Between Empires: Ukraine in the Nineteenth Century

Fabian Baumann

The 19th century was a time of empires in the history of Eastern Europe; there was neither a Ukrainian state nor a territory defined as Ukrainian within a state.

Over the course of the 19th century, both empires underwent significant modernization, albeit in different ways. The Austrian half of the Habsburg Monarchy deveIoped into a reIativeIy democratic constitutionaI state that of­fered its multilingual and muIticonfessionaI population wide-ranging cultural autonomy. Starting in the 1860s, Vienna instituted an all-imperial parliament and regionaI assembIies. They were eIected on an ever-broadening franchise until universal male suffrage was introduced in 1906. Meanwhile, the Russian Empire remained a bureaucraticaIIy governed autocracy. OnIy after 1905 did it cautiously begin to introduce constitutional structures.

Like many East European regions, 19th-century Ukraine had a diverse pop­ulation in terms of language and religion. What was typical for Ukraine, es­pecially its western regions, was that linguistic and religious categories often corresponded to socio-economic status. This was especially applicable to the territory's three major groups: Orthodox speakers of Ukrainian, Catholic Pol­ish-speakers, and Yiddish-speaking Jews. Each of these categories had a ten­dency to belong to certain professions and occupy specific social positions. As the historian Andreas Kappeler noted, Ukrainian society was characterized by an “interethnic division of labor” - a clear socio-ethnic ordering of the popu­lation.

Orthodox speakers of Ukrainian dialects formed a majority in most regions of what is today Ukraine. Many of them were illiterate and spoke local dialects rather than modern standard Ukrainian. From a socio-economic perspective, most Ukrainian speakers were peasants working in agriculture. During the 19th century, many migrated to the cities and towns, where they found em­ployment as artisans or factory workers. In the process of urbanization and social mobility, they tended to assimilate by adopting the Russian or Polish lan­guage. Ukrainian dialects were thus spoken mostly in the countryside and in smaller towns by those with little or no formal education. A rare but important exception were rural priests, from whose ranks many of the earliest Ukrainian­speaking intellectuals emerged. There were also some Orthodox elites in the cities of Russian Ukraine, such as bureaucrats, soldiers, priests, academics, or medics.

Ukraine's Polish-speaking population mostly descended from the szlachta, the Polish nobility. Usually Catholics, Polish-speakers were concentrated in the west of Ukraine, where they formed an upper class living in cities or on country estates. The szlachta were very diverse in terms of wealth, ranging from impoverished, peasant-like nobles to magnates who owned thousands of serfs and influenced high politics in both Russia and Austria-Hungary. Some magnates even owned entire, largely Jewish, towns such as the shtetl of Berdy- chiv, which belonged to the Radziwill family. In Galicia, the Austrian state reached an agreement with these Polish elites in 1867, handing them control over the provincial administration. Subsequently, all Galician governors were Poles, and the crownland increasingly fell under Polish cultural dominance.

The Jewish population was mostly settled in large villages and small towns, called shtetlekh in Yiddish, and often occupied mediating positions between the nobles and the peasants. Jews worked as innkeepers, grain merchants, or stew­ards on rural estates. This economic role fueled antisemitic resentment among the Slavic Orthodox majority: if a peasant encountered state power, it was usu­ally embodied not by a bureaucrat or nobleman but by a Jewish steward col­lecting taxes or an innkeeper lending money with interest. This situation gave rise to the antisemitic stereotype of supposedly parasitic Jews oppressing the Christian peasants through usury and alcohol, a caricature later adopted by Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian nationalists alike.

Thus, Orthodox Ukrainian peasants formed a majority in the countryside, while towns and cities were Jewish, Polish, or imperial Russian enclaves. This socio-ethnic order was most pronounced in Western Ukraine. The southern provinces of so-called “New Russia” had a different demographic structure, having been conquered and colonized considerably later by the Russian Em­pire.

The ideological basis of the later Ukrainian nation state was established in the 19th century: the idea that the territory had a common culture, that its (East Slavic Orthodox) inhabitants formed their own nation, and that they ultimately had a right to self-determination. During the early 1800s, scholars began to collect popular songs and Cossack chronicles; writers used the Ukrainian language in ballads and stories, often for comical effect. These developments were in line with European Romanticism, as intellectuals across the continent grew interested in the lives of common people. However, they often viewed Ukrainian culture from an antiquarian perspective, as a relic that would eventually die out.

The politicization of Ukrainian national romanticism began in the 1840s, as intellectuals connected their interest in popular culture with a critique of social injustice and political oppression under Tsarism. Since most Ukrainian speakers were peasants, these intellectuals conceived of Ukrainians as a par­ticularly democratic or “plebeian” nation. The most prominent figure of this period was the writer Taras Shevchenko, today venerated as Ukraine's national poet.

The Russian authorities soon cracked down on Ukrainian high culture and demands for autonomy. Shevchenko and his peers were exiled from Ukraine in the late 1840s. Consequently, whenever these so-called “Ukrainophiles” sought to re-politicize their cultural circles, the imperial state would intervene. In 1863, a Circular issued by the Russian Interior Minister, PetrValuev, prohibited most publications in Ukrainian, infamously declaring that “[...] there was not, is not, and cannot be any special Little Russian language, and that their dialect, as used by uneducated folk, is the same Russian language, only corrupted by Polish influence.” In 1876, Tsar Alexander II signed the Ems Ukaz, tightening the earlier law and even prohibiting Ukrainian theater performances.

Imperial propagandists and Russian nationalists repeatedly sought to denigrate the Ukrainian literary language as artificial, claimed that the na­tional movement was in fact a Polish intrigue, and insinuated that its goal was to sow division among the Russian population. For them, Ukraine's peasants were Little Russians, a peculiar yet integral branch of the Russian nation that formed the ethnic core of the empire. They hoped to assimilate these Little Russians completely into imperial Russian culture as they became literate, creating a bulwark of a loyal Russian population on the Western border.

Besides Ukrainian and Russian nationalists, Polish nationalists also claimed at least Western Ukraine as part of their national territory. In 1830 to 1831 and 1863, Polish nobles staged uprisings against Russian rule. The Rus­sian state repressed these revolts with force, confiscated nobles' estates, and removed thousands of Polish administrators from their posts. Meanwhile, the Polish nobility was de facto able to govern Austrian Galicia thanks to Vienna's classic “Divide and rule” policy. This policy also meant that Vienna saw the Ukrainian movement as a welcome counterweight to the powerful Polish nobility and treated it relatively well. During the closing decades of the 19th century, the first Ukrainian political parties were formed in Galicia, includ­ing both social-democratic and national-liberal groups. Galicia's Ukrainian- language press flourished, schools were permitted to teach in Ukrainian, and the provincial capital of Lemberg introduced Ukrainian-language chairs at its university. By the outbreak of the First World War, the Ukrainian educational society Prosvita had over 36.000 members in Galicia and reached 200.000 people through its libraries and reading clubs.

Who were the people who gave rise to the Ukrainian national movement during the 19th century? A distinguishing feature was that most of them had received a good education at universities or religious seminaries. Just as im­portantly, most Ukrainian nationalists made a conscious decision to see them­selves as Ukrainians. A notable case in point is the biography of the Ukrainian historian Volodymyr Antonovych. Born Wlodzimierz Antonowicz in a village west of Kyiv in 1834, he was the son of an impoverished Polish gentry fam­ily. His autobiography describes his youth on a noble estate where his mother worked as a governess. YoungAntonovych became increasingly disgusted with the arrogance of the Polish nobility, who believed the peasants to be drunk and primitive good-for-nothings and did not see any need to educate them.

As a student, Antonovychs reading of French Enlightenment philosophy led him to identify the peasants as a democratic element within Ukraine's so­ciety. On several hikes across rural Ukraine, he stayed with local peasants and tried to learn about their lifestyle. In the late 1850s, he co-founded a secret school in Kiev to educate peasant children in a democratic and Ukrainian-na­tional spirit. Unsurprisingly, the Polish intelligentsia was not amused, insult­ing Antonovych as a khlopoman (peasant lover) and turncoat. In 1862, he pub­lished an article entitled “My Confession,” where he proudly embraced this ep­ithet, declaring that a conscientious Polish nobleman in Ukraine had the moral duty to “to love the people in whose midst he lived, to become imbued with its interests, to return to the nationality his ancestors once had abandoned, and, as far as possible, by unremitting labor and love to compensate the people for the evil done to it.”

Thus, Antonovych consciously chose the Ukrainian nationality for himself for political reasons and encouraged others to do the same. Feeling guilty before the exploited peasantry, he tried to repay his debt by working towards their socio-economic and national liberation. Antonovych almost experienced his self-Ukrainianization as a religious conversion, and indeed he did con­vert from Catholicism to Orthodoxy. Having grown up in Polish-speaking surroundings, he made the effort to learn Ukrainian as an adult (his fifth lan­guage after Polish, Latin, Russian, and French). Despite his subversive views, Antonovych became a history professor at Saint Vladimir Imperial University of Kiev, where he founded a social historical school that focused on the life of the common people. He wrote his works in Russian, since Ukrainian was restricted, and while he openly denounced the historical role of the Polish nobility, his criticism of the Russian state remained subtle and restrained.

Individuals like Antonovych had various options for national identifica­tion, each of which was linked to a political project and broader worldview. Antonovychs family background would have enabled him to be a Catholic Pole and a member of the Polish rural gentry, which would likely have gone along with the political project of Polish autonomy or even the re-establishment of an independent Polish state. His education at Russian universities enabled him to become a professor and he could easily have assimilated fully into Russian culture. This would have been a political decision for the imperial state, with the possibility of a successful career in the administration. Instead, Antonovych chose the third option of learning the language of the peasantry, working towards the advancement of Ukrainian high culture, and becoming a member of a peasant nation. His decision to identify as Ukrainian resulted from his political loyalty to the project of nationally based Ukrainian socialism. Like Antonovych, many 19th-century Ukrainian nationalists were not native speakers of Ukrainian. Among them were Russian- and Polish-speaking no­bles as well as Jewish intellectuals and even individuals with French or Swiss ancestors. The Ukrainophiles were not connected by their ethnicity or native tongue but by their political dedication to the peasants' cultural and societal improvement.

For much of the 19th century, Ukrainian nationalism remained the project of a small intellectual elite. In the Habsburg Monarchy, various clubs and eco­nomic co-operations took advantage of the relatively liberal legal regime to turn it into a true mass movement by the early 20th century. Consequently, the earliest demands for an independent Ukrainian state were voiced in Gali­cia around the turn of the century. Meanwhile, in Russia, the number of self­declared national Ukrainians slowly rose among the educated population, es­pecially university students and teachers, but a mixture of repression and pop­ular indifference delayed the formation of mass organizations. Only during the 1917 revolutions would Ukrainian nationalism become a truly relevant politi­cal force in Kiev, as the Ukrainian movement profited from the post-imperial power vacuum and briefly managed to establish a nation-state. However, as the subsequent civil war showed, the idea ofUkrainian nationhood was not yet sufficiently anchored in the population to guarantee Ukraine's independence in the face of several competing political forces. A combination of state poli­cies, bottom-up mobilization, and extreme violence would change this over the course of the twentieth century, ultimately leading towards the establishment of a more sustainable independent Ukrainian state in 1991.

Selected Bibliography

Bilenky, Serhiy (ed.) Fashioning Modern Ukraine: Selected Writings of Mykola Kos­tomarov, VolodymyrAntonovych and Mykhailo Drahomanov (Toronto: Canadian Institute ofUkrainian Studies Press, 2013).

Bilenky, Serhiy. Romantic Nationalism in Eastern Europe: Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian Political Imaginations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

Hillis, Faith. Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Na­tion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).

Kappeler, Andreas. Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine. 7th ed. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2022).

Kohut, Zenon E. Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy: Imperial Absorp­tion ofthe Hetmanate1760s-1830s (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUkrainian Re­search Institute, 1988).

Magocsi, Paul R. A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples. 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010).

Miller, Alexei. The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2003).

Remy, Johannes. Brothers or Enemies: The Ukrainian National Movementand Russia, from the 1840s to the 1870s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).