Second paragraph of third chapter:
When did it all begin? We have an exact date for the start of the Viking Age in Britain: June 8, 793. On that day, Viking pirates who had probably set out from Norway attacked and pillaged a Christian monastery on the island of Lindisfarne off the English coast. They drowned some of the monks in the sea and took others into slavery before disappearing with the monastery’s treasures on their longboats. During the same decade, the Vikings/ Normans, who would eventually give their name to the province of Normandy, appeared near the shores of France. The Viking Age had begun.
I got this soon after the war started, almost three years ago now, but have only just got around to reading it. It’s an important explanation of the story of Ukraine, starting from Kievan Rus and going through the various semi-autonomous realms of the Middle Ages, through the centuries of Russian rule, and then independence up to 2014.
Some interesting nuggets: the daughters of the eleventh century Grand Prince of Kiev, Yaroslav the Wise, and his Swedish wife, married the kings of Hungary, Norway and France, and one of his sons married the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor. I see that there is also a theory that another daughter married an English Saxon prince and was the mother of Edgar Ætheling and Saint Margaret of Scotland, though Plokhii doesn’t mention it.
It was by no means historically inevitable that Ukraine would spend much of its history under Russian rule. Connections northwestward, to Poland, Lithuania and what’s now Belarus, were always strong, and there were always links with Constantinople and to a lesser extent Vienna as well. The Cossack states of the early modern period and the national revivals of the nineteenth century demonstrate that Ukraine is not just something invented in the twentieth century.
Speaking of which, the twentieth century history of Ukraine is pretty awful, and also pretty closely linked to Russia. After losing the 1917-1921 war of independence, Ukraine was incorporated into the USSR, and was economically very important with its concentrations of both agriculture and industry. Khrushchev made his political career there; Brezhnev was born there; Konstantin Chernenko, who briefly ruled the USSR near the end, was born to a Ukrainian exile family.
But Stalin executed almost all of the senior political and intellectual leadership, and then the Holodomor, the great famine, killed millions more. Stepan Bandera, the far right political figure who Russians love to hate, was never in fact very successful, but the Soviets had good reason to worry about Ukraine’s loyalty (and assassinated the exiled Bandera in Munich in 1959 by spraying him with cyanide).
And when both Ukraine’s Communist leadership, and the Ukrainian people when consulted at the ballot box, refused the offers of a new relationship made by Moscow in 1990-91, the result was the disintegration of the USSR as a whole. In the 1991 independence referendum, there was more than a 50% vote in favour in both Crimea and Sevastopol, and more than 80% in Donetsk and Luhansk; those were the four least pro-independence oblasts.
I said many years ago that all European borders are tidemarks in the ebb and flow of empires, and this is particularly so in the case of Ukraine. But that doesn’t make Ukraine a fictional concept, or Ukrainian a fictional language, or Ukrainians a fictional people, as the tankies would have you believe. Ukraine deserves external support to maintain and restore its integrity as a state, and this book is a good introduction to its history. You can get it here.
This was both my top unread non-fiction book, and my top unread book acquired in 2022. Next on those piles respectively are Nine Lives, by William Dalrymple, and Ithaca, by Claire North.