This is a pre-1900 POD, but it has been argued that there might be no indepedent Ukraine today if the Russians had taken eastern Galicia in the nineteenth century. To quote (with a few changes) an old soc.history.what-if post of mine:
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I have recently been reading Andrew Wilson's *The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation* (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2000). In chapter 7 he has an interesting discussion of what would have happened to the idea of a Ukrainian nation if Russia had seized Galicia (or at least predominantly Ukrainian eastern Galicia) either in 1772, when Austria annexed the region after the first partition of Poland, or in 1813-15, when Alexander I attempted to secure it before and during the Congress of Vienna. Solzhenitsyn in particular has criticized Alexander I for failing to press home Russia's advantage after the defeat of Napoleon in 1812:
"Was [Alexander] seeking territorial rewards for Russia after such a bloody and victorious war? No, he did not put forward any preconditions whatever for aiding Austria and Prussia in 1813. The single wise move he could have made was to *return* [my emphasis--DT] Galicia to Russia, thus uniting the Eastern Slavs (and from what disastrous problems would he have rid our future history!) Austria was not particularly bent on retaining Galicia at the time, seeking rather to regain Silesia, annex Belgrade and Moldo- Wallachia--thus stretching herself between the Black and Adriatic Seas. But Alexander did not make use of this opportunity, although it was then easily within his grasp." *The Russian Question at the End of the 20th Century* (1995)
According to Solzhenitsyn, Alexander only compounded the mistake by seeking instead the "rebellious nest" of Poland (i.e., Congress Poland), "not seeing if only through Austria's example, how harmful it is for the dominant nation in a state to create a multiethnic empire." In other words, to Solzhenitsyn, as to many other Russians, "returning" Ukrainians to Russia (unlike annexing Congress Poland) would *not* have made Russia more multiethnic. Essentially, this view sees Russia as the successor to Kievan Rus', and the Ukrainians and Belarusians as Russians who had been artificially cut off from their fellow Russians by the Mongolian invasions and subsequent Lithuanian/Polish conquest. According to this point of view, it is unfortunate that the Ruthenes of Galicia and Bukovina were left outside the Russian sphere when all the other East Slavs (such as the Dnieper Ukrainians and the Belarusians) had been "reunited" with their Russian brethren in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wilson thinks it conceivable that if eastern Galicia had been absorbed into Russia in 1772 or 1815, "modern Ukraine might then have become more like modern Belarus, with a much weaker sense of national identity." (p. xii)
It is certainly true that Ukrainian nationalism had far greater opportunity to develop in Galicia and Bukovina than in "Dnieper Ukraine." This is not due simply to Austria (eventually) having much greater freedom than Russia; Vienna actually had an interest in utilizing Ukrainian nationalism as a counterbalance to Polish nationalism in Galicia, and also to discourage the Russophile orientation among the East Slavs of Galicia (in 1882 there was a major treason trial of Russophile leaders). When Ukrainian nationalists were persecuted in Kiev, they could find refuge in Lemberg/Lwow/Lviv; when printing in the Ukrainian language was banned in Russia, Ukrainian-language books were smuggled in from Galicia. Ukrainian nationalists in Galicia viewed Galicia as the "Piedmont" of a future free and united Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Russophile orientation was in decline; in the 1907 elections to the Vienna parliament the Russophiles won only five seats to 22 for the Ukrainophiles.
To be sure, in 1914-15, when Russia did occupy most of Galicia and Bukovina, it viewed it as a golden opportunity to Russify the area. But by then it was too late. If Tsarist Russia had won the war and annexed Galicia, by that time it would indeed have been a "poisoned gift"--the higher Ukrainian consciousness of the area would exercise a pernicious (from the viewpoint of Russia's leaders) influence on Dnieper Ukraine--just as it did after 1945. (As Durnovo said in his famous memorandum warning Nicholas II against a war with Germany: "It is obviously disadvantageous for us to annex, in the interests of national sentimentalism, a territory [Galicia] that has lost every vital connection with our fatherland. For, together with a negligible handful of Galicians, Russian in spirit, how many Poles, Jews, and Ukrainized Uniates we would receive! The so-called Ukrainian, or Mazeppist, movement is not a menace to us at present, but we should not enable it to expand by increasing the number of turbulent Ukrainian elements, for in this movement undoubtedly lies the seed of an extremely dangerous Little Russian separatism which, under favorable conditions, may assume quite unexpected proportions.")
As Wilson says, all this does not mean that one has to accept Solzhenitsyn's views about avoiding Russia's "disastrous problems" with Ukraine if only Galicia had been annexed in 1815. This assumes that there were no significant differences to eradicate in 1815, whereas in fact there were already plenty. "Nevertheless, with nearly all significant Ukrainian territory under Russian control, Ukraine might have been in the same situation as Belarus and any nineteenth-century Ukrainian national 'revival' might have looked more like its much weaker north-western counterpart. The Greek Catholic Church would have been almost completely, rather than only partially, abolished in 1839, apart from some tiny remnants (assuming its other outpost in Transcarpathia was also under Russian control). On the other hand, in the Ukrainian territories already under the Tsars...there was already a much stronger national tradition than in Belarus. The nineteenth-century Ukrainian national movement began in Kharkiv. It would have had to stay there rather than transfer to Galicia, so it would have developed differently. But it would still have existed." (p. 121) (BTW, the Russian Imperial government actually encouraged the Ukrainian cultural revival in the 1830's. Interest in "Little Russian" culture was encouraged in order to de-Polonize right-bank Ukrainians who had lived so long under Polish rule. The point in teaching them that they were "Little Russians" was not to emphasize their differences from the "Great Russians" but their differences from the Poles.)
It has btw even been argued that Russia might have secured Galicia during the diplomatic maneuverings at the Congress of Berlin in 1876. I don't know how realistic that was, but 1772 or 1813-15 were real possibilities: Russian armies occupied Lviv (or however you want to spell it...) in 1769- 72 and part of Ternopil was temporarily annexed between 1809 and 1815.
Anyway I am skeptical whether all this would have ultimately prevented Ukrainian independence--after all, even Belarus which was totally under Russian control in the ninetenth century, and where national consciousness was much lower than in Ukraine, did after all ultimately become indpendent--though of course that was due largely to the national policy of the USSR, and with all the butterflies a Russian Galicia might create, I am not sure there will even be a USSR...
(I do think it would be fairly easy to prevent an independent Belarus with a twentieth century POD: The Belarusians in 1917 had much less national consciousness than the Ukrainians, and whether they were in fact a nation was disputed among the Bolsheviks. The creation of a Belorussian SSR was therefore by no means inevitable, and Stalin was the decisive voice in creating it against the objections of some members of the Bolshevik party's Northwestern Committee. See my post at
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/russian-belarus.410538/#post-14268706 where I note "It may be inconsistent to say that Ukrainian is a language and the Ukrainians a nation whereas Belorussian isn't a language and the Belorussians aren't a nation, but the Bolsheviks were capable of worse inconsistencies..." Had Belarus simply been incroporated into the RSFSR, I doubt it would ever have become independent.)
