Page:The New Europe - Volume 4.djvu/149

Rh The course of events since the Revolution, however, has made it impossible to ignore the problem any longer, especially as it has completely revolutionised the traditional attitude of Austria and Russia both towards it and towards each other.

The very name of the Ukraine had fallen into oblivion in the west: but that it is not a mere modern invention is shown by the numerous books devoted to Ukraine events which were published in English as long ago as the 17th century. The word signifies “border” and took its origin from the debateable country which then lay between the three unwieldy rivals of those days, Turkey, Poland and Muscovy. But the territory inhabited by Ukrainians stretches far beyond this border country, and its inhabitants were commonly known as Little Russians, or in Austria as Ruthenes, until gradually “Ukrainian” has come to be accepted as the national name. To-day their numbers are estimated at some twenty to twenty-five millions on Russian soil, occupying Podolia, Volhynia, Kiev, and Cholm, and stretching far to the east of the Dniepr to the Sea of Azov and beyond; four millions in Eastern Galicia and Bukovina and half a million in the Carpathian districts of Hungary. Their earliest state formation was that of Kiev, which accepted Christianity under Vladimir in the 10th century and had already attained a high degree of culture and commercial prosperity, before the rival Russian principalities of the north rose to power. Kiev’s independence was destroyed by the terrible Mongol invasion of 1239. In a greatly reduced form the state of Halitch-Volhynia dragged out a somewhat precarious existence under its own dynasty for a century longer, until it in its turn collapsed before the combined onslaught of Poland and Hungary. The western half (what is roughly the Eastern Galicia of to-day) fell under the Polish Crown, while Volhynia, Podolia and Kiev preserved a looser connection with Lithuania, at whose court White or Little Russian was the predominant language. But after the union of the Polish and Lithuanian crowns in 1385, the oppressive aristocratic system of Poland asserted its sway more and more, until by the Union of Lublin in 1569 the old equality gave place to unfettered Polish hegemony. In the century that followed, however, Poland proved unequal to the task of defending her conquests against the hordes of Tartar invaders from