My Science School

The Cossacks gradually grew into a power to be reckoned with. They revolted against the Poles in 1648, under Hetman Bohdan Khmelnystsky, and founded the state of Cossack Hetmanate in today’s central Ukraine. However, it lasted only about a century. The Russian empress Catherine the Great abolished the state and annexed the whole Cossack territory to the Russian empire. The Cossacks were happy to be part of the Russian empire, as many privileges were offered to them. This annexation was part of the early efforts of Russia to expand into the Balkans and the Black Sea region.

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The first language of the country is of course Ukrainian, spoken by about 68 per cent of the population. Russian is spoken by about 30 per cent. There are other languages too, though spoken by much smaller number of people, like Crimean Tatar, Moldavian, Hungarian, Romanian etc.

Ukrainian became the official language in 1989, about two years before the country became independent. Later, in 1996, the country’s constitution reaffirmed its official status.

The script of Ukrainian is very similar to the Russian alphabet. At the same time Ukrainian is also very close to the Polish language. Ukrainian is an Indo-European language, being structurally similar to German, Greek, Celtic, Italian, Hindi etc. Linguists would say that it is a close cousin of Polish, Serbian, Czech, Russian, Belorussian and Bulgarian.

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Ukraine is blessed with several rivers and waterbodies. The most prominent among the rivers are the Dnieper River, the Southern Buh and the Danube. The longest river in Ukraine, Dnieper dominates the central region of the country with many tributaries and has several hydroelectric dams and huge reservoirs along its course to the Black Sea. The Southern Buh also flows into the Black Sea along with the Inhul, its major tributary. The Danube flows along Ukraine’s southwestern frontier.

Almost 3 per cent of Ukraine is marshland, which is mostly found in the northern river valleys and in the lower reaches of rivers like the Dnieper and Danube.

The rivers are a major source of water, and to enable its proper supply a series of canals have been built in Ukraine. There are dams and hydroelectric plants built on all the larger rivers.

Ukraine has a few natural lakes, too, but they are small in size. Lake Svitiaz in the northwest is one of the largest; with an area of 28 square km. Along the coast there are some saline lakes which are larger. There are also some artificial lakes, like the reservoir on the Dnieper near the city of Kremenchuk.

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Ukraine is rich in animal and plant life. About 350 species of birds and more than a hundred species of mammals live there. Add to this more than 200 species of fish, too. There are fearsome predators like wolves, foxes, wildcats, and martens and hoofed animals like roe deer, wild pigs, elk and mouflons. There are also several species of rodents like hamsters, jerboas, field mice etc. Among birds, the major species are the black and hazel grouse, owls, gulls and partridges. Migrating birds are also found in abundance, like wild geese, ducks and storks. About 385 species of wild life are listed as endangered in the Red Book of Ukraine.

As for natural vegetation, Ukraine has three main zones - Polissya (woodland and marsh), the forest-steppe and the steppe. The Polissya zone, in the northwest and north, has one quarter of it with mixed woods like oak, elm, birch, hornbeam, ash, maple, pine linden, alder, poplar, willow and beech. The forest-steppe lie south of the Polissya and only one-eighth of this zone has forests. Further south is the steppe zone which is mostly composed of treeless plains used for cultivation.

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Ukraine is located in Eastern Europe, sharing its borders with Russia, Belarus, Moldova, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland.

Covering an area of 600,000 square kms, Ukraine is the second largest country in Europe, next only to Russia. It is roughly twice as big as Italy. The landscape of Ukraine is mostly plains and plateaus, with only the Carpathian Mountains in the west rising to impressive heights.

Ukraine has a population 41.3 million people, and the language spoken is mainly Ukrainian; Russian is also spoken by many people. Its capital is Kyiv.

The country is one of the largest grain exporters in the world, blessed with large areas of fertile land. But it is still counted as one of the poorer countries of Europe, haunted by low life expectancy and widespread corruption.

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The impressive capital of Ukraine, Kyiv boasts of a rich, ancient history. According to legends, this port city on the Dnieper River was founded by three brothers named Kyi, Shchek and Khoryv, and their sister Lybid.

The city-name Kyiv means ‘belonging to Kyi’. It acquired the title ‘Mother of Rus Cities’, a thousand years ago, as the centre of Kievan Rus. The city suffered heavy damages during World War II, but it was rebuilt and restored by the mid-1950’s. The second half the 20th century saw Kyiv flourishing with a well-developed economy and cultural life.

Ukraine became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991, and this enhanced the status of Kyiv as a major capital city in Europe.

The city has many higher education centres and hi-tech industries. There are famous historical landmarks, too, like the Saint Sophia Cathedral and Golden Gates of Kyiv.

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Ukrainian Hryvnia is the country’s official currency, which is subdivided into 100 kopiyka. The production, circulation and stability of hryvnia are managed by the National Bank of Ukraine. The name hryvnia was taken from the weight measures of the medieval period of Kievan Rus.

After Ukraine became independent, the hryvnia coins were minted in 1991. But they were released into circulation only in 1996. Bank notes of different denominations soon followed.

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Here’s the man who made the world shudder, with his attack on Ukraine. Russia’s current president, Vladimir Putin is one of the strongest leaders in the world.

He was born in Leningrad, the city now named as St. Petersburg. After graduating in law in 1975, he joined the KGB, the dreaded secret service of the Soviet Union. He was further trained at the Yuri Andropov Red Banner Institute in Moscow, and then worked in East Germany under the pretence of being a translator. He left the KGB following the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, which he did not agree with.

Putin then sought a career in politics and was quite successful in it. He reached the highest position in Russia in 2000. Among all the current presidents in Europe, Putin is the second longest serving - behind only Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus. In fact, the Russian constitution allowed a person to serve as president only for two terms. To get around this problem, a shrewd Putin chose to be the prime minister in 2008, swapping places with the then prime minister Dimitri Medvedev. Putin was re-elected as president in 2018, for the fourth time. In April 2021, he changed the constitution so as to allow him to be elected as president for two more terms. This would enable him to remain as president until 2036.

Putin’s rule of Russia is characterized by a shift to authoritarianism. His government is also accused of gross human rights abuses. Most recently, the attack on Ukraine has added to his image as a ruthless ruler.

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We have already seen that fifteen independent countries were formed after the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist. They are: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Russia is internationally recognised as the successor of the U.S.S.R.

The first to declare independence were Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, during March-May, 1990. Among the countries that sprouted from the Soviet Union, Ukraine is getting the most attention these days because of the Russian invasion. Ukraine officially became an independent state on August 24, 1991, with Leonid Kravchuk as the first president. Ukraine gave up all the nuclear weapons it had inherited from the Soviet Union, and declared itself a non-nuclear nation on June 1, 1996.

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Boris Yeltsin became the first president in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He was also the first freely elected leader in the whole history of Russia going back to a thousand years!

President Yeltsin presented a new constitution in 1993 which was approved by the Russian voters. It gave strong powers to the president, leaving the Russian parliament comparatively weaker. Yeltsin abandoned some of the basic ideas that the Soviet Union had held dear. He allowed private ownership of property and brought in a free market, and did away with price controls. Many of the state assets were privatized. Yeltsin also supported a free press, and agreed to a reduction in nuclear arms.

Yeltsin’s reforms made a section of the people very wealthy, but many were left poor. He also invited criticism against Russia by sending troops to Chechnya in 1994, causing the death of many. Yeltsin announced his resignation on December 31, 1999, and named Vladimir Putin as his successor. He died on April 23, 2007.

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No doubt, the Soviet Union was a superpower in the world. Yet, its military was also feeling the impact of perestroika and glasnost.

Funding for the military was reduced considerably between 1985 and 1991, and the troop strength came down. In 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev acted on the negotiations for a long pending arms reduction treaty, bringing about the first major reduction. This reduced military strength by 500,000 men. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan happened around this time to which more than 100,000 Soviet soldiers were deployed. The ten- year-long Afghan war left more than 15,000 Soviet troops dead and thousands injured.

People’s resistance to military draft also contributed to the decline of troops. In the new spirit of glasnost, the conscripted soldiers felt free and bold to talk about the abuses they suffered. This caused great concern among the public and there was resistance everywhere to military draft. As separatist movements came up in the republics of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Lithuania between 1989 and 1991, the military was not strong enough to suppress them.

The centralised Communist Party was losing its grip. The Party hard-liners organised a coup attempt to overthrow Gorbachev, fed up with perestroika and glasnost. But the attempt failed, because the now-fragmented military stood in support of Gorbachev. Gorbachev managed to stay in office, but the coup had weakened the U.S.S.R further, quickening its slide to dissolution.

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Memories of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl still send shock waves through the world. The disaster occurred on April 26, 1986 at the Chernobyl power station in Prypíyat, now in Ukraine. Its radioactive fallout was 400 times bigger than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, reaching over most of the western U.S.S.R and even other European countries.

The Chernobyl disaster brought a moment of disillusionment for the people who had felt jubilant over the policy of glasnost. Glasnost had promised more open communication, but what happened now was that the Communist Party officials suppressed information about the disaster and its dangers. May Day parades were held as planned in the affected areas, in spite of the radiation risks. Gorbachev issued an official statement on the disaster only on May 14, eighteen days later. He said in it that the Chernobyl incident was a misfortune, but blamed the Western media for spreading lies. But people in the fallout zone and beyond were actually suffering the after-effects of radiation, and the policy of glasnost lost the public’s trust.

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The Soviet Union ceased to exist on December 25, 1991, as President Mikhail Gorbachev announced its dissolution. The day also marked the birth of the Russian Federation with Boris Yeltsin as its first president.

The world’s largest communist state, the mammoth power that had influenced international politics for so long, was dissolved to form 15 independent republics. What brought the giant down? There were many factors that led to this - political, economic, social and military. The Soviet economy had been suffering for a long time, and the country’s bureaucracy was inefficient. Mikhail Gorbachev, who was appointed the general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, wanted to give the system a strong push. He brought in two major policies, ‘glasnost’ (which means ‘openness’) and ‘perestroika’ (‘restructuring’). Glasnost gave people the freedom of speech, and religion was restored. Hundreds of former dissenters were released from prison. The aim of perestroika was to adopt a mixed economic system of communism and capitalism. All this was strange and too sudden for the hitherto closed Soviet system, and created social and economic tensions. Under the Soviet economy, all sources of industrial and agricultural production were under the control of the government, and this idea was shaken by the new reforms. Nationalist parties soon raised their heads in the constituent republics posing a threat to the Soviet monolith.

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World War II was won by the combined might of the Allied Forces which included Great Britain, France, the USA and the Soviet Union. However, this bond of friendship was not to last long, and the capitalist western countries and the communist U.S.S.R soon drifted apart; so did their respective allies. This developed into a deep rivalry that was open, but controlled. This peculiar form of international hostility came to be known as the ‘Cold War’.

The term ‘Cold War’ first appeared in an article written by the English writer George Orwell. He was using it to describe a possible nuclear stalemate between two or three monstrous super-states. This usage was introduced into the United States in 1947, by Bernard Baruch who was a financier and adviser to the president, in a speech at the State-House in South Carolina. Soon ‘Cold War’ became part of the common parlance in international politics.

The countries of Eastern Europe, liberated by the Soviet Red Army during World War II, were put under communist governments. They were under the control of the U.S.S.R. The western powers feared this Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, and they also perceived a threat of the Soviet influence spreading to other democracies. By 1947-48, the Cold War had become a reality to live with, as the U.S. brought the western European countries under its influence. In 1949, the U.S.A and its European allies formed a military alliance named the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), to resist any possible threat from the Soviet bloc.

The Cold War mostly operated on political and economic grounds, with propaganda as a weapon. There was only very limited use of real weapons, and the world is lucky it did not develop into a ‘Hot War’. Ultimately, the dissolution of the U.S.S.R brought an end to the Cold War.

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Joseph Stalin was the iron ruler of the U.S.S.R, who made the country a formidable military and industrial superpower.

Born in Gori, Georgia in 1878, he played an active role in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Lenin chose Stalin to head the Workers’ and Peasants’ inspectorate, which made him a powerful man. He was appointed the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on 3rd April, 1922.

In the beginning he acted as part of a collective leadership. But by the 1930’s Stalin had become a dictator. He consolidated his absolute power by shrewdly manoeuvring and isolating those who stood in his way, and by using police terror. Towards the end of the 1920’s, he had established a totalitarian rule that prohibited all sorts of opposition. His brutal reign is held responsible for the deaths of millions.

He made clever use of nationalism to strengthen his rule and promoted some aspects of Russian history, some national heroes and the Russian language.

Joseph Stalin ruled the country from 1929 to 1953, until his death.

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