Previous Subchapter → 1.4 History - Zweiter Weltkrieg
Fast forward to the end of that era, in the early 1990s, and thanks to a combination of botched reforms, economic stagnation and growing war costs the USSR was crumbling just as the Russian Empire and Republic had previously, in March 1991 a referendum was held on preserving the USSR by its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and most of the Soviet Union’s member states, Ukraine included, voted to stay in the union in exchange for more sovereignty for their republics.
But in August 1991 a military coup was launched against Gorbachev led by Soviet hardliners unhappy with his reforms, the coup failed and Gorbachev returned to power with his credibility as a leader tainted. Later in the month Ukraine voted on independence and the Ukrainian people, seeing pending demise of the union, voted overwhelmingly to leave the USSR.
In December 1991 the leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus decided to declare an end to the USSR and with its 3 biggest member states gone the largest country on the planet fell like a jenga tower.
Source: https://mapcollection.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/rsz_ussrnations.jpg
15 new countries were created and Ukraine was one of them.
For the first time in several hundred years Ukraine was its own country completely separate from foreign rule, the fight for Ukrainian independence was finally complete.
But there was a problem with this process: The Soviet Republics which these new countries were inheriting everything from weren’t designed to become the markers for international borders.
The Republics were essentially recognitions of different identities and languages within the wider Soviet community and they swapped lands, gained and lost autonomy and status arbitrarily over time, at the whim of politicians who never imagined they would one day become separate countries, often without the consultation of the local people.
Karelia is an example of this, a place you’ve probably never heard of, it used to be its own Republic called the Karelo-Finnish (Soviet Socialist) Republic when it first became part of the USSR, but it was downgraded to an autonomous part of Russia in the 1950s, in the same decade the Oblast of Crimea, which you probably have heard of, was transferred from Russia, its original Republic, to Ukraine; If decisions like these were never made our history could have looked very different now.
On top of this, the Soviet authorities had contradictory attitudes towards non-Russian populations through the USSRs history, initially promoting a policy known as “indigenization”, where local languages and identities were emphasised and encouraged, then later reversing the policy and either neglecting these identities or promoting Russification instead, this process was not helped by the fact that before and during WW2, millions of people throughout the Soviet Republics were shuffled around into different territories, under a system now known as “population transfer”, leaving masses of people outside of their ancestral homelands and a jumbled mess of populations with an inconsistent level of attachment to their national identities.
Decision makers could get away with this at the time because the places they were marking out were all still part of one big country and one big grouping, the Soviet people and the Soviet Union, their sudden leap from regions to whole new countries was chaotic and resulted in territorial disputes, inflaming ethnic tensions almost overnight and even leading to major wars, this instability almost spread to Ukraine through Crimea.
Shortly before the end of the Soviet Union Crimea changed from an Oblast to an Autonomous Soviet Republic, the status it had previously when it was part of Soviet Russia, in 1992 after independence Crimea got a new constitution and was renamed to the “Republic of Crimea”, in 1994 a politician named Yuri Meshkov was elected to the Crimean Presidency, aiming to pivot the region away from Ukraine and towards Russia, proposing moves like granting Crimeans Russian citizenship and moving Crimea’s time zone to be in line with Russia’s, but his dream didn’t last long, in 1995 he was arrested by the Ukrainian military, put on a plane and deported to Moscow, and a new constitution was formed, the “Republic of Crimea” became the “Autonomous Republic of Crimea”, with closer political ties to Ukraine, this killed off the idea of Ukraine joining any kind of “Russian World”, for the time being at least.
But the differences in identity that caused those ideas to emerge in the first place still existed, because Ukrainians and all the other Post-Soviet people’s were still trying to find their footing, to understand what nations they belonged to and what it meant to be part of these nations, this was a struggle because they just didn’t have a lot of practice, for the past century their taste of nation building had been extremely brief; as they were beginning to find their way from the aftermath of the Russian Empire and other dying kingdoms, they were all swallowed back up into one country again and meshed into one experimental, often confusing identity, the Soviet identity. With that identity gone, these people all had to figure out what to do with themselves, and with a legacy of contradictory identity politics that’s easier said than done.
[Editor’s Note: Alongside the Crimean Pro-Russians, there was also a Pro-Russian organisation in Eastern Ukraine from 1990-2003 called the “International Movement of Donbas”, the organisation opposed the breakup of the USSR and later the “Ukrainianisation” of Donbas, but didn’t lead to any serious attempts to split up parts of Ukraine or unite them with Russia
Some have considered the Donetsk Republic party, the ruling party in the Donetsk People’s Republic, as the successor of this movement, the DPR uses a similar flag to the movement’s]
To illustrate just how problematic this became for Ukrainians, here are some quotes from an article by The Washington Post:
Ukraine’s politics have long been divided into two major factions by the country’s demographics. […] roughly speaking, about four out of every six people in Ukraine are ethnic Ukrainian and speak the Ukrainian language. Another one in six is ethnic Russian and speaks Russian. The last one-in-six is ethnic Ukrainian but speaks Russian.
Of course the article’s description is a generalisation, not every Russian speaker wanted closeness with Russia, or every Ukrainian speaker closeness with Western Europe, but Ukraine’s ethnic and political divisions were clearly strong elements of society, this is the kind of crisis that Ukraine found itself trapped in, once again the contradictions between self determination and territorial integrity were rearing their ugly heads.
Essentially, as Ukraine got closer and closer to becoming its own country, thanks to the largest nation on earth dissolving twice, first as the Russian Empire, second as the Soviet Union, the differences between sects of its society became harder to ignore. These gaps were widened with the resurgence of the far right to Ukraine, with Ukrainian expats from Germany returning home to reform the OUN as the “Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists” or “KUN” for short, local Ukrainians soon followed suit and shortly after independence there were several different far right blocs emerging, earning a degree of sympathy and plenty of hate.