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61 " The official Soviet line on the dispute emphasised harmony, homogeneity, Brotherhood. Kievan Rus was inhabited by a single monolithic ‘ancient Rus’ nationality, from which Russians, Ukrainians and Belarussians all descended; for them to argue over Volodymyr and Yaroslav made no more sense than for the English and French to squabble over Charlemagne. The languages of all three nations descend from the ancient Slavs’, and all three inherited Orthodoxy. "
― Anna Reid , Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine
62 " Being ‘Ukrainian’, for the hordes of patriotic young people manning a starburst of new charities and campaign groups in the capital, is not about what your surname is or what language you speak. It is about making a moral choice, about wanting a decent country and being a decent person. They are proud that the Ukrainian journalist who initiated the Maidan is Afghan by background, and that the first two demonstrators shot dead by police were ethnically Belarussian and Georgian. "
63 " UKRAINA is literally translated as ‘on the edge’ or ‘borderland’, and that is exactly what it is. Flat, fertile and fatally tempting to invaders, Ukraine was split between Russia and Poland from the mid seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth, between Russia and Austria through the nineteenth, and between Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania between the two world wars. Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it had never been an independent state. "
64 " Being a borderland meant two things. First, Ukrainians inherited a legacy of violence. ‘Rebellion; Civil War; Pogroms; Famine; Purges; Holocaust’ a friend remarked, flipping through the box of file-cards I assembled while researching this book. ‘Where’s the section on Peace and Prosperity?’ Second, they were left with a tenuous, equivocal sense of national identity. Though they rebelled at every opportunity, the few occasions on which they did achieve a measure of self-rule – during the Cossack risings of the seventeenth century, the Civil War of 1918–20, and towards the end of Nazi occupation – were nasty, brutish, and above all short. "
65 " All the same, Kiev was a melancholy city. Its defining features were failures, absences. Some were obvious: only one supermarket (dollars only), few private cars (six at an intersection counted as a traffic jam), a joke of a postal service (to send a letter, one went to the railway station, and handed it to a friendly face going in the right direction). Others one only felt the force of after a time. With benefits and pensions virtually non-existent, the crudest health care (drugs had to be paid for; doctors wanted bribes), and no insurance (a few private firms had sprung up, but nobody trusted them with their money), Kievans were living lives of a precariousness unknown in the West, destitution never more than an illness or a family quarrel away. It showed in their wiry bodies and pinched, alert, Depression-era faces; the faces of people who get by on cheap vodka and stale cigarettes, and know they have to look after themselves, for nobody else will do it for them. "
66 " But the past that gives Kiev unique glamour, that made it ‘the City’ to the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov and the ‘Joy of the World’ to the medieval chroniclers, is not the brash boom town of the turn of the last century, but the Kiev of a thousand years ago. From the tenth century to the thirteenth it was the capital of the eastern Slavs’ first great civilisation, Kievan Rus. And here Ukraine’s fight for an identity commences. Generations of scholars have bandied insults about how Rus began, how it was governed, even about how it got its name. But the biggest argument of all is over who Rus belongs to. Did Kievan Rus civilisation pass eastward, to Muscovy and the Russians, or did it stay put, in Ukraine? ‘If Moscow is Russia’s heart,’ runs a Russian proverb, ‘and St Petersburg its head, Kiev is its mother.’ Ukrainians, of course, say Kiev has nothing whatsoever to do with Russia – if she mothered anybody, it was the Ukrainians themselves. "
67 " Northerners, with their poor soil and never-ending winters, ate black bread made from rye; southerners, with their rich black earth and longer growing season, ate white bread, made from less hardy wheat. "
68 " What widened the split between the two halves of Rus dramatically was the arrival of the Mongols. Kiev and southern Rus suffered devastation, but were abandoned again in little over a century. The northern principalities, in contrast, became permanent tributaries of the Golden Horde. The Mongols ruled by proxy, granting charters to local leaders in exchange for tribute. The most successful northern princes became those who could squeeze most men and money out of their territories for delivery to the khan at his capital on the Volga. "
69 " Just as diaspora Ukrainians still tend to regard themselves as part of Ukraine despite having been born and brought up in Canada or Australia, exiled nineteenth-century Poles felt they were no less part of Poland for having spent their lives in Paris or Moscow. Their countries existed in a sort of mental hyperspace, independent of such banalities as governments and borders. ‘Poland is not yet lost’ was the title of a Napoleonic Polish marching song; ‘Ukraine is not dead yet’ is the less-then-inspiring opening line of the present-day Ukrainian national anthem. With this "
70 " Trading posts turned into forts, forts into tribute-collecting points, and tribute-collecting points, by the end of the tenth century, into the largest kingdom in Europe, stretching from the Baltic to the Carpathians. "
71 " intermarrying with the local clans and Slavicising their names. Helgi became Oleh; Ingwarr, Ihor; Waldemar, Volodymyr. "