Ukraine's Dream of a Thousand Years

As a Ukrainian-American on my father's side and Ukrainian-Canadian on my mother's, I cringed at Vladmir Putin's outrageous lies about Ukrainian history. It was a relief to read author-journalist David A. Andelman's rebuke of Putin (CNN 2/22): “Putin's address manufactured a succession of events that bear little resemblance to the real, rich history of a powerful, independent Ukraine that for centuries dwarfed an independent Russia in importance, even size. The independent Ukrainian ethnicity dates back a thousand years...” Indeed, the Ukrainian Cossack (“free man”) Hetmanate was one of the earliest operating democracies. In the mid-1600s it fought against domination by its neighbor to the west, Poland. Polish kings used the Zaporozhian Cossacks to protect their borders, returning the favor with treachery and oppression. Desperate to get out from under that domination, the founder of the Hetmanate, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, signed a pact with Tsar Alexis in Moscow. This Pereyaslav Agreement of 1654 promised wide autonomy for Ukrainians. But treachery prevailed again. For the next couple generations the Russian Tsars used the Cossacks as soldiers and stole the Ukrainian grain, robbed its treasury, turned peasants into serfs, and used Ukrainian towns as a buffer against attacks from Turks and Mongols. Hetman Ivan Mazepa may have tried to balance Ukrainian interests with Russian demands at the Romanov court in the late 1600s, but mostly failed. He was dealing with Peter I (Peter the Great) who had outsize demands and ego. Another Cossack leader rose to the challenge. Peter Ivanenko Petryk went to the Crimea to raise Tatar troops for a rebellion against Mazepa. In 1691 Petryk wrote: "If you do not rise for your freedom now then you can be sure that you will lose it forever, that you will remain slaves of Moscow, and that there will be no one in the future to champion your case."   (Ukrainian Weekly, January 19, 1942, p. 3) Many Cossacks joined his cause. Hetman Mazepa himself hoped to use Petryk to reach an pact with Crimea and kick the Muscovites out of Ukraine. But when troop strength looked insufficient, he betrayed Petryk. “He not only withdrew his possible support but also denounced it and took steps to quell it,” according to Ukrainian Weekly. Ironically, Mazepa later rebelled when Peter I ordered Cossacks to perform unsuitable tasks and let the Russian army abuse Ukraine’s civilian population. He saw his chance when Russia was at war with Sweden, joining Swedish King Charles XII with 3,000 to 5,000 Cossack troops instead of going to the aid of the Russians as expected (October 1708). In the end, however, Mazepa and Charles together could not defeat the Russians at Poltava the following summer. The Cossack Hetmanate was abolished by Catherine the Great in 1765. Over the next 300 or so years the Ukrainians have tried to throw off one yoke after another. The Ukrainian yearning for freedom was expressed by the nation's most celebrated poet, Taras Shevchenko. In 1847 Russians sent him into exile and forced military service for writing the poems “The Dream,” “The Caucasus,” and “The Epistle,” which satirized Russia's oppression of Ukraine. My great grandfather, living near Lviv, Ukraine, was conscripted into the Austrian army during World War I. Then it was Nazis. First the Ukrainians welcomed them as liberators, then learned the awful truth. In 1932-33, Stalin starved nearly 4 million Ukrainians in an effort to quell their nationalism. Later the Soviet Union used the resources of Ukraine, often called the Breadbasket of Europe, stripping, pillaging and polluting the country. Because the Soviets kept their people captive, my grandmother was never able to meet her younger sister. The freedom that came with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a dream of a thousand years.