Ukraine is one of Europe’s great submerged nations. A thread of Ukrainian statehood can be traced back to mighty 10th century Kievan Rus, sovereign over all of the eastern Slavic lands, through to the 17th-century Cossacks, who briefly asserted their independence from Poland only to lose it to Russia, and on to flickers of national independence at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution and the second world war. But to outside eyes, this iconic national narrative was overshadowed by the more obvious reality of Ukraine’s imperial overlords - Poland, Austria-Hungary, Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union.
Yet beneath this cloak of invisibility, the idea of Ukraine as a separate state continued to germinate, emerging with particular strength in the 19th century among its proselytising, educated intelligentsia. Then, as now, Ukrainian identity was as much about making a personal and political choice as it was an ethnic or historical fact: this multi-ethnic and historically divided land did not lend itself to a single interpretation. With the Soviet takeover of central and eastern Ukraine, and then, with the second world war, of the formerly Polish territories that are now western Ukraine, choosing to be Ukrainian became ever more marginal and dangerous. The notion of Ukraine went underground, while abroad those Ukrainians who managed to escape Soviet rule nurtured their nation’s emblems - language, history, culture - with a zeal that often seemed absurd to outsiders.
