If it is possible to describe the entire history of a country in one word, then for Ukraine it would be a history of resistance. In any case, it is the theme that modern Ukrainians choose as the dominant motive in their narrative of their own past. This motif serves as a common denominator, designed to bring together a history full of ruptures and steep turns.
When modern nations were starting to emerge in Europe, ethnic Ukrainians found themselves divided between two empires – the Russian and Austro-Hungarian. The architects of the Russian national project tried to incorporate 30 million Ukrainian peasants into what was to become the Russian nation and just as modern Russia does, denied the existence of Ukrainians as a separate people. But while nations are indeed imagined communities, the national imagination is not boundless. Ukrainian lands have had a long, albeit fragmented, history of statehood, which Ukrainians could use as a historical anchor for their own national project. Moreover the obvious linguistic and cultural differences between Ukrainians and Russians hardly could be overcome. When both empires collapsed, unable to bear the burden of the World War I, Ukrainians suddenly appeared on the political map of Europe as one of the largest stateless nations. Even more surprising was the fact, as the Historian Y. Hrytsak put it, that Ukrainians of the Russian and Austrian empires were emerging as a unified nation.
As historian A. Graziosi noted, the Ukrainians‘ struggle for independence then took the form of a national movement with a strong social component. It was one of the first manifestations of a phenomenon that would destroy the world colonial system in the future. The attempt by Ukrainians to create their own independent state failed, but the scope of the Ukrainian national movement forced the Bolsheviks, who had won the Russian Civil War, to reckon with the fact of the existence of the Ukrainian nation. In the Soviet Union, proclaimed in 1922, the Ukrainians were granted a formal statehood – the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic. Its political sovereignty was a fiction, but the Ukrainian language became the language of education for the first time and many Ukrainians joined the ranks of the Soviet ruling class.
This version of a Ukrainian nation, a nation with a more complete social structure, could potentially constitute a threat to the unity of the Soviet empire. It was the fear that the resistance of the Ukrainian peasants to collectivization, which was far more stubborn than anywhere else in the USSR, and the distrust of the loyalty of the Ukrainian party elites that prompted Stalin to decide to use the terror of famine against Ukraine. The victims of this terror were not only at least 4 million Ukrainian peasants. At the same time, tens of thousands of Ukrainian party and state officials and cultural figures were jailed or shot.
The famine of 1932-33, called in Ukraine Holodomor not only devastated but also demoralized Ukrainians. When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Ukrainians were mostly passive. They were not eager to defend Soviet rule, and many met the Nazi occupation, if not with hope, then neutrally. At the same time, uprisings in the Soviet rear at the beginning of the war occurred only in the western part of Ukraine, which had been part of Poland between the world wars and had not experienced the Holodomor.
The uprisings were led by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). It was a radical nationalist underground organization with antidemocratic ideology and terrorist tactics. In the first half of 1941, the OUN actively cooperated with German military intelligence, hoping to overthrow Soviet power and build a Ukrainian state with German help. Trying to seize administrative power in the regions of Ukraine occupied by German troops, Ukrainian nationalists initiated killing people they blamed for the crimes of Soviet power. The victims of this violence included several thousand people, mostly Jews, to whom special adherence to Soviet power was attributed. The OUN is also responsible for the murders of tens of thousands of Poles who fell victim of ethnic cleansing in course of mutual Polish-Ukrainian violence during the war. The victims of the Nationalists were also many Jews who had survived in hiding the Nazi genocide. In dealing with the Germans, who quickly rejected the idea of a Ukrainian state and already in the second half of 1941 moved to mass repression against Ukrainian nationalists, most of the Organization moved first to neutrality and early in 1943, to armed resistance.
After the return of Soviet power, the OUN and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, created by it, continued the organised armed struggle against the Soviet regime until the early 1950s. This struggle ended in defeat. But even in Soviet camps, where thousands of Ukrainian nationalists were imprisoned, they did not stop the resistance. It was the uprisings organized by Ukrainians – men and women after Stalin’s death in 1953 that were one of the main factors prompting the new Soviet leadership to abolish the Gulag – the system of the penal and forced-labor camps that was used as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. This resistance of the OUN to the Soviet regime will be the basis of their heroic myth, which is becoming increasingly popular in contemporary Ukraine against the background of Russian aggression.
After World War II, the ethnic map of Ukraine became obviously poorer. Jews, who had been an important part of the country’s culture for thousands of years, were largely exterminated by Nazi genocide. Poles who survived ethnic cleansing during the war were deported by the Soviets, so were Germans and Bulgarians. In 1944, Crimean Tatars were deported from Crimea to Central Asia. Up to half of those deported did not survive the resettlement process. Instead, the number of Russians grew in Ukraine, to a large extent due to the assimilation of ethnic Ukrainians. Although Ukrainians, like other nationalities with the exception of Jews, were not openly discriminated against in the USSR, their subordinate position in comparison to Russians was always felt.
Ukraine’s declaration of independence in 1991, made possible to a large extent by the weakening and disorientation of the government in Moscow, put an end to the existence of the Soviet empire. The Ukrainian national project then looked rather amorphous. Radical Ukrainian nationalism was, and still is, far from dominating the political spectrum of the newly created state. The pronounced regional differences and religious diversity (in Ukraine since the early 1990s there have been three Christian churches of roughly equal influence) on the one hand made it difficult to build an effective state, but on the other forced the elites to compromise, to balance interests, to seek unifying ideas. The need to seek support from the United States and the EU to balance the influence of Russia, which never came to terms with Ukraine’s sovereignty, also significantly curbed the anti-democratic tendencies that are characteristic for most states formed on the ruins of the Soviet Union. Throughout the years of independence, Ukraine has had free elections, real change of power and freedom of speech. The Ukrainian state, unlike some other post-Soviet countries, rejected the practice of administrative fixation of ethnicity and ensured equal political rights for all residents of this country.
In terms of ideology, nation-building in Ukraine during the period of independence balanced between a certain image of the future, embodied by the idea of European integration, and the „lessons of history“. In this sense, the memory of the Holodomor played a key role. This tragedy, the memories of which existed in one way or another in almost every Ukrainian family, together with very recent memories of the Chernobyl disaster, also perceived as one of the crimes of the imperial center, became the most powerful pillars of the idea of political independence as a guarantee of their prevention in the future. These memories have become the Ukrainian „never again“, largely determining today’s resistance of Ukrainians to the Russian aggression.
In these conditions in Ukraine over the past 30 years not only a strong civil society has been able to form – during this period Ukraine has experienced two successful democratic revolutions, which demonstrated the enormous potential of civil self-organization of Ukrainians. During this time Ukraine has also formed a fairly unique community of people who are united simultaneously by patriotism, fervent commitment to the idea of national independence, and support for the values of an open society. Moreover, the growing support for democratic freedoms, gender equality, and minority rights goes hand in hand with patriotic mobilization. According to one recent poll, the number of people who support LGBT equality has doubled in the past six years, from 33 percent to 64 percent. Moreover, the highest level of tolerance for differences is demonstrated by young people, a category that also has the highest level of support for national independence. That are mostly these people, who now defend the Ukrainian state with weapons in their hands.