Quotes About History

In August, the Hungarians cut the barbed wire at their border with Austria, creating the first hole in the Eastern Bloc.

Today I walk from my place up Brunnenstrasse, past Frau Paul's tunnel to Bernauer Strasse where the Wall was. There is a new museum here. Its greatest exhibit is opposite: a full-size reconstructed section of the Wall, complete with freshly built and neatly raked death strip, for tourists.

It's a hypothesis. History won't take us far enough to confirm it. And our certainties never really hold water. One day you feel like dying and the next you realize all you had to do was go down a few stairs to find the light switch so you could see things a bit more clearly.

Russians had not grudged it when the world war turned both the Atlantic and Pacific into 'American lakes,' but when these same Americans, who had taken all the oceans and who were building bases on their islands and shores, called Russia greedy for taking back what she formerly owned, this ranked.

People and trees are caught in irreversible histories of disturbance. But some kinds of disturbance have been followed by regrowth of a sort that nurtures many lives.

Jeder Mensch bekommt eine bestimmte Zeit im Kontinuum der Menschheitsgeschichte und jeder bekommt seine Herkunft und bestimmte Eigenschaften vererbt, die alles bestimmen, jedenfalls fast alles, was er sein wird. Mit dem Rest freien Willens kann er sich ein Leben lang herumraufen und versuchen, ihm seinen unverwechselbaren Stempel aufzudrücken und sich von der Hypothek seiner beschädigten Eltern zu befreien.

Scratch a Russian, as the saying goes, and you find a Tatar.

George Bush, had he been around at the time, would undoubtedly have joined this chorus in favour of the status quo, his only contribution to Ukrainian independence being the infamous 'Chicken Kiev' speech of August 1991, in which he urged Ukrainians to stay loyal to the Soviet Union. But at least Bush knew Ukraine existed.

Despite these unpromising beginnings, Volodymyr must at some point have decided that to keep pace with its neighbours his empire needed an advanced religion.

Today, Polish-Ukrainian relations are rather muted – surprisingly so given their long and scratchy common history.

The number of ethnic Poles left in Ukraine is tiny, and Poland has no leverage over Ukrainian affairs. Whereas Khmelnytsky tried to play off Muscovy against the Poles, today's Ukraine balances Russia against America.

Did I know that Donetsk used to be called Yuzovka, after a Welshman, John Hughes, who opened the first foundry on the site? Did I know that Donetsk was twinned with Cardiff?

Ukraine's Russians are fairly recent arrivals. They came in waves that mirrored the empire's belated industrial revolution: at the end of the nineteenth century, with the first industrial boom; in the 1920s and 1930s, with the Five-Year Plans; and again after the war. By 1989, according to the last Soviet census, they made up 11 million of Ukraine's 52 million population. In the Donbass coal basin, equidistant from Kiev and Moscow, they form a majority.

Nor, since not all Ukrainians were Cossacks and not all Cossacks Ukrainians, did Cossackdom form an embryo Ukrainian nation.

Wiser councils prevailed, and today a solitary Khmelnytsky slices the uncomplaining air on a traffic island outside Santa Sofia Cathedral. It is hard to make out

The Most Serene Commonwealth of the Two Nations'. From the late fourteenth century until Russia took its first big bite out of the Commonwealth in the mid seventeenth, therefore, nearly the whole territory of present-day Ukraine, including Kiev, was ruled from the Polish royal capital of Cracow.

Moreover, until very recently Ukraine's neighbours did not see it as a separate country, or Ukrainians as a separate people, at all. To Russians it was part of Russia; to Poles, part of Poland.

The (Polish-bom) American Sovietologist Zbigniew Brzezinski writes that 'without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.

Here begins Ukraine's great debate – still raw, still undecided: are Ukrainians Central Europeans, like the Poles, or a species of Russian? Poles used to call western Ukraine 'Eastern Little Poland'; the Russian name for Ukraine was 'Little Russia'.

West Ukrainian men, like Poles, are addressed as 'Pan So-and-So'; central and eastern Ukrainians, like Russians, are 'Gospodin'. Most Ukrainians are Orthodox, but in the west a separate 'Uniate' church, founded at the end of the sixteenth century, combines Orthodox liturgy with obedience to the Pope.

Ukraine's relationship with Poland is difficult and contradictory. For 500 years they shared a common history, first under the Polish kings, then under the Russian tsars. But like rival siblings they define themselves more by their differences than their similarities – Poland glamorous and self-dramatising;

UKRAINA is literally translated as 'on the edge' or 'borderland', and that is exactly what it is. Flat, fertile and fatally tempting to invaders, Ukraine was split between Russia and Poland from the mid seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth, between Russia and Austria through the nineteenth, and between Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania between the two world wars. Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it had never been an independent state.

Trading posts turned into forts, forts into tribute-collecting points, and tribute-collecting points, by the end of the tenth century, into the largest kingdom in Europe, stretching from the Baltic to the Carpathians.

Not only can what others are suffering be a consolation while we are suffering, but even knowing what others suffered long ago can be consoling.