Overview
The territory of what is the modern country of Ukraine has been controlled politically by a number of state entities. Much of the territory was controlled by Rus' principalities in the Middle Ages. Rus' dominion faded during the Mongol invasions of the 13th century. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland conquered portions of modern-day Ukraine in the 14th century. The establishment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569 led to large portions of Ukraine being subsumed under the Commonwealth's control. A Cossack state, commonly known as the Cossack Hetmanate or Zaporizhian Host, under Russian protection was established in 1648 and persisted until 1764. The Partitions of Poland led territories of modern Ukraine to fall under the control of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Russian Empire. Conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire led to the incorporation of Crimea into Russia under the rule of Catherine the Great (1762-1796).
Do give a sense of fluctuations in rule over the territories that would become the modern state of Ukraine, major modern Ukrainian cities fell under the control of a variety of historical state actors. Kyiv served as the capital of the Kieven Rus', fell under the control of the Mongol Golden Horde, became a part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, was incorporated into the Kingdom of Poland, came under the control of the Cossack Hetmanate, and was absorbed into the Russian Empire. Lviv was part of the Halych-Volyn Principality in the 13th century, came under Polish rule in the 14th century, was incorporated into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and came under the control of the Habsburg Monarchy during the Polish Partitions. The region where Odessa would eventually emerge was ruled during the middle ages by the Mongol Golden Horde, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Ottoman Empire, successively. Following the Russo-Turkish War of 1787-1792, the region fell under the control of the Russian Empire led by Catherine the Great, and the modern port city of Odessa was established in 1795.
For further information on Ukrainian history prior to the Great War, navigate to the section on "History of Ukraine," beginning on page 161 and ending on page 180, from:
Kubijovyč, Volodymyr, ed. “H.” In Encyclopedia of Ukraine: Volume II: G-K, 108–293. University of Toronto Press, 1988. http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctt15jvz0h.3.
And for further information on Ukrainian history in the early modern period, see:
Plokhy, Serhii. "Ukraine." In Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, edited by Jonathan Dewald, 89-93. Vol. 6. New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004. Gale eBooks (accessed March 7, 2022). https://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3404901145/GVRL?u=22516&sid=bookmark-GVRL&xid=e422da06.
Children of Rus': Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation by ISBN: 9780801469268Publication Date: 2013In Children of Rus', Faith Hillis recovers an all but forgotten chapter in the history of the tsarist empire and its southwestern borderlands. The right bank, or west side, of the Dnieper River--which today is located at the heart of the independent state of Ukraine--was one of the Russian empire's last territorial acquisitions, annexed only in the late eighteenth century. Yet over the course of the long nineteenth century, this newly acquired region nearly a thousand miles from Moscow and St. Petersburg generated a powerful Russian nationalist movement. Claiming to restore the ancient customs of the East Slavs, the southwest's Russian nationalists sought to empower the ordinary Orthodox residents of the borderlands and to diminish the influence of their non-Orthodox minorities.Right-bank Ukraine would seem unlikely terrain to nourish a Russian nationalist imagination. It was among the empire's most diverse corners, with few of its residents speaking Russian as their native language or identifying with the culture of the Great Russian interior. Nevertheless, as Hillis shows, by the late nineteenth century, Russian nationalists had established a strong foothold in the southwest's culture and educated society; in the first decade of the twentieth, they secured a leading role in local mass politics. By 1910, with help from sympathetic officials in St. Petersburg, right-bank activists expanded their sights beyond the borderlands, hoping to spread their nationalizing agenda across the empire. Exploring why and how the empire's southwestern borderlands produced its most organized and politically successful Russian nationalist movement, Hillis puts forth a bold new interpretation of state-society relations under tsarism as she reconstructs the role that a peripheral region played in attempting to define the essential characteristics of the Russian people and their state.
Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century by Call Number: DK508.9.G35 H55 1988ISBN: 9780312016098Publication Date: 1988This first case study of how the East European peasantry was drawn into national politics focuses on the Ukrainians of Galicia (1772-1914). On the basis of first-hand testimony by peasants and rural notables, it demonstrates that the peasants' political consciousness was forged by serfdom, reforms initiated by the state, and the penetration of a money economy.
This book breaks new ground on related issues, including the connection between class and national consciouness, the reasons for a sharp exacerbation of the peasantry's antagonism toward Jews, the new role of generational differences in the village, and the place of rural women in the national movement.
The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism by ISBN: 9781442682252Publication Date: 2002This study provides a solid background for understanding nineteenth-century Galicia as the historic Piedmont of the Ukrainian national revival.
The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century by ISBN: 9780585465401Publication Date: 2003Discusses the process of incorporating the Ukraine, better known as "Little Russia" in that time, into the Romanov Empire in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Other than territorial expansion, this process was the manifestation of Russian nationalism with regard to Ukrainian culture.
Brothers or Enemies: The Ukrainian National Movement and Russia, from the 1840s to the 1870s by ISBN: 9781487511067Publication Date: 2016In Brothers and Enemies, Johannes Remy reveals that the roots of Ukrainian independence were planted fifty years earlier. Remy contextualizes the Ukrainian national movement against the backdrop of the Russian Empire and its policy of oppression in the mid-nineteenth-century.
Ukraine between East and West: Essays on Cultural History to the Early Eighteenth Century by Call Number: DK508.4 .S44 1996ISBN: 9781895571141Publication Date: 1996Ihor Ševčenko’s Ukraine between East and West explores the development of Ukrainian cultural identity under the disparate influences of the Byzantine Empire and western Europe, mediated through Poland. Byzantium was the source from which Kyivan Rus’ received Christianity and a highly developed literary and artistic culture, which stimulated Kyiv’s own achievements in those fields. Professor Ševčenko shows how the prestige of Byzantine civilization was reinforced by the activities of Kyiv’s Greek metropolitans, various Byzantine emperors, and the Byzantine missionaries and teachers of Greek who influenced the outlook of the South and East Slavic elites during the Middle Ages. Byzantine civilization impacted the culture of Rus’ not only during Constantinople’s period of greatness, but even after its fall to the Turks.
Professor Ševčenko also analyzes the importance of the Counter-Reformation in early modern Ukraine. Polish Jesuit scholarship and new instructional methods and the Polish church’s and state’s assimilationist pressures compelled the Ukrainian elite to rise in defense of its ancestral Orthodox faith and reshape its traditional culture with the aid of Western innovations. The intellectual ferment of the era is captured in essays on religious polemical literature and the complex figure of Kyiv’s famous Orthodox metropolitan, Peter Mohyla. Concluding the book is a consideration of the way Byzantine and west European influences combined with the Kyivan legacy to produce a distinctive Ukrainian identity.
