As we indicated in Part 1, even by the end of the 18th century, the nation of “Ukraine” was nowhere to be seen on the maps of the era. And shortly thereafter the greatest map-making assemblage of nations that the world had ever seen only confirmed its non-existence within the maws of an expanding Russian Empire.
We are referring to the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, which was the diplomatic mechanism by which the victors over Napoleon – Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Great Britain – reordered the political geography of Europe. Their purpose was to restore monarchical legitimacy after a quarter-century of revolution and war, to prevent the re-emergence of French hegemony, and to compensate themselves for the costs of the struggle.
Under the guiding influence of Austria’s Prince Metternich, Russia’s Tsar Alexander I, Britain’s Viscount Castlereagh, and Prussia’s Prince Hardenberg, the powers rejected both the popular sovereignty associated with the French Revolution and also any simple reversion to the pre-revolution map of 1789.
Instead they fashioned a conservative settlement grounded in dynastic right, a workable balance among the great powers, and mutual territorial swaps and boundary adjustments. These rearrangements extended across the continent and into the adjacent Eurasian borderlands.
Thus, France was confined to its frontiers of 1792 and surrounded by reinforced buffer states. The German lands were consolidated into a confederation dominated by Austria, while Italy was left divided among restored or compensated rulers. In northern Europe, territorial exchanges strengthened Sweden and created a united Kingdom of the Netherlands.
But it was the settlement in the east that is material to what was the still missing map of Ukraine at the end of the Congress. In fact, its handiwork went in the opposite direction by confirming and enlarging the late 18th century gains and colonization projects of the Russian Empire.
Alexander I of Russia received most of the former Duchy of Warsaw, reconstituted as the Kingdom of Poland under the Russian crown, and obtained formal recognition of the extensive territories Russia had already acquired through the eighteenth-century partitions of Poland and through earlier wars. Those acquisitions encompassed the greater part of the territories that constitute modern Ukraine: the Right Bank and the Left Bank of the Dnieper River, as well as the region then known as Novorossiya, and the Crimean Peninsula.
At that point in time, Galicia, including the city of Lviv, remained under Habsburg rule, a secondary consequence of the partitions that the Vienna powers left undisturbed. Prussia obtained more limited Polish districts to the west.
In none of these allocations did an independent Ukrainian state appear. The peacemakers regarded the region as imperial territory to be distributed among the victorious monarchies, not as the patrimony of a distinct nation entitled to sovereignty. British and Prussian acquiescence in Russia’s share formed part of the larger bargain that contained France and preserved the conservative equilibrium; neither power had an interest in promoting a Ukrainian polity that would have unsettled the eastern settlement they had helped to construct.
The Concert of Europe that issued from Vienna therefore placed the Czarist empire’s control over the Ukrainian lands under the collective sanction of the anti-Napoleonic coalition. Territories that had been absorbed through Russian conquest, partition, and colonization in the preceding century were now underwritten by the authority of the principal European powers.
For the remainder of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, therefore, the territories of today’s Ukraine continued to be governed as provinces of the Russian and Austrian empires. Their inhabitants remained subjects of those states rather than citizens of a Ukraine that the statesmen of 1814 had not had reason to reject because as of yet it had not even been envisioned.
Needless to say, the 1814 map below speaks for itself. The current line of contact in the Ukraine War, which is just east of the Dnieper River has seen the slaughter of upwards of 400,000 soldiers on both sides of the trenches. Yet when the modern map of Europe was fixed at the Congress of Vienna their forebears had all been subjects of the same Russian Empire; most were adherents of the Russian Orthodox confession; and the mother tongue of many was Russian, as well.
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