Ukraine’s most important river is the Dnieper, which, at 2,201 kilometres in length, is the third-longest river in Europe. It divides Ukraine into ‘Left-Bank Ukraine’ and ‘Right-Bank Ukraine’. Whilst the majority of the land is flat or consists of gentle hills, the Carpathian Mountains, with peaks reaching up to 2,000 metres, form a barrier. The Crimean Mountains reach altitudes of up to 1,500 metres. Extensive forests are found mainly in the north. The highly fertile black earth is found in the forest-steppe zone in the south and south-east of the country.

Soviet rule did indeed bring about the territorial unification of all the major areas inhabited by Ukrainians, particularly as a result of the Soviet expansion westwards after the Second World War, and it provided Ukrainians with career opportunities within the system. At the same time, however, social groups persecuted as anti-Soviet (e.g. kulaks, Ukrainian nationalists, clergy and others), as well as the elites – who were in any case only weakly established – were subjected to repression.

In the 1920s, the fledgling Soviet government attempted to bind the nationalities to the Soviet Union through cultural promotion and to recruit Soviet cadres from among them. For Ukraine, this policy of ‘rooting’ (Russian: korenizacija), introduced in 1923, meant, amongst other things, the strengthening of the Ukrainian language. Ukrainian National Communists such as the Commissars for Public Education, Oleksandr Šums’kyj (1890–1946) and Mykola Skrypnyk (1872–1933), were willing implementers of Moscow’s directives. However, the – already limited – influence of Ukrainian politicians on Soviet directives diminished further as Stalin’s (1878–1953), General Secretary of the Party’s Central Committee since 1922, grew increasingly fearful that national forces posed a threat to the system. The ‘revolution from above’ he initiated – involving the forced collectivisation of agriculture and accelerated industrialisation from the late 1920s onwards – was accompanied by a purge of Ukrainian national communists. These immense social upheavals were exacerbated by the devastating famine (Holodomor, literally: ‘death by starvation’) of 1932–33. Triggered by a crop failure and exacerbated by grain exports by the Soviet government – which, for propaganda reasons, denied the existence of the famine abroad – this resulted in millions of deaths in Ukraine (as insouthern Russia). The number of those who starved to death can only be estimated approximately: Western historians put the figure at around six million victims of starvation in the European Soviet Union, more than half of whom were ethnic Ukrainians,^[2] Ukrainian historians put the death toll in Ukraine at just under four million, though some estimates reach as high as ten million.^[3]

The theory that the catastrophe was deliberately caused by Moscow in order to wipe out the Ukrainian population is espoused primarily by Ukrainian historians, but is open to criticism for several reasons:^[4] The famine extended far beyond Ukraine, affecting regions such asWestern Siberia, the southern Urals,Northern Kazakhstan, the Northern Caucasus, the Kuban and the Volga region, where it also affected Russians and other nationalities. Furthermore, its impact was not evenly distributed across Ukraine, where the death toll from starvation increased from west to east. Nevertheless, in addition to Ukraine, several other states recognise the mass deaths as ‘genocide against the Ukrainians’; in 2008, the European Parliament described the ‘Holodomor (the deliberately induced famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine) as a terrible crime against the Ukrainian people and against humanity.’^[5]

The nationwide Stalinist purges and the Great Terror of 1936–1938, which were initiated by a crackdown on ‘Ukrainian nationalism’ from 1933 onwards, were overseen in Ukraine from 1938 by Nikita Khrushchev (Khrushchev, 1894–1971) as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party (CP). Almost the entire political leadership in Kyiv fell victim to the purges of 1936–1938: in addition to the Politburo, the Organisational Bureau and the Office of the Party’s Central Committee, this included the 17 People’s Commissars of Ukraine. Of the 102 members of the Central Committee (CC) and candidates, only three survived their arrest. However, it is difficult to calculate the total number of Stalinist victims in Ukraine because the sources are too fragmented and the term ‘victim’ is often not further differentiated in statistics. Furthermore, the victims include not only those who died as a result of direct acts of terror, such as executions by firing squad, but also those who perished as a result of measures such as imprisonment in camps, during deportation or whilst en route to camps, and during the recurring famines.^[6]

The Red Army’s recapture of Ukraine in 1943 was followed by the re-establishment of the Soviet regime and the settlement of scores with Nazi collaborators and those who were declared as such on the basis of fabricated evidence: repatriated ‘Eastern workers’ and prisoners of war, as well as Ukrainians and Russians who had served in the Wehrmacht or the civilian occupation authorities, and the underground fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in Western Ukraine – which was to be Sovietised – who continued to harass the Red Army until 1946. The number of Ukrainian inmates in Soviet penal camps rose from 107,550 Ukrainians (out of a total of 1,703,095 prisoners) in 1946 to 506,221 out of a total of 2,528,146 Ukrainians in 1951.^[9]

Stalin’s dictatorship came to an end with his death in 1953. The subsequent period up to 1964 – Khrushchev’s term as First Secretary of the Party in Moscow – brought political détente to Ukraine. For the first time, Ukrainian dissidents organised themselves in secret; initially they sought a relaxation of the socialist cultural dogma, but then, in the wake of the Helsinki human rights movement, they pressed for the rule of law and democratisation. However, they never became a mass movement; their numbers remained modest. Many Ukrainian opposition figures were sentenced to prison terms on political grounds or committed to psychiatric hospitals.

In the year before Khrushchev’s downfall in 1964, Petro Šelest (1908–1996; 1963–1972) was appointed Party Secretary in Kyiv, where he pursued a cautious ‘Ukrainian course’. His replacement by the hardliner Volodymyr Shcherbitzky (Ščerbic’kyj, 1918–1990; 1972–1989) resulted in increased alignment with Moscow and Russification, which even the ‘perestroika’ of the party’s new General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev (Gorbačev), refused to accept. It was only the traumatic events of the Chernobyl/Čornobyl’ nuclear disaster on 26 April 1986 and the shock felt by the Ukrainian and Soviet populations at the authorities’ inaction that brought about a rethinking of policy. During this period, civil society associations and groups advocating democratisation also began to form; in 1989, strikes took place in the coal mines of the Donbas (Russian: Donbass), during which the strikers initially pursued social and subsequently political objectives. The ‘People’s Movement of Ukraine for Perestroika’ (Narodynj ruchUkraïny za perebudovu), or ‘Ruch’ for short, founded in 1989, played an important role in the democratisation process. The anti-Soviet protest movement in Ukraine gained a momentum of its own through its national component, which ultimately aimed at state independence. In September 1989, Ščerbic’kyj, along with other politicians in the Ukrainian republic’s leadership who were resistant to reform, was removed from office by Moscow. On 16 July 1990, the Supreme Council of Ukraine (Verchovna Rada Ukraïny) declared Ukraine’s state sovereignty. Although the Soviet Union lost an important economic base as a result of Ukraine’s secession, Moscow did not oppose this, but insisted on the handover of nuclear weapons and a guarantee regarding the use of the naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea.

When the government led by Prime Minister Mykola Azarov (born 1947; 2010–2014) postponed the signing of the EU Association Agreement indefinitely on 21 November 2013, this triggered a widespread protest movement, the ‘Euromaidan’. Starting in Kyiv, where several tens of thousands of citizens had initially gathered from November 2013 onwards, supporters of the ‘Revolution of Dignity’ soon emerged across the country^[12]. Violence on the Maidan in Kyiv escalated when, from 20 January 2014, snipers opened fire on the crowd, killing around 100 people. Under mounting pressure from the streets, Yanukovych decided to flee (as he had planned) to Russia. This led to his removal from office by the Kyiv parliament. In the presidential election on 25 May 2014, Petro Poroshenko (born 1965; 2014–2019) became the first candidate to be elected representing the whole of Ukraine.

Meanwhile, regions with large Russian-speaking populations were thrown into turmoil. Following a dubious referendum and the infiltration of soldiers without insignia into Crimea, the peninsula was annexed by Russia on 21 March 2014. In Donetsk and Luhansk, insurgents – supported more or less openly by Moscow – established pseudo-states with the aim of seceding these ‘People’s Republics’ from Ukraine. The war being waged in these areas – referred to in Ukraine as the ATO (Anti-Terrorist Operation)) – between regular and paramilitary Ukrainian units and heavily armed separatists has so far claimed several thousand lives, and has resulted in widespread fear amongst the affected civilian population and flows of internally displaced persons numbering in the millions. It is destabilising Ukraine in its efforts to advance democratisation. At two summit meetings in Belarus, France and Germany attempted to mediate between Ukraine on the one hand and Russia and the separatists on the other. However, the negotiations, which culminated in two agreements – ‘Minsk I’ of 5 September 2014 and ‘Minsk II’ of 12 February 2015 – failed to prevent the establishment of pseudo-state structures in Donetsk and Luhansk.

Driven by disappointment at the failure of public reforms and the continued rule of corrupt elites, the political newcomer Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Zelens’kyj, born 1958) emerged victorious in the run-off of the 2019 presidential election. He is thus the seventh president since 1991 to have come to office through a democratically legitimate transition of power. This is remarkable when compared with Belarus, where Aleksandr Lukashenko (Lukašenko) has ruled continuously since 1991, and with the Russian Federation, where, following President Boris Yeltsin (El’cin), President Vladimir Putin has held office since 2000 – with a one-off swap of roles with Dmitry Medvedev from 2008 to 2012 – and, following the 2020 constitutional amendment, has the option of standing for re-election multiple times.

Kyiv continues to pursue a course of rapprochement with the EU. The section of an Association Agreement governing political and economic cooperation was signed by Poroshenko, or rather the interim government, in March and May 2014. A deeper effect of the ongoing state of war in Ukraine is that the population’s willingness to help, patriotism and civil mobilisation are developing into an integrative force within society that did not exist in previous decades.

The majority of the population are ethnic Ukrainians, accounting for almost 78 per cent in 2001. In the years prior to 1989, their number increased by 0.3 per cent and their share of the total population rose by 5.1 percentage points. Russians rank second. Compared with 1989, their proportion fell by 26.6 per cent, their share of the total population decreased by 4.8 percentage points and stood at 17.3 per cent in 2001.

In this breakdown, the German minority is scarcely noticeable in terms of numbers. Nevertheless, from a historical perspective, it holds cultural significance in the settlement areas of Volhynia, the Black Sea coast, the Crimea, Galicia and Bukovina. On the one hand, German settlers contributed to the colonisation of southern Ukraine in particular. On the other hand, in modern times, several Ukrainian towns were granted Magdeburg city rights, including Lviv and Kyiv. This led to the expansion and development of urban institutions, the likes of which did not exist in regions further to the east.

The spread of Lutheranism amongst the Ukrainians in Galicia—which can still be found there today—was also fostered by the former German settlements. In the Catholic sphere, it is worth noting that Alexander Frison (1875–1935) was one of four bishops secretly consecrated in 1926 on a papal mission to the USSR. Following repeated arrests during the Stalinist terror, Frison was shot in prison in 1937.^[14]

During the Soviet era, the fate of the Ukrainians of German descent was marked by numerous upheavals. During the 1920s, not only was an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of the Volga Germans established, but a number of German raions were also founded across the Union, ten of which were in Ukraine. Here, German became the official language and was promoted, within the limits permitted by the ideology, through cultural institutions such as theatres, libraries and the press, as well as through schools, universities and technical colleges. Following the gradual phasing out of these concessions to national minorities, the collectivisation of agriculture, driven through under Stalin, hit the Germans particularly hard, as the majority of them were farmers who made their living from agriculture. During Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’, minorities in particular found themselves in the crosshairs of the mass persecution of alleged ‘anti-Soviet elements’. Many Germans fell victim to the ‘German Operation’ of 1937–38 because, particularly after Hitler’s seizure of power, they were regarded as potential internal enemies.^[15] Following the German Reich’s invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, as a result of the decree of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of 28 August 1941 on the‘resettlement of the Volga Germans’, , 82,900 Germans from Ukraine were also deported in several waves to Soviet special settlements inWestern Siberia, Kazakhstan, Central Asia and the Altai.^[16]

The question of a Ukrainian national identity has been, and continues to be, a major theme in fiction. Prophetic and heroic roles, extending far beyond the act of storytelling, have been attributed to – or imposed upon – writers. Even today, they enjoy ‘a certain cult status’^[26].

In the 18th century, Ukrainian was established as a written language by the philosopher Hryhorij Skovoroda (1722–1794). The poet Taras Shevchenko (Ševčenko, 1814–1861) is regarded as the true founder of the Ukrainian literary language. The fact that he was exiled by the Russian Tsar and banned from writing only served to cement his status as the Ukrainian national poet and hero of freedom. Since 1939, Kyiv State University has been named after him. The city of Ivano-Frankivsk, known as Stanislau until 1962, owes its present name to the poet, playwright and prose writer Ivan Franko (1856–1916).

Authors of various native languages lived in regions that now form part of Ukraine. Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) was born in Velyki Soročynci and repeatedly drew on motifs from Ukrainian folklore in his Russian-language works. Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940; his work *The Master and Margarita* [‘Master i Margarita’] is considered a masterpiece of European stature) witnessed the numerous changes of rule in his native city of Kyiv amidst the turmoil of the revolution and civil war, and immortalised them in ‘The White Guard’. The Polish writer Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) lived in Drohobych, Galicia, where he was shot dead by an SS soldier. The Russian-speaking journalist and writer Isaak Babel (1894–1940) was born in Odessa/Odesa. As one of the many victims of Stalinist terror, he was arrested, tortured and killed. Also from Odessa were the Russian-speaking satirical duo Ilya Ilf (1897–1937) and Yevgeny Kataev (known as Yevgeny Petrov, 1903–1942). Joseph Roth (1894–1939), an Austrian writer, came from Brody in Eastern Galicia. The Polish science fiction author Stanisław Lem (1921–2006) lived in Lviv until 1946. Paul Celan (1920–1970) and Rose Ausländer (1901–1988) met in the ghetto of Czernowitz/Černivci/Cernăuţi.

During the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, Yuri Andrukhovych (Andruchovyč, born 1960) gained the widest international recognition among Ukrainian-language authors through his poems, essays and novels that contrast the pre-Soviet and Soviet past with the post-Soviet present, he gained the greatest international recognition amongst Ukrainian-language authors. Among the authors writing in Russian in Ukraine is Andrei Kurkov (born 1961). His novels (‘Picnic on the Ice’, ‘The President’s Last Love’) recount, in a style that is partly realistic and partly fantastical, the eccentricities of post-Soviet society in a state of upheaval.