Making Ukraine

Negotiating, Contesting, and Drawing the Borders in the Twentieth Century

Olena Palko, Constantin Ardeleanu, Olena Palko, Constantin Ardeleanu

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780228011019
• eBook ISBN: 9780228013341
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Theory & Criticism
• Index: History

Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine have brought scholarly and public attention to Ukraine's borders. Making Ukraine aims to investigate the various processes of negotiation, delineation, and contestation that have shaped the country's borders throughout the past century.

Essays by contributors from various historical fields consider how, when, and under what conditions the borders that historically define the country were agreed upon. A diverse set of national and transnational contexts are explored, with a primary focus on the critical period between 1917 and 1954. Chapters are organized around three main themes: the interstate treaties that brought about the new international order in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the world wars, the formation of the internal boundaries between Ukraine and other Soviet republics, and the delineation of Ukraine's borders with its western neighbours. Investigating the process of bordering Ukraine in the post-Soviet era, contributors also pay close attention to the competing visions of future relations between Ukraine and Russia.

Through its broad geographic and thematic coverage, Making Ukraine illustrates that the dynamics of contemporary border formation cannot be fully understood through the lens of a sole state, frontier, or ideology and sheds light on the shared history of territory and state formation in Europe and the wider modern world.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration and Translation
• INTRODUCTION Making the Bordersof Contemporary Ukraine
• PART ONE Negotiating Borders
• 1 Ukraine’s Borders at the Brest-Litovsk Peace Conference, 1917–18
• 2 Poland’s “Civilizing Mission” and Ukrainian Statehood at the Paris Peace Conference
• 3 The Path to the Treaty of Riga
• 4 From the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to the Territorial Agreement of “the Big Three”
• PART TWO Establishing the Borders of the Soviet Republics
• 5 Emerging States and Border-Makingin Times of War
• 6 Contested Lines
• 7 Overlapping Spaces
• 8 Crimea’s 1954 Transfer to Ukraine
• PART THREE Delineating Ukraine’s Western Border
• 9 The Formation of the Polish-Ukrainian Border in Volhynia, 1918–21
• 10 To Reach beyond the Carpathians
• 11 The Making of the Romanian-Ukrainian-Moldovan Border at the Maritime Danube in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
• CONCLUSION Making and Unmaking the Ukrainian-Russian Border since 1991
• Contributors
• Index