The "Maidan Revolution" - Anti-government protesters clash with police in Kiev on Feb. 20, 2014.

A Brief History of Modern Ukraine, 1900-2020

with Chris Boïcos

The object of this lecture is to provide our PAS audience with some of the key elements – national, political and cultural - of modern Ukrainian history that can serve as a background for understanding the current conflict.

Ukraine has always been a fascinating and turbulent crossroads of peoples, religions, cultures and empires since ancient times. Since the Middle Ages, Ukrainians, Russians, Tartars, Poles, Cossacks Ottomans and among religions, the Orthodox, Uniate, Catholic, Jewish and Muslim, have collided, but also fused, in the territories covered by the modern state born after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

We will outline the evolution of Ukraine from the late Tsarist period (1900-1914) through the travails of World War, Revolution and Civil War (1914-1921), the regimes of Lenin and Stalin (1921-1954) - with the dramatic episodes of the Great Famine, “Holodomor” (1932-33) and the destructions, massacres and privations of WWII (1941-44) - the late Soviet period (1954-1991) to the emergence of an independent, Ukraine (1991) and the two democratic revolutions – “Orange” (2004) and “Maidan” (2014) – that Vladimir Putin considers an existential threat to his concept of a totalitarian Russia.