The Gates of Europe

Ukraine has, ever since my mission, been of at least some interest to me.  As a kid, there was no such place.  Ukraine was part of the USSR, which most Americans referred to as the Soviet Union or simply Russia.  Once Communism fell apart (there’s a lesson there for those who care to see it), Ukraine became its own country.  Most Americans refered to it as “the Ukraine,” but that, someone decided, carried Russian imperialist overtones, so now it’s just Ukraine.  The nuclear disaster at Chernobyl probably put Ukraine on the map for most people, myself included.  Later, I met a few Ukrainians or people of Ukrainian ethnicity as a missionary and then after my mission.  One I remember particularly well was a guy named Valery Pruss, who I met on the streets of Kolpino while a missionary.  The way my last name was transliterated into Russian on my missionary name tag and the way his last name was spelled were identical.  He couldn’t believe someone had the same last name as him, so he even pulled out his passport to prove to me we were somehow distant cousins.  After a few minutes on the street, he became on of the thousands of people one talks to on a mission for only a few minutes, but his name and his Ukrainian ethnicity have stuck with me.  Since the end of my mission, I’ve been lucky enough to visit Ukraine a few times.  I enjoyed those visits and hope I might have similar opportunities in the future.

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy (ISBN: 978-0-465-09486-8) provides a brief but comprehensive survey of the history of Ukraine.  The main point is that a unique Ukrainian identity exists and has always existed (this reminded me of a similar book on Bosnia).  The secondary point is that constant turmoil and political turnover have prevented that identity from really blossoming.  Plokhy starts his history with ancient Greeks almost 1,000 years before Christ.  They emigrated to the region in search of natural resources.  There were local tribes in the area, but Greek culture exerted a strong influence on the region, a concept that would remain important as Greece turned to Christianity and Greek missionaries spread Christianity, baptizing Rus (the name of the polity from which modern-day Russia derives its name) in 988, when Grand Prince Vladimir and his subjects in Kiev accepted Orthodox Christianity.  Rus survived the Mongolian hordes and the Ottoman empire, only later to become part of various incarnations of Polish, Lithuanian, and Austo-Hungarian empires.  That brought Catholicism into the mix.  Throughout the myriad invaders and empires, there were nationalist uprisings that also started to cement a uniquely Ukrainian identity in the people.  As time went on and as empires fell in the XIX and XX century, Ukrainians worried less and less about their neighbors’ religious identity and started viewing themselves, in part because of language, but also because of common imperial enemies or shared economic and political ideals, as Ukrainians.  The Soviets, although generally dismissive of nationalism, encouraged it at times in Ukraine, and that helped further the national identity, as did the struggles of the people against Stalinism’s famine or Communist oppression.  The book ends with the Orange Revolution, continuing the thread of Ukraine continuing to solidify its own identity by fighting against outside influence.

In large part because the topic is somewhat unfamiliar, I found the book interesting, although not riveting.  Unlike a lot of modern history, this book does not “read like a novel,” as the endorsements always try to claim.  This is old-fashioned history with lots and lots of names, dates, and places.  Some of that will go over readers’ heads unless they are supremely familiar with the map of eastern Europe stretching from the Baltic Sea down to Athens, Greece, and from Austria in the west to Moscow in the east.  The heavy dose of dry history, though, does not detract from the book’s theme, and, in fact, often adds to it through the secondary stream of incessant turbulence in the region.  The history of Ukraine would be a lot more stable had there been fewer individuals, nations, tribes, and political movements involved.  I think understanding some of the history of the region helps explain the current situation in Ukraine, where national identity is firm, but like firm Jell-O® and not like set cement.  There is room for things to sway and maybe change shape.  Russia and the West vie for influence, sometimes violently.  Ukraine is very much a flashpoint on the borderlands of Europe and the Orient, where things remain fluid long after the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, and the Communists have departed, similar to Balkan countries like Romania and the countries of the former Yugoslavia.  Ukraine’s slowly gelling identity will likely hold it together.  The book is a good reminder that history is worth knowing since it influences thoughts and actions today.

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License and is copyrighted © MMXXI John Pruess.