Are you surprised at the extent of resistance by Ukraine in their current war with Russia? It appears to many observers that the Russian Military and Putin Government probably miscalculated the Ukrainian people’s will to resist domination. By taking a look at the last 100 years of the history of Ukrainian-Russian relations we can see that the Ukrainian people have repeatedly resisted domination by Russia, often leading to hostilities.
Ukraine-Soviet War: From 1917-1921 Ukraine fought what was considered to be an incursion into their territory by a military force of Bolsheviks after the October, 1917, revolution in Russia. The incursion was meant to prevent breakaway republics, as the February, 1917, Revolution in Russia resulted in many Tsarist territories seeking independence from Bolshevik rule. The Bolsheviks set up a provisional government, known as the Directorate of Ukraine, to counter a series of uprisings that took place in various parts of Ukraine. In 1918, as German forces were retreating near the end of World War I, they established the Hetman Government to counter the rise of Bolshevism. The Hetman government lasted for about nine months before it was overthrown by the Directorate of Ukraine. In 1919, the Red Army invaded Ukraine in full force. The fighting escalated as the Ukrainian National Army grew to about 100,000 in strength. The end came when the Red Army defeated the Ukrainian National Army in November, 1921, in a battle near Mali Mynky. However, it took the Red Army until 1923 to pacify the countryside as resistance continued.
Unification Act: In the midst of the fighting that took place at the onset of the Russian Revolution, The Central Council of Ukraine declared that the Ukrainian People’s Republic was an independent and sovereign state of the Ukrainian People. The first official act of the new government was to form a merger of the Ukrainian People’s Republic with West Ukrainian People’s Republic. The independence was largely symbolic as both divisions retained most of their autonomy including their armed forces. Ukraine was unable to fully gain independence as much of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic went to Poland and most of the Ukrainian People’s Republic became the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Holodomor: In 1929, Josef Stalin imposed collectivization in Ukraine by replacing individual farms with larger, state managed co-operatives. Many farmers that were subsistence level producers, resisted the collectivization effort by slaughtering their livestock, as collectivization would take away their land and therefore their livelihood. Those who resisted were declared to be enemies of the state. Many were driven off the land by authorities and/or were relocated to Gulags in Siberia.
In 1932, the aggregate of Ukrainian grain production fell short of their state assigned quota by sixty percent. The peasants who still farmed as a part of the co-operative had retained enough grain to survive, but those stores of grain were confiscated by authorities as a form of punishment for failing in aggregate to meet the state-imposed quota. The state further decided to punish the party members who did not fulfill new, tougher quotas. During this same period, Stalin had purged the schools and libraries of teachers, intellectuals, and books in the Ukrainian language. But owing to the grain shortfall, Stalin ordered that the Ukrainian language must not be used by local Ukrainian officials. Other cultural policies were likewise repressed. These attacks amounted to assaults on the traditional Ukrainian village—considered to be the backbone of Ukrainian culture.
The famine only worsened, driving people to leave their homes in search of food. But they often faced death or deportation to Russia by the secret police and the Soviet system of internal passports. As the crisis worsened, the policies and actions taken by the Soviet State in response became more and more punitive. The famine became known as “Holodomor” meaning in the Ukrainian language, to inflict death by starvation.
By 1933, about thirty-three percent of the peasantry that worked the collective farms remained on the land. The others had either left to find food or died of starvation. The Soviet state’s reaction was to relocate peasants from other areas of the Soviet Union to Ukraine to work the land. This was viewed as the state’s effort to suppress Ukrainian autonomy by pushing the people off the land and bringing in others to work it. Even as the starvation rate in Ukraine became massive, the Soviet government refused to acknowledge the famine or to provide relief, and even exported over a million tons of grain to western countries. All these actions led to a major amount of hatred and resentment towards the Soviet state, and provided solidarity to Ukrainian nationalism.
It has been estimated that about 3.5 million to 5 million Ukrainians died as a consequence of the famine. However, by including the entire period from 1931 to 1934, that number rises as high as 10 million. Historians agree that the entire crisis was made and driven by the Soviet state and was not significantly impacted by other causes. The maladies that arose as people were starving included cannibalism.
Chernobyl Disaster: On April 26, 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant at the town of Pripyat, Ukraine, caused a nuclear fallout that contaminated large areas of Northern Ukraine and also neighboring Belarus. The incident sparked an independence movement that led to the formation of first opposition party in Soviet Ukraine. The party was named the People’s Party of Ukraine or Rukh, and it helped to expedite the independence of Ukraine with the ensuing fall of the Soviet Union.
End of the Soviet Union: In 1990 on the 71st anniversary of the Unification Act, the largest public demonstration since the beginning of Glasnost occurred, as some 300,000 Ukrainians formed a human chain that linked the cities of Kyiv and Lviv, symbolically uniting East and West Ukraine. Ukraine officially became an independent sovereign nation on August 24, 1991, when the Supreme Soviet of the Ukraine adopted the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine. It was put to a vote of the Ukrainian populace and passed with a ninety percent popular vote. The vote encompassed majorities in every region including those with a predominance of Russian speaking peoples.
Conclusions: It should be no surprise in light of the previous 100 years of history of Ukrainian-Russian relations that Ukrainians would value their independence from Moscow and would fight for it whenever necessary.
Sources: history.com, How Joseph Stalin Starved Millions in the Ukrainian Famine, by Patrick J. Kiger, April 16, 2019.
Britannica.com/place/Ukraine/ Holodomor
Wikipedia.