When Ukrainian Identity Emerged

The myth: identity as an “eternal essence”

The Russian narrative about Ukraine rests on a simple assumption: if a people exists today, it has existed “always” — from the birth of Christ and earlier, unchanged. From this follow two mirror-image conclusions: Ukrainians do not “really” exist, because they were “invented” recently, while Rus’ is precisely the Russians, so “we are one people.” The historian Vitaliy Dribnytsya calls this move operating with historical statics: opponents fail to understand that any identity is dynamic and changes over time^[2].

This cycle consists of seven authorial mini-lectures based on the first volume of the recent academic 6-volume series “Ukraine: Essays on History” (Institute of History, NAS of Ukraine, 2023–2024), the chapter “Formation of Ethnic Identity”^[1]. It answers a direct question: when and how did Ukrainian ethnic consciousness actually emerge — and why its roots cannot be reduced either to an “eternal” people or to a shared “Old Rus’” one.

Before the 10th century: ethnic identity does not yet exist

The main sign that a people has formed is the appearance of a self-designation, recorded in sources and accepted by the members of the community themselves^[2]. By this criterion, it is impossible to speak of an ethnic identity on the Ukrainian lands before the end of the 10th century. The first written mentions of the Slavs — the ancestors of Ukrainians — begin in the 5th century, and everything earlier is archaeology, which describes material culture but not ethnic groups.

In the Middle Ages a person was defined not by “nationality” but by entirely different identities: territorial (one knew which village or town one lived in), religious (which church one attended), and estate-based (feudal lord, clergy, or the “third estate”)^[3]. The reason is the underdevelopment of communications: for a mass ethnic consciousness to appear, one needs printing (where you can read that you are a Ukrainian or a Russian), communication routes all the way to railways, and state education with unified curricula — and that is already the 19th century^[4]. As the historian Natalia Yakovenko formulates it, the absence of a single information field across a territory “laced with impassable forests and marshes,” as princely Rus’ was, altogether rules out the possibility of a single identity — so before the formation of Rus’ (the second half of the 9th century), the sources record no ethnic identities at all^[5].

Tribes against archaeology: there was no “single people”

The Russian ideologeme of a “single Old Rus’ people” is shattered against the concrete sources. The “Primary Chronicle” lists seven (possibly nine) tribal unions on these lands — Polianians, Derevlians, Siverians, Volhynians, Ulichians, Tivertsians, Croats — but this list does not map onto the archaeology: only two archaeological cultures can be traced here (the Luka-Raikovetska on the right bank of the Dnipro and the Volyntsevo-Romny on the left bank), which in no way divide into seven^[7]. Moreover, the chronicles themselves record enmity and wars between these tribes — one’s own kin do not fight like that.

Telling, too, is something else: the artifacts of both archaeological cultures, in the assessment of the archaeologist Volodymyr Baran, are 80–85% similar^[8] — that is, materially this is rather a single, kindred mass. Dribnytsya, meanwhile, criticizes the very term “Southern Rus’” used by the authors of the 6-volume series: in his view, Rus’ was one, centered on Kyiv, and in the chronicle sense — the lands of present-day northern Ukraine (the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Pereyaslav, and Volhynia regions, and later Galicia)^[6]. Either way, neither archaeology nor the chronicles yield a “single people” that could be identified with present-day Russia.

”Local-dweller” consciousness: an identity the size of a county

So what existed instead of ethnic consciousness? What prevailed was a “local-dweller” (tuteishyi, local) consciousness — a term coined by the Belarusian ethnologists Chakvin and Tereshkovich. Within it, a person regards as their own only the inhabitants of their own village or a few neighboring ones, and all others — “outsiders” from other counties — as strangers^[9]. This is not a unique “backwardness”: the researcher Smith showed that even in Turkey before 1900 — despite the sultanate, railways, and newspapers — the local identities of clan, village, and region carried more weight than the all-Turkish one^[10]. In certain parts of Belarus, ethnographers recorded the “local-dweller” consciousness right up to the 20th century.

Above this local level rose a “supra-local,” land-based consciousness — but it was characteristic not of the peasants but of the elite: the princes, the administration, the priests, the upper merchantry, that is, the stratum that was effectively common to all of Rus’^[11]. This is the very source of the word “land” itself: in place of the vanished tribal names, the chronicles introduce “lands,” and the term “land,” as medievalists note, is identical to the modern concept of “country” — zemlia, kraina, Ukraine^[12].

”Land-based” identity of the 12th–13th centuries: Kyivans, Galicians, Chernihivians

From the 12th century, the lands come to the fore — the Rus’, Galician, Volodymyr, Volhynian, Chernihiv, and Turiv lands. It is important to distinguish them from principalities: the borders of principalities were constantly changing, while a land remained a stable unit^[13]. The hierarchy of identities was concentric (after Smith): the lowest level was the “local-dwellers,” the middle level was the land-based consciousness (Kyivans, Galicians, Chernihivians), and only the highest, weakest level was the all-Rus’ one — and the local population was called “Rus’” mainly from outside, in dealings with foreigners^[14].

That the land-based identity was real and acute is clear from the constant wars between the lands — Novgorodians against Suzdalians, Galicians against Kyivans. In such wars the chronicler calls the warriors of his own land “ours” and rejoices at the defeats of rival land-based communities^[14]. These unifying processes, which in Europe led to overcoming fragmentation, were on Rus’ interrupted by the Mongol invasion of the mid-13th century — which is why a Ukrainian late-medieval centralized state never took shape, and the “local-dweller” and “land-based” consciousnesses were preserved for a long time^[15].

The completion of the formation of the Rus’ identity

And yet it is precisely at the end of the 12th and during the 14th century, in the assessment of Ukrainian historians, that the formation of the Rus’ identity on the Ukrainian lands is completed^[16]. The specificity of Ukraine here is that not only the political factor worked (the overcoming of fragmentation) but also large-scale migrations: the importance of the migration waves caused by the advances of nomads was pointed out already by Mykhailo Hrushevsky^[17].

The political side of this process was described by Mykhailo Braichevsky: within the bounds of the future Ukraine, two integration centers stood out — the western one (Galicia and Volhynia) and the eastern one (Chernihiv), whose spokesmen were the Romanovych and Olhovych dynasties, which competed for Kyiv and the legacy of Rus’^[17]. The princes of these lands saw themselves as the continuers of the cause of the former Kyivan princes; according to Yaroslav Isaievych, the compilers of the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle regarded Halych as a “second Kyiv”^[18]. An eloquent proof of this Rus’ identity is the Ukrainian students at European universities at the end of the 15th century: by their allegiance they registered as “Lithuanians” or “Poles,” but they called themselves Rusyns^[19]. At the same time Dribnytsya honestly cautions that this identity encompassed mainly the elite, while the peasant mass remained “local-dweller”^[19].

”Rus’/Rusyn” becomes the ethnonym of the Ukrainian lands

The most important thing for refuting the “one people” myth is to trace the ethnonym itself. Drawing on the works of the Ukrainian linguist Antin Hensiorsky (a researcher of the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle), Dribnytsya shows that from the end of the 10th and the beginning of the 11th century the name “Rus’” spread from the middle Dnipro to the neighboring lands — first the Chernihiv land, then Galicia, Volhynia, and even Transcarpathia, where Hungarian sources of the 12th century already speak of a “Rusyn march”^[20][21]. Hensiorsky’s conclusion is categorical: over the course of the 13th century the term “Rus’” in its ethnic sense encompassed all the south-western lands — the territories of present-day northern and western Ukraine — and there became established as an ethnic one^[21].

Here too lies the key linguistic boundary between the Ukrainian “Rusyn” and the Russian “russky.” “Rusyn” is a noun (a substantive), a native self-designation. Whereas “russky” was originally an adjective (an attributive: “russkie liudi,” “Russian people”), which only later became substantivized, turning into a noun^[22]. The ethnonym “rus, Rusyn” was on the Russian territories never a self-designation of the broad masses, and it entered the chancery language of Moscow late — and even then under the influence of the Kyivan (Kyiv-Mohyla) written school^[22].

An ethnonym from the very beginning: the treaties of 911 and 944

That “Rus’” is an ethnonym, and not a later label, is clear already from the earliest sources. In the “Primary Chronicle” the name “Rus’/Rusyn” is recorded precisely as an ethnonym (not a politonym and not a toponym) from the 10th century — in the texts of the treaties with Byzantium of 911 and 944, and at first fixed only to the middle-Dnipro Rus’ land^[23]. The Russian researchers Belova and Petrukhin noticed a telling detail: in the preamble of the 911 treaty, Rus’ (the princely retinue of Varangian origin) is still contrasted with the Slovenes, whereas in the 944 treaty this contrast is already gone — the name “Rus’” unites rather than divides^[24]. It was precisely in this interval that the Dnipro Slavs and the Varangians merged into a single community; according to Oleksiy Tolochko, the chronicle formula “the Polianians, who are now called Rus’” explains why the mentions of the Polianians disappear so quickly: the Polianians were the first to adopt the name Rus’^[24].

What this means

The unfolded picture of pre-modern identity demolishes the “one people” myth not with a slogan but with a method. To unite the local land-based communities of Ukrainian Rus’ with the northern lands (the future Belarus and Russia) into a “single people” there were no grounds whatsoever — neither geographic, nor cultural, nor political, nor even a network of communications that would have made it possible^[25]. Instead, “Rus’/Rusyn” became, at the end of the 12th and during the 13th century, the endoethnonym of precisely the population of present-day Ukraine — early compared with the English, the French, or the Russians. Therefore, Dribnytsya concludes, when in Moscow they repeat that Ukrainians are “russkie” and “we are one people,” behind that phrase stands emptiness: it is enough to open even a basic textbook of ethnopolitology to see it^[26]. Ukrainian identity is neither “artificial” nor “recent” — it has documented medieval roots that do not lead to Russia. More on the very term “Rus’” — in the articles “‘There was no Kyivan Rus”” — the myth examined and how “Rus’” became “Russia”; on the modern nation-building of the 19th century — in the article is the Ukrainian nation “artificial”.