Ukraine, The Forging of a Nation review: Portrait of a people torn between East and West

Yaroslav Hrytsak begins his enthralling journey through the history of Ukraine by asking how it got its name.

It resembles words for “borderland” and “country”, and Hrytsak notes that being on the outskirts or in the heartland is merely a matter of perspective – an observation that points to something he is trying to achieve with a book that has been a bestseller in Ukraine.

For the empires that divided and ruled parts of Ukraine for centuries, it was a land between – vast, richly fertile and apparently up for grabs, which made it irresistible to invaders including Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Putin.

For the many ethnic groups living there it was of course home, the centre of their own universe. But centuries of struggle for Ukraine have also placed it, time and again and at appalling cost to many millions of its people, at the blood-soaked heart of world affairs.

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Hrytsak has described this book as a “global history” of Ukraine, and he explores how the Ukrainian people and their idea of a state – even as they lived as subjects of imperial powers – were moulded by the same transformative currents of political, religious, scientific and philosophical thought that moved through the great capitals of Europe and the world.

By bringing Ukraine in from the periphery of European history, and showing how it connects to events and movements that shaped the modern world, Hrytsak examines how his nation again – and once more unwillingly – now finds itself at the epicentre of a major conflict.

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“I have tried to discover the reasons for Ukraine’s resilience within a global context,” he writes. “Because the Russia-Ukraine war isn’t just another war. This war will determine the contours of the future world.”

Hrytsak thinks the ancient rulers of Kyiv – Viking conquerors and traders who established something resembling a state called Rus in the late 900s – got off to a bad start by swapping paganism for Orthodox Christianity rather than Catholicism.

That bound them not to Rome but Byzantium, and while the former spread Latin along with religion and so gave converts access to the learning of the classical world, Constantinople did not spread Greek to the mostly Slavic tribes who became Orthodox believers.

Without knowledge of Aristotle and his logic and rationalism, there could be no Thomas Aquinas or Descartes in the eastern Orthodox realm. In fact, Hrytsak writes, “between the 10th and the 17th centuries, we don’t find a single scholarly work in the Church Slavonic tradition”, and the library of an educated person in the Ukrainian lands in the early 1600s would have been almost identical to that of his ancestors 500 years earlier.

Hrytsak recalls how Vasyl Stus, a revered Ukrainian poet, who died, or was perhaps killed, in a Soviet prison in 1985, wrote that adopting Orthodox Christianity and Constantinople’s traditions “brought us, the easternmost part of the West, into the East” and “our individualistic western spirit [was] stamped by despotic Byzantine Orthodoxy”.

A shared Orthodox faith was one of Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s reasons for seeking help from the Russian tsar in his 17th-century revolt against the Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had ruled most of the Ukrainian lands for some 300 years.

Khmelnytsky’s agreement in 1654 to swear allegiance to the tsar in return for his military protection was a turning point for Ukraine, when the fledgling Cossack state became a Russian vassal and then saw its freedom relentlessly curtailed, and abolished entirely a century later by Catherine the Great.

Yet crucial seeds had already been planted, Hrytsak argues. Long rule by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had an elective monarchy with powers constrained by a relatively large gentry, had left its mark on the Cossacks, who chafed against Russian autocracy and believed they had a right to rebel against an unjust monarch.

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Another famed Cossack leader, Ivan Mazepa, did just that in 1708, when he joined forces with Sweden and Poland in a doomed bid to defeat Peter the Great. The Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated Mazepa as punishment – a ruling that still stands to this day.

Hrytsak writes that this was a crucial period when, due to Lithuanian-Polish rule, Ukrainian lands were influenced less by despotic Russia than by western Europe, “where different political traditions of leadership and a different relationship between state and society emerged”.

Russia may have destroyed Cossack autonomy by 1775, but “what did not disappear, however, was the image of Ukraine…as a rebellious but free and rich land”.

Unimaginable trials were ahead, and the modern age showed its bloodiest face in Ukraine: the first World War, the Bolshevik revolution and civil war, then Soviet repressions and the Holodomor, a 1932-1933 famine caused by Stalin’s farm policies that killed millions. A decade later, the second World War and the Holocaust would pile horror upon horror.

Eighty years on, Ukraine is again fighting for survival. Hrytsak finds hope in the Ukrainian word “volya”, which means both “freedom” and “will”.

He says it might be “the shortest answer to the question of the relationship between progress and catastrophe” that runs so starkly through his nation’s history: “Of all possible scenarios, the most likely outcome is the one we freely choose and steadfastly defend.”