Abstract: The current conflict in Ukraine and the troubled course of its relations with Russia since declaring independence in 1991 has encouraged speculation and misinformation about the longer history of their relationship. Th ese two new books by leading historian of Ukrainian and Russian history provide last chapters with informed accounts of relations since 1991. Their primary concerns and the bulk of their books are devoted to the much longer histories and complex relations from the Tsarist centuries through the Soviet period. 

Keywords: Cossacks, Slavophiles / PanSlavists, Duma/Rada, Hrushevsky, famine, Khrushchev

Summary 

Two new books by leading historians of Ukraine and Russia provide largely compatible and highly dispassionate accounts of a changing set of complex relations and connections. Plokhy follows Ukrainian history, while Kivelson/Suny track the Russian empires that began as Muscovy after the Mongol invasion. From Ivan the Terrible as the first Russian Tsar forward into the 17th century, Kivelson/Suny emphasize the shifting relations of the Cossacks, Ukraine’s major military force, as an informal ally or official agent of the Tsar, while Plokhy recognizes their eff orts to assert independent statehood. From St Petersburg under the Tsars Peter and Catherine the Great, Kivelson/Suny track the emergence of a Russian Empire absorbing Ukraine but leaving its language, education and Orthodox Church still autonomous. By the 19th century, two Tsars, the autocratic Nicholas I and the reformist Aleksandar II, restricted that cultural and religious autonomy more for state control than for ethnic identifi cation. Plokhy finds a Ukrainian national literature nonetheless emerging but does not see a political movement for Ukrainian independence until the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Kivelson/Suny agree with Plokhy that Lenin’s creation of the Soviet Union was designed particularly to give Ukraine republican status as a defense against Polish incursion. Both volumes find the same repressive features in Stalin’s regime, but Plokhy sees the forced famine of the early 1930s as ethnic targeting. Kivelson/Suny cite arguments for peasants in general as class enemies for Stalin not just in Ukraine. In the subsequent Nazi occupation, Plokhy shows how quickly the German administration dismissed a demand of the Ukrainian opposition for independence. In the post-war years, the authors agree that the Ukrainian born Khrushchev favored the republic not just by annexing Crimea but also by industrial investment and agricultural assistance. Plokhy sees this favoritism continuing under the Ukrainian born Brezhnev’s Politburo, but Kivelson/Suny do not. They blame the Soviet Union’s collapse on its failure to solve the imperial dilemma of relying on central control to provide regional economic reform. They agree with Plokhy that Gorbachev’s determination to apply perestroika equally in all republics ended any Ukrainian advantage. Aft er the further disadvantage of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, a Ukrainian popular movement used the cultural reopening of Gorbachev’s glasnost to start on the road to independence in 1991.