What we have in common with Lithuania
The great expanse of history, including that of Ukraine, has unfortunately been adopted by the mass consciousness and grasped by people with irregular “density” of this process. Everyone knows that Ukraine was part of Muscovy, then the Russian Empire, and later still the Soviet Red state for 337 years all in all. Many remember the days when Ukraine was part of the Commonwealth of Both Nations, that is, a Polish state. However, people only rarely recall nearly two centuries (a short time for history, relatively speaking, as it lasted from 1362-1569) when almost all of Ukraine was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, one of the most powerful state formations in Europe at the time.
And yet, it was those days, the 14th to 16th century, as well as dramatic events of the 20th century, that give us a good excuse to talk about the historical interconnectedness, and even commonality, of the two nations’ fates. Indeed, the official language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was Old Ukrainian; the Ukrainians of the time found a common ground with the ancient Lithuanians based on mutual respect, so that the Ukrainians felt the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as largely their own state (the principle stated by grand dukes Algirdas, Gediminas, and Vytautas is a case in point: “We neither break any tradition nor introduce any novelty.”). The Lithuanian Statute should be remembered as well, for this code was in force in the Ukrainian lands into the 19th century!
Let us now “jump” into the 20th century (we have to mention, though, at least in passing, that Taras Shevchenko spent several months studying in Vilnius as a 16-year-old boy, and it was a very important period in his life). In 1918, Lithuania and Ukraine simultaneously went for independence; and our Baltic friends achieved it then, while the Ukrainian People’s Republic was suppressed by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, aided by internal strife. In 1939-40, treaties signed by two mustachioed “great leaders” contributed to the occupation of independent Lithuania by the Soviet troops and the repressive Stalinist “reunification” of western Ukraine with the Ukrainian SSR. Mass deportations, massacres, executions, and tortures followed, hitting Lithuania as well as Galicia. In the postwar years 1945-55, the “forest brothers” waged guerrilla war in Lithuania (the film Nobody Wanted to Die is very instructive, as it, though Soviet, is a strong and interesting work), while the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was fighting the same enemy in western Ukraine. Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev’s Russification policies in the Soviet Ukraine can be compared with the experience of the Lithuanians at the time, who successfully defended their language and culture, despite adverse conditions (even then Communist leader of Lithuania Antanas Snieckus had to make concessions to the Lithuanian national spirit).
And finally, we should not forget that it was the Lithuanian Seimas that, the first of all Soviet republican parliaments, proclaimed the restoration of state independence of the country on March 11, 1990 without a referendum (our Verkhovna Rada rejected this political formula, which had far-reaching negative consequences later). After a year and a half of economic and political blockade imposed by the “union government,” following an attempt to storm the television station in Vilnius on January 13, 1991, bringing dozens of deaths (by the way, the Kremlin had created a pro-Soviet parallel pseudo-administration that was leaving miserable impression), the Lithuanians eventually won. For over 10 years, Lithuania has been in NATO and the EU. That is, it has been a member of the organizations which Ukraine aspires to join as well.
Even this extremely short excursion into our common history, and this is a case where this latter expression may and should be written without quotation marks, is, I think, enough for our readers to feel that our peoples are much closer to each other than it may seem at first glance, not to mention the sincere, strong support that Lithuania and its President Dalia Grybauskaite are providing to Ukraine now. Therefore, let us study the experience of Lithuania – of its history as well as culture, of fighting for freedom and conducting effective, successful reforms.
