Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Sich, she annexed the region to the imperial province of 'New Russia' and charged gov-
ernor Grygory Potemkin with attracting settlers and founding new cities. Potemkin
helped establish today's Dnipropetrovsk, Sevastopol and Simferopol, but died before
Odesa was completed.
In 1772 powerful Prussia, Austria and Russia decided to carve up Poland. Under the
resulting Partitions of Poland (1772-95), most of western Ukraine was handed to Russia,
but the far west around Lviv went to the Austrian Habsburg Empire. The Ukrainian na-
tionalist movement was born in Kyiv in the 1840s, but when the Tsarist authorities there
banned the Ukrainian language from official use in 1876, the movement's focus shifted
to Austrian-controlled Lviv.
New York Times
journalist Walter Duranty is a very controversial Pulitzer Prize winner
because of his denial of the Ukrainian famine when reporting from the 1930s USSR.
Civil War
Following WWI and the collapse of the Tsarist monarchy, Ukraine had a shot at inde-
pendence, but the international community was unsupportive and none of the bewilder-
ing array of factions could win decisive backing. In Kyiv, the first autonomous Ukrainian
National Republic (UNR) was proclaimed in 1918 under president Mykhailo
Hrushevsky. Meanwhile, Russian Bolsheviks set up a rival Congress of Soviets in
Kharkiv. Civil war broke out, with five different armies - Red (Bolshevik), White, Pol-
ish, Ukrainian and Allied - vying for power, while various anarchist bands of Cossacks
(the most famous led by Nestor Makhno) roamed the land. Author Mikhail Bulgakov es-
timated that Kyiv changed hands 14 times in 18 months.
Just as any UNR victories in Kyiv proved short-lived, so too did the West Ukrainian
National Republic (ZUNR) in Lviv. Proclaimed in October 1918, it was overrun by Pol-
ish troops the following summer. Under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles negotiated after
WWI and the following Treaty of Riga in 1921, Poland, Romania and Czechoslovakia
took portions of western Ukraine, while Soviet forces were given control of the rest. Na-
tionalist leader Semyon Petlyura set up a government in exile, but was assassinated in
Paris in 1926.
Mikhail Bulgakov's novel
The White Guard
brings to life the confusion reigning in Kyiv
during the 1918 Civil War - and better explains the competing factions than most history
topics do.
