Is the Ukrainian nation "artificial"?

The myth: “the nation never existed”

Russian opponents, Raikivsky notes, constantly argue that Ukrainians as an ethnos or a nation “never existed” — and add for good measure that “Lenin invented Ukraine.” The historian’s answer is blunt: this is utter nonsense from someone who knows nothing about history. Nations are not created in a short time by a single figure — that simply does not happen^[1].

What a nation is

There is no single definition of a nation — and that is a good thing, because the Soviet era trained people to expect a “single correct theory” that rejected everything else. A nation is a community united by a set of criteria (language, religion, territory, and others), with different nations relying on different factors. But the defining feature is national consciousness: in the words of the French thinker Ernest Renan, a nation is “a daily plebiscite”^[2].

The modern era

Modern nations are a product of the modern era. The mass self-awareness of large groups of people became possible only with industrialization, print, schools, railways, and newspapers; the origins of modern nations are linked to the French and American Revolutions of the late 18th century. The Ukrainian nation took shape in the 19th century — just like other European nations^[3]. In this sense it is neither “artificial” nor “younger” than its neighbours: all modern nations arose at roughly the same historical moment.

How nations come into being at all

The accusation of “artificiality” usually rests on the naïve notion that a “real” nation has existed “forever.” But ethnopolitology — a distinct discipline — says otherwise. There are at least a dozen and a half approaches to defining an ethnos, but two are the main ones. The classical, primordialist approach treats the ethnos as a community with objective markers (territory, language), even though it cannot draw clear boundaries between ethnic groups. Today the constructivist approach prevails^[10]. Between these poles there is also a third, moderate one — which the historian Nataliia Starchenko calls “conservatism”: since the source base for the Middle Ages has expanded considerably in recent decades, researchers do in fact look for the real roots of an ethnos in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, reducing it neither to an “eternal” essence nor to a purely late “construct”^[25].

The key thesis of this approach: the nation is a political and modern phenomenon. Nations form from the second half of the 18th century, roughly from the Great French Revolution. Before that, the labels “Frenchman,” “Englishman,” “German” were rather conventional: societies were estate-based, and a person was defined by their estate, town or village, and subjecthood to a monarch — not by “nationality”^[11]. A large community such as a nation exists primarily in the consciousness of people: we do not personally know forty million Ukrainians — we conceive of them as a community. In the formulation of the founders of these theories (the same “daily” principle of Renan’s), the nation is a daily choice^[12].

Hence the answer to the myth of “artificiality”: if all modern nations were “constructed” at one historical moment, then the charge that “someone invented the Ukrainians” strikes the French, the Italians, and the Russians themselves equally. Nations grow out of ethnic groups in the 19th century; in Western Europe — chiefly on a political basis, in Eastern Europe (where the Russian, Austrian, and Ottoman empires held sway) — on a cultural and linguistic one. Among Ukrainians this proceeded through language — beginning with Kotliarevsky’s Eneida — and the name “Ukrainians” spread precisely in the 19th century^[13]. Here scholarship also played a key role: until the early 19th century, Ukrainian was regarded merely as a “Little Russian dialect” of a common “Russian” language, but the Czech philologists — Šafárik, Hanka and others — proved at the start of the 19th century that it was a separate language, and therefore a separate ethnos^[26]. It is ironic that “artificiality” is pinned precisely on the very language whose distinctness was first established scientifically by disinterested outsiders. Tellingly, the Russian nation, in the author’s assessment, is still not fully formed — Russians do not know where Russia’s border ends — whereas the Ukrainian nation is already formed as a distinct people with its own territory^[14].

Deep roots: the Cossack myth

At the same time, a nation does not arise from nothing. The driving force of the 19th-century Ukrainian national revival was the Cossack myth — the memory of the Hetmanate. Tellingly, it was at work even in Galicia, which had never known Cossackdom: Galician narodovtsi (populists) dressed in Cossack garb, reviving a Dnieper-region symbol. In Raikivsky’s apt image, Shevchenko could not have “created” a nation without deep roots: a tree without roots is doomed^[4].

Sobornist — salvation from assimilation

A distinctive feature of the Ukrainian revival was the idea of sobornist (all-Ukrainian unity) that joined Galicia (under Austria) and the Dnieper region (under Russia). This is a unique trait: the concept of “sobornist” has no direct equivalent among Poles or Slovaks. For Ukrainians divided between two empires, it was a way to save the nation from assimilation — to preserve it as a single whole despite state borders^[5].

A war over identity

Nation-building never ends — it is that same “daily plebiscite.” That is why the current war, Raikivsky stresses, is above all a war over identity: the Ukrainian national idea as part of the civilized world against the idea of the “Russian world” as a return to the imperial past^[6]. Tellingly, it was tsarism — not only Soviet power — that banned the Ukrainian language altogether. Attempts to declare the Ukrainian nation “artificial” are a direct continuation of this imperial logic.

Not an “Austrian general staff,” but the Prosvita society

A separate version of the “artificiality” myth holds that Ukraine was invented by an “Austrian general staff.” The historian Ihor Stambol answers this with a concrete example of civic self-organization — the Prosvita society. Opponents, he notes, simply fail to understand the concept of development: they imagine that someone at a certain moment wrote a decree — and “out came” Ukrainians or the city of Odesa — whereas such processes unfold over years and decades^[7].

Prosvita (founded in 1868 in Galicia and in 1905 in the Dnieper region) was the first mass legal Ukrainian organization and a forge of national cadres. Ukrainians first united in cultural and educational societies, gained organizational experience, and evolved from a civic organization into a political one, and then into the state-building of 1917^[8]. Here the state grew from below, out of a civic movement, not from anyone’s “general staff.”

Ironically, the accusation of “invention” ricochets back: it was precisely the pro-Russian Galician “Muscophilism”, financed by the empire, that constructed an artificial mongrel tongue — yazychie — in which its own adherents could not properly communicate. Prosvita arose precisely as a grassroots counterweight to it^[9].

”One people” is an imperial invention, not a natural fact

The thesis that “Ukrainians and Russians are one people” only appears to be an ancient truth; in reality it is a specific official ideology of the Russian Empire of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the doctrine of the “triune Russian people”, under which “the Russians” consisted of three branches — Great Russians (today’s Russians), Little Russians (Ukrainians), and White Russians (Belarusians), all officially called “Russians”^[15]. In other words, the formula Putin repeated in his 2021 article is not a scientific discovery but a reanimated imperial construct.

A factual correction should be made here to the way this doctrine is sometimes illustrated. It is said that even the 1897 census imposed on everyone a “nationality” column — “Russian”^[16]. The census did indeed proceed from the same triune logic, but it had no direct “nationality” column at all: ethnicity was determined indirectly — by native language and religious confession. And this detail works rather against the imperial narrative: the census recorded a separate “Little Russian” (Ukrainian) language as a distinct category — meaning that even imperial statistics had to acknowledge linguistic distinctness. (The “Great Russian” mark attributed to Lenin is an illustration of the “triune people” doctrine, not of an actual column on the census form.)

The very semantics of the word “Russian” before the age of nations was not ethnic but confessional: after the adoption of Christianity, “Russians” denoted people of the Rus’, that is, Orthodox, faith — and in this sense the word appears even in Bulgarian sources of the period^[17]. Imposing today’s ethnic equation “Russians = the Russian nation” onto this pre-modern, confessional category is a crude substitution — and it is on this substitution that the myth of “one people” rests.

Rusyns: an ethnographic group or a “separate people”?

A separate version of the “artificiality” myth works in reverse — it does not deny Ukrainians altogether, but tries to carve off part of them: supposedly the Transcarpathian Rusyns are not Ukrainians but an independent Slavic people. Precision is needed here, because two different things hide behind the word “Rusyns,” and conflating them is a direct sleight of hand.

The first meaning is entirely real and poses no threat to Ukrainian unity. “Rusyn” is the old self-designation of Ukrainians: from Rus’ there remained the memory that the “Ruthenians” were “Rusyns,” and only from about the 16th century does the name “Ukrainians” spread alongside it; the process took a long time, and only by the early 20th century did the majority come to see themselves precisely as Ukrainians, while “Rusyns” and “Little Russians” still lived alongside^[23]. In Transcarpathia — a land that joined the Ukrainian SSR only in 1945, and before that changed hands and was mostly part of Hungary — this ancient name simply survived longer. In this sense the Rusyns are an ethnographic (sub-ethnic) group of Ukrainians, like the Boikos or Hutsuls; no one denies recognizing Transcarpathian distinctiveness^[20].

The second meaning is already a political project. In the 1990s a political “Rusynism” arose that declares the Rusyns a separate East Slavic people in need of recognition as a distinct ethnos^[20]. Its theoretical frame was provided by the Canadian historian Paul-Robert Magocsi, who advocates the thesis of the Carpatho-Rusyns as a separate Slavic nation; relying on it, literature was at one time published in Transcarpathia and even schools were opened in Rusyn, and the dialect itself is presented as a “separate language”^[21]. This is where the line lies: a dialect and a regional identity are one thing (that is a fact), but constructing from them a “separate people” with political demands is quite another (that is a project).

Why this project provokes wariness is clear from who feeds it from outside. Political “Rusynism” is actively supported by Hungary — above all by the right-wing parties and personally by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán; the logic is transparent — to justify claims to Transcarpathia, which already belonged to Hungary in 1939–1944^[22]. In other words, the thesis of a “separate Rusyn people” works not for the Transcarpathians themselves, but as an instrument against Ukrainian territorial unity — by the same imperial “divide” logic as the myth of an “artificial nation” in general.

The legal side is telling too. Rusyns are recognized as a national minority by law in Slovakia, Poland, Hungary (and also Serbia, Croatia, Romania) — where Rusyn communities live outside Transcarpathia. In Ukraine, however, they are not singled out as a separate people but considered a sub-ethnic group of Ukrainians^[24]. Paradoxically, opponents present this “Ukrainian peculiarity” as “oppression” — although it is precisely a matter of the state not recognizing an artificially constructed distinctness where there is a linguistic dialect and a shared history. There is no need to deny Transcarpathian identity; it is enough not to confuse an ethnographic group with a political “separate people” — and it is on exactly this confusion that the attempt to instrumentalize the Rusyn question rests.

Statehood — not only the 20th century

A charge close to the myth of an “artificial nation” is that Ukrainians “never had a state,” so the nation is not real either. But this is again the imposition of a late legal concept of the state (formulated by 19th-century jurists) onto the Middle Ages. The markers of an early class-based state are different: the sovereignty of the ruler, the collection of taxes, and a non-tribal administrative division. By these criteria, statehood on Ukrainian lands appears already under Princess Olha: before her, tribute was unregulated, whereas Olha introduced a fixed tribute (the uroky and pohosty) and installed her own governors in place of tribal princes — in particular in the land of the Drevlians and in Novgorod^[18].

This is not a modern improvisation but a classic periodization: as early as the start of the 20th century, Nataliia Polonska-Vasylenko — the founder of the statist school of Ukrainian historiography — identified, in her two-volume History of Ukraine, the successive stages of Ukrainian statehood (Rus’, the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia, and onward)^[19]. In other words, the continuity of Ukrainian statehood is the subject of a long-standing academic tradition, not a propaganda fabrication contrived “in response” to a Kremlin myth.