Ukraine represents the border between the Eurasian steppe and the Eastern European forest landscape. Between Western and Eastern Christianity, now between Europe and the so-called Russian world. To be a border or a gate is Ukraine’s destiny, according to the recently published Czech book by historian Serhii Plokhy, aptly titled Gates of Europe.
Today, 65-year-old Serhij Plochij, whose name the Jota publishing house puts on the cover in the English transcription of Serhii Plokhy, is Ukrainian. He grew up in the east of the country and later moved to the United States, where he has been a professor of history at Harvard University since 2007. He combines knowledge of Ukrainian realities with the ability to communicate the history of his native country to a Western audience.
In 2018, his book Chernobyl – the history of the nuclear disaster received huge international praise and was translated into many languages. The Gates of Europe was written by Plokhy three years earlier. The motivation was the Russian annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbass, publications on the history of Ukraine existed until then in Europe and the USA. The fact that the Gates of Europe was published in the Czech translation by Richard Janda only now has its advantage. They contain a new preface, written by the author last June, already after the beginning of Russian aggression.
Serhii Plokhy has been a professor of history at Harvard University since 2007. | Photo: Alamy / Profimedia.cz
In it, he disputes Russian President Vladimir Putin’s thesis that Russians and Ukrainians are actually one nation and that Ukraine in its current borders is the work of the politician, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. According to Plokhy, this belief stems from a misunderstanding of the origin and history of Ukraine, the result of which is and will be a huge loss of human life.
“Putin’s so-called special military operation soon collapsed, surprising not only those who planned it, but also observers around the world. Kyiv did not fall within seventy-two hours, the Ukrainian president did not leave the country, and the Ukrainian armed forces, about which the world knew very little, they performed excellently and forced the Russians to retreat from Kiev and northern Ukraine,” the historian summarizes the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year, which the Kremlin officially designated as a so-called special military operation.
Disposal of books
The author has no doubts about Putin’s intentions and goals. “Russia is trying to restore its imperial past and destroy not only Ukrainian statehood, population, economy, infrastructure, history and culture, but the very idea of Ukraine’s existence,” he writes. What we have seen in schools and libraries in occupied cities like Kherson and still Mariupol proves him right. Bringing books in Ukrainian to piles and their liquidation, instead of them the supply of Russian textbooks with a Russian view of history, where there is no place for an independent Ukraine and the Ukrainian language.
Plokhy’s book is a long answer to two questions at the same time: Why is Russia attacking Ukraine and why are Ukrainians defending themselves. And he goes deep into history in this answer.
The union of the Cossacks led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky with the Russian tsar by the Treaty of Pereyaslav in 1654 led to the gradual liquidation of their independence. In the Battle of Poltava in 1709, the Cossacks allied against Tsar Peter I with the Swedes, but lost and Catherine II. then she uprooted the last vestiges of Cossack autonomy. Ukraine has become a part of Russia as Vladimir Putin would imagine it today, who sees himself as a follower of Peter I.
Fast forward a century later. Plokhy describes the fate of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, today considered the father of modern Ukrainian literature. He was born in 1814 in a Ukrainian family as a serf, later he was a servant in St. Petersburg. His friends bought him out of slavery, and he then wrote the collection Kobzar in Ukrainian. Tsar Nicholas I sent him into exile for ten years as a punishment for being a dangerous rioter and disrupter of the unity of the Russian Empire.
His life represents a metaphor for Ukrainian existence in Russian subjugation, essentially to this day: whoever claims to be Ukrainian and emphasizes his difference from Russia and Russians deserves punishment and must be corrected. There is no difference in the thinking of the then Tsar and Vladimir Putin: Ukrainians have the right to exist, but only as an offshoot of the Russians. If they refuse, they are considered a tool of enemy propaganda. In the nineteenth century, the government called Shevchenko a Polish agent, today Moscow blames it on the West and NATO.
A broken dream
The twentieth century is Ukraine’s struggle for survival. At the end of the First World War, Ukrainians tried to create an independent state in the atmosphere of the collapse of the imperial powers – including both the territory that belonged to the Russian Empire and Austria-Hungary. But unlike the Czechoslovak project, the Ukrainians were not welcome because they did not have sufficient support abroad. The independent republic was taken over and divided between stronger neighbors: already Bolshevik Russia and Poland, while small pieces of territory went to Romania, Czechoslovakia and Lithuania. “A broken dream”, he calls the chapter about this period of Plokha.
Central and Eastern Ukraine found itself in the Soviet Union. Soviet leader Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin’s hatred of landowners and Ukrainians resulted in enormous tragedy and crime. An artificially, deliberately induced famine. Stalin wanted to collectivize the countryside and destroy the independent farmers. He imposed drastic grain supply standards that could not be met, and as punishment for sabotage, the Soviet government confiscated all food and goods.
A woman walks past people dying of starvation during the Russian-induced famine in Ukraine, 1932 to 1933. | Photo: TASS / Profimedia.cz
“As a result of the famine in Ukraine, almost four million people died. And it completely decimated the country. Between 1932 and 1934, every eighth resident of Ukraine succumbed to hunger,” Plokhy writes. “The famine left Ukrainian society deeply traumatized and crushed its ability to openly oppose the regime for several generations,” he adds.
One of the things that the Russian occupiers did after capturing Mariupol in May of last year is worthy of attention. The monument to the victims of the famine in the city was removed.
Those who are more interested in the topic of famine can find the twelve-part Ukrainian series And there will be people in the Netflix video library. It depicts the fate of people from the fictitious village of Tarasivka east of Kiev from the beginning of the century to the 1930s, when the Bolsheviks requisitioned all supplies, even former party functionaries ended up in prison and on the gallows, and opponents of the regime tried in vain to mount an armed resistance in the forests.
In 1941, Hitler’s Germany broke the alliance agreement with the Soviet Union – known as Molotov-Ribbentrop, named after the foreign ministers of both countries – and attacked. Ukraine received another blow: seven million Ukrainians, or sixteen percent of the population, lost their lives during the years of war. “Many residents welcomed the German advance in the summer of 1941 with the hope that it would end the terror unleashed by the Soviet authorities in recent years,” Plokhy reports. According to him, however, the expectations turned out to be wrong, regardless of what the hopes for a better life under the German occupation stemmed from.
Cover of the book Gates of Europe. | Photo: Jota publishing house
The German occupiers did not intend to tolerate an independent Ukraine, and the bearer of this idea, Stepan Bandera, was interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp until the end of the war. His two brothers perished in Auschwitz. Ukrainians were taken by the Nazis as cheap labor.
“In 1942 and 1943, almost 2.2 million Ukrainians were captured and sent to Germany. Many of them died of malnutrition, disease, or during the Allied bombing of the arms and ammunition factories where they worked. Those who lived to be liberated by the Red Army were often considered traitors and some went straight from German concentration camps to Soviet gulags,” Serhii Plokhy mentions that until the 1980s Soviet citizens had to answer numerous forms asking whether they or their relatives lived in the territory occupied by Germany. Right after the box “record in the criminal record”.
And after all that, today Ukrainians have to listen to Russian and pro-Russian propagandists that they are Nazis and Bandera people. One thing is different compared to past Ukrainian disasters and tragedies in the present. This time the country has great support from abroad, it is not at the mercy of the enemies. This time he has a chance.
Book
Serhii Plokhy: The Gates of Europe
(Translated by Richard Janda)
Jota Publishing House 2023, 432 pages, 448 crowns
