This Mess Goes Back

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

I’m a citizen of three NATO countries; one of them, Poland, borders Russia at Kaliningrad. All of them blame Vladimir Putin, exclusively, for starting the war with Ukraine.

In the immediate sense, they are of course correct. But this mess goes back much further – in fact, about a century ago. And those most responsible for creating it involve a Polish leader, Marshal Jozef Pilsudski, and three Soviet Communist autocrats -- Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Nikita Khrushchev.

In 1914, at the start of World War I, Ukrainians were a nation, in fact perhaps two, but they had no state. In the west, they were ruled by the Habsburgs of Austria-Hungary, in the east by the tsarist Russian Romanovs.

The western Ukrainians looked westward and were religiously in communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Eastern Ukrainians were part of the Orthodox Christian World.

Both the Austrian and Russian empires collapsed in 1918. But, despite some attempts, no Ukrainian entity emerged.

In the aftermath of the 1919 peace treaties, Communists gained power in Russia. At the same time, a reborn Polish polity was created, with boundaries not yet fully determined.

The so-called Curzon Line, named for the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, was proposed as the eastern Polish border, separating Poland from Russian, Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples.

But a war with the new Soviet republic established Poland’s eastern border about 200 kilometres east of the line. The 1921 Treaty of Riga divided Ukraine and Belarus between Poland and Soviet Russia. Moscow established internal Soviet entities in its territory; the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR) was one.

Lenin also gave the new republic areas in the Donbas region in its east which were mainly ethnically Russian. Since the Soviet Union was really a Communist entity run from Moscow, this didn’t much matter to most.

Meanwhile Poland governed the ethnically Ukrainian and Belarusian regions it had conquered (as well as ethnically Lithuanian territories around Vilnius). In 1939 the population in the territories of interwar Poland east of the Curzon Line totalled 12 million, consisting of over five million Ukrainians, between 3.5 and four million Poles, 1.5 million Belarusians, and 1.3 million Jews.

In 1939 Hitler and Stalin invaded and partitioned Poland, with the Soviets occupying the ethnically Belarusian and Ukrainian territories beyond the Curzon Line. They were annexed to the respective Soviet republics that were already within the USSR.

However, most of the western Ukrainians who now found themselves newly ruled from Moscow, for the very first time, were less than pleased with this arrangement and many fought against Soviet forces during World War II. But Stalin’s victorious Soviet Union regained them after 1945 and they remained part of the Ukrainian SSR.

The Crimean Peninsula had been conquered and settled by Russians in the 18^th century. It was incorporated by Catherine the Great in 1783 into the Russian Empire from the defeated Ottoman Empire.  

Though attached to the Ukrainian mainland, in 1921 the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was created by Lenin. After 1945 Stalin made it a fully incorporated part of the large Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (today’s Russian Federation).

However, in 1954, Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, unilaterally handed it over to the Ukrainian SSR. Again, this didn’t matter to the mainly Russian population there because the totalitarian Soviet state was, after all, centrally ruled from Moscow.

But all this came to and end in 1991. Suddenly, almost without warning, the component union republics of the USSR, in their then current frontiers, became sovereign nations. The new Ukrainian nation now included Russian areas like Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea.

The 2014 Maidan uprising led to the formation of a more nationalistic political culture in Ukraine; Russians and Russified Ukrainians in these eastern regions were not comfortable with this new attitude. Putin then unilaterally annexed Crimea and has now recognized the other two entities as independent states.

The last step was his invasion of Ukraine, in order to force Kyiv to accept these moves, and also to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO. Will he succeed? Though not a NATO member, Ukraine has the full backing of the alliance. It is itself a large state, so the outcome remains in doubt.