Western Ukraine
The Western Ukraine is a predominantly agrarian embossed and structurally weak area extending within the Ukraine differs in historical and political terms from other parts of the country. By far the largest urban center in this region is Lviv .
history
In the course of history, the east and south of Ukraine have repeatedly and for a long time belonged to the steppe empires of the Eurasian nomadic and equestrian peoples of the Khazars , Kyptschaks (capital Sharukhan near Kharkiv ) and Tatars ( Golden Horde on the Volga), while the peasantry in western Ukraine which based Kievan Rus .
Poland-Lithuania has dominated western Ukraine since the 14th century . Here, Ukraine began to be catholized, which after the church union of Brest initially also encompassed large parts of western Ukraine, but came to a temporary end with the exit of Kiev from the union in 1630.
After the collapse of the Tatar and Lithuanian rule, the Orthodox Cossacks of central Ukraine rose against Catholic Poland-Lithuania in 1648 and placed themselves under Russian protection together with Kiev in 1654 . Western Ukraine remained with Poland in 1668. In 1793, 1795 and 1809, when Poland was partitioned, most of the rest of Ukraine fell to Russia.
Parallel to the loss of Polish territory to Russia, the territory of the Uniate Church was also pushed back by the Orthodox churches. When Poland was partitioned in 1772 and 1795, Galicia fell to the Austrian Empire . In Galicia, isolated from the Russians and Kiev, the Western Ukrainians waged a self-assertion struggle against Poles and Austrians , Catholics and Uniates, and aroused the feeling of being “true” Ukrainians . The stronghold of an emerging Ukrainian nationalism in the 19th century was therefore not Kiev, which was under Russian rule, but eastern Galicia.
During the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the Russian tsarist empire, the West Ukrainian People's Republic briefly emerged in Galicia , although it was crushed between the expanding Soviet Russia and the Second Polish Republic . With the Soviet defeat in the Soviet-Polish War and the suppression of the Ukrainian independence movements, Galicia became part of Poland, further areas came to Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Romania . Within the Soviet Union , the eastern Ukrainian Kharkiv became the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic instead of Kiev in 1920–1934 . The Soviets promoted industry in the east of the country and shipping in the south versus agriculture in the west, which became the "breadbasket".
After the Soviet Union had militarily occupied the area in September 1939 and annexed it to the state, it deported around one million Poles and Ukrainians to Siberia . The NKVD murdered 24,000 political prisoners .
After the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the population was relieved, but the rule of Reich Commissioner Erich Koch made them an enemy.
As a result of the Second World War, Eastern Galicia with Lviv and Carpathian Ukraine came under Soviet rule in 1946 . Until 1947, and in isolated cases even until 1954, the West Ukrainians armed armed opposition to Soviet rule. Even after that, Lviv remained a stronghold of the national and religious opposition.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union , there was a referendum on Ukraine's independence in 1991 . Since then, presidential and parliamentary elections have reflected the orientation of western Ukraine towards western Europe. However, all Ukrainian election winners were also dependent on votes from areas in eastern Ukraine that were more towards Russia, as was the case in the runoff ballot of the 2004 presidential election in Ukraine . While Viktor Yanukovych, supported by Russia, achieved majorities in all regions of the east and southern Ukraine, the west Ukrainian candidate Viktor Yushchenko sat down with many votes from western Ukraine, Kiev and central Ukraine, but also with enough votes from the populous oblasts in the east by. In contrast to less clear majorities in Kiev and central Ukraine, Yushchenko achieved majorities of over 90% in the far west.
In April 2014 called for Viktor Orbán for the 200,000 ethnic Hungarians in Zakarpattia Oblast , the dual citizenship and more autonomy .
Religions and population
Religions
Most of the residents of western Ukraine and Kiev are Catholics, Uniates and Ukrainian Orthodox.
- Roman Catholic Church in Ukraine
- Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church
- Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church
- Orthodox Church of Ukraine
population
While there are larger Russian minorities in the east and south of Ukraine between Kharkiv and Odessa , Ukrainians in the central regions and Kiev make up three quarters or more of the population. This proportion is even higher in the west.
In Galicia there are small Polish and German minorities, most of whom are members of the Roman Catholic Church of the Latin Rite. Numerous other non-Ukrainian minorities live in Carpathian Ukraine, some of which are also Protestants .
The Ukrainian language is more widespread than Russian , which in the far west is sometimes not spoken at all. A common oral hybrid form of the Ukrainian language with the Russian is the surschyk .
At the end of the 19th century the so-called Young Ruthenian movement was supported by the Austrian government (also against the Poles and the Romanians). This was intended to stimulate a differentiation from Russian, to which the so-called Old Ruthenians had remained faithful. The Ukrainian language was codified for the first time in Chernivtsi by the linguist Stepan Smal-Stozkyj , a leading young Ruthenian.
Criticism of the model of a bipolar Ukraine
In particular, during reporting on the 2004 presidential elections in Ukraine , the image of an east-west split in the country was used in Western media to illustrate the political division between Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych . Since the areas of today's Ukraine were shaped by multi-ethnic empires, the regions have developed culturally differently, which is also reflected in language usage. The portrayal of an east-west dichotomy , shaped by a Russian-speaking, allegedly Soviet - nostalgic East and a Ukrainian- speaking, nationalistic and allegedly democratic- oriented West, fails to recognize the spectrum of national and linguistic identities in Ukraine. According to the 2001 census, of the approximately 48 million Ukrainian citizens, 77.8% identified themselves as ethnic Ukrainians (although only 67.5% stated Ukrainian as their mother tongue) and 17.3% as ethnic Russians . The other minorities include Belarusians (0.6%), Moldovans (0.5%) and Crimean Tatars (0.5%). There are also Bulgarian, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish and Jewish minorities. The population of Ukraine can therefore mainly be divided into Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians, Russian-speaking Ukrainians and Russian-speaking Russians, whereby the change between identities is often fluid. Defining yourself as a Ukrainian can also go hand in hand with a bond with the Russian language culture.
See also
- Western Ukrainian People's Republic
- Ukrainian Liberation Army
- Ukrainian Insurgent Army
- Volhynia
- Massacres in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia
literature
- Andreas Kappeler : A Brief History of Ukraine . Beck, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-406-37449-2 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Konrad Schuller : The prehistory . Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , August 1, 2009, p. 40.
- ↑ Kiev fears destabilization in western Ukraine (WAZ)
- ↑ Western Ukraine: Hungarian minority want more rights (rianovosti)
- ^ Wilfried Jilge : Split in East and West? Language issue and history politics in Ukraine in the context of the 2004 and 2006 election campaigns ( Memento from July 20, 2009 in the Internet Archive )