And yet a reader not particularly interested in Ukrainian history may be all the more fascinated by the Ukrainian story, and what Hrytsak secures for his country is a story line in the global tale. For example: the iconic images of Soviet tanks in Prague in 1968, crushing the Prague Spring, are easily recognizable, but few in the West, even among historians, know the name of Petro Shelest. Shelest, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, was a vigorous promoter of the Soviet crackdown. A reader at this point may imagine him to be a Moscow loyalist, but Shelest had more complicated reasons to applaud the tanks. As a result of the Prague Spring, the Greek-Catholic Church was legalized in Czechoslovakia; it had been forbidden in the USSR since 1946 and severely persecuted in the Russian Empire before that. The faithful of the church, a mostly Ukrainian minority, were localized in the eastern region of Slovakia. Across the Czechoslovakian-Ukrainian border lived the Greek-Catholics of Western Ukraine, which was, along with the Baltics, one of the least Sovietized region in the USSR (as it was first annexed only in 1939, and then again in 1944). The region was also notoriously rebellious. Czechoslovak legalization might reanimate Western Ukraine’s surprisingly resilient underground movement. Shelest was managing the risks.
Hrytsak also shows the reverse: how supposedly « national » historical events would be impossible without developments elsewhere. For instance, 1492, a standard milestone in world history, becomes a milestone in Ukrainian, too. Two major events happened on opposite sides of the globe that year: Christopher Columbus stumbled upon America, and the Cossacks of the steppe frontier first appeared in the historical records. And in the Orthodox calendar, as fate would have it, the year 1492 was the year 7000, an apocalyptically round number. Hrytsak exploits the coincidence, narrating Ferdinand and Isabella’s Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula, and their subsequent sponsorship of Columbus’s voyage, alongside the Orthodox expectation of the end-times. (« That was the end. The end of the world created seven thousand years ago. ») Columbus’s plan for Ferdinand and Isabella was to find the new route to India, and fund their Reconquista of Jerusalem with his trophies. And there Ferdinand would wait for the Antichrist, and then for the Christ, because where else?
The idea of Ukraine—that is, the entity that isn’t merely the territory or its material resources; the thing that is somehow different from its neighbors; the work-in-progress that is Hrytsak’s protagonist and that will, over the centuries, articulate itself with Western tools—would emerge as the world became global. In the century that followed, Spaniards found vast deposits of silver in Potosi (now Bolivia), the mass import of which caused an increase of money supply, which in turn caused a jump in prices, first and foremost for food. The ensuing crisis in the western part of Europe benefited the elites of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (the Rzeczpospolita, literally Res Publica), which had meanwhile absorbed the Ukrainian territories. The local barons who controlled those territories, now filthy rich, forced the colonization of the eastern frontier – the Ukrainian Wild East, if you wish – and enslaved peasants to maximize the output of grain. This spread of serfdom in the 16th and 17th centuries, Hrytsak notes, prepared the ground for the later division of Europe into « West » and « East »: Eastern Europe would become, in effect, an agrarian colony of the West, a periphery of the capitalist society that would arise on the Atlantic coasts. More immediately, that economic model, with its huge gap between the mighty magnats (barons) and their subjects, set the stage for the violent uprisings to come.