The Ukrainian race is as nearly autochthonous as any in central or eastern Europe. A brief survey of history shows that, for more than one thousand years, the Ukrainians and their forbears have continued to occupy approximately the same lands which they now inhabit, except for temporary recessions and re-colonizations caused by Mongol invasions. In the ninth century they were already settled in the vast and fertile plains and woodlands lying between the Carpathian Mountains and the Sea of Azov, and embracing the valleys of the Dniester, Pruth, Boh, Dnieper and Donetz.
Organized government in Ukraine began with the ancient state of Kiev. The ascendancy of Kiev also marks the period of Ukraine's greatest political expansion. From the ninth to the thirteenth century, Kiev was the center of the economic, intellectual and political life of eastern Europe, uniting the entire ethnographic Ukrainian territories. The name by which this state was known was "Russ," taken from the name of the reigning dynasty. This term was later appropriated by the Great Russians. "Because of the Byzantine commerce, learning and craft," observes the Polish historian Zakrzewski, "Kiev, the 'mother of Russ cities,' was for the Poland of the eleventh and twelfth centuries what Rome had been for earlier Germans." The French geographer Reclus notices that academies flourished at Kiev and Ostrog before the Great Russians owned a single high school, and draws attention to the fact that Russia, during the regenerative period of Peter the Great, received her teachers from Ukraine.
The fall of Kiev and Ukraine's subsequent loss of autonomous statehood in the fourteenth century can only be ascribed to the old system of military conquest. The affairs of eastern Ukraine became confused and decadent through the constant Mongol pressure which began in the thirteenth century. One hundred years later, part of western Ukraine also, weakened by frequent Tatar invasions, fell a prey to Poland, to whom she was a tempting prize because of her rich soil.
The Polish conquest of Ukraine started in 1340 and, after thirty-five years of the bitterest warfare, the Poles succeeded in annexing an area of land approximately coextensive with the present provinces of Kholm and Eastern Galicia. This they never succeeded in assimilating, in spite of the most tremendous efforts. Simultaneously Volhynia and other northern Ukrainian territories became confederated with Lithuania in order to gain protection against the Tatars. The marriage of the Lithuanian king to the Queen of Poland and the union of the two realms drew these Ukrainian lands also in 1386 into an informal union with the Polish empire which, in 1569, in spite of Ukrainian protests, was made definite, and lasted until 1648.
In that year the whole Ukrainian people rose, under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnitsky, and put an end to this union, which was incompatible with their interests and with their type of civilization. Then, anticipating further Polish efforts to destroy the newly won independence of Ukraine, and menaced by other foes, particularly the Turks, then the strongest military power in eastern Europe, the Ukrainians concluded an agreement of confederation with the Czar of Muscovy in 1654. It is interesting to recall that Khmelnitsky was expressly advised against this step by Oliver Cromwell, who declared that the Czar would never permanently recognize a free people.
The most important clauses in the treaty of 1654 guaranteed a freely chosen supreme head for the Ukrainian state, called a "hetman"; the right to engage in diplomatic relations with other states, except Poland and Turkey, when the cognizance of the Czar was necessary; free trade with all foreign nations; the complete independence of the judicial system; the right to choose a leader for the army, over whom the "hetman" had supreme control; and, lastly, the independence of the Ukrainian Church.
Muscovy did not live up to these terms, and the result was a succession of Ukrainian uprisings, directed now against Russia just as they had formerly been aimed at Poland. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, Russia and Poland made common cause and partitioned Ukraine, making the Dnieper the frontier between their two empires. The most important rebellion against this last measure was that led by Mazeppa in 1709, which was quelled by Peter the Great. After the time of Mazeppa, Russia's policy of repression was pursued openly and ruthlessly. Peter instituted a supervision over the autonomous Ukrainian administration, vesting authority in Muscovite officers, through whose hands passed everything pertaining to the hetman's chancellery. In 1722 the power of the hetmans was cut down to nothing. In 1764 Catherine II. abolished the office altogether.
Meanwhile, in order to assure possession of Ukraine, the Russian government was making every effort to assimilate the Ukrainian people. One step toward accomplishing this was the suppression of Ukrainian literature. In 1720 a special censorship over the publication of Ukrainian books was established in Kiev. In 1769 even the printing of Ukrainian primers was forbidden, and Russian text-books were introduced in spite of the protests of Ukrainian educators.
Step by step, national feeling was stifled in Ukraine. In 1775, the "Zaporogian Sitch," the last bulwark of Ukraine's autonomy, and the basis of the Ukrainian Army, was destroyed. In 1783 the peasants of Ukraine, free since 1648, when they had thrown off Polish domination, were again subjected by the Russian government to serfdom in its most cruel form. Hundreds of thousands of free peasants and Cossacks, together with millions of acres of Ukrainian land, were distributed among the favorites of Catherine II.
This measure had the effect of crushing the resistance to Russification among the Ukrainian nobility, and estranged them from the common people. The serfdom of the small farmer was so profitable for the gentry that the preponderance of the aristocracy became superficially Russian. Under pressure of Russian schooling, administration and military service, they adopted the Russian language and political ideas. To achieve this desirable result, the Muscovite government did not hesitate to persecute ruthlessly anything that could be held as a reminder of the republican régime in Ukraine. At the same time, an analogous Polonization of the upper classes was being carried out in western Ukraine. The last quarter of the century witnessed a temporary eclipse of the Ukrainian spirit of nationalism.