Echoes of Defiance in National Anthems

The opening lines of Ukraine’s national anthem, “Ukraine has not yet perished,” strike a somber yet resilient tone. This sentiment is mirrored in Poland’s anthem, which begins with the nearly identical phrase, “Poland has not yet perished.” Written in 1797, the Polish anthem predates Ukraine’s 1862 version, suggesting a cultural influence between the two nations. But where did this shared pessimism originate? For both Poles and Ukrainians, the specter of national extinction emerged from their 18th-century traumas: the partitions of Poland and the destruction of the Cossack Hetmanate.

Unlike triumphant anthems celebrating victory, these songs reflect a defiant survival instinct. The Polish anthem began as a military march for Napoleon’s Polish Legions in Italy, originally titled “Dąbrowski’s Mazurka” after General Jan Henryk Dąbrowski. Many legionaries, including Dąbrowski himself, had fought in the Kościuszko Uprising against foreign occupiers. Its lyrics—”So long as we still live”—tied national survival to the people’s will, offering hope not just to Poles but to stateless nations across Europe.

The Shadow of Partition and Erasure

The late 18th century brought existential crises for both nations. Poland vanished from maps after being carved up by Russia, Prussia, and Austria in three partitions (1772–1795). Meanwhile, Catherine the Great dismantled the Cossack Hetmanate in 1764–1782, erasing Ukraine’s autonomous governance. These events birthed a new nationalist ideology: the nation as a democratic community of citizens, not just territory ruled by elites.

Napoleon’s campaigns (1803–1815) unexpectedly fueled these ideas. His creation of the Duchy of Warsaw (1807) on Prussian-annexed Polish lands thrilled Polish patriots, including poet Adam Mickiewicz, who celebrated French troops “liberating” Belarus in his epic Pan Tadeusz. Though Napoleon’s defeat crushed these hopes, the 1815 Congress of Vienna established a semi-autonomous “Congress Poland” under Russian rule—a fragile compromise that satisfied no one.

Cultural Revival and the Birth of Modern Identities

As political independence faltered, culture became the battleground for national survival. In Ukraine, writer Ivan Kotliarevsky pioneered vernacular literature with his 1798 travesty Eneida, recasting Virgil’s Aeneid with Cossack heroes speaking Ukrainian. This was no mere parody; it asserted Ukrainian as a literary language. By 1818, Oleksii Pavlovsky published the first Ukrainian grammar, while Mykola Tsertelev compiled folk songs—key steps in standardizing the language.

Meanwhile, the History of the Rus’, an anonymous early 19th-century text, mythologized Cossack history as a struggle against Poles, Jews, and Russians. Romanticists like Taras Shevchenko and Nikolai Gogol drew inspiration from its tales, weaving a narrative of Ukrainian distinctiveness. In Kharkiv, newly founded universities became hubs for studying folklore and history, with journals like Ukrainian Herald promoting local identity—albeit in Russian due to imperial censorship.

Rebellion and Repression: The 1830s Turning Point

The November Uprising (1830–31) marked a watershed. Polish officers rebelled against Russian rule, sparking revolts across modern Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Imperial retribution was swift: Vilnius University closed (1832), deemed a nationalist hotbed, while Kyiv gained a new Russian-language university (1834) to counter Polish influence.

Russia’s response fused cultural Russification with religious coercion. The 1839 “reunification” forcibly converted 1.6 million Ukrainian and Belarusian Uniates to Orthodoxy, erasing a key marker of non-Russian identity. Education minister Sergei Uvarov’s triad—”Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality”—defined loyalty to empire and Russian ethnicity as inseparable.

The Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius: A Ukrainian Awakening

In 1847, a secret society emerged in Kyiv advocating Slavic federalism and Ukrainian autonomy. Led by historian Mykola Kostomarov and poet Taras Shevchenko, the Brotherhood saw Ukraine’s Cossack past as a model for democratic equality. Shevchenko’s poetry, like his seminal Kobzar (1840), blended folk motifs with searing critiques of serfdom and tsarism:

“Why do Czechs, Serbs publish books,
While Ukraine stays mute?
Let Russians write as Russians do—
We’ll write in our own tongue!”

Their vision was crushed within a year. Shevchenko endured a decade of military exile; others faced prison. Yet their ideas outlasted imperial persecution, laying groundwork for Ukraine’s 20th-century independence movements.

Legacy: From Anthems to Nationhood

Today, Kyiv’s Shevchenko Monument replaces a statue of Tsar Nicholas I—a symbolic reversal of imperial domination. Both Poland and Ukraine transformed their anthems’ mournful defiance into reality: Poland regained independence in 1918; Ukraine followed in 1991 after Soviet collapse.

These anthems endure not as relics of despair, but as proof that nations can outlast empires. As Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity showed, the spirit of “has not yet perished” still fuels resistance. In Warsaw and Kyiv alike, these songs remind the world that some identities cannot be partitioned, banned, or erased.