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The most important events of the period were as follows: the entrance of France into the European Economic Community (1958); French nuclear weapon test (1962); the reconciliation between France and Germany, put into life by the treaty between De Gaulle and Adenauer (1963). Student’s disturbances (May 1968) were aimed at democratization of the country’s political system and favored the rejuvenation of the country’s political elite. The enlivening of left-centralist sentiments in the country does not hold any pronounced radical character. The modern policy of France is directed to preservation of the former greatness. Its real economic position among the leading seven industrial states has a tendency to a decline. It shifted from the 4th to the 5th place according to its economic indices in the recent five years.

Quite probably, the evolutionary period of development has not exhausted its potency and will last in the first quarter of the 21st century.

8.6. Ukraine

For Ukraine, the beginning of the first epochal cycle is identified with sources of Kievian Rus’ history.

It would not be groundless to assume that the revolutionary phase of the cycle is connected with the seizure of power in Novgorod and Kiev by the Norman army of Oleg (882). The establishment of control over the trade way «from Varangians to Greeks» was the sense of the event. The campaigns of Svyatoslav (964-969) also became the content of the revolutionary phase. However, they did not provide for the territorial expansion of Rus to the West, and, moreover, they uncovered the southern borders of the state, exposing them to Khasarian attacks.

The entrance of Ukraine-Rus to the involutionary period was connected with the choice of belonging to a civilization and the introduction of Christianity of the Byzantine model (988). The fight for the Kievian throne, which flared up after the death of Prince Vladimir, ended only during the rule of Yaroslav the Wise (1019-1054). The inner political situation in Kievian Rus stabilized in that period. At the same time, under the influence of the external factor, the split of the Christian church to the Catholic (ecumenical) and Orthodox (right) ones, Ukrainian lands, according to Hrushevsky, lose their own civilizational rhythm of history. The insiccation of the Byzantine sources of culture, to what Ukraine-Rus belonged, did not allow that land to find the rhythm neither in the Catholic nor in Protestant civilizational cycles[63]. In fact, the civilizational failure was marked along the Dnieper («East»– «West»).

The fight for political influence in the country stimulated the processes of feudal disunity, confirmed at the meeting of Princes in Lubich (1097), where they made a decision: «everyone holds his own dominion». The reinforcement of kindred North-Eastern Russian princedoms in the XI century stimulated their struggle against the parental culture of the Kievian Rus. This process was symbolized by the war for the Kievian throne between Izyaslav Mstislavitch and the Prince of Suzdal, Jury Dolgoruky (1147-1149). The situation was complicated with permanent confrontation with the nomadic nations of steppe. The assault of hordes of Polovtsians upon Kiev (1169) did not stimulate any uniting processes in the military and political spheres. Every prince strived for his own victories, trying to prove his right to be primus inter pares. The bright example is the campaign of Severian Prince Igor Svyatoslavich against Polovtsians, which ended in the defeat of Igor by the Polovtsian Khan Konchak (1185).

The peculiar correctives, amended to the historical development of the Ukraine-Rus by the steppian nations, finally weakened the political influence of Kiev as a uniting power of the Slav nations. The situation promoted the appearance of new centers of power – the beginning of a growth of the Galych-Volyn princedom (1199) and princedoms of the North-Eastern Rus.

Transient processes of the co-evolution of the first epochal cycle are identified with defeats of the North-Eastern Rus and the Mogul-Tartarian invasion of it (1237-1238). This period includes: the defeat of Kiev (1240), the creation of «Saga on Defeat of Rus» by monks. In fact, Ukraine-Rus turned into a distinctive defensive line for Europe.

The blossom of the evolutionary period is connected with the strengthening of the Lithuanian princedom that took Ukraine-Rus under its military cover: the campaign of the Lithuanian prince Gediminas to the Kievian princedom (1323). The power of the Lithuanian princedom allowed it to inflict a defeat upon the Mogul-Tartaric horde near the Blue Waters in 1362. However, the military successes, strengthened by the Kievian Union (1385) of the Great Lithuanian princedom and the Kingdom of Poland, weakened the Orthodox hierarchy, especially after the metropolitanate had moved to Moscow (1326). It opened the doors for catholic missionaries to the Ukrainian land, by strengthening the western vector in its culture and, at the same time, stimulating the interconfessional confrontation.

The consequences of Tartar-Mogul destructions became the main reason for the lag of towns of Ukraine-Rus behind the West-European towns in richness, the level of development of guild handicraft, and self-government. Though the town of Vladimir-Volynsky gained the Magdeburg right (1324), in general, the urban culture had not yet reached the West-European level.

Despite the separation of the Crimean Khanate from the Golden Horde (1443), the incursions of nomads on the Ukrainian lands still took place, what favored the emergence of list Cossacks as a special military class, defending the southern borders of the state from incursions. Later, the formations of the Zaporizhzhian Sich appear on Dnieper rapids. The enslaving of peasants intensified in this period. Such a state of affairs cannot help to influence the social-political situation in the Great Princedom of Lithuania.

The growing political tension reached their critical point because of active policy of catholicizing the Ukrainian population, finding its expression in the decisions of the Brest synod (1596) on the creation of the Uniate Church.

The second epochal cycle. Revolutionary content had the events of the first quarter of the 17th century, connected with the struggle of Ukrainian Cossacks for extending their social rights, the struggle of peasants for liberation from the serfdom oppression of Polish magnates and the struggle of all Ukrainian population for the confessional equality.

The apogee of the events became the War for liberation of the Ukrainian nation under the guidance of Bogdan Khmelnitsky (1648-1654). This period became a divide in the history of Ukraine. However, the high point of restoration of the national statehood of the period of Bogdan Khmelnitsky did not end in success. The Andrusov Peace (1667) between Moscow and Rzecz Pospolita stimulated the geopolitic split of Ukrainian lands: the Left-bank Ukraine remained in the zone of Russian influence, the Right-bank one (except Kiev) – under control of Poland. According to the figural statement of Hrushevsky, the period of Ruin had come, when Ukrainian lands were devastated by almost semicentenary uninterrupted wars.

The period involutionary by its characteristics in the history of Ukraine is connected with its following existence in the borders of Russia. The last attempt of preserving its identity found its expression in the causes that led to events of the Poltava battle (1709). The spiritual front of the period was defined by the works of Hrigory Skovoroda (1722-1794).

Ukraine loses the foretype of its statehood of this period with the destruction of the Zaporizhzhian Sich by Russian troops (1775). The gradual erosion of its social-cultural grounds proceeded. The territorial enlargement at the expense of three divisions of Poland (1772, 1793, 1795) and accession of the Crimea (1783) led to the spread of serfdom on the peasants of the Left-bank and Slobodian Ukraine at the same time. The «reincarnation» of Ukrainian national spirit was realized in the works of Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), what gave an ideological ground to the following generations of freethinking democrats.

The defeat of the Russian Empire in the Crimean War (1854-1856) stimulated reforms, beginning with the abolishment of serfdom (1861). In fact, it became the turning co-evolutionary phase of the third epochal cycle. The bourgeois reforming of economy opened the space for the private initiative. At the same time, the differentiation of the urban Russian-speaking and country Ukrainian-speaking cultures is intensified in the growing processes of russification of Ukraine: the Valuev (1863) and Ems (1876) edicts, that appreciably limited the publishing of books and prohibited the teaching at schools in Ukrainian. All these factors distinctively restrained national-cultural development of Ukraine and manifested in a drop in efficiency of country’s cultural self-realization.

The evolutionary stage of the second epochal cycle was interrupted by the events of the Great October Socialist Revolution (1917-1921). Thus, any accelerated revolutionary processes appeared to be untenable for Ukraine on the whole, and the struggle for national liberation ended in defeat. Appearing in the unit multinational state, the USSR, Ukraine continued its development already in the involutionary period of the third epochal cycle.

The involutionary stage is connected with the realization of the policy of the «military communism» under conditions of the civil war (1918-1921). The objective specificity of the period, consisting in «acceleration» of the time of historical development and in unique peripetias of the process of mobilization of the «pursuit development», revealed later. Especially, it can be seen in the transformation of the traditional Ukrainian agrarian society to the «noncapitalist» industrial one, preserving the specific features of «multistructureness»: from the forms of quasistate slavery in the concentration camps, «petty-bourgeois» agrarian production of the «new economic policy» times, to the elements of «state capitalism».

The Second World War (1939-1945) became a tragic trial for Ukraine. It questioned the very possibility of the following historical development as a subject rather than an object of the hostile expansion. On the other side, almost all ethnically Ukrainian territories were included to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, what created the perspective for formation of a political nation.

At the same time, the involutionary period was connected with solution of the tasks of industrial development. The overall nationalization of the objects of property, the collectivization of the agrarian and industrial production, the secularization of the spiritual life did not give any freedom of choice except that defined by the policy of the single governing Communist party and the plans for country’s economic development. Possessing the enormous fertility of both the agricultural area and spiritual space, Ukraine represented an example of the fatigueless supplier of elite personnel to USSR’s bodies. This directly influenced the condition of the national elite.

The co-evolutionary phase of the third epochal cycle for Ukraine is identified with the disintegration of the USSR (1991) and the third attempt (after 1648-1654 and 1917-1921) to create a sovereign state.

8.7. Russia

Speaking on the historical destiny of Ukraine, Russia, and Belorussia as a basis of the Eurasian civilizational area, one should pay attention to differences in the dynamics of development of epochal cycles of the national historical processes of three Slav nations.

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