The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch (1836–1895), journalist, writer, and author of romantic stories about Galicia

  Mykola Lysenko (1842–1912), composer and founder of the Ukrainian national school in music

  Ilia Repin (1844–1930), realist painter best known for his epic painting Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (1891)

  Sholem Aleichem (Solomon Rabinovich) (1859–1916), leading Yiddish writer best known for his stories about Tevye the Dairyman, which served as a basis for the musical Fiddler on the Roof

  Olha Kobylianska (1863–1942), modernist writer and early feminist

  Heorhii Narbut (1886–1920), graphic artist, a founder of the Ukrainian Academy of Fine Arts (1917), and designer of the Ukrainian coat of arms (1918)

  Figures of the Ukrainian Revolution (1917–1921)

  Yevhen Petrushevych (1863–1940), lawyer, political activist, and head of the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic (1918–1919)

  Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866–1934), prominent historian and president of the Central Rada, the Ukrainian revolutionary parliament (1917–1918)

  Pavlo Skoropadsky (1873–1945), descendant of a prominent Cossack family, imperial officer, and hetman of Ukraine in 1918

  Symon Petliura (1879–1926), journalist, political activist, secretary of military affairs of the Central Rada, and head of the Directory of the Ukrainian People’s Republic

  Volodymyr Vynnychenko (1880–1951), best-selling writer and head of Ukrainian governments from 1917 to 1919

  Nestor Makhno (1888–1934), anarchist revolutionary and commander of a peasant army in southern Ukraine (1918–1921)

  Isaac Babel (1894–1940), journalist, writer, and author of Red Cavalry (1926)

  Yurii Kotsiubynsky (1896–1937), son of the Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Bolshevik, and commander of the Red Army in Ukraine in 1918

  Figures of the Cultural Renaissance (1921–1933)

  Mykola Skrypnyk (1872–1933), communist official and promoter of Ukrainization who committed suicide in the wake of the Great Famine

  Pavlo Tychyna (1891–1967), leading poet whose work evolved from symbolism to socialist realism

  Mykola Khvyliovy (Nikolai Fitilev) (1893–1933), leading communist writer and founder of Ukrainian proletarian literature who committed suicide in the wake of the Great Famine

  Oleksandr Dovzhenko (1894–1956), screenwriter, director, and pioneer of Soviet film montage

  Dziga Vertov (David Kaufman) (1896–1954), pioneer documentary filmmaker whose best works, including The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), were produced in Ukraine

  World War II Heroes and Villains (1939–1945)

  Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky (Roman Aleksander Maria Szeptycki) (1865–1944), head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (1901–1944) and leading figure in Galician society

  Sydir Kovpak (1887–1967), Soviet partisan commander

  Mykhailo Kyrponos (1892–1941), Red Army general and commander of the defense of Kyiv in 1941

  Erich Koch (1896–1986), Nazi Gauleiter of East Prussia (1928–1945) and Reichskommissar of Ukraine (1941–1943)

  Nikolai Vatutin (1901–1944), general and commander of the Red Army’s First Ukrainian Front

  Otto von Wächter (1901–1949), Nazi governor of the District of Galicia

  Roman Shukhevych (1907–1950), a leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and commander in chief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (1943–1950)

  Stepan Bandera (1909–1959), leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its chapters in western Europe and North America (1933–1959)

  Communist Leaders of Ukraine (1938–1990)

  Nikita Khrushchev (1938–1949)

  Lazar Kaganovich (1925–1928, 1947)

  Leonid Melnikov (1949–1953)

  Oleksii Kyrychenko (1953–1957)

  Mykola Pidhorny (1957–1963)

  Petro Shelest (1963–1972)

  Volodymyr Shcherbytsky (1972–1989)

  Volodymyr Ivashko (1989–1990)

  Leaders of the Dissident Movement (1960s–1980s)

  Levko Lukianenko (b. 1927), lawyer and political activist who spent more than twenty-five years in prison and internal exile, author of the Declaration of Ukrainian Independence (1991)

  Georgii Vins (1928–1998), Baptist pastor and religious activist twice arrested and sentenced by Soviet courts before being expelled from the USSR in 1979

  Viacheslav Chornovil (1937–1999), journalist, chronicler of Ukrainian dissent in the 1960s, and inmate of Soviet prisons and concentration camps

  Mustafa Dzhemilev (b. 1943), leader of the Crimean Tatar national movement who was arrested six times and spent years in Soviet labor camps and internal exile

  Semen Gluzman (b. 1946), psychiatrist and human rights activist sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for exposing Soviet use of psychiatry against political dissidents

  Presidents of Ukraine (1991–2015)

  Leonid Kravchuk (1991–1994)

  Leonid Kuchma (1994–2005)

  Viktor Yushchenko (2005–2010)

  Viktor Yanukovych (2010–2014)

  Petro Poroshenko (2014–)

  Glossary

  Central Rada—Central Council; Ukrainian revolutionary parliament in 1917 and 1918

  chaiky—Cossack longboats

  Directory—revolutionary government of Ukraine in 1919 and 1920

  dumas—Ukrainian folk songs

  Gubernia—province of the Russian Empire

  Haidamaky—brigands; participants in popular uprisings in eighteenth-century Right-Bank Ukraine

  hetman—Cossack commander (from the German Hauptmann)

  Hetmanate—Cossack state from 1649 to 1764 and again in 1918

  kurhany—burial mounds

  Kurkul’ (Russian: kulak)—elastic Soviet term for a well-to-do peasant in the 1920s and 1930s

  Maidan—square or plaza; shorthand for Independence Square in downtown Kyiv and the revolutionary events there in 2004 and in 2013 and 2014

  oblast—province of Soviet or post-Soviet Ukraine

  otaman—Cossack official

  Raskol’niki—members of the Old Belief church

  Samvydav—self-published dissident literature in Soviet Ukraine

  voevoda—Rus’ and Muscovite military commander

  yarlyk—permit for conditional right to rule a principality, issued by Mongol khans

  Zaporozhians—Cossacks who established their headquarters beyond the Dnieper rapids in the sixteenth century

  Further Reading

  Introduction: General Histories of Ukraine

  Dmytro Doroshenko, A Survey of Ukrainian History, with introduction by O. Gerus, upd. ed. (Winnipeg, 1975); Mykhailo Hrushevsky, A History of the Ukraine (New Haven, CT, 1940; Hamden, CT, 1970); idem, History of Ukraine-Rus’, vols. 1, 6–10 (Edmonton and Toronto, 1997–2014); Ivan Katchanovski et al., Historical Dictionary of Ukraine, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD, 2013); Paul Kubicek, The History of Ukraine (Westport, CT, 2008); Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine, 2nd ed. (Toronto, 2010); idem, Ukraine: An Illustrated History (Toronto, 2007); Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine (London, 1997); Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History, 4th ed. (Toronto, 2009); Roman Szporluk, Ukraine: A Brief History, 2nd ed. (Detroit, MI, 1982); Andrew Wilson, The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT, 2009); Serhy Yekelchyk, Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation (New York, 2007).

  I. On the Pontic Frontier

  Paul M. Barford, The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe (Ithaca, NY, 2001); David Braund, ed., Scythians and Greeks: Cultural Interactions in Scythia, Athens and the Early Roman Empire (Exeter, UK, 2005); Martin Dimnik, Mikhail, Prince of Chernigov and Grand Prince of Kiev, 1224–1246 (Toronto, 1981); idem, The Dynasty of Chernigov,
1146–1246 (Cambridge, 2003); Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus’, 750–1200 (London, 1996); Edward L. Keenan, Josef Dobrovský and the Origins of the Igor’ Tale (Cambridge, MA, 2003); Jukka Korpela, Prince, Saint and Apostle: Prince Vladimir Svjatoslavic of Kiev (Wiesbaden, 2001); Omeljan Pritsak, The Origin of Rus’, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA, 1981); Christian Raffensperger, Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ in the Medieval World (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Renate Rolle, The World of the Scythians (London, 1989).

  II. East Meets West

  Ludmilla Charipova, Latin Books and the Eastern Orthodox Clerical Elite in Kiev, 1632–1780 (Manchester, UK, 2006); Brian L. Davies, Warfare, State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500–1700 (London and New York, 2007); Linda Gordon, Cossack Rebellions: Social Turmoil in the Sixteenth-Century Ukraine (Albany, NY, 1983); Borys A. Gudziak, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Cambridge, MA, 1998); David A. Frick, Meletij Smotryc’kyj (Cambridge, MA, 1995); Iaroslav Isaievych, Voluntary Brotherhood: Confraternities of Laymen in Early Modern Ukraine (Edmonton and Toronto, 2006); The Kiev Mohyla Academy. Special issue of Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 8, no. 1–2 (June 1984); Paulina Lewin, Ukrainian Drama and Theater in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Edmonton, 2008); Jaroslaw Pelenski, The Contest for the Legacy of Kievan Rus’ (Boulder, CO, and New York, 1998); Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford, 2001); idem, The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus (Cambridge, UK, 2006); Ihor Ševčenko, Ukraine Between East and West: Essays on Cultural History to the Early Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed. (Edmonton and Toronto, 2009); Frank E. Sysyn, Between Poland and the Ukraine: The Dilemma of Adam Kysil, 1600–1653 (Cambridge, MA, 1985).

  III. Between the Empires

  Daniel Beauvois, The Noble, the Serf, and the Revizor: The Polish Nobility Between Tsarist Imperialism and the Ukrainian Masses, 1831–1863 (New York, 1992); Serhiy Bilenky, Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford, CA, 2012); idem, ed., Fashioning Modern Ukraine: Selected Writings of Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, and Mykhailo Drahomanov (Edmonton and Toronto, 2014); Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, Feminists Despite Themselves: Women in Ukrainian Community Life, 1894–1939 (Edmonton, 1988); Alan W. Fisher, The Russian Annexation of the Crimea, 1772–1783 (Cambridge, UK, 1970); Alison Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Leonard G. Friesen, Rural Revolutions in Southern Ukraine: Peasants, Nobles, and Colonists, 1774–1905 (Cambridge, MA, 2008); George G. Grabowicz, The Poet as Mythmaker: A Study of Symbolic Meaning in Taras Ševčenko (Cambridge, MA, 1982); Patricia Herlihy, Odesa: A History, 1794–1914 (Cambridge, MA, 1986); Faith Hillis, Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2013); John-Paul Himka, Socialism in Galicia: The Emergence of Polish Social Democracy and Ukrainian Radicalism, 1860–1890 (Cambridge, MA, 1983); idem, Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1988); idem, Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine: The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900 (Montreal and Kingston, ON, 1999); Zenon E. Kohut, Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy: Imperial Absorption of the Hetmanate, 1760s–1830s (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Natan M. Meir, Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859–1914 (Bloomington, IN, 2010); Alexei Miller, The Ukrainian Question: Russian Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Budapest and New York, 2003); Serhii Plokhy, Tsars and Cossacks: A Study in Historiography (Cambridge, MA, 2003); idem, The Cossack Myth: History and Nationhood in the Age of Empires (Cambridge, 2012); idem, ed., Poltava 1709: The Battle and the Myth (Cambridge, MA, 2013); Thomas Prymak, Mykola Kostomarov: A Biography (Toronto, 1996); Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History (Edmonton, 1987); David Saunders, The Ukrainian Impact on Russian Culture, 1750–1850 (Edmonton, 1985); Orest Subtelny, The Mazepists: Ukrainian Separatism in the Early Eighteenth Century (Boulder, CO, and New York, 1981); Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2004); Stephen Velychenko, National History as Cultural Process: A Survey of the Interpretations of Ukraine’s Past in Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian Historical Writing from the Earliest Times to 1914 (Edmonton, 1992); Larry Wolff, The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (Stanford, CA, 2010); Charters Wynn, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870–1905 (Princeton, NJ, 1992); Andriy Zayarnyuk, Framing the Ukrainian Peasantry in Habsburg Galicia, 1846–1914 (Edmonton, 2013); Sergei I. Zhuk, Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917 (Washington, DC, Baltimore, and London, 2004); Steven J. Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881 (Stanford, CA, 1985).

  IV. The Wars of the World

  Henry Abramson, A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1999); John A. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 3rd ed. (Englewood, CO, 1990); Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA, 2004); Bohdan Bociurkiw, The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State, 1939–1950 (Edmonton, 1996); Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2004); Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York, 1987); Theodore H. Friedgut, Yuzovka and Revolution: Life and Work: Politics and Revolution in Russia’s Donbass, 1869–1924, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ, 1989–1994); Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917–1933 (Cambridge, MA, 1996); Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, exp. ed. (Princeton, NJ, 2002); Mark von Hagen, War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914–1918 (Seattle, WA, 2007); Halyna Hryn, ed., Hunger by Design: The Great Ukrainian Famine and Its Soviet Context (Cambridge, MA, 2008); Bohdan Klid and Alexander J. Motyl, eds., The Holodomor Reader: A Sourcebook on the Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine (Edmonton, 2012); Bohdan Krawchenko, Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine (London, 1985); Andrii Krawchuk, Christian Social Ethics in Ukraine: The Legacy of Andrei Sheptytsky (Edmonton, 1997); Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s–1990s (Cambridge, 1998); idem, Conscience on Trial: The Fate of Fourteen Pacifists in Stalin’s Ukraine, 1952–1953 (Toronto, 2012); George Liber, Alexander Dovzhenko: A Life in Soviet Film (London, 2002); Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005); James E. Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918–1933 (Cambridge, MA, 1983); Paul Robert Magocsi, The Shaping of a National Identity: Subcarpathian Rus’, 1848–1948 (Cambridge, MA, 1978); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2001); Alexander J. Motyl, The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919–1929 (Boulder, CO, and New York, 1980); Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew (New Haven, CT, 2009); idem, The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe (Princeton, NJ, 2014); Serhii Plokhy, Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History (Toronto, 2005); idem, Yalta: The Price of Peace (New York, 2010); Anna Procyk, Russian Nationalism and Ukraine: The Nationality Policy of the Volunteer Army During the Civil War (Edmonton, 1995); Thomas Prymak, Mykhailo Hrushevsky: The Politics of National Culture (Toronto, 1987); George Y. Shevelov, The Ukrainian Language in the First Half of the Twentieth Century, 1900–1941: Its State and Status (Cambridge, MA, 1989); Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Bel
arus, 1569–1999 (New Haven, CT, 2003); idem, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York, 2010); Stephen Velychenko, State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine: A Comparative Study of Governments and Bureaucrats, 1917–1922 (Toronto, 2011); Serhy Yekelchyk, Stalin’s Empire of Memory: Russian-Ukrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical Imagination (Toronto, 2004); idem, Stalin’s Citizens: Everyday Politics in the Wake of Total War (New York, 2014).

  V. The Road to Independence

  Anne Applebaum, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe (New York, 1994); Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton, NJ, 2007); Yaroslav Bilinsky, The Second Soviet Republic: The Ukraine After World War II (New Brunswick, NJ, 1964); Marta Dyczok, The Grand Alliance and Ukrainian Refugees (New York, 2000); idem, Ukraine: Movement Without Change, Change Without Movement (New York, 2000); Andrea Graziosi, Lubomyr A. Hajda, and Halyna Hryn, eds., After the Holodomor: The Enduring Impact of the Great Famine on Ukraine (Cambridge, MA, 2013); Bohdan Harasymiw, Post-Communist Ukraine (Edmonton and Toronto, 2002); Askold Krushelnycky, An Orange Revolution: A Personal Journey Through Ukrainian History (London, 2006); Taras Kuzio, Ukraine: State and Nation Building (London and New York, 1998); Borys Lewytzkyj, Politics and Society in Soviet Ukraine, 1953–1980 (Edmonton, 1984); Paul Robert Magocsi, This Blessed Land: Crimea and the Crimean Tatars (Toronto, 2014); David Marples, The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster (New York, 1988); idem, Ukraine Under Perestroika (Edmonton, 1991); idem, Stalinism in Ukraine in the 1940s (Edmonton, 1992); idem, Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine (Budapest, 2007); Kostiantyn P. Morozov, Above and Beyond: From Soviet General to Ukrainian State Builder (Cambridge, MA, 2001); Alexander J. Motyl, Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine After Totalitarianism (New York, 1993); Olga Onuch, Mapping Mass Mobilization: Understanding Revolutionary Moments in Argentina and Ukraine (New York, 2014); Serhii Plokhy, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (New York, 2014); William J. Risch, The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv (Cambridge, MA, 2011); Gwendolyn Sasse, The Crimea Question: Identity, Transition, and Conflict (Cambridge, MA, 2014); Roman Szporluk, Russia, Ukraine, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA, 2000); Catherine Wanner, Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (University Park, PA, 1998); idem, Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism (Ithaca, NY, and London, 2007); Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 2001); Andrew Wilson, Ukrainian Nationalism in the 1990s: A Minority Faith (Cambridge, 1997); idem, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (New Haven, CT, and London, 2005); Kataryna Wolczuk, The Moulding of Ukraine: The Constitutional Politics of State Formation (Budapest, 2001); Sergei Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 (Washington, DC, Baltimore, and London, 2010).