One of the most affecting parts of Plokhy’s book concerns the sufferings endured by Ukraine in the mid-20th century. Three centuries later, Soviet officials celebrated this council as marking the unification of Ukraine with Russia, and even claimed to transfer the Crimean Peninsula to Ukrainian jurisdiction as a sign of “eternal friendship” between the two peoples.īut, Plokhy writes, the two parties at the council were distinct enough to need interpreters to communicate with each other and when the tsar did not fulfill his obligation of military protection to the Cossacks, he approved new articles that were recognized as “a Magna Carta of Ukrainian liberties in the Russian Empire.” Similarly, the image of Kyiv as the birthplace of the Russian nation was a myth based partly on the Synopsis of 1674, a text written by Kyiven monks to convince the tsar to protect them from Ottoman and Catholic forces. At the Pereiaslav Council of 1654, for example, a group of Ukrainian Cossack officers swore allegiance to Tsar Aleksei Romanov of Muscovy.
Plokhy goes to great lengths to show that Putin’s claim is a historical distortion. Throughout its long and varied history, the inhabitants of Ukraine have struggled to assert their own identity – a struggle that continues to this very day, as shown by Vladimir Putin’s statement that Russians and Ukrainians are “one and the same people.” It was successively infiltrated and ruled by a host of foreigners including Vikings, the Mongols, Poles, and Muscovites.
From the very beginning, Ukraine was a frontier zone, a gateway between the West and the “other,” although the identity of that other changed over time. Plokhy begins with a description of the region in ancient times, when, as the Greek historian Herodotus chronicled, mysterious Scythian tribes lived there. What follows is a history of Ukraine that is encyclopedic in nature and epic in scale. Plokhy is certainly qualified to undertake the challenge. So writes Serhii Plokhy as he sets an ambitious goal for his book The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (New York: Basic Books, 2015).Īs the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History at Harvard and director of the university’s Ukrainian Research Institute, Mr. … The hope that history can provide insights into the present and thereby influence the future.” “To understand the trends underlying current events in Ukraine and their impact on the world, one has to examine their roots.
The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (Basic Books, 2015) by Serhii Plokhy.
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