CHAPTER EIGHTEEN THE FIRST WORLD WAR
ON August ι, 1914, Germany declared war upon Rus- ^sia^aι⅛d-4he First World War was on. The tensions and controversies that had been growing in bitterness beneath the surface all through the nineteenth century now exploded with unparalleled force.
The future was to be anybody’s guess, for the increasing magnitude of the struggle s∞n overflowed the bounds that had been set for it in the thoughts of the leaders of the various countries, and the most fantastic dreamer could not have imagined the strange changes that were to take place in an area that seemed to the outside world fixed and determined for centuries.In such a turmoil the Ukrainian problem was involved from almost the first day of the struggle. In Austria, without any delay, the government arrested and interned all the Jeaders of the Ukrainians who had been in any way sympathetic to Russia. Their institutions were closed, and their publications stopped, for Austria-Hungary had no intention of allowing them to be the focus of a movement on behalf of the enemy.
At the same time, in Russian Ukraine, the Russian government for its part at once suppressed all Ukrainian ac-~ tivity. The newspapers that had been published ifi Kiev and elsewhere with governmental permission were closed and the patriotic enthusiasm played into the hands of the Russian nationalists, who had long been displeased at the Ukrainian development. From 1914 until the Revolution there was steadily increasing agitation to eliminate everything Ukrainian from the Russian Empire, and leaders of all parties vied with one another in discovering new methods of upsetting and preventing Ukrainian work. The ostensible excuse was that the Ukrainians were really Russians and that it was German influence and money that was developing the Ukrainian culture, language and national consciousness.
It would take t∞ long to recite all the devices that were invoked. Authors desiring to publish in Ukrainian were ordered to give three copies of their manuscripts to the censors in advance of publication. Then these were examined and held up, changes were made, and the publication was prevented. The leaders of the Ukrainians were arrested and moved further into the country so that they could have no possibility of working and of corresponding with the enemy. Requirements were made that all Ukrainian articles should be published only in the Russian orthography. Ukrainian work in Eastern Ukraine was brought to as complete a halt as the Tsarist government could accomplish.At the same time the Russian armies invaded Eastern Galicia and on September 3, 1914, within a month after the beginning of the war, they occupied the city of Lviv. It was now the turn of the pro-Russian faction. The Russian Governor General of Galicia, Count A. G. Bobrinskγx. intended to wipe out the entire Ukrainian movement and willingly listened to the denunciations of the Ukrainians offered by the pro-Russian party. Ukrainian libraries and reading rooms were closed, Ukrainian co-operatives and other institutions were brought" to an end, and everything was done to prove to the people that they were Russians and nothing else. Even Prof. Hrushevsky, who was seized at his summer home in the Carpathians, was sent to Nizhni Novgorod on the Volga under arrest, although the Russian Academy of Sciences later arranged to have him moved to Moscow where he could work in the libraries. He was followed into arrest and exile by thousands of the intellectual leaders of Galicia.
was not only the secular institutions that were affected. The Russians decided to wipe out the Uniat Church. Many of the priests had fled before the approach of the Russian armies. Those who remained were forced to return to Orthodoxy, exactly as Russia had done in all of the territory which she had taken from Poland during the last century and a half.
As a result, relations between the peasantry and the Russians became even worse than between the Russians and the Poles in the western part of Galicia. Archbishop Sheptitskyr the head of the Uniat Church, was arrested and sent into Russia and was not allowed to return to his home for years.Finally the Tsar himself visited Lviv and other centres in the spring of 1915, and in well chosen words declared that Galicia was now an inherent part of Russia and would remain so. The Russians spread over the entire province up to Krakow. They occupied much of Carpatho-Ukraine and threatened to go through the passes of the mountains into the plains of Hungary.
This was the high watermark of the Russian advance into Austria-Hungary. At the end of April, 1915, the German armies of General Mackensen broke the Russian line on the Dunajec River and compelled a general retreat. This meant more misery for the inhabitants of Western Ukraine. Naturally the pro-Russian Ukrainians hurried to get out of the province. In addition to them, the Russian armies gathered up as much of the population as they could and started them, willingly or unwillingly, with their families and their cattle on a long march into Russia to a place of safety. Thousands of displaced Ukrainians were thus gathered in prisons and concentration camps in and around Kiev and countless thousands were moved by train to Kazan, to Perm and on into Siberia. -Thp ðè MjppH migration was the Iarg- est of its kind in Ukrainian history,"SVeri *e505B⅛ding the de^
THE FIRST WORLD WAR
population of the country during the Ruin of the seventeenth century.
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