The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, both the Russian and Ukrainian governments have sought to enlist history on their side. Russia claims that Ukraine is not a “real” country but is instead a timeless appendage of the Russian Empire that was unfairly separated from it and which now must be brought back into the fold. Ukrainians, on the other hand, have argued that their identity as an independent people is both natural and eternal, and being absorbed into Russia would amount to something like cultural genocide. I’m not an expert on the Slavic world, but wanting to interrogate these competing claims I picked up The Gates of Europe, which is as close as you can get to a definitive history of Ukraine published in recent years.

So what’s the verdict? Well, the uncomfortable truth is that medieval history is almost always malleable and hazy enough that any side can plausibly make the argument that they need to justify present politics. The historical battle between Ukraine and Russia is no different. Ukraine does have a history of independent Cossack tribes and princely-states, but these Ukrainians did not resemble anything like a modern-state since no such thing existed at the time. Sometimes they allied with Moscow and sometimes they fought it, and they had similarly complex relations with the Poles and Ottomans. Medieval Ukrainians also occasionally came under Russian suzerainty and had warm ties with Moscow due to their shared Orthodox Christian faith. The recorded history of Ukrainians literally goes back to Herodotus (cited in this book!) and is so byzantine that it’s very difficult to make definitive statements about their modern national identity based on these ancient and medieval sources, no matter how much people argue about them.

What does give powerful grounding to the idea of Ukrainian national identity is Ukraine’s modern history, which is frankly far more important to understanding the current war. Ukraine suffered immensely as a colonial territory of the Soviet Union, which, during its early years, inflicted a state of terror and famine that killed millions of Ukrainians. It was during this time that many Ukrainians truly learnt why it was bad to be ruled by Russia, and why independence might be a thing to cherish. The reason that some Ukrainian nationalists have been Nazis is that, in a paradoxical way, the Nazis represented a resistance movement in certain places against the unremitting Stalinist terror that descended upon Ukraine during the early-20th century. I don’t seek to defend that, but it helps explain what is probably otherwise inexplicable to a lot of people. Ukraine national consciousness was forged during traumas like the Holodomor, perpetrated by an imperialist Soviet Union. It is being strengthened further today by the atrocities and armed resistance that the world is witnessing as Ukrainians fight against assimilation within the Russian Federation. When you see Ukrainian civilians stopping to salute processions of servicemen killed in action against Russia, you’re watching a nation being born. Whether it existed a thousand years ago is hardly the point.

If you want to plow very deep and learn everything there is to know about Ukraine, this book will be a helpful starting point. It’s a decently written history that tries to condense a few thousand years into about three hundred pages. A book that probably will be more practically useful to understanding the roots of the current war, however, is Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands. That is a history of World War I and II that is set partly in the Ukraine and highlights the tragedies that really gave birth to the modern nation. I will publish my review of that in a later newsletter.