The 20th-Century History Behind Russia's Invasion of Ukraine
History | March 4, 2022
The 20th-Century History Behind Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
During WWII, Ukrainian nationalists saw the Nazis as liberators from Soviet oppression. Now, Russia is using that chapter to paint Ukraine as a Nazi nation
Katya Cengel
snip//
In an essay published on the Kremlin’s website in Russian, Ukrainian and English last July, Putin credited Soviet leaders with inventing a Ukrainian republic within the Soviet Union in 1922, forging a fictitious state unworthy of sovereignty out of historically Russian territory. After Ukraine declared its independence in 1991, the president argued, Ukrainian leaders “began to mythologize and rewrite history, edit out everything that united [Russia and Ukraine], and refer to the period when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as an occupation.”
The “historical reality” of modern-day Ukraine is more complex than Putin’s version of events, encompassing “a thousand-year history of changing religions, borders and peoples,” according to the New York Times. “[M]any conquests by warring factions and Ukraine’s diverse geography ... created a complex fabric of multiethnic states.”
snip//
In Putin’s telling, the modern Ukrainian independence movement began not in 1917 but during World War II. Under the German occupation of Ukraine, between 1941 and 1944, some Ukrainian independence fighters aligned themselves with the Nazis, whom they viewed as saviors from Soviet oppression. Putin has drawn on this period in history to portray any Ukrainian push for sovereignty as a Nazi endeavor, says Markian Dobczansky, a historian at Harvard University’s Ukrainian Research Institute. “It’s really just a stunningly cynical attempt to fight an information war and influence people's opinions,” he adds.
Dobczansky is among a group of scholars who have publicly challenged Putin’s version of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine and the years of Soviet rule it’s sandwiched between. Almost all of these experts begin their accounts with the fall of the Russian Empire, when tens of thousands of Ukrainians fought against the Bolshevik Red Army to establish the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Ukrainians continued to fight for independence until 1922, when they were defeated by the Soviets and became the Ukrainian Soviet Republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). By leaving out Ukraine’s short-lived but hard-fought period of independence in the early 20th century, Putin overlooks the country’s sovereignty, says Dobczansky.
Also omitted from this version of events are the genocide and suppression that took place under Soviet rule—most famously the Great Famine. Holodomor, which fuses the Ukrainian words for starvation and inflicting death, claimed the lives of around 3.9 million people, or approximately 13 percent of the Ukrainian population, in the early 1930s. A human-made famine, it was the direct result of Soviet policies aimed at punishing Ukrainian farmers who fought Soviet mandates to collectivize. The Soviets also waged an intense “Russification” campaign, persecuting Ukraine’s cultural elite and elevating Russian language and culture above all others.
more...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-20th-century-history-behind-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-180979672/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
= new reply since forum marked as read
Nor were they one group of people.
Some allied themselves with the Germans early on, fighting the Red Army. They pogromed Jews and *Poles*. (The Polish bodies are usually overlooked. The Ukrainians remembered Polish imperialism in the Podol.) Think of them as "KKK Ukrainians."
Other Ukrainians just wanted to independence. They weren't into pogroms and Pole-bashing because Jews and Poles posed no threat to their "get the hell off my lawn" thinking. But the Red Army? Sure. Imperialist oppressors. And Holodomor sponsors.
When the Nazis actually controlled the territory, some Ukrainians "sieg heiled". But most of the "resistance" Ukrainians fought the Nazis like they fought the USSRites. For that latter group, the Germans had been the lesser evil fighting those who imposed famine on their land. Then when the new masters were much like the old masters in their oppression and dictatoriality, the Ukrainians turned and tried to kill them, too. (And when the Red Army pushed the Germans out later in the war, it was like old times--the Red Army found a partisan action they could label 'pro-Nazi' but which was just more "get the hell off my lawn!"
That's a 2x2 split: Nationalism versus oppression, pro-Nazi v "get off my lawn!"
Society is complicated.
One problem in the OP is straightforward: Shevchenko and Ukr nationalism started before 1917. There's a reason Ukrainian (language) was suppressed in the mid-late 1800s. The early 1800s saw a period of nationalism in Europe--it ultimately led to Greek independence and the Greek genocide in Turkey. It led to the Italian state forming. The unification of Germany. Edvard Grieg in music. Yes, ultimately to national socialism in the late 1890s and to Serbian desires for independence. Poems of Ossian, Kralodvorsky rukopis in Bohemia, possibly the Lay of Igor's Host (Slovo o p"lky Igoreve) in Russian, depending on how you judge that thing's authenticity. Not saying it was always good ("identity movements" often have a dark side), but the Ukrainian version certainly didn't start in 1917. Might be easier to present to a lay audience, I guess.