The Gates of Europe

How can one country be both a crossroads of civilizations and a recurring battlefield for empires? In The Gates of Europe, historian Serhii Plokhy argues that Ukraine’s identity and destiny are rooted in geography—its position as the bridge between Europe and the Eurasian steppe. This liminal position makes Ukraine neither exclusively Eastern nor Western but a frontier where worlds meet, clash, and hybridize. To understand Ukraine’s modern struggles for sovereignty and orientation, you have to trace how centuries of migrations, conquests, and cultural exchanges built, fractured, and redefined this frontier.

Plokhy’s story spans millennia—from Greek colonists and Scythian nomads to Kyivan princes, Cossack rebels, and post-Soviet reformers. What connects these eras is not a fixed national essence but what he calls moving frontiers: ecological, political, and religious boundaries that shape Ukraine’s plural foundations. In this book, you witness how these boundaries evolve, how empires rise and fall over this contested landscape, and how the Ukrainian people translate centuries of fluidity into a modern national project.

Geography as destiny

The fertile black earth of the Dnieper basin, stretching between forest and steppe, gives Ukraine its agricultural wealth but also its vulnerability. Ancient Greeks saw it as a breadbasket; Herodotus compared it to Egypt. The same open terrain that supported farming also provided a highway for nomads—Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Mongols—and later, armies from Poland, Russia, and Germany. Geography made Ukraine desirable and defenseless at once: a prize to be seized, a corridor to be crossed.

These shifting frontiers also separated civilizations. The fault line between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism runs through Ukraine, leaving behind a mosaic of rites, languages, and loyalties. In some regions (Galicia), Catholic influences met Byzantine traditions to form a Uniate synthesis; elsewhere, Orthodox and Cossack cultures combined to resist both Catholic and imperial dominance. From the earliest centuries, Ukraine’s cultural code became plural and adaptive rather than monolithic.

A continuous struggle for autonomy

Because Ukraine sat on the frontier, every empire sought to absorb it. The Kyivan Rus’ empire built the first political unity; the Mongol invasion shattered it. The Polish‑Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Habsburgs, and the Romanovs each imposed their systems, leaving regions with different administrative and religious histories. Yet Ukrainian society repeatedly regenerated autonomy through local forms: the Cossack Sich on the steppe, the Hetmanate politics of the seventeenth century, and later the university and church networks that preserved identity under empire. When imperial pressures tightened, Ukrainians turned to language, religion, and folk tradition as safe havens for collective memory.

The book shows that political independence has never been a permanent state but a rhythm of rise and repression. From Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s revolt (1648) to the fleeting Ukrainian People’s Republic of 1918, autonomy always emerged amid chaos—wars, revolutions, and shifting alliances—and often ended in subjugation. Modern independence (1991) is thus part of a centuries-long cycle rather than an abrupt rebirth.

Empires and modernity

By the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imperial modernization brought railroads, industry, and the printed word. But it also introduced new hierarchies: St. Petersburg imposed Russification; Vienna and Warsaw encouraged Polonization or restrained national campaigns; both feared mass literacy in Ukrainian. Yet language revival movements (Kotliarevsky, Shevchenko, Hrushevsky) transformed ethnic consciousness into nationalism. You learn how literature, education, and print substituted for the political institutions Ukrainians lacked (a pattern mirrored by Ireland and Finland in the same era).

The twentieth century added extremes: civil wars, famine, genocide, Stalinist repression, and Nazi occupation. Each wave redrew boundaries and memories, turning identity into survival. The Soviet era both enabled modernization and suppressed nationhood, while the late‑Soviet awakening—sparked by disasters like Chernobyl—revived calls for democracy and self-rule.

Ukraine’s place in Europe’s story

Plokhy ultimately situates Ukraine as a mirror of Europe’s contradictions: unity through diversity, freedom through struggle. Europe’s east–west divide is embodied in Ukraine’s landscape and history. When you read about medieval trade routes or modern revolutions, you see how Ukraine repeatedly redefines Europe’s borders—not as a peripheral margin but as its testing ground. (Note: Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands echoes this argument, but Plokhy’s narrative centers Ukrainian agency rather than victimhood.)

Key takeaway

Ukraine’s history is not a linear march toward nationhood but a story of resilience within overlapping empires. Geography created diversity; empire imposed hierarchy; culture preserved continuity. Today’s sovereignty battles—from Crimea to Donbas—are chapters in the same long chronicle of a frontier society struggling to control its own gates to Europe.

Once you see Ukraine through this frontier lens, every historical episode—whether Kyivan princes forging treaties, Cossacks swearing oaths at Pereiaslav, or modern citizens rallying on the Maidan—becomes part of a single drama: the enduring quest to balance openness with autonomy in the space between worlds.

Plokhy begins with a deep historical canvas. Before there was Ukraine, there was the steppe—the great grassland corridor linking Europe, Persia, and China. Greeks founded colonies along the Black Sea (Olbia, Chersonesus) to trade with Scythian nomads and local cultivators. The region functioned as an exchange zone, not a border wall: Greek coins and mythic griffins appear in Scythian burials, showing how trade and art intertwined. When the Slavs moved south after the fall of Rome and joined these older layers, a fusion of agriculture and mobility set the stage for state formation.

The making of Kyivan Rus’

The ninth century introduced the Varangians—Scandinavian traders and warriors—who, according to the Primary Chronicle, founded princely dynasties that ruled from Novgorod to Kyiv. Under princes like Oleh and Volodymyr, trade along the Dnieper route linked the Baltic with Byzantium. Volodymyr’s baptism in 988 integrated Rus’ into Christian civilization, replacing pagan pluralism with organized church and law. Yaroslav the Wise (1019–1054) codified the Rus’ Justice and built St. Sophia Cathedral—a symbol of literacy, architecture, and faith merging in political legitimacy.

Fragmentation and legacy

After Mongol armies burned Kyiv in 1240, the first Ukrainian state collapsed, but its spiritual heritage endured. The Orthodox Church and the Cyrillic literary tradition kept continuity alive through monastic scriptoria and chronicles. Kyiv’s fall displaced political power northward to Vladimir and Moscow, but in Galicia and Volhynia it inspired experiments with western alliances. The Mongol era left scars yet stabilized trade and shifted diplomatic horizons, connecting Ukrainians both eastward into Asia and westward into Latin Christendom.

Crucial lesson

Ukraine’s earliest statehood emerged from networks and exchange, not isolation. The Kyivan synthesis—Slavic, Norse, Byzantine—shows that identity on the steppe was built through contact, a constant pattern in Ukraine’s later history.

When you trace this arc from Scythians to Rus’, you realize that Ukraine’s cultural DNA blends openness, adaptation, and hybrid continuity—the essential traits it would need to survive later conquests.

By the sixteenth century, frontier life produced a new social organism: the Cossacks. Living between settled lands and the wild steppe, they embodied freedom, self-defense, and Orthodox piety. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth tried to co-opt them through military registers while imposing Catholic hierarchy through the Union of Brest (1596), which created the Uniate Church. These overlapping pressures bred both religious reform (Peter Mohyla’s Orthodox revival in Kyiv) and rebellion.

Khmelnytsky’s revolution

Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1648–1657) unified peasant and Cossack grievances into a national uprising. Victories over Polish forces at Zhovti Vody and Korsun led to the formation of the Cossack Hetmanate, headquartered in Chyhyryn. At Pereiaslav (1654), Khmelnytsky sought protection from Muscovy, swearing allegiance to Tsar Aleksei—but each side read the pact differently. To Cossacks it was alliance; to Moscow it implied subordination. After Khmelnytsky’s death, civil wars and foreign interventions split Ukraine along the Dnieper (Andrusovo Truce, 1667), with the Left Bank absorbed by Russia and the Right Bank reverting to Poland.

Legacy of autonomy and loss

The Hetmanate institutionalized Cossack governance—elected hetmans, military councils, and clerical scholarship (Kyiv-Mohyla Academy)—that kept a vision of self-rule alive under imperial watch. Its gradual abolition under Catherine II in the 1760s–1780s mirrored the extinction of Polish autonomy and marked Ukraine’s descent into the imperial order. Yet the Cossack myth survived in folklore and literature, fueling later nationalism. (Note: Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar later turns Cossack freedom into a national metaphor.)

Enduring pattern

Ukraine’s search for security through alliances—whether with Moscow, Warsaw, or Vienna—often brings new domination. The Hetmanate teaches that autonomy gained on the battlefield can quietly erode at the conference table.

You can read the Cossack era as Ukraine’s second founding: it redefined political membership around equality, literacy, and Orthodox unity, values that would return in modern national movements.

From the late eighteenth century, Ukraine was divided between empires—the Russian and Habsburg. Catherine II’s annexation of the steppe (creating New Russia) and the Habsburg integration of Galicia (after Poland’s partitions) put Ukrainian lands under different imperial logics. The south urbanized rapidly through colonies like Odesa, Katerynoslav, and Yuzivka; meanwhile, western Ukrainians lived in a semi‑autonomous province of competing Poles, Ruthenians, and Jews. This dual empire experience molded two variants of Ukrainian identity: one imperial and censored, the other provincial but politically active.

Language and nation-making

As serfdom waned and printing spread, writers reimagined nationhood. Ivan Kotliarevsky’s Eneïda (1798) transformed vernacular speech into literature, while Taras Shevchenko’s poetry presented Ukraine as a moral homeland betrayed by empire. Historians like Mykhailo Hrushevsky later provided an academic lineage connecting modern Ukrainians to Kyivan Rus’. Empires reacted defensively: the Valuev Circular (1863) and Ems Ukase (1876) banned Ukrainian language publications, insisting that “there is no separate Little Russian language.” Yet these bans only confirmed that language had become political.

Economic change and social mobilization

Industrialization drew millions into new cities—Kharkiv, Kyiv, Odesa—turning peasants into industrial workers and fueling socialist agitation. Galicia became a training ground for parliamentary politics inside Austria-Hungary, while Russian Ukraine found outlets in underground movements. The 1905 Revolution opened the first mass Ukrainian press and legal associations, planting civic seeds that would blossom in 1917. Despite censorship and division, Ukrainians learned to organize across borders through shared culture and print networks.

Historical continuity

Imperial suppression inadvertently unified Ukrainians by teaching them that culture could serve as politics. The nineteenth century became the laboratory of nationhood, long before any state would exist.

World War I and the 1917 revolutions collapsed the imperial order, turning Ukraine into one of Europe’s most chaotic laboratories of statehood. The February Revolution in Petrograd prompted the creation of the Central Rada in Kyiv under historian Hrushevsky. What began as cultural coordination became government: by the Fourth Universal (January 1918), Ukraine declared full independence as the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR). But independence came without a standing army or stable institutions.

War, occupation, and civil conflict

The Rada’s weakness forced it to ally with the Central Powers, leading to German intervention and General Skoropadsky’s Hetmanate (1918)—a technocratic but unpopular regime dependent on foreign bayonets. Its overthrow brought Symon Petliura’s Directory and further fragmentation. Between 1918 and 1921, Ukraine endured overlapping wars among Bolsheviks, Whites, Polish armies, anarchist detachments (Makhno), and nationalist forces. The pogroms of this era killed tens of thousands of Jews, leaving moral wounds still debated today. Ultimately, Bolshevik victory and the 1921 Treaty of Riga partitioned Ukraine among Soviet Russia, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.

A fragile foundation

Despite defeat, this revolutionary period institutionalized key modern forms—a national parliament, universities, Ukrainian-language schools, and international diplomacy. It proved that independent Ukraine was thinkable and could mobilize broad social support. (Note: Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined communities” fits perfectly here; a nation was imagined through action even without durable borders.)

Enduring lesson

Political independence requires state capacity as much as enthusiasm. The Ukrainian revolution created symbols and constitutions but lacked the power to defend them—an echo that reappears in modern geopolitics.

The Bolshevik victory remade Ukraine as a Soviet republic within the USSR (1922). Early policies of korenizatsiia (indigenization) offered cultural breathing space: Ukrainian schools, publishing, and theater flourished under figures like Oleksandr Shumsky and Mykola Khvylovy. This brief renaissance represented “national communism,” a socialist path compatible with Ukrainian identity. But Stalin’s consolidation of power reversed it, demonstrating the limits of autonomy within empire.

Famine and purge

The Five-Year Plans brought spectacular industrial projects like Dniprohes, symbolizing modernization through coercion. Forced collectivization (1929–1933) devastated rural Ukraine, where over‑quota grain requisitions starved millions (Holodomor). The famine became both an economic instrument and a political purge of “national deviation.” By 1934 Ukrainization was rolled back, the capital moved to Kyiv under tighter control, and the 1937–1938 purges wiped out intellectual and clerical elites. Stalin buried a potential plural Soviet model beneath centralized terror.

Between communism and nationalism

Meanwhile, western Ukrainians under Polish rule faced Polonization and economic neglect. Radical groups like the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), led by figures such as Stepan Bandera, combined anti‑imperial passion with authoritarian ideology. By the late 1930s, Ukrainian life was polarized: Soviet Ukraine suppressed its own intellectuals, while Galicia radicalized toward violence. Both tendencies carried forward into World War II.

Historical irony

Stalin built an industrial Ukraine but destroyed its moral and demographic base. The Soviet project realized modernization without humanity, forging a state that was powerful yet profoundly broken.

Nazi Germany’s 1941 invasion turned Ukraine into the bloodiest arena of the Second World War. Millions of Red Army soldiers were captured; entire cities—Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa—were destroyed. Under occupation, Ukraine experienced three intertwined horrors: genocide against Jews, mass deportation of civilians for forced labor, and scorched-earth warfare between partisans, nationalists, Nazis, and Soviets.

The Holocaust in Ukraine

Unlike in Poland, extermination here occurred largely through open‑air shootings by Einsatzgruppen and police auxiliaries. At Babi Yar alone, over 33,000 Jews were executed in two days (September 1941). Similar massacres decimated Jewish life in Vinnytsia, Chernihiv, and Dnipropetrovsk. The genocide unfolded in towns and ravines familiar to victims—a local apocalypse that entwined proximity and complicity. Ukrainians themselves were victims too: millions of civilians perished from siege, labor drafts, and reprisal killings.

Resistance and divided loyalties

Ukrainians fought on multiple sides. More than seven million served in Soviet forces; nationalist insurgents (UPA) battled both Germans and Soviets in the west; local collaborators and the Galician Waffen‑SS division pursued an impossible anti‑Soviet dream. The war left physical and moral devastation—6–7 million dead in Ukraine and societies deeply fractured. By 1945 Ukraine re‑entered the USSR enlarged territorially but traumatized, having lost both its Jews and much of its prewar intelligentsia.

Enduring wound

World War II turned Ukraine into a moral landscape of impossible choices. Collaboration, resistance, and victimhood overlapped, leaving controversies over memory that still shape identity and foreign relations today.

After Stalin’s death, Khrushchev’s de‑Stalinization and Crimea’s 1954 transfer to Ukraine symbolized a limited resurgence of Ukrainian agency within the USSR. Yet political stagnation and censorship persisted. The 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe exposed systemic decay and Moscow’s disregard for local lives, turning ecological outrage into political awakening. Activists, intellectuals, and clergy demanded transparency, setting the stage for perestroika‑era mobilization.

Independence through collapse

When the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Ukraine declared independence on August 24 and confirmed it by a 90% referendum vote nationwide. This was not secession by the west alone but a near‑universal act of civic will. Joining the CIS through the Belavezha Accords, Ukraine inherited Soviet industry, borders, and nuclear arsenals, immediately confronting the challenge of rebuilding a viable state amid economic collapse and oligarchic privatization.

Democratization and new revolutions

The 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2013–2014 Revolution of Dignity (Euromaidan) became milestones in civic awakening. Each arose from electoral deceit or corruption but evolved into a broader assertion of dignity, legality, and European aspiration. The Maidan protests of 2014 led to the fall of Yanukovych and provoked Russia’s annexation of Crimea and war in Donbas. Between reform drives and wartime resilience, Ukraine matured from a post‑Soviet republic into a nation-defending state.

Contemporary meaning

Modern independence tests whether centuries of frontier experience can be converted into stable institutions. Ukraine’s survival now depends not only on geography or resistance but on civic endurance, reform, and the defense of democratic sovereignty.