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The consequences of Tartar-Mogul destructions became the main reason for the lag of towns of Ukraine-Rus behind the West-European towns in richness, the level of development of guild handicraft, and self-government. Though the town of Vladimir-Volynsky gained the Magdeburg right (1324), in general, the urban culture had not yet reached the West-European level.
Despite the separation of the Crimean Khanate from the Golden Horde (1443), the incursions of nomads on the Ukrainian lands still took place, what favored the emergence of list Cossacks as a special military class, defending the southern borders of the state from incursions. Later, the formations of the Zaporizhzhian Sich appear on Dnieper rapids. The enslaving of peasants intensified in this period. Such a state of affairs cannot help to influence the social-political situation in the Great Princedom of Lithuania.
The growing political tension reached their critical point because of active policy of catholicizing the Ukrainian population, finding its expression in the decisions of the Brest synod (1596) on the creation of the Uniate Church.
The second epochal cycle. Revolutionary content had the events of the first quarter of the 17th century, connected with the struggle of Ukrainian Cossacks for extending their social rights, the struggle of peasants for liberation from the serfdom oppression of Polish magnates and the struggle of all Ukrainian population for the confessional equality.
The apogee of the events became the War for liberation of the Ukrainian nation under the guidance of Bogdan Khmelnitsky (1648-1654). This period became a divide in the history of Ukraine. However, the high point of restoration of the national statehood of the period of Bogdan Khmelnitsky did not end in success. The Andrusov Peace (1667) between Moscow and Rzecz Pospolita stimulated the geopolitic split of Ukrainian lands: the Left-bank Ukraine remained in the zone of Russian influence, the Right-bank one (except Kiev) – under control of Poland. According to the figural statement of Hrushevsky, the period of Ruin had come, when Ukrainian lands were devastated by almost semicentenary uninterrupted wars.
The period involutionary by its characteristics in the history of Ukraine is connected with its following existence in the borders of Russia. The last attempt of preserving its identity found its expression in the causes that led to events of the Poltava battle (1709). The spiritual front of the period was defined by the works of Hrigory Skovoroda (1722-1794).
Ukraine loses the foretype of its statehood of this period with the destruction of the Zaporizhzhian Sich by Russian troops (1775). The gradual erosion of its social-cultural grounds proceeded. The territorial enlargement at the expense of three divisions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) and accession of the Crimea (1783) led to the spread of serfdom on the peasants of the Left-bank and Slobodian Ukraine at the same time. The «reincarnation» of Ukrainian national spirit was realized in the works of Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), what gave an ideological ground to the following generations of freethinking democrats.
The defeat of the Russian Empire in the Crimean War (1854-1856) stimulated reforms, beginning with the abolishment of serfdom (1861). In fact, it became the turning co-evolutionary phase of the third epochal cycle. The bourgeois reforming of economy opened the space for the private initiative. At the same time, the differentiation of the urban Russian-speaking and country Ukrainian-speaking cultures is intensified in the growing processes of russification of Ukraine: the Valuev (1863) and Ems (1876) edicts, that appreciably limited the publishing of books and prohibited the teaching at schools in Ukrainian. All these factors distinctively restrained national-cultural development of Ukraine and manifested in a drop in efficiency of country’s cultural self-realization.
The evolutionary stage of the second epochal cycle was interrupted by the events of the Great October Socialist Revolution (1917-1921). Thus, any accelerated revolutionary processes appeared to be untenable for Ukraine on the whole, and the struggle for national liberation ended in defeat. Appearing in the unit multinational state, the USSR, Ukraine continued its development already in the involutionary period of the third epochal cycle.
The involutionary stage is connected with the realization of the policy of the «military communism» under conditions of the civil war (1918-1921). The objective specificity of the period, consisting in «acceleration» of the time of historical development and in unique peripetias of the process of mobilization of the «pursuit development», revealed later. Especially, it can be seen in the transformation of the traditional Ukrainian agrarian society to the «noncapitalist» industrial one, preserving the specific features of «multistructureness»: from the forms of quasistate slavery in the concentration camps, «petty-bourgeois» agrarian production of the «new economic policy» times, to the elements of «state capitalism».
The Second World War (1939-1945) became a tragic trial for Ukraine. It questioned the very possibility of the following historical development as a subject rather than an object of the hostile expansion. On the other side, almost all ethnically Ukrainian territories were included to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, what created the perspective for formation of a political nation.
At the same time, the involutionary period was connected with solution of the tasks of industrial development. The overall nationalization of the objects of property, the collectivization of the agrarian and industrial production, the secularization of the spiritual life did not give any freedom of choice except that defined by the policy of the single governing Communist party and the plans for country’s economic development. Possessing the enormous fertility of both the agricultural area and spiritual space, Ukraine represented an example of the fatigueless supplier of elite personnel to USSR’s bodies. This directly influenced the condition of the national elite.
The co-evolutionary phase of the third epochal cycle for Ukraine is identified with the disintegration of the USSR (1991) and the third attempt (after 1648-1654 and 1917-1921) to create a sovereign state.
8.7. Russia
Speaking on the historical destiny of Ukraine, Russia, and Belorussia as a basis of the Eurasian civilizational area, one should pay attention to differences in the dynamics of development of epochal cycles of the national historical processes of three Slav nations.
The bright example of such a dissonance is the Russian history. By creating the hypothetical scheme of changes of the epochal cycles, one should pay attention to the «interference» of wave-like cycles of the historical processes within nations which were either forcibly or peacefully included in various times to the Russian Empire as the unique Eurasian geopolitic formation. The conception of Klyuchevsky (1841-1911) concerning the Russian civilization as a peculiar synthesis of the Orthodoxy and Islam seems to be efficient. This conception reflected the main peculiarities of the Russian history in the most adequate manner.
The beginning of the first epochal cycle may be identified with the revolutionary stage, whose political sense is connected with radical changes in the alignment of forces between the parental culture of the Kievian Rus and its northern princedoms. The following events may be referred to this period: the first mention of Moscow in chronicles (1147); the transfer of the «capital» princely throne from Kiev to Vladimir (1157). The seizure and destruction of Kiev by the troops of Andrei Bogolubsky (1169) was the symbolic end of the revolutionary phase.
The involutionary period of the first epochal cycle was developing since the latter half of the 12th century. The Mogul-Tartar invasion (1237-1240) became the defining event for this cycle. The Moscowian state was also forced to stand up to the military threats from the West – the opposition of Alexander Nevsky to the Swedish and Teutonic pressure (1240-1242) – which virtually determined the Eurasian geostrategy of the North-Eastern Russia.
The identification of Moscow as a center of collection of lands (1326) is referred to this period – the transfer of the capital from Vladimir-on-Klyazma. The political reinforcement of the Moscowian princes was connected with the successful opposition to the Mogul-Tartars – the Kulikovo battle (1380); the defeat of the Gold Horde by Timur-Tamerlane (1395). The seizure of Constantinople by the Turks (1453) favored the emergence of the ideology «Moscow is the Third Rome, there cannot be the fourth». The collection of lands around Moscow was followed by the addition of the Great Novgorod (1478) and the Princedom of Tver (1485). The victory over the Great Princedom of Lithuania allowed one to annex Pskov and Smolensk to Moscow (1514).
The co-evolutionary transient period is connected with the beginning of the rule of Ivan IV the Terrible. The main events of this period were as follows: the publication of the code of laws (1550); the seizure of Kazan (1552); the establishment of oprichnina (1565-1572).
The evolutionary period of the cycle is connected with the Asian territorial expansion of Russia. In particular, with the campaign of Ermak to Siberia (1581), which ended in the join of the territory that had an area of three Europes. Klyuchevsky said: «The state fattened, and the people languished». The successes of Russia in the west were not so impressive. The destructive Livonia War (1558-1583) did not allow one to solve the task for the Russia to way out to the Baltic Sea. The country remained terrestrial in the geopolitic sense.
The symbols of the evolutionary period were: the establishment of patriarchate (1589) and «troublous times» (1598-1612), connected with cessation of the Rurik’s dynasty and transition of the scepter to the Romanovs. At this time, the influence of the Moscowian czardom on the European part of Eurasia was strengthening, especially after the joining of Ukraine (1654). The new geopolitical situation on the West was legitimated by the «Eternal Peace» with Poland (1686). The analogous functions in Asia were played by the Nerchinsk Treaty with China (1689).
The reforms led by Peter I became revolutionary by the character of social changes. They began in 1698 with «the Great embassy» to Western Europe and ended with the victory over Sweden in the North War and exit to the Baltic Sea. Russia was proclaimed the empire. The involutionary period of the second epochal cycle began with the death of Peter I (1725). This period lasted to the abolishment of serfdom (1861). The following half-way bourgeois reforms of 1870s can be viewed as the co-evolutionary phase of development.
The evolutionary period of the second epochal cycle is connected with Russia’s finding solutions to the tasks of searching for a compromise between the feudalist-monarchic form of governance and the nascent forms of bourgeois democracy. In fact, this process was interrupted by the Great October Socialist Revolution (1917-1921), which established the Soviet variant of the socialist system from Brest (Belorussia) to Vladivostok, from the Arctic Ocean to Kushka (Turkmenistan). In fact, the new economic policy, which became a peculiar pullback process in the USSR, was the continuation of revolutionary processes and had the aim to «make a step back in order to make two steps forward» as Lenin said. After a complete fulfillment of its tasks, the policy was changed with the series of tasks characteristic of the soviet (involutionary) period such as «collectivization», «industrialization», «electrification», «chemicalization» and other programs of establishing an industrially developed society of the «quasiwestern» type.
The period (1954-1964) is famous with the reforms of N. S. Khrushchev and reflected all contradictions of the soviet social system. The following period of L. I. Brezhnev (1964-1982) led the country to the situation, when the USSR became the second superpower after the USA. But, at the same time, the social-economic stagnation and decline of morality became more and more obvious. Together with that, the inner potencies of intellectual and creative self-expression of the nation were growing. The period of Andropov (1982-1983) expressed itself by the attempt to start the «planned» economic transformations according to the Chinese model, preserving the stability of political institutions. Then Gorbachev (1985-1991) expanded the reforms and drove the country to the modern uncontrolled transient processes of co-evolution – the fall of the Berlin Wall and downfall of the socialist system in Europe (1989), the disintegration of the USSR and emergence of new independent states in the Central and Eastern Europe (1990-1991), the catastrophic collapse of economies of these countries, which destabilized the world’s financial system.
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