#4 Ukrainian Independence
After the Russian monarchy collapsed in 1917, the patriotic Ukrainians saw their chance to establish a council and a revolutionary parliament. Ukraine was granted autonomy by the Russian Provisional Government, as the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR). However, the Bolsheviks denied its existence and invaded Ukraine to include it in the Soviet state.
Despite this, the UNR declared independence in January of 1918, during the First World War, and signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers before the Bolsheviks could do the same. German authorities installed a monarch in the region, but the Republic came back into power after WWI, unifying the other parts of Ukraine that were taken by the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The new state was no match for the horrific crash between the two Russian armies during the Russian civil war, as they were fighting in their territory, due to neither recognizing Ukrainian sovereignty. When Stalin came into power, he was forced by the precedent declaration of independence to create the Soviet Ukrainian Republic, before making it a founding member of the Soviet Union in 1922.
With Stalin in power, he did everything he could to eradicate the Ukrainian political nation (and anyone loyal to the UNR), engineering a famine that lasted for two years (1932-1933), and killing 4 million Ukrainian peasants in the process: an act of mass genocide known in Ukrainian as Holodomor (“murder through starvation”), that Russia still rejects to this day. This is also when Russia started to promote the tsarist idea that Ukrainians were Russia’s “little brothers”, destroying their national identity.
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