{"id":38737,"date":"2022-06-16T13:23:35","date_gmt":"2022-06-16T11:23:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/?p=38737"},"modified":"2022-11-29T10:24:18","modified_gmt":"2022-11-29T09:24:18","slug":"the-identity-of-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/the-identity-of-ukraine\/","title":{"rendered":"The Identity Of Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ukraine does not have its own identity but has always been Russian. This narrative of Moscow caught on in the West. Now that the country’s sovereignty is under threat, it is all the more important to become aware of its identity. Current publications help with this.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

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Under the title \u2039L’Occident est bien plus influenc\u00e9 par l’imp\u00e9rialisme russe qu’il ne l’admet\u203a (\u2039The West is much more influenced by Russian imperialism than it admits\u203a), the French daily newspaper \u2039Le Monde\u203a published an interview with Mykola Riabchuk, head of research at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, on May 9, 2022. \u00abIn the foreign press and in the speeches of leading politicians, it is often heard that Ukraine is divided, which perfectly coincides with the claims of Russian propaganda,\u00bb says Riabchuk. \u00abThe West is much more influenced by Russian imperialism than it admits.\u00bb He adds that the West had no awareness of Ukraine’s existence before it gained its independence in 1991. Thus, \u2039Russian mythology\u203a, which is still widespread today, could \u00abpass as scientific truth on an international level\u00bb. In most textbooks from American and British universities for courses in Eastern European history, \u00abUkraine is portrayed as a \u2039natural\u203a part of Russia,\u00bb said Riabchuk, who looked at these textbooks. They were often written by Russian emigrants \u00aband served to train generations of regional experts and journalists.\u00bb At the end of the interview, Riabchuk contrasts this view with an outline of Ukraine’s history.<\/p>\n\n

From Polish Influence To Autonomy<\/h3>\n\n

Before Ukraine was annexed by Russia, it has been for a long time under Polish control. This was especially true during the Two Nations Republic (1569\u20131795), which consisted of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland. \u00abThis experience helped to anchor Ukraine in Europe in terms of political values,\u00bb Riabchuk said, as the Polish-Lithuanian state functioned on a much more open basis than Russia, \u00abwhere perfect despotism prevailed according to divine law.\u00bb. With the founding of the Cossack State in the 17th century, Ukraine experienced a phase of autonomy, Riabchuk said. \u00abThis moment is fundamental to the emergence of Ukrainian identity as it establishes a quest for freedom embodied by the figure of the Cossack as a freedom fighter \u2013 a popular theme in 19th-century romantic literature.\u00bb Historical sources show, how during this period, the Cossacks became carriers of Ukrainian independence, which was initially defined exclusively in contrast to everything Polish but in the course of the first half of the 17th century also laid the roots for an independently conceived Ukrainianism.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n

Only at the beginning of the 18th century, the Tsar and later Emperor of Russia, Peter the Great, transformed the then still so-called \u2039Muscovy\u203a into Russia, Riabchuk explains. However, the Russian Empire initially expanded to the east, towards the Pacific. \u00abAt that time, there was hardly any contact between Ukraine and Moscow.\u00bb Only at the end of the 18th century, Ukraine came completely under Russian control, and most of what constitutes Ukraine today lived under Russian rule. Their own language was banned and intellectuals were persecuted. Europe served as a symbolic point of reference \u00abto oppose Russian imperialism. Ukrainians began to say, \u2039We are not Russians, but Europeans.\u203a\u00bb Thus, during the spread of nationalism in Europe in the 19th century, Ukrainian identity was \u00abconsolidated\u00bb. Since this founding moment, the Ukrainian population has seen itself as a European nation. \u00abContrary to what you hear, there is no natural closeness between Russians and Ukrainians, but the national aspirations of Ukrainians have long been directed towards Europe,\u00bb says Mykola Riabchuk.<\/p>\n\n

Unequal Brothers<\/h3>\n\n

The Swiss historian Andreas Kappeler, a historian of Eastern Europe in Cologne and Vienna for a long time, comes to similar conclusions. In his 1994 book \u2039A Little History of Ukraine\u203a, he explains that Ukraine has centuries-old traditions of language and literature, statehood, and history that are clearly different from those of Russia. Kappeler’s research confirms Riabchuk’s statements in the time of a war that arose from a conception of history. As early as 2008, Vladimir Putin tried to convince US President George W. Bush that Ukraine was not a state at all. He justified the annexation of Crimea by saying that it had always been an inseparable part of Russia. Helmut Schmidt reflected Moscow’s claim to Crimea with the remark that among historians, it was controversial \u00abwhether there is a Ukrainian nation at all\u00bb. A misjudgment, according to Kappeler, who notes that the West regularly adopts \u00abthe Russian view, which has had the sovereignty of interpretation for two centuries.\u00bb In his 2017 book \u2039Unequal Brothers: Russians and Ukrainians\u203a, Kappeler writes about the differences and parallels between Russians and Ukrainians from the Middle Ages to the present day. He exposes Putin’s speech to justify the annexation of Crimea as a collection of historically \u00abfalse claims and distortions\u00bb and rather sees possible claims to Crimea among the Muslim Crimean Tatars.<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n

Freedom, Brotherhood, And Equality In Ukraine<\/h3>\n\n

Both Russians and Ukrainians see their national roots in Kievan Rus. This is questionable because from the 9th to the 13th century, Kievan Rus can be seen as a community of different principalities, originally founded by Scandinavian Vikings. Moscow, which was founded later, was not one of them. Kappeler points to the lack of temporal continuity: the Ukrainian and Russian populations developed very differently and were exposed to different influences: the Russians to that of the Mongols, the Moscow prince, and then the tsars, the Ukrainians as part of Poland-Lithuania with strong Cossack influence. \u00abIn Ukrainian historiography, the Cossacks played and continue to play a much greater role than in The Russian one,\u00bb writes Kappeler in his book \u2039The Cossacks\u203a, referring to the hetmanate founded on Ukrainian soil in 1648. \u00abUkrainian historiography is more uniform than Russian: it focuses on the Ukrainian Cossacks as the most important carriers of an early modern Ukrainian nation.\u00bb<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n

In Moscow, autocratic forms of government and distance from Europe’s social awakening prevailed. In contrast, in today’s Ukraine, there was a lot of sympathy for the ideals of the French Revolution and its democratic attempts. Even if this political culture of Europe may not have yet materialized in Ukraine, according to Kappeler, it is \u00abthe most important Ukrainian national myth\u00bb that was revealed in the demonstrations on the Kyiv Maidan of 2013\/14 against President Viktor Yanukovych. Surely he would add today: and the resistance to Putin’s war as a representative of the great power Russia, which bases its attack on Ukraine on a conception of history that denies Ukraine as a state and culture.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n

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Image<\/strong> Painting by Mykola Ivasiuk, Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s entry into Kyiv in 1649,<\/em> End of the 19th century, Ukrainian National Museum – Translation: Monika Werner<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ukraine does not have its own identity but has always been Russian. This narrative of Moscow caught on in the West. Now that the country’s sovereignty is under threat, it is all the more important to become aware of its identity. Current publications help with this. Under the title \u2039L’Occident est bien plus influenc\u00e9 par l’imp\u00e9rialisme russe qu’il ne l’admet\u203a (\u2039The West is much more influenced by Russian imperialism than it admits\u203a), the French daily newspaper \u2039Le Monde\u203a published an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9345,"featured_media":38397,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8846,9204],"tags":[10403,8824],"class_list":["post-38737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-ukraine-en","tag-2022-21-en","tag-spotlights"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9345"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}