historians-from-ukraine

"Food, like language, is the first and last cultural bastion. We grow up with it, and we associate ourselves with it. Countries communicate with other countries through food."

"The ancestors of modern Ukrainians lived in dozens of premodern and modern principalities, kingdoms, and empires, and in the course of time they took on various names and identities. The two key terms that they used to define their land were “Rus’” and “Ukraine.” (In the Cyrillic alphabet, Rus’ is spelled Pycь: the last character is a soft sign indicating palatalized pronunciation of the preceding consonant.) The term “Rus’,” brought to the region by the Vikings in the ninth and tenth centuries, was adopted by the inhabitants of Kyivan Rus’, who took the Viking princes and warriors into their fold and Slavicized them. The ancestors of today’s Ukrainians, Russians, and Belarusians adopted the name “Rus’” in forms that varied from the Scandinavian/Slavic “Rus’” to the Hellenized “Rossiia.” In the eighteenth century, Muscovy adopted the latter form as the official name of its state and empire."

"Lukianenko’s declaration referred to the thousand-year history of Ukrainian statehood, meaning the tradition established by Kyivan Rus’. His declaration was in fact the fourth attempt to proclaim Ukrainian independence in the twentieth century: the first occurred in 1918 in Kyiv and then in Lviv, the second in 1939 in Transcarpathia, and the third in 1941 in Lviv. All those attempts had been made in wartime, and all had come to grief. Would this one be different? The next three months would tell. A popular referendum scheduled for December 1, 1991, the same day as the previously scheduled election of Ukraine’s first president, would confirm or reject the parliamentary vote for independence."

"On December 1, 1991, Ukrainians of all ethnic backgrounds went to the polls to decide their fate...In Vinnytsia, in central Ukraine, 95 percent voted for independence; in Odesa, in the south, 85 percent; and in the Donetsk region, in the east, 83 percent. Even in the Crimea, more than half the voters supported independence: 57 percent in Sevastopol and 54 percent in the peninsula as a whole. (At that time, Russians constituted 66 percent of the Crimean population, Ukrainians 25 percent, and the Crimean Tatars, who had just begun to return to their ancestral homeland, only 1.5 percent.)...The vote for Ukraine’s independence spelled the end of the Soviet Union."

"The view of Ukrainians as constituents of the Russian nation goes back to the founding myth of modern Russia as a nation conceived and born in Kyiv, the “mother of Russian [rather than Rus’] cities.” The Synopsis of 1674, the first printed “textbook” of Russian history, compiled by Kyivan monks seeking the protection of the Muscovite tsars, first formulated and widely disseminated this myth in Russia. Throughout most of the imperial period, Ukrainians were regarded as Little Russians—a vision that allowed for the existence of Ukrainian folk culture and spoken vernacular but not a high culture or a modern literature."

"Recognition of Ukrainians as a distinct nation in cultural but not political terms in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1917 challenged that vision. The aggression of 2014, backed by the ideology of the “Russian World,” offers Ukrainians today a throwback in comparison with Soviet practices. Nation building as conceived in a future New Russia makes no provision for a separate Ukrainian ethnicity within a broader Russian nation. This is hardly an oversight or excess born of the heat of battle. Less than a year before the annexation of the Crimea, Vladimir Putin himself went on record claiming that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people. He repeated that statement in a speech delivered on March 18, 2015, to mark the first anniversary of the annexation of the Crimea."

"Since the fall of the USSR, the Russian nation-building project has switched its focus to the idea of forming a single Russian nation not divided into branches and unifying the Eastern Slavs on the basis of the Russian language and culture. Ukraine has become the first testing ground for this model outside the Russian Federation."

"The Revolution of Dignity and the war brought about a geopolitical reorientation of Ukrainian society. The proportion of those with positive attitudes toward Russia decreased from 80 percent in January 2014 to under 50 percent in September of the same year. In November 2014, 64 percent of those polled supported Ukraine’s accession to the European Union (that figure had stood at 39 percent in November 2013). In April 2014, only a third of Ukrainians had wanted their country to join NATO; in November 2014, more than half supported that course. There can be little doubt that the experience of war not only united most Ukrainians but also turned the country’s sympathies westward."

"History has been a battleground from the very beginning of Russia’s war with Ukraine...This thinking that Ukraine is a part of Russia that was somehow torn apart from it – this is very much 19th-century thinking, in which the nation is defined almost exclusively by language rather than political loyalty."

"The founding myth of 2014 and the war in eastern Ukraine – that Russian-speaking Ukrainians would gladly join Russia – did not result in a pro-Russia groundswell of opinion across the country. While this was realised in Crimea and parts of Donbas, Russophone cities such as Kharkiv and Odesa remain Ukrainian. “This was a huge miscalculation and disappointment for the authors of the attempted Russian takeover of eastern Ukraine,” Plokhy said."

"The Kremlin’s dismembering of Ukraine in 2014 de facto removed millions of the most pro-Russian voters from Ukraine’s electoral rolls. It also turned the tens of millions still living under Kyiv’s authority decisively against Russia. The share of Ukrainians holding a favourable view of Russia sank from 84 per cent in 2010 to a mere third in 2019, according to polling by the Pew Research Center. Part of the fall, but not the whole of it, can be explained by the exclusion of those living in territories now controlled by Russia or its proxies."

"Both Ukrainians and Russians claim Yaroslav the Wise as one of their eminent medieval rulers, and his image appears on the banknotes of both countries. The Ukrainian bill depicts Yaroslav with a Ukrainian-style moustache in the tradition of Prince Sviatoslav and the Ukrainian Cossacks. On the Russian note, we see a monument to him as the legendary founder of the Russian city of Yaroslavl, first mentioned in a chronicle seventeen years after his death. The Russian bill shows Yaroslav with a beard in the tradition of Ivan the Terrible and the Muscovite tsars of his era."

"The Byzantine epoch starts if not with Constantine himself, in any case with Theodosius, and reaches its climax under Justinian. His was the time when a Christian culture was conscientiously and deliberately being built and completed as a system. The new culture was a great synthesis in which all the creative traditions and moves of the past were merged and integrated. It was a "New Hellenism," but a Hellenism drastically christened and, as it were, "churchified.""

"It is still usual to suspect the Christian quality of this new synthesis. Was it not just an "acute Hellenization" of the "Biblical Christianity," in which the whole novelty of the Revelation had been diluted and dissolved? Was not this new synthesis simply a disguised Paganism? This was precisely the considered opinion of Adolf Harnack."

"Now, in the light of an unbiased historical study, we can protest most strongly against this simplification. Was not that which the XIXth century historians used to describe as an "Hellenization of Christianity" rather a Conversion of Hellenism? And why should Hellenism not have been converted? The Christian reception of Hellenism was not just a servile absorption of an undigested heathen heritage. It was rather a conversion of the Hellenic mind and heart."

"The early monks wanted simply to realize in full the common Christian ideal which was, in principle, set before every single believer. It was assumed that this realization was almost impossible within the existing fabric of society and life, even if it is disguised as a Christian Empire. Monastic flight in the IVth century was first of all a withdrawal from the Empire. Ascetic renunciation implies first of all a complete disowning of the world, i.e. of the order of this world, of all social ties. A monk should be "homeless," aoikos, in the phrase of St. Basil. Asceticism, as a rule, does not require detachment from the Cosmos. And the God-created beauty of nature is much more vividly apprehended in the desert than on the market-place of a busy city."

"There is much in Luther that is interesting, perceptive, and true. However, there is also much that does not speak the same language as early Christianity. And herein lies the great divide in the ecumenical dialogue. For the ecumenical dialogue to bear fruit, the very controversies that separate the churches must not be hushed up. Rather they must be brought into the open and discussed frankly, respectfully, and thoroughly."

"At a time when even the most impoverished and underdeveloped states in the third world enjoy full sovereignty, Ukraine has practically none. This great discrepancy is a historical puzzle, one that calls for an examination of the often overlooked and even more frequently misunderstood past of Ukraine and the Ukrainians."