A “Eurasian” Ukraine

The “Kozak Mamay”, as depicted by Pavlo Mikheyev, is shown with a bandura (a steppe music instrument), which became a Cossack icon. Photo: Pannattamm (CC) commons.wikimedia.org

The fact that Moscow promotes the Eurasian idea as a civilisational integration project encourages the simple juxtaposition of the Eurasian Russia versus the European Ukraine. Eurasianism seeks to connect the elements of Asia and Europe as a third way, an alternative to Europe. The establishment of the Eurasian Economic Union by the Kremlin was based on the Eurasian ideology created during the interwar period among Russian émigrés in the West. Its main point of reference was the Great Steppe and the Mongol-Turkic Empire of Genghis Khan, while Russia was portrayed as its heir. The belief in a clearly authoritarian character of the empire reflected poorly on its creators’ knowledge of Mongol history, which in fact had a strong tradition of wartime democracy.

Fundamental reinterpretation

Contrary to the archetype of Ukraine as a bulwark, is the vision of a leader of non-Russian nations in the Great Steppe fighting for freedom against Moscow. This Promethean idea contradicted the imperial elements of Ukrainian nationalism, popular among the radical fractions of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The latter wanted to see Ukraine as a continental great power ruling over the Great Steppe based on the American conquest of the Wild West.

Ukrainian contemporary historical memory and cultural identity is further complicated by the fact that the occupation of Crimea by Russia caused a fundamental reinterpretation of the relationship between Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars. The latter became part of the Ukrainian nation, while the history of the Crimean Khanate which was the heir to Genghis Khan became part of Ukrainian historical memory. These contradictions can be mitigated if we look at Ukraine as a country that for centuries was closely connected and shaped by the Great Steppe. In fact, the name “Ukraine”, which comes from the word “borderland”, refers to the border between the steppe (southern part) and the forest (northern part). Not accidently, the word “steppe” also comes from the Ukrainian language and has been incorporated into many languages.

The idea of Eurasia is closely connected with a geographical and cultural phenomenon of the Great Steppe, the largest plain in the world. It played a significant role in the history of Eurasia, as it became home to a dozen or so mighty nomadic empires, having a huge influence on neighbouring regions. Quite often the whole of Ukraine, or its parts, was under their reign. Already in the fifth century, Ukraine became part of the Hun Empire, stretching from the Rhine to the Amu-daria River. Between the sixth and the eighth century, a Turkic Khaganate stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Danube. It was a prelude to the empire of Genghis Khan. In the following centuries, other Turkic groups – Khazars (9th-11th centuries) and then Cumans (11th-13th centuries) ruled over Ukraine’s steppes, southern Russia and a vast part of Central Asia. According to Omeljan Pritsak, a prominent Ukrainian historian and Turkologist, Kyiv itself was founded by a Khazar vizier Kuya, from whom the city took its name. Ukrainian Cossacks also saw themselves as descendants of Khazars, and their name, which comes from the Tatar language, has similar roots as the names Khazars and Kazakhs (kaz means to ramble, to roam).

Pax Mongolica

However, the mightiest state in the history of the Great Steppe was the Mongol empire, founded by Genghis Khan, which after the British Empire controlled the largest land area in world history (24 million square kilometres). It stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, including Ukraine. Mongolian conquests destroyed large parts of the Kievan Rus’, although archaeological research shows that the then historical sources exaggerated their scale. At the same time, as part of Pax Mongolica, the political stabilisation brought about the first occurrence of trade and globalisation in history. It played an important role in the transfer of inventions from east to the west. Traders from Kyiv reached China. Many of Ukraine’s inhabitants moved to cities built in the Asian steppe, along the continental trade routes. Some of these places, for example Sarai at the Volga River, back then where – contrary to the stereotype of empty steppe land – some of the largest cities in the world. Ukrainian chivalry fought in the ranks of the Mongol army as their vassals, even in China. After the Mongolian conquest of China, divisions of the imperial guard, made up of knights from the Kievan Rus’, were formed in Beijing.

The huge Mongol-Tatar Empire gradually dissolved into several mighty states. Ukraine came under the control of the Golden Horde, which stretched from the Danube to the Altay Mountains. In the mid-15th century, the Golden Horde was divided into the Great Horde and independent khanates: Crimea, Kazan, Astrakhan, Siberian and the Nogay Horde. As part of the geopolitical reshuffling, Ukrainian Cossacks emerged and had an immense influence on the history on this part of the continent.

The most important of the Ukrainian regions, bordering the Great Steppe to the east, were the Principality of Chernigov, Severia and Pereyaslav, located in Left-bank Ukraine (left bank of the Dnieper River). In the Middle Ages, a large part of southern Russia, with a strong Ukrainian population, also ended up within the borders of these principalities. These borderland areas played a key role in the history of Russia, Ukraine and the whole Eurasia. It was there that the confrontation between Moscow and the Golden Horde took place. After the 1480 Battle of Ugra, Moscow broke free from the 250-year-long dependence on the Golden Horde. It was thus not an accident that this was where the 1709 Battle of Poltava took place, which determined Russia’s transformation into a European empire. In the end, it was in this steppe that Hitler’s dream of a thousand-year-old Reich ended with his defeat in the 1943 Battle of Kursk.

Eventually, Russia conquered the lands of the Great Steppe, located east of the Chernigov region in the 1620s and 1630s. The expansion had a big influence on history of the region, as it allowed Moscow to continue expanding into Ukraine, at the time within Poland’s borders. Until that time, the Polish-Russian wars were fought mostly in Belarus and northern Russia. Second, Kalmyks, Mongolian nomads, who migrated to the steppes of southern Russia from eastern China, became Russia’s allies in the fight against Turkic Nogais. Under the pressure from Kalmyks, Nogais started migrating to the steppes of southern Ukraine reaching the Danube River. In the mid-18th century, Nogais began to gradually move from Ukraine towards the east, to the steppes of southern Russia. They stayed in southern Donbas as nomads until the 1860s. The migration to the Ukrainian steppe of the independent and militant Nogais destabilised the Crimean Khanate (civil wars) and intensified plundering escapades of the Nogai hordes.

Turkic-Slavic symbiosis

Against this background, the influence of Ukrainian Cossacks considerably strengthened. They became involved in civil wars in Crimea and began to rebel against Poland which did not recognise their autonomy. The apogee of this process was the Khmelnytskyi Uprising in 1648, which was the key event in Ukraine’s history. In 1654, in Pereyaslav, Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, the leader of the Cossack uprising, reached an agreement with Russia and accepted its protectorate. As a result, Left-bank Ukraine became annexed by Russia and the autonomous regions of the Cossack Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine, were formed. In the 20th century during the interwar period, it was the Russified members of the old Ukrainian Cossack elite or old aristocratic families originating from these regions that created the Eurasian ideology. They explained their identification with the Great Steppe with their Cossack roots.

Sharing a borderland with a steppe led to frequent fights between the dukes of Chernigov and Severia and Turkic Cuman nomads. However, it also contributed to their co-existence. Mixed marriages with Cuman princesses were common. It was not an accident that the greatest epos of the Kievan Rus, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign, told the story of  Duke Igor’s 12th century expedition against the Cumans. Together with his son Volodymyr, Igor was captured by the Cumans. Volodymyr returned from captivity with a new wife – the daughter of Khan Konchak, one of the most prominent rulers in Cuman history. The story became an important source of inspiration for other nations of the Great Steppe. Olzhas Suleimanov, a prominent Kazakh writer, wrote a book titled AZ-i-IA in 1975 about The Tale of Igor’s Campaign which he presented as an originally Turkic epos. He believed in a Turkic-Slavic symbiosis in the Great Steppe. According to Suleimanov, the author of the epos was bilingual, speaking both Slavic and Turkic. In his opinion, the Slavic-language epos used many Turkic loanwords, whose origins were forgotten by the next generations.

The connections between the Chernigov region and the Great Steppe are also significant, as Turkic nomads were settling on its territory since the Middle Ages, setting up vassal states subject to Christian rulers. The last such states of the Muslim Tatars were conquered by Russia in the beginning of the 16th century. The most notable representatives of Tatar settlers included the aristocratic Gliński family. They received the family name after the town called Glinsk, located in the Chernigov region. Ivan the Terrible’s mother came from Gliński family. It traced their roots to Mamay – a Tatar leader from Central Asia who lost the battle of Kulikovo against Muscovy in 1380. The family played a key role in the formation of Ukrainian Cossack groups. A Cossack, playing a bandura (a steppe music instrument) and sitting with legs crossed, which became an icon in the Ukrainian art, was named after Mamay.

Expansion to the Great Steppe

At times the expansion was going the opposite way, that is, from Ukraine to the east into the steppe. Towards the end of the tenth century Prince Svyatoslav conquered the Khazar state and captured its capital located along the Volga River. The next wave of expansion took place during the reign of Vytautas the Great, a Grand Duke of Lithuania (1392-1430). Ukrainian aristocratic families were the main supporters of Vytautas’ expansive policy towards the Great Steppe. Vytautas made an attempt to enthrone Tokhtamysh – one of the most prominent 14th century steppe leaders from Kazakhstan – in the Golden Horde. After a lost battle against Tamerlane, the founder of a mighty empire in Eurasia with the capital in Samarkand (today’s Uzbekistan), Tokhtamysh found shelter in Ukraine. In case Tokhtamysh had managed to take over the Golden Horde, Vytautas planned to form an alliance with him, subdue Moscow and the Great Novogrod, and take the lead over an enormous Eurasian empire. This plan can be seen as an attempt to create a rebours, a Eurasian empire similar to that of Genghis Khan. However, the plan ended with a defeat of the coalition of Vytautas and Tokhtamysh under the Vorskla River close to Poltava in 1399 in the fight against the Tatars – Tamerlane’s vassals.

Despite the defeat, Vytautas did not give up on his attempt to enthrone his descendants in the Golden Horde. He managed to achieve this goal several times. He extended his de facto protectorate over Tatar hordes close to Astrakhan and the Don River. Their khans took part in the famous congress in Lutsk in Ukraine in 1429, which gathered the most powerful leaders of Central and Eastern Europe. In 1430 after Vytautas’ death, a civil war broke out in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania between his heirs. It took place at the same time as the fight for succession in the Golden Horde.

Two competing Tatar-Lithuanian fractions were formed. One of them was led by Švitrigaila, a Chernigov-Severian duke, strongly backed by Ukrainian boyars. In 1448, a civil war in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania erupted again, with Ukraine as its main arena. Khans of Crimea and the Great Horde, fighting against each other, supported the warring sides in Ukraine. At the time, many Tatars from the Great Horde found shelter around Kyiv and were subject to gradual Ukrainisation. As a result, as a prominent Ukrainian historian, Natalia Yakovlenko, has shown, one-third of Ukrainian nobility in the Kyiv region had Tatar roots, including the families of Vykhovsky and Nemirovich, who had a big impact on Ukrainian history in the 17th century.

Another attempt to create a state in the Great Steppe through Ukrainian expansion in the east was made in the 16th century by the Crimean Khanate. It decided to fight against Moscow for the legacy of the Golden Horde. At first, Crimea managed to take control over large parts of the south Russian steppe as well as the Kazan Khanate. In the fight against Moscow, Crimea was often supported by Ukrainian Cossacks. However, the confrontation ended with the victory of Russia and the capturing of Kazan in 1552, thanks to which Russia could have begun its Siberian conquest.

Ukrainian Cossacks joined the Kazan Tatars and Nogais against Russia in the Great Steppe again during the Time of Troubles in Russia (1605-1613). It was an attempt by Polish magnates to enthrone False Dmitry I and then II in Russia, both presented as sons of Ivan the Terrible who had miraculously survived. Their wife was a Polish aristocrat Maryna Mniszech. After their death, Maryna fell in love with a Ukrainian Cossack, Ivan Zarucki. The two adventurers took over Russia’s southern steppes and for a short period of time, ruled over their own quasi-state with the capital in Astrakhan. They led an army composed of a mix of all people living in this part of Eurasia from Tatars to Cossacks. The involvement of Ukrainian Cossacks in the Great Steppe of the 16th and 17th century gradually led to the rise of the Russian Cossack communities from the Azov Sea to the Pacific Ocean. They played a key role in Russia’s conquests of the Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia.

Colonising the Wild East

At the end of the 19th century, Ukrainians began mass migration along the Great Steppe. This is how Malinovyi Klyn in Kuban (north of the Caucasus), Zhovtyi Klyn (along the Volga river from Kazan to the Caspian Sea), Siryi Klyn (north-eastern Kazakhstan and bordering regions of Russia) and Zeleny Klyn (Far East) came into being. These settlements resembled the colonisation of the Wild West by the Americans and Canadians. Interestingly, at the time, Ukrainians immigrating en masse to Canada were settling predominantly in the Prairie Provinces.

As a result of mass migration along the Great Steppe, Ukrainians became one of the most important migrant groups between the Pacific Ocean and the Black Sea, after the Russians. The Soviet census of 1926 shows that on the territory of today’s Russia, mainly in the south, close to six million Ukrainians lived there, while in Central Asia, almost one million (mostly Kazakhstan). In comparison, during the same period, around 27 million people lived in Ukraine. In some regions, Ukrainians made up a large part of the population. Towards the end of the 19th century, Ukrainians constituted almost half of all inhabitants in the Kuban region. In Stavropol, they made up over 35 per cent of the population, while in north-eastern Kazakhstan in 1920, 40 per cent of inhabitants were Ukrainian. After the October Revolution in Malinovyi, Siryi and Zelenyi Klyns, Ukrainians made an attempt to build their own state that would then join Ukraine proper. This attempt however, was crushed by the Bolsheviks and White Russians.

In the 1930s, the Ukrainian population in the steppes of southern Russia and Kazakhstan dramatically decreased as a result of Holodomor – the forced-hunger genocide of Ukrainians organised by Stalin’s regime and as a result of Russification. Censuses conducted in 1939 show that the Ukrainian population on the territories of today’s Russia decreased by almost half, while in Kazakhstan by almost one fourth. According to the most recent census, there are slightly more than two million Ukrainians living in Russia and Central Asia (not including refugees from the conflict in Donbas).

Some Ukrainians were deported to Central Asia against their will or as political prisoners. The most prominent of them was Taras Shevchenko, who spent many years in exile in Kazakhstan. He felt sympathy towards the difficult fate of the Kazakhs, conquered by tsarist Russia. He got to know their culture and saw similarities between them and the Ukrainian Cossacks. The Kazakhs had an important place in his poetry and art. Today, they see his works dedicated to Central Asia as part of their culture.

Dream of a Ukrainian Eurasian empire

Due to the mass migration of Ukrainians to the east during the interwar period, the radical groups within the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists came up with an idea to create a Ukrainian empire that would stretch through the Great Steppe up to the Hindu Kush. It was meant to be built on the ruins of Russia, as a result of the Great Steppe’s people’s uprising, under the leadership of Ukrainians. The main ideologue of this vision was Mykhailo Kolodzhinskiy. “When we win the war in Europe, we urgently need to send an expedition to Kazakhstan to join the Far Eastern Army (Ukrainian) and give the leadership to all the peoples of Central Asia who will fight Moscow,” he wrote. “Because the Uzbeks, Tajiks and Turkmens are not able to liberate themselves on their own, but only with our help, so they must remain under our political influence. In the case of Kazakhstan, however, it is necessary to make it part of the Ukrainian dominion.”

His plan included devising a Ukrainian Asian empire that would be appealing to the Kazakhs (home rule), but in which they would remain under the Ukrainian protectorate. In his vision, Prometheism (the idea of a common fight for freedom of different nations) collided with imperialism. Somewhat paradoxically, he portrayed Ukrainians as a nation of farmers, perennial opponents of the steppe, and at the same time as protectors of the Central Asian nations. While denying Ukraine’s steppe legacy, his endeavour in fact is most reminiscent of the Crimean Khanate’s struggle to rebuild the Golden Horde.

Translated by Agnieszka Pikulicka-Wilczewska

Adam Balcer is head of the foreign policy programme at WiseEuropa, a Polish private think tank. He also works as a national researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and a lecturer at the Centre of East European Studies (SEW) at the University of Warsaw.

Euraisan Ukraine, Great Steppe, history, Ukraine