ABSTRACT
This chapter supports the idea that Ukraine can serve as a perfect model for studying the concept of borderland in terms of a particular historical, cultural and geographic meso-region and confirms the validity of this approach. In many ways, Ukraine's space and its perceptions need be explained by the very nature of the huge Eurasian landmass stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The Ukrainian lands always played the role of a periphery in the polyethnic states whose centres of influence were located beyond Ukrainian territory: Vilnius, Warsaw, Istanbul, Moscow, St Petersburg, Vienna and Berlin. The successive symbolic and political configurations of what came to be the present-day Ukrainian national space each added additional layers, resulting in an ever more complex cultural heterogeneity. The Soviet era has not only consolidated the boundaries of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic founded in 1922 but also preserved Ukraine's earlier multifaceted historical and cultural legacy.
