Ukrainian History...thank you Amy!

A bit of history – if you’re interested!

Among the Slavs' earliest settlements was that of the name of Kyiv along the Dnipro River. The state known as Kyivan Rus-Ukraine arose in late 9th century. The Kyivan Rus-Ukraine reached its zenith in the 10th and 11th centuries under the rulers Volodymyr I (Volodymyr the Great) and his son Yaroslav I (Yaroslav the Wise). Volodymyr adopted Christianity as the official religion of his realm in AD 988. Christianity gave the eastern Slavic peoples their first written language, called Church Slavonic and Kyiv became eastern Europe's chief political and cultural centre. At this time Moscow was a small village in one of the northern principalities of Kyivan Rus, which later developed into Russian Empire. The 12th and 13th centuries saw the decline of Kyiv owing to internal dissension, struggles with the invading nomads. The Mongol conquest in the mid-13th century decisively ended Kyivan power, but a Ukrainian principality in western Ukraine that had emerged about 1200 continued into the 14th century.

In the 14th century Lithuania annexed most Ukrainian lands except for the Galician principality, which passed to the kingdom of Poland; and in the meantime southern Ukraine remained under the control of the Tartars. After the Union of Lublin in 1569, rule over Ukraine was transferred from Lithuania to Poland. Religious dissent and social strife between the Ukrainians and their Polish overlords were augmented by the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who were in fact a class of free warriors. From their stronghold along the lower Dnipro River, the Cossacks in 1648, led by their Hetman (military leader) Bohdan Khmelnytsky, rose against the Poles and formed a semi-independent, if short-lived, state. Khmelnytsky's need for help against the Poles led to an agreement with the Muscovite tsar in 1654.

In the late 18th-century the Russian Empire obtained the Ukrainian lands west of the Dnipro, except for Galicia, which went to Austria. A Ukrainian nationalist movement developed in the 19th century, but in Russian-held Ukraine the movement faced political repression and restrictions against the Ukrainian language. After the Russian Revolution of February 1917, Ukrainian and Bolshevik forces struggled for control of Ukraine until 1921, when the Soviet government won.

Beginning in the 1930s, the Soviet government under Joseph Stalin carried out by brutal force a policy of rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine. This policy met with peasant resistance, which in turn prompted the confiscation of grain from Ukrainian farmers by Soviet authorities, with the result that a famine in the early 1930s took an estimated five million lives.

Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union (1941) brought devastation to Ukraine and enormous suffering to its population. A major reconstruction effort after the defeat of the Nazis restored the country's economy to its pre-war level in a short time.

After the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the reforms in the late 1980s, Ukrainian nationalist feelings gradually awoke, leading the newly democratized Ukrainian parliament to declare the republic's sovereignty in 1991.