Ukraine on Both Banks of the Dnipro

Try to imagine Ukraine without its watery Dnipro majestically and proudly rolling down toward the Black Sea. Immortalized and glorified in folk songs and historical legends, the Dnipro or Slavutych played an important role, still to be duly appreciated by researchers, in the formation of the Ukrainian national idea. Modern social consciousness interprets the Dnipro not so much as a historical and geographic reality as an archetypal and symbolic model of Ukraine in dimensions beyond time and space.

For many centuries the river had been breadwinner and a means of communication for those living on both its banks, as well as an important natural and geographic factor which delimited, defended, and united the population of Ukraine. One of Europe’s longest waterways (2,248 km), it constitutes the specific geopolitical endocentric axis on which all Ukrainian history has turned. It is no accident that an Ancient Greek chronicler wrote that the starting point of this history dated to those sacred times when, after the Tower of Babel had been ruined, Slavs came over here “from the tribe Japheth” to settle along the Dnipro. The great road “from the Varangians to the Greeks” (to be more exact, “from the Greeks to the Varangians”) bound the numerous eastern Slavic and non-Slavic tribes into a single body politic, Kyiv Rus’. This waterway constituted the main direction of its trade ties, military expeditions, and flow of colonization. Blessed by the visit of St. Andrew, the apostle, this river linked Constantinople, Kyiv, and Rome into one civilization, a line of historical progress in its sacral dimension.

Knitting Rus’-Ukraine together, the Dnipro simultaneously divided this integrity by setting different regional paces in the historical development of this country. The catalyst for this instability was the early eighteenth century conflict that erupted between St. Volodymyr’s sons, Kyiv Prince Yaroslav and Mstyslav of Tmutarakan, who seized Chernihiv in 1024 and defeated his brother in a battle near Lystven. In 1026 they concluded a truce which for the first time divided Rus’-Ukraine along the Dnipro line: “Yaroslav took this side (Right Bank — Author) and Mstyslav the other.” After Mstyslav’s death in 1036 the Chernihiv principality was abolished. However, division along the Dnipro was restored less than two decades later: after Yaroslav the Wise died, the Left Bank saw the emergence of separate principalities in Chernihiv and Pereyaslav.

This event left a deep imprint in the social awareness of the then elite. Laying claim to the inheritance of their parents and grandparents, princely clans would invariably refer to that precedent, remembering “how our ancestor Yaroslav separated us with the Dnipro.” Although the Right Bank never seceded from the Left Bank in the princely period of Ukrainian history, precisely then the idea arose of a different historical face of the two banks. Old Rus’ chronicles usually refer to the Right Bank as “this” or the Rus’ side in contrast to the hostile Left Bank (a steppe corridor extending as far as today’s Boryspil), where the Polovetsians ruled. Incidentally, the archaic semantics of this ethnonym embodied, from the viewpoint of Kyiv scribes, the “on” (“this”) side of the Dnipro. It is the juxtaposition between of the two banks (“ob on pol” — the Polovetsians) that gave birth to this specific Old Rus’ ethnicon. It should be also borne in mind that Christology connects the right side with life, while the left is associated with death and “a terrible presentiment of woes and illnesses.”

The Mongol invasion of 1237-1241 exacted its by far its greatest toll on the Left Bank principalities. The Principality of Pereyaslav, a specific political continuation of Kyiv, ceased to exist at all, turning into a buffer zone between the estates of Rus’ princes and the Golden Horde. On the other hand, the light of public life continued to shine in the Chernihiv-Siversk land. Tellingly, the chronicles called the Northern Left Bank as the Chernihiv side and, from the second half of the thirteenth century, as the land beyond the Dnipro. These lands later came within Lithuania’s sphere of influence and, from the early 16th century, Muscovy. Meanwhile, Right Bank Ukraine was transferred from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to the Polish crown.

In the early-to-mid 1660s, the emergence of two Hetmanates in Ukraine again causes the historical sources to divide it into “this” and “that” sides. This political and geographic division, which committed parts of Ukraine belong to different ethnic theaters of civilization, had disastrous consequences that still make themselves felt. Dismembering the national body of Ukraine in two, Right and Left-Bank, the division thus cemented the segmentation of Ukrainian social organism. The political and ideological elite of Ukraine still continued to be aware of the common history of their land across the Dnipro or, to quote a seventeenth century source, “single brotherhood born of one mother... on this and that side of the Dnipro.” For example, the concept of Ukraine as our common land (Patria nostra) across both banks of the Dnipro (Ukraina adutrague parte Borysthenis) was one of the fundamental ideas of Pylyp Orlyk’s constitution.

However, “the ideals of a nation,” as Arnold J. Toynbee once noted, are incompatible with the integrity of civilization as a regional cultural and political community. The differences of civilization, political life, and culture of Right and Left Bank Ukraine determined the special features, which formed the national and cultural identity of Ukrainians in modern and recent times. Taras Shevchenko was the first to mention this cultural and psychological dichotomy of Eastern and Western Ukraine, as Oksana Zabuzhko pointed out in he book Shevchenko’s Myth of Ukraine: An Attempt at Philosophical Analysis. The artist’s eye catches what is common and different on the two banks. There is “the same soil, the same speech, the same everyday life, the same physiognomy of the people, even the songs are the same, as if they were children of the same mother. But the past life of this bunch of pensive children of a great Slav family is not the same. You often feast your eyes on the picturesque ruins of old massive castles and mansions on the fields of Volyn and Podillia... But you won’t walk even half a mile down the Dnipro banks without seeing a high grave or sometimes dozens of graves... What do these frequent dark graves on the Dnipro banks and the grandiose ruins of palaces and castles on the Dnister tell an inquisitive descendant? They tell of slavery and freedom. Poor weak Volyn and Podillia! They protected their tormentors in impregnable castles and luxurious mansions, while my beautiful, powerful and freedom-loving Ukraine would cram the incalculable huge mounds with free and hostile corpses. It never surrendered its glory to the victor’s mercy but trampled upon the despotic enemy, and it died free and unsullied. This is what graves and ruins mean.” The young Soviet Ukrainian poet Pavlo Tychyna also felt and painfully endured this metaphysical dismemberment and disintegration of the country: “Here comes our last judgment/ which has left a furrow none can plow,/ spat into our Dnipro/ and cut us by in two.”

The artistic intuition of Shevchenko and the poetic imagination of Tychyna are strikingly consonant with the modern concepts of a Ukraine “between East and West.” Most controversial is Samuel P. Huntington’s concept of the “conflict of civilizations.” The civilization fault line he drew runs across Central Europe from Finland, along the present-day borders of Latvia, Lithuania, and Russia, cuts in half Belarus and Ukraine, separates Transylvania from Rumania, and Slovenia and Croatia from the rest of Yugoslavia. This line is the watershed axis between the West and the rest of the world. The scholar forecasts that the differences of civilization within Ukraine, above all, its division between Greek Catholic West and Orthodox East, will continue to be a decisive factor in how Ukrainian society functions.