A review of a history of Ukraine: “Borderland” by Anna Reid
On 24 February 2022, Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale Russian invasion of the independent state of Ukraine and immediately I was keen to learn more about the history of the country being violated. I was pleased to find this work which is immensely informative and very accessible. “Borderland” was first published in 1997 and republished in 2015 and therefore it is in two parts.
The first part was written after Reid served as the Kiev correspondent for the “Economist” and the “Daily Telegraph” from 1993 to 1995. Helpfully it starts with a map of the country and a four-page chronology of its history. What follows is a 1,000-year history of Ukraine but the material is not presented in strict chronological order as it is structured around Reid’s travels through the country, so that the subtitle of the book is “A Journey Through The History Of Ukraine”.
The second part was crafted after Reid returned to the country in the immediate aftermath of the Orange Revolution, Russian occupation of Crimea, and uprising in the Donbass. It provides a chronological account of what happened in the two decades after the first edition and provides an extra 60 pages for the second edition taking us up to February 2015.
Reid begins by explaining that the word Ukrainia is literally translated as ‘on the edge’ or ‘borderland’ (hence the title). For many centuries, most of what we now call Ukraine was ruled by Lithuania or Poland or a combination of the two. For many centuries afterwards, Ukraine was ruled by Tsarist Russia or the USSR. The time of the switch can be precisely dated and attributed.
It was January 1654 when Bordan Khmelnytsky, the leader of the Hetmanate Cossacks who led a successful uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, signed an agreement which provided that, in return for allegiance to the Russian Tsar, the Cossack Hetmanate would receive the military protection of Russia.
For the next three and a quarter centuries, Kiev (now Kyiv) would be ruled from Moscow. It is a tragic, often violent, history. In the 20th century alone, about 1.5M were killed in the First World War and the Civil War between 1914-1921, up to 12M ‘kulaks’ were deported in 1929-1933, up to 5M peasants died of starvation in 1932-1933, there were massive purges in 1930 and again in 1937-1939, there was the German occupation and slaughter of the Jews in 1941-1944, the Crimean Tatars were deported in 1944.
Although calls for Ukrainian independence have ebbed and flowed, they have usually come from a small intellectual minority. Until fairly recently, the nearest that the country came to independence was the period between the end of the First World War in 1918 and the victory of the Red Army in 1921. In Kiev, there was a Central Council or Rada in competition with the Soviet of Soldiers and Workers, but it had very little power and survived less than a year.
As Reid put it writing in 1997: “Ukrainians won independence on 24 August 1991 by default. Many had dreamed of independence, but none had expected it, none had prepared for it“ and she refers to “Ukraine’s fuzzy sense of national identity”.
However, in the second edition of the history, she asserts: “The biggest change since I lived in Ukraine is that it now feels like a real country. Though plenty of people would have got cross if you had said so, it used to have something of a make-believe, provisional air. With nearly a quarter of a century and two patriotic revolutions under its belt, that has all gone. Ukraine is no longer a borderland. It is its own place and here to stay.”
In her final paragraph, Anna Reid writes presciently: “We in the West should be very clear with ourselves. If we let Russia wreck Ukraine – if we are feeling too poor, anxious, or distracted to fight Ukraine’s corner – we will not only be undermining our own security, but betraying 46 million fellow Europeans.”