy after the Mongol conquests. From the late 15th century the Grand Princes of Moscow expanded in several directions, but the westward movement that eventually reached the Dniester and beyond came chiefly at the expense of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Thus, in 1492 Muscovy stood mostly to the east of present day Ukraine, while the Commonwealth controlled the great majority of the old Kievan lands, including Kiev and Lviv. Over the following centuries, however, a series of Russo-Polish wars, truces, and annexations steadily shifted that frontier westward.
Lands that had been under Lithuanian or Polish rule passed under Russian control. These gains were not matched by equivalent Commonwealth expansion on its western flank sufficient to offset the eastern losses. On the contrary, the Commonwealth was simultaneously pressed by Sweden, the Ottomans, and later by Prussia and Austria on its western boundaries.
Accordingly, by 1776 the cumulative effect of these earlier wars plus the first Partition of Poland (1772) is visible on the next map below. By then the Russian Empire had advanced westward to the Dniester River in places and held substantial eastern and central Ukrainian territory, while the Commonwealth survived in steadily reduced form.
As it happened, in fact, the first partition of Poland by the tripartite powers—Russia, Austria and Prussia—trimmed the Commonwealth but left it intact; only the second and third partitions (1793 and 1795) extinguished Poland entirely and transferred its remaining Ukrainian territories to the three rising powers of that era.
At the same time, Catherine the Great’s reign in Russia (1762-1796) accelerated both the westward absorption of Commonwealth lands and the southward drive against the Ottomans and the Crimean Khanate.
In that context, Prince Grigory Potemkin famously organized the Russian colonization project in this region. After the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774) made the Khanate nominally independent of the Ottoman’s, Russian forces occupied Crimea; and in 1783 Catherine annexed the peninsula outright, adding it to the rapidly expanding footprint of the Czarist Empire.
Thereafter, Potemkin founded Sevastopol as the base of the new Black Sea Fleet, giving the Czars their long-sought warm-water port. Simultaneously, he directed the colonization of the steppe lands between the Dnieper, the Don, and the Black Sea—settling it with local peasants, Russian colonists, and foreign immigrants and founding new towns and centers of commerce and industry.
Thus, while the American colonies were separating from Britain, Catherine’s government was colonizing the territories of today’s eastern and southern Ukraine, incorporating them into the Czarist empire under the name “Novorossiya” or New Russia.
A few years latter in his farewell address George Washington admonished his fellow citizens to avoid any and all foreign entanglements. Had he known, he might have called out the tangled cauldron of conflict and colonization then underway on the steppes north of the Black Sea as an example of what was to be avoided.
As we will see in Part 2 and Part 3, the entanglements and intrigues in the region had just begun—even as no sign of a state called “Ukraine” was anywhere on the map. And what was about to unfold there had nothing to do with the homeland security of America—either then or now.
How Ukraine Was Pieced Together
As we indicated in Part 1, even by the end of the 18th century, the nation of “Ukraine” was nowhere to be seen on the maps of the era. And shortly thereafter the greatest map-making assemblage of nations that the world had ever seen only confirmed its non-existence within the maws of an expanding Russian Empire.
We are referring to the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, which was the diplomatic mechanism by which the victors over Napoleon – Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Great Britain – reordered the political geography of Europe. Their purpose was to restore monarchical legitimacy after a quarter-century of revolution and war, to prevent the re-emergence of French hegemony, and to compensate themselves for the costs of the struggle.
Under the guiding influence of Austria’s Prince Metternich, Russia’s Tsar Alexander I, Britain’s Viscount Castlereagh, and Prussia’s Prince Hardenberg, the powers rejected both the popular sovereignty associated with the French Revolution and also any simple reversion to the pre-revolution map of 1789.
Instead they fashioned a conservative settlement grounded in dynastic right, a workable balance among the great powers, and mutual territorial swaps and boundary adjustments. These rearrangements extended across the continent and into the adjacent Eurasian borderlands.
Thus, France was confined to its frontiers of 1792 and surrounded by reinforced buffer states. The German lands were consolidated into a confederation dominated by Austria, while Italy was left divided among restored or compensated rulers. In northern Europe, territorial exchanges strengthened Sweden and created a united Kingdom of the Netherlands.
But it was the settlement in the east that is material to what was the still missing map of Ukraine at the end of the Congress. In fact, its handiwork went in the opposite direction by confirming and enlarging the late 18th century gains and colonization projects of the Russian Empire.
Alexander I of Russia received most of the former Duchy of Warsaw, reconstituted as the Kingdom of Poland under the Russian crown, and obtained formal recognition of the extensive territories Russia had already acquired through the eighteenth-century partitions of Poland and through earlier wars. Those acquisitions encompassed the greater part of the territories that constitute modern Ukraine: the Right Bank and the Left Bank of the Dnieper River, as well as the region then known as Novorossiya, and the Crimean Peninsula.
At that point in time, Galicia, including the city of Lviv, remained under Habsburg rule, a secondary consequence of the partitions that the Vienna powers left undisturbed. Prussia obtained more limited Polish districts to the west.
In none of these allocations did an independent Ukrainian state appear. The peacemakers regarded the region as imperial territory to be distributed among the victorious monarchies, not as the patrimony of a distinct nation entitled to sovereignty. British and Prussian acquiescence in Russia’s share formed part of the larger bargain that contained France and preserved the conservative equilibrium; neither power had an interest in promoting a Ukrainian polity that would have unsettled the eastern settlement they had helped to construct.
The Concert of Europe that issued from Vienna therefore placed the Czarist empire’s control over the Ukrainian lands under the collective sanction of the anti-Napoleonic coalition. Territories that had been absorbed through Russian conquest, partition, and colonization in the preceding century were now underwritten by the authority of the principal European powers.
For the remainder of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, therefore, the territories of today’s Ukraine continued to be governed as provinces of the Russian and Austrian empires. Their inhabitants remained subjects of those states rather than citizens of a Ukraine that the statesmen of 1814 had not had reason to reject because as of yet it had not even been envisioned.
Needless to say, the 1814 map below speaks for itself. The current line of contact in the Ukraine War, which is just east of the Dnieper River has seen the slaughter of upwards of 400,000 soldiers on both sides of the trenches. Yet when the modern map of Europe was fixed at the Congress of Vienna their forebears had all been subjects of the same Russian Empire; most were adherents of the Russian Orthodox confession; and the mother tongue of many was Russian, as well.
As even casual students of European history are aware, the writ of the Congress of Vienna imposed by the great powers from above was thereafter periodically challenged by liberal and nationalist uprisings from below. In particular, the year 1848 is remembered across Europe as the “Spring of Nations,” a wave of liberal and nationalist revolutions that briefly shook the conservative order established by the Congress of Vienna.
In Italy, the German states, the Austrian Empire, and parts of France and Central Europe, popular demands arose for constitutional government, an end to absolute monarchy, and, above all, national unification or independence. In the Italian peninsula, for instance, uprisings in Milan, Venice, and elsewhere challenged Austrian rule and local princely authority. Likewise, the short-lived Roman Republic and the wars of the Risorgimento signaled a growing drive toward Italian unity.
In the German Confederation, the Frankfurt Parliament attempted to create a unified German state under a constitutional monarch, while revolutions in Berlin, Vienna, and Prague forced temporary concessions from the Prussian and Austrian crowns.
During this time Hungary rose in a full-scale war of independence against Habsburg rule, and similar unrest touched Bohemia, Galicia, and other provinces of the Austrian Empire. Further north, liberal agitation in the Low Countries and Scandinavia added to the sense that the old order was under siege.
Yet the outcomes of 1848–1849 proved highly uneven as between Europe proper and the interior lands of Czarist Russia. Thus, in Italy and the German lands the revolutions were largely suppressed in the short term, but they accelerated the long-term processes of national consolidation.
By the 1860s and 1870s both Italy and Germany would emerge as unified nation-states, their fragmented patchwork of kingdoms, duchies, and free cities replaced by centralized nation-states. The map of Central Europe was thereby simplified and nationalized.
Similarly, the Austrian Empire survived, but only after crushing the Hungarian revolt with Russian assistance and later compromising with Hungary in the 1867 Ausgleich (settlement) that created the Dual Monarchy. The revolutionary year therefore left a lasting imprint: it demonstrated the power of nationalist sentiment and set in motion the political rearrangements that would produce modern Italy and Germany.
But this era also produced no incipient Ukraine.The territories that today lie within the borders latter drawn by Soviet rulers experienced no comparable transformation.
Instead, on the political map of 1848 those lands remained divided between two multi-ethnic empires. The great majority – Right-Bank and Left-Bank Ukraine, Novorossiya, and Crimea – belonged to the Russian Empire. Western Galicia, including Lviv (Lemberg), formed part of the Austrian Empire. Neither empire recognized a Ukrainian nation-state, nor did the upheavals of 1848 produce any widespread attempt from below to realize one.
In Austrian Galicia a modest Ukrainian (Ruthenian) national movement did arise, centered on cultural and linguistic demands. As it happened, much of the impetus came from the Greek Catholic clergy which was dominant in the region, as opposed to the Russian Orthodoxy that prevailed in the old Kievan Rus’ to the east.
While some activists might have sought release from their respective imperial overlords, these hopes were disappointed.The Hapsburg authorities restored order, and Galicia remained an Austrian province.
Within the Russian Empire the situation was even more restrictive. The Czarist government viewed the Ruthenian (Ukrainian) agitation, which was rooted in Galicia with suspicion, especially after the Polish uprising of 1830–31. Accordingly, the use of the Ukrainian language in print and education was tightly controlled, and political organization was impossible. The 1848 revolutions elsewhere in Europe thus elicited no parallel uprising capable of altering the status of the Ukrainian lands under the Tsar.
Consequently, while the revolutions of 1848 helped clear the path toward the nation-states of Italy and Germany, they left the map of Eastern Europe essentially unchanged with respect to Ukraine. The Russian and Austrian empires continued to administer the territories that the Soviet commissars would later force into the de novo polity of Ukraine, treating them as integral provinces rather than as the homeland of a separate people entitled to sovereignty.
The contrast is instructive: The same historical moment that loosened the bonds of dynastic empire in Central Europe and allowed national consolidation in those regions left the Ukrainian lands firmly embedded within the imperial structures of St. Petersburg and Vienna. Not until the collapse of those empires in the First World War would the question of Ukrainian statehood re-emerge on the European agenda.
Indeed, by the eve of the Great War (WWI) in 1914 the political map of Europe was dominated by a handful of consolidated nation-states and multi-ethnic empires. Italy had completed its unification in the 1860s and 1870s. France and the United Kingdom stood as established great powers.
And across Central and Eastern Europe the three remaining imperial giants—the German Empire forged by Bismarck, the Hapsburg Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and the Russian Empire of the Romanovs – still controlled the greater part of the continent. These six entities, bound by the pre-war alliance systems (the Triple Entente of France, Russia, and Britain; the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy), would become the principal combatants once the July Crisis escalated into general war.
The “guns of August” thus ended the century of relative peace that had followed the Congress of Vienna. On the Western Front the armies of France, Britain, and Germany settled into the trench stalemate that consumed millions of lives. On the Eastern Front the forces of Germany and Austria-Hungary faced the Russian Empire across a vast and fluid theater stretching from the Baltic to the Carpathians and the Black Sea.
The war that ensued was, in scale and destructiveness, unlike anything Europe had previously experienced. Yet throughout the five years of industrialized slaughter one political fact remained constant: There was no Ukrainian state on the field of battle.
On the 1914 map shown below the territories that today constitute Ukraine were partitioned between two of the contending empires. The overwhelming majority – Left-Bank and Right-Bank Ukraine, Novorossiya, and Crimea – belonged to the Russian Empire and were administered as ordinary imperial provinces.
Western Galicia, including Lviv, formed part of the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy. Neither empire recognized a separate Ukrainian polity, and no Ukrainian government existed to declare neutrality, to choose sides, or to mobilize a national army.
Instead, Ruthenian (Ukrainian) soldiers served in large numbers in both the opposing Russian and Austro-Hungarian forces, slaughtering each other with alacrity based on the flags of their imperial overlords.
Likewise, Ukrainian civilians in the millions endured occupation, requisition, and displacement. But these experiences occurred under alien flags and within alien state structures. The national question that had animated Italians, Germans, Poles, and others in the nineteenth century had not yet produced a sovereign Ukraine capable of entering the war as a belligerent in its own right.
Consequently, while the pre-existing alliances drew the six major powers into a continental catastrophe, the lands of Ukraine remained simply the eastern and southwestern marches of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. The nation-state of Ukraine was nowhere to be found among the combatants of 1914.
Only the collapse of those empires in 1917–1918 would open the possibility, but even then it came at the hand of Bolshevik terrorists, as we will amplify in Part 3.
David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back, and the recently released Great Money Bubble: Protect Yourself From The Coming Inflation Storm. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.
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