Countries Russia Once Controlled and Wants Back

 Nadene Goldfoot                                       

Once upon a time, Russia gained control over Ukraine.  Most of Ukraine fell to the Russian Empire under the reign of anti-Semitic Catherine the Great; on January 23, 1793.  Ukraine was then annexed by Russia in this Second Partition of Poland.

Catherine the Great, anti-Semite,  created the Pale of Settlement made up of 25 provinces of Czarist Russia (in Poland, Lithuania, White Russia, Ukraine, Bessarabia and Crimea) where Jews were allowed to live.  Otherwise, they were not to live in Russia proper. 

There were 2 Catherines.  Catherine I ruled: 1725-1727 and in May 1727 expelled all Jews resident in Little Russia.  this order was commanded after her death.  Catherine II The Great ruled 1762-1796, and her Jewish policy was marked by coercion.  Jews were allowed to register in the merchant and urban classes of 1780.  During her last years of 1789-1796, she prevented the extension of Jewish settlement and in 1795, prohibited Jewish residence in rural areas.  

Lithuania, Poland Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire.   

Jews moved to Ukraine from Khazaria, the Caliphate, and Byzantium between 9th and 12th centuries; then from central Europe from 14th and 15th centuries and from Poland in the 16th century.  Massacres happened in 17th and 18th centuries like the Khrnielnicki and Haidamak uprisings.  The 19th century influxes were from Galicia and white Russia, Ukraine was always an anti-Semitic center, scene of pogroms in 1905 and 1918-1920.  

During the 14th and 15th centuries, present-day Ukrainian territories came under the rule of four external powers: the Golden Horde, the Crimean Khanate, 

the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as shown above,  and the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland. The latter two would then merge into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth following the Union of Krewo and Union of Lublin.  

1, The history of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1648) covers a period in the history of Poland and Lithuania, before their joint state was subjected to devastating wars in the middle of the 17th century.                     

   2. The Russo-Polish War of 1654–67 and the failed Treaty of Hadiach which would have formed Polish–Lithuanian–Ruthenian Commonwealth. In consequence, by the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, signed in 1686, the eastern portion of Ukraine (east of the Dnieper River) was to come under Russian rule, 146,000 rubles were to be paid to Poland as compensation for the loss of the Right Bank of Ukraine, and the parties agreed not to sign a separate treaty with the Ottoman Empire. The treaty was strongly opposed in Poland and was not ratified by the Polish–Lithuanian Sejm until 1710. The legal legitimacy of its ratification has been disputed. 

3. According to Jacek Staszewski, the treaty was not confirmed by a resolution of the Sejm until its 1764 session.

To the grief of all the bourgeois we’ll fan a worldwide conflagration!, a Soviet poster with the words from the poem The Twelve by Alexander Blok (artist Alexander Zelenskiy)                   (see below)         

 The Twelve is a controversial long poem by Aleksandr Blok. Written early in 1918, the poem was one of the first poetic responses to the October Revolution of 1917.  The October Revolution (also called the Bolshevik Revolution) overturned the interim provisional government and established the Soviet Union. The October Revolution was a much more deliberate event, orchestrated by a small group of people. The Bolsheviks, who led this coup, prepared their coup in only six months. Bolsheviks were  a member of the majority faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party, which was renamed the Communist Party after seizing power in the October Revolution of 1917.  The Bolsheviks, also known in English as the Bolshevists, were a far-left, revolutionary Marxist faction founded by Vladimir Lenin that split with the Mensheviks from the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, a revolutionary socialist political party formed in 1898, at its Second Party Congress in 1903.

 Alexander Zelenskiy was a Russian artist who was born in 1882. Alexander Zelenskiy's work has been offered at auction multiple times. The artist died in 1942. He must be a relative of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine today.

4. On 29 December 1922 a conference of plenipotentiary delegations from the Russian SFSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR approved the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and the Declaration of the Creation of the USSR, forming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Ukraine officially declared itself an independent country on 24 August 1991, when the communist Supreme Soviet (parliament) of Ukraine proclaimed that Ukraine would no longer follow the laws of USSR and only the laws of the Ukrainian SSR, de facto declaring Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union.

On March 12, 1990, the Supreme Council of the Republic of Lithuania declared independence. Moscow imposed an economic blockade and then sent in security forces to reestablish control, which was resisted by the vast majority of Lithuanians.                            

On November 11, 1918, Marshal Józef Piłsudski became Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Army and de facto head of what was about to become the Republic of Poland, effectively restoring Polish independence after 123 years of Prussian, Austrian and Russian occupation.

1918 - After more than a century of foreign rule, an independent Polish state is restored after the end of World War One, with Marshal Jozef Pilsudski as head of state.

1939 - Nazi Germany invades Poland. Beginning of World War Two as the United Kingdom and France declare war on Germany in response. USSR invades from the east. Germany and the Soviet Union divide Poland between them and treat Polish citizens with extreme brutality. Germany begins systematic persecution of the large Jewish population.

THE TWELVE:  The poem describes the march of twelve Red Guards (likened to the Twelve Apostles) through the streets of revolutionary Petrograd, with a fierce winter blizzard raging around them. The mood of the Twelve as conveyed by the poem oscillates from base and even sadistic aggression towards everything perceived bourgeois and counter-revolutionary, to strict discipline and sense of "revolutionary duty." A prostitute who is found with Ivan, who is from the same background as the Twelve but is in no revolutionary mood, is killed by one of the Twelve (Peter), who appears unusually struck by the accident and later reveals to his comrades that he had been in love with the woman. However, after the others remind him that in these revolutionary times one's personal tragedies are nothing, the murderer regains his determination and continues the march. In the last stanza of the poem, most controversially, a figure of Jesus Christ is seen in the snowstorm, heading the march of the Twelve.

Aleksandr Blok TWELVE A Poem in a new translation by Maria Carlson 

1. Black night. White snow. The wind, the wind! Impossible to stay on your feet. The wind, the wind! Blowing across God’s world! The wind swirls round The clean, white snow. Under the snow -- there’s ice. It’s slick, it’s hard, Pedestrians Slip -- oops! too bad! From building to building Stretches a cable. On the cable’s a placard: “All Power to the Constituent Assembly!” An old woman keens and weeps beneath it, She just can’t understand what it means, Why such a huge scrap of cloth For such a placard? It would make so many footwraps for the boys, And so many are without clothes, without shoes . . .The old woman, hen-like, Managed somehow to scramble over the snowbank. “Oh, Holy Mother of God, our Protectress! “Oh, the Bolsheviks are going to drive me into my grave!” The wind is biting! The frost tenacious!.....

Russia  invaded Ukraine Thu, Feb 24, 2022.  

Resource:

https://kafkadesk.org/2020/11/11/on-this-day-in-1918-poland-regained-its-independence-after-123-years/

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-17754512

https://www.cato.org/commentary/how-lithuania-destroyed-soviet-union#:~:text=On%20March%2012%2C%201990%2C%20the,the%20vast%20majority%20of%20Lithuanians.

https://www.sparknotes.com/history/european/russianrev/summary/#:~:text=The%20October%20Revolution%20(also%20called,coup%20in%20only%20six%20months.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_(poem)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Soviet_Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union_(1917%E2%80%931927)

https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/6598/BlokTwelve_RusEngTxt.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y  translation into English of poem

https://www.mutualart.com/Artist/Alexander-Zelenskiy/947BF330AEF04347/Biography