s and their forbears have continued to
occupy approximately the same lands which they now inhabit, except for
temporary recessions and re-colonizations caused by Mongol invasions.
In the ninth century they were already settled in the vast and fertile
plains and woodlands lying between the Carpathian Mountains and the Sea
of Azov, and embracing the valleys of the Dniester, Pruth, Boh, Dnieper
and Donetz.

Organized government in Ukraine began with the ancient state of Kiev.
The ascendancy of Kiev also marks the period of Ukraine's greatest
political expansion. From the ninth to the thirteenth century, Kiev was
the center of the economic, intellectual and political life of eastern
Europe, uniting the entire ethnographic Ukrainian territories. The name
by which this state was known was "Russ," taken from the name of the
reigning dynasty. This term was later appropriated by the Great
Russians. "Because of the Byzantine commerce, learning and craft,"
observes the Polish historian Zakrzewski, "Kiev, the 'mother of Russ
cities,' was for the Poland of the eleventh and twelfth centuries what
Rome had been for earlier Germans." The French geographer Reclus
notices that academies flourished at Kiev and Ostrog before the Great
Russians owned a single high school, and draws attention to the fact
that Russia, during the regenerative period of Peter the Great,
received her teachers from Ukraine.

The fall of Kiev and Ukraine's subsequent loss of autonomous statehood
in the fourteenth century can only be ascribed to the old system of
military conquest. The affairs of eastern Ukraine became confused and
decadent through the constant Mongol pressure which began in the
thirteenth century. One hundred years later, part of western Ukraine
also, weakened by frequent Tatar invasions, fell a prey to Poland, to
whom she was a tempting prize because of her rich soil.

The Polish conquest of Ukraine started in 1340 and, after thirty-five
years of the bitterest warfare, the Poles succeeded in annexing an area
of land approximately coextensive with the present provinces of Kholm
and Eastern Galicia. This they never succeeded in assimilating, in
spite of the most tremendous efforts. Simultaneously Volhynia and other
northern Ukrainian territories became confederated with Lithuania in
order to gain protection against the Tatars. The marriage of the
Lithuanian king to the Queen of Poland and the union of the two realms
drew these Ukrainian lands al