KYIV
The topos of 'Rus' described the middle Dnipro region, a medieval state centred in Kyiv in the ninth century. During the Kyivan state's heyday (10th to first half of the 11th century), the term 'Rus' had two meanings: political and ecclesiastical.
Kyiv, as an important trade hub, concentrated goods of Byzantine and Eastern origin, resulting in a common trade space that connected the East and West (goods from India and China came to Europe) and the North and South (Scandinavia and Byzantium).
This economic development contributed to the spread of mental culture, i.e., writing, librarianship, and customary law.
Religion in Kyivan Rus, for example, developed in competition with Polish Catholicism and underwent theological (polemical literature) and artistic (Cossack Baroque) transformations during the Renaissance and Baroque times.
In contrast, as a result of Muscovy's cultural isolation and limited contact with the West, Moscow Orthodoxy has become much more closed in its ideas and closely linked to the state and its rulers.
The political role of Rus' was emphasised by the connections of Kyivan princes with European courts of the 11th and 12th centuries.
Marriages between European ruling dynasties and Kyivan princes were organised for political purposes, such as gaining support in diplomatic and military affairs.
At the same time, under feudal law, all princes of Kyivan Rus, as descendants of the great Kyivan prince, had equal inheritance rights.
This aristocratic proto-egalitarianism promoted the concept of a common cause and political responsibility, but it also increased competition among princes, resulting in fragmentation.
Kyiv's historical significance was to unite East Slavic tribes into what Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky referred to as 'the first form of Ukrainian statehood', as well as to mark the beginning of statehood for many non-Slavic peoples (Ugro-Finnish and Turkic neighbours), protecting the continent from destruction by Mongol invasion in the 13th century.
GALICIA
The development of Magdeburg law (city law, which emerged in the XIII century in Germany and provided for the liberation of the city from the administrative power of feudal lords-owners and the establishment of city self-government) in Ukrainian lands began in Lviv, resulting in a powerful centre of trade in particular.
It was the birthplace of the Brotherhood movement (a cultural and educational movement centred on Orthodox decentralized and community-based churches), which paved the way for Ukrainian cultural advancement.
Lviv has played a key role in the history of the Ukrainian nationalist movement.
In the late 19th century, the centre of the national movement shifted from Naddniprianshchyna (the historical and geographical part of Ukraine that originally included the central and northern regions of Ukraine and is geographically connected to the Dnipro basin) to Galicia (a historical region in western Ukraine, lying to the north of the Carpathians and bounded on the east by the Zbruch River).
As a result of the Russian Empire's persecution of the Ukrainian language and culture, Galicia (ruled at the time by a more liberal Habsburg empire) became a centre of Ukrainian culture.
Galicia was then referred to as the Ukrainian Piedmont (in reference to the region from which Italy's liberation and unification began).
After 1867, some Ukrainian thinkers in eastern Ukraine fled to Galicia after being forbidden to create the Ukrainian language in books, everyday life, theatres, and churches by the Valuev Circular and then by the Ems Decree.
The Habsburg Empire became a place where Ukrainian politics could be practised, whereas the Russian Empire was a place where neither Ukrainian politics nor de facto Ukrainian culture could be realised.
For example, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, a Ukrainian historian who studied in the Russian Empire before relocating to Galicia, was allowed to teach his complete history of Ukraine from the Middle Ages in Lviv.
Lviv became the main centre of Ukrainian political life for the second time in the 1920s and 1930s when the USSR's totalitarian system suppressed people's independent sentiments.
Having fallen under Bolshevik rule only in 1939 (and then again in 1944), Lviv was less affected by the system.
It remained one of the leading Ukrainian cities in Ukraine even during the KGB (a body of state power in the USSR that supervised the population and persecuted politically unfit members of society) repressions, where the national liberation struggle persisted despite all russification efforts.
Unfortunately, Galicia's lack of political potential prevented it from liberating and uniting Ukraine.
The defeat of the ZUNR (the Western Ukrainian People's Republic that existed after the First World War during the collapse of Austria-Hungary) in 1919, as well as the Soviet annexation of Galicia by Stalin in 1939, were intended to put an end to the struggle.
The underground's work in the 1940s and 1950s was continued by dissidents in the 1960s and 1970s, with Lviv emerging as one of the most important centres of the dissident movement.
Despite atheist propaganda, the banned Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Galicia continued to operate underground.
CHERNIVTSI
Chernivtsi is a multinational city whose residents include Ukrainians, Romanians, Jews, Poles, Armenians, Hungarians, Slovaks, and Germans.
After the Russo-Turkish war, in 1774 Bukovyna (at that time it was part of the present-day Chernivtsi region of Ukraine) became part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Chernivtsi became the eastern outpost of German-language culture with a German-language university, theatre and literature.
Paul Celan, a native of Chernivtsi, rose to prominence in both the city and postwar German lyrics.
In 1941, Chernivtsi was occupied by German-Romanian troops, and the poet's family was forced to move to the Jewish ghetto.
From 1942 to 1944, Celan was imprisoned in a Romanian labour camp, where he worked hard on the construction of a highway. His parents died in a concentration camp near the end of 1942.
In his famous Fugue of Death, Paul Celan emphasises the destruction of "the very corpses," which had no equivalent in the places of deportation of Bukovinian Jews—the Romanian camps on the Dniester and the German "labour camps" across the Buh.
Celan characterised Chernivtsi as the most important pivot around which his poetic studies of topos revolve. Another Chernivtsi native, Rosa Ausländer, testified about the city's spirit on the eve of WWII. Her poem 'Chernivtsi before the Second World War' reads:
‘A peaceful city on the hills
surrounded by beech forests
Four languages
get along together
dove the air
How happily it breathed
before the bombs fell.’
Also, Olha Kobylanska is one of the most prominent figures in Ukraine's feminist literature, a writer whose native language was German but who chose Ukrainian as the language of her writings.
