The story of the Ukraine

Ukraine is often called the granary of Europe and its natural wealth has long made it the object of envy of all of its neighbors and of all aggressive peoples in the eastern par...

Perhaps no single circumstance has done more to confuse the opinions of the world about Ukraine than the strange confusion that has taken place over the name of the country. The...

The actual history of Kievan Rus’ commenced in 862 with the accession to power of Rurik and his brothers. From this time we can trace a consistent history of the realm. Although...

The fifteenth century opened on a ruined state of Rus’-Ukraine. There was nothing left of the old authority of the state. Its independence and its wealth were gone and its peopl...

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a brilliant and colorful age, an age of high thinking and of great adventure. Not since the age of the Vikings had men of courage an...

In 1638 it might have seemed to a superficial observer that the cause of the Kozaks had been crushed once and for all. The old liberties and rights on which they had prided them...

The seventeenth century, which saw the settlement of the English in America, witnessed a shift in the balance of power in Eastern Europe and no one had contributed more to this...

At the very moment when Moscow was pursuing its consistent policy of reducing Ukraine to the level of a Muscovite province, it was falling just as steadily under the influence o...

At the beginning of the seventeenth century nearly all of Ukraine was within the borders of Poland and the Polish King and the magnates were able to feel that Ukraine offered a...

The disastrous outcome of the revolt of Mazepa gave to Peter the Great his opportunity. The battle of Poltava had definitely strengthened his position and that of Russia in Euro...

The Zaporozhian Sich was destroyed by the forces of Catherine the Great of Russia on June 5, 1775 and on August 3 of the same year the Empress by an edict abolished the very nam...

In 1798 there suddenly appeared in St. Petersburg, a volume entitled the _Eneida_, written by one Ivan Kotlyarevsky. It was a travesty on Virgil’s Aeneid, in which the Trojans w...

It was impossible under Russian rule to have any immediate hopes for the beginning of definite political activity and this was no more true for the Ukrainian population than for...

During the seventeenth century, there had gradually developed differences in those sections of Ukraine which had remained under Polish control after the Treaty of Andrusivo. Thi...

The arrest and exile of the members of the Society of Saints Cyril and Methodius brought to a halt the first phase of the Ukrainian revival in the Russian Empire. It had been th...

After the failure of the movement of 1848, there ensued a period of reaction and of torpor in Galicia and the other Ukrainian lands in the Hapsburg Empire. For a brief moment it...

The revolution of 1905 made many changes in the life of Russia and these affected very materially the situation in Ukraine. For the period of a few weeks it appeared as if the e...

On August 1, 1914, Germany declared war upon Russia and the First World War was on. The tensions and controversies that had been growing in bitterness beneath the surface all th...

In February 1917 the position of the Russian government became more difficult. Rasputin had been murdered and an atmosphere of gloomy foreboding spread over the entire nation. U...

This struggle to win for Ukraine a position first as a federated state in a new Russia and secondly as a completely independent country was not proceeding in an atmosphere of pe...

The successful Russian occupation of Lviv within a month after the beginning of the War threw into sharp relief the military weakness of Austria-Hungary and the following events...

Petlyura returned to Kiev with the Direktoria on December 19, 1918 and he at once set about to rebuild the shattered structure of the state. Conditions were more unfavorable tha...

By the summer of 1919 Polish military control had been extended over the whole of Western Ukraine and the alliance between Petlyura and the Polish government early in 1920 ratif...

The fate of Carpatho-Ukraine was quite different. It was represented in the negotiations that led up to the formation of the Republic of Western Ukraine, but when the Western Uk...

The seizure of power in Russia by the Bolsheviks gave them the opportunity to carry out their theories of government, which were in marked variance to all previous political tho...

By the middle of 1939 it became clear that divided Ukraine was in an unfortunate situation. For a brief moment the promise of a free and independent Carpatho-Ukraine seemed to i...

At the end of the First World War, Ukraine won a shortlived independence and then it was torn apart and divided among its neighbors. For a while it seemed to have reverted to th...