Between the woods and the water

At the beginning of the historical record, the lands that we now call Ukraine were a reservoir of fantasy. Achilles probably did not sail from a Greek port on the north of the Black Sea up the rapids of the Dnipro River to find his final resting place, as some Greeks once believed. Nor is it likely that Ukraine, or the Pontic steppe as the Greeks had it, was the homeland of the Amazons. That said, it was Herodotus who supplied the south-to-north physical geography that Serhii Plokhy wisely follows: the ports of Crimea and the coast, the rich steppe heartland, and the forests. For Plokhy, the formation of Ukraine is the establishment of a unity among these three zones, and his themes are ‘geography, ecology and culture’.

Greek culture reached Kyiv, a city on the Dnipro where steppe meets forest, in about 1000 AD. Byzantine civilisation extended northward, thanks to an assist from Scandinavians. The Vikings, seeking trade and tribute, were the first to control the northerly forests, but did not master the steppe. After attempts to intimidate Constantin-ople, these Scandinavians, known as the Rus, settled on conversion. Their leaders took the names of local Slavs and married them, and accepted the Church Slavonic invented by Byzantine clerics as the language of their new faith. Yaroslav, the most famous ruler of Rus, is associated with the law codes written in a secularised version of that tongue. His daughter was unhappy as queen of France, whose culture she found ‘revolting’.

When the Mongols arrived from the east in 1240, the lands of Rus were divided into three zones. The westernmost principality, Galicia-Volhynia, would fall under Polish rule. The easternmost, Vladimir-Suzdal, remained a Mongol dependency until 1480, when Ivan the Great broke the ‘Tatar yoke’. His capital was Moscow. The difference between the trajectories of Galicia and Volhynia, today’s western Ukraine, and Muscovy, later the seat of the Russian empire and the USSR, are undeniable.