CHAPTER SIXTEEN DEVELOPMENTS IN WESTERN UKRAINE

AFTER the failure of the movement of 1848, there en­sued a period of reaction and of torpor in Galicia and the other Ukrainian lands in the Hapsburg Empire. For a brief moment it had seemed as if there might be a general solution of the various questions involved but out­side of the formal liberation of the serfs nothing had been accomplished.

At the same time there came a period of crisis through­out the Empire. With Russian help the revolt of Hungary had been suppressed, and for a decade the Emperor Francis Joseph II was able to rule as an absolute monarch and defy the wishes of all portions of the Empire. Yet even this could not last, for at the end of that decade the Austrian armies were badly defeated by the Italians at the battle of Solferino and worse was to come with the battle of Sadowa in 1867, when the armies were overwhelmed by the Prussians. The outcome of these defeats was the reorganization of Austria­. Hungary as the^Dual Monarchy, which it remained until 1918, and the granting to the Poles of the control of Galicia.

These developments were not without significance for the fate of the Ukrainians, whether they lived in Galicia, in Bukovina or in Carpatho-Ukraine. The language question was still being bitterly debated but at this moment there were two leading parties.

The conservatives, and they included a large part of the -Uniat clergy and the richer and more prosperous sections of the laity/held out strongly for the old Church Slavonic. They still maintained the theory that there was almost something sacred in the maintenance of the traditional Ian-

THE STORY OF THE UKRAINE guage and they felt vaguely that there was something he­retical and impious about the attempts to read and write in the language of the ordinary peasants.

On the other hand the influence of those who desired to approximate the language to Russian increased.

For a while it even seemed that the conservatives would make common cause with them. They gradually lost hope in Austria. They realized that the defeats of the Austrian army were jeopardizing the security of the Empire, and the Austrian recognition of the Polish interests in Galicia cut them to the quick. Under such circumstances they ideal­ized the Empire of Nicholas I and paid little attention to the results of the Crimean War. They saw only that for a moment the Russian army had offered a brighter prospect to the Ukrainians of Eastern Ukraine. They also completely ignored the fact that even under the conditions prevailing in Galicia they were still able to have certain political rights which were completely denied in Eastern Ukraine.

On the other hand, the younger generation passed under the influence of Shevchenko. They read the writings of Marko Vovchok and they realized the weaknesses of Im­perial Russia. They had learned something of western ideals from study in Vienna and elsewhere and they felt more strongly the advantages of the more democratic tend­

DEVELOPMENTS IN WESTERN UKRAINE encies which they learned from the West and from the modern literature of Eastern Ukraine.

Thus the stage was set for a bitter struggle in Western Ukraine as a whole and it lasted for a couple of decades before there came the definite triumph of those forces which sought to develop the national tradition.

It soon became evident, however, that in its simplest and baldest form this position too was impossible. The differ­ences between them and their neighbors proved to be greater than those between them and the Eastern Ukraine and it was not long before this idea went the way of so many other opinions in Ukrainian history.

The entire controversy was based upon a curious miscon­ception. The Moscophiles knew little more of Russia than that the Russian armies had successfully invaded Hungary in 1849. They knew very little about the difficulties of the Ukrainians resident in Russia and they knew little more about the development of life in Eastern Ukraine. At the very moment when they were dreaming of how much bet­- ter off the Ukrainians were in Russia, the Ukrainians of the east were looking hopefully to Galicia for a freedom which they did not have at home.

It was at this moment that the first copies of the Osnova began to arrive in Lviv and the other cities. Then came in quick succession the news that this journal had ceased to exist and that a ban had been imposed on all Ukrainian writings in Russia. This startling news was followed by the appearance in Lviv of Kulish and of other Ukrainian au-

thors who brought eye-witness accounts of the forcible sup­pression of Ukrainian culture in the land where the modern revival had started.

The arrival of these refugees from their envied home­land started to turn the scale in the larger part of Galicia. It made it clear to the younger and more alert people that they had been mistaken and that much of the boasted well­being of the Ukrainians of Russia was only a mirage.

For the next decades as we have seen, the bulk of Ukra­inian literature written in Eastern Ukraine was published in Lviv. The young men came to know the refugees and emigrants and slowly but surely the century-old barrier between the provinces began to break down. For the first time in centuries there came a real transfer of ideas be­tween Eastern and Western Ukraine.

This movement was greatly assisted by the work of Mykhaylo Drahomaniv, one of the most brilliant of the pub­licists, who had profited by the relaxation of censorship in Russia during the early seventies. As a professor of the University of Kiev, he came in contact with the various socialist parties of Russia and then in 1-876, after the re­newed ban on Ukrainian work, he emigrated to Switzer- Iand where he could work more freely. Later he became" a professor at the University of Sofia in Bulgaria, where he died in 1895. Drahomaniv continued the ideas of the So­ciety of Saints Cyril and Methodius in his belief that there should be developed a federal union of all the Slavs, but he differed from the earlier group in emphasizing the ne­cessity of adapting Slavonic life to the progressive European thought of the seventies and eighties and in emphasizing

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

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THE STORY OF THE UKRAINE inseparable or a fire would be kindled that would be dif­ficult to extinguish.

The prohibition of the publication of books in the Ukrainian language for forty years now bore very definite fruits. The Ukrainian leaders were not in a position to dis­tribute revolutionary material in their native language as well as were the Poles, the Baltic peoples and the groups of the Caucasus. The peasants (and they were the chief force in the disturbances in the country) were concerned about the land question and undoubtedly paid more attention to the economic situation than the national and cultural pro­blems.

On the other hand, in the various cities of Ukraine where there had been an influx of Great Russians, largely work­men, the appeals of the radical parties that also denied the existence of Ukraine, led the strikers in the various fac­tories to emphasize the demands that they made on the owners and on the government. Here again it was highly expedient to play down the feelings of any self-conscious Ukrainian groups and to label them as dreamers and as fan­tastic individuals who were romantically trying to recall a long vanished past.

It is significant in view of the frequent statements that only a handful of scholars and literary men were in favor of Ukrainian separate development that the new laws in­troduced by the government repealed all the prohibitions that had been made in 1863 and 1876. The censorship was lifted and without delay there began a flood of Ukrainian newspapers and journals in all the cities of Ukraine. Sev­eral were started in Kiev, in Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Pol­tava. In places where for over a century there had not been a word of Ukrainian spoken (according to the infor­mation of the government), now newspapers sprang up almost like magic to supply a need that was solemnly de­clared to be non-existent.

BETWEEN REVOLUTION AND WAR

BETWEEN REVOLUTION AND WAR between Kiev and Lviv would be tightened and that it might not be impossible for the two sections to work to­gether, in case there should be a conflagration in Europe which would involve the two Empires.

This could not fail to have an effect upon European politics and indirectly upon the future fate of the Ukra­inians and their position in world opinion. Russia as the self-appointed protector of all the Slavs could not fail to look with dissatisfaction at the loss of influence of her friends in Austria-Hungary. As the self-appointed model of Ortho­doxy, she could not but be displeased at the success of the Uniats and at their revival in Eastern Galicia. During the years before 1914, she made constant efforts to turn back the Greek Catholics to Orthodoxy, especially in Carpatho- Ukraine under Hungary. She exploited in every way pos­sible any unrest or discontent in the mountain valleys and hoped in the coming struggle to be able to profit by these newfound friends. At the same time her own position and her own attitude insisted upon thinking of all Ukra­inians as merely a form of Russians and she could not visu­alize any policy other than that of complete Russification.

On the other hand, Austria-Hungary and later Germany could not be blind to the potentialities of the Ukrainian movement. They had first used it as a tool against the dangers offered by Polish irredentism. Now as they saw it growing in Russia, they began to wonder if it might not be used also as a means of disintegrating that country also. Some of their leaders began to scheme how this could best be done and they were willing to make minor concessions in Eastern Galicia which might win over the loyalty of the Ukrainians and make them more willing to be loyal to the Dual Monarchy.

In this position there ensued a curious tug of war. With the two Empires still nominally at peace, each was doing its best to sponsor a movement that would redound to its

BETWEEN REVOLUTION AND WAR

ravaged by armies on both sides, the Ukrainians had little to do except to trust to the justice of their cause and hope that somehow and in some way they would attract the at­tention to their problem that it deserved. For years the neighboring peoples had been waiting for the day to come. They had made preparations, often more as an intangible dream than as stark reality but they could, in the crucial moment, put these preparations into action. They could rely upon distinguished sons to win them a hearing every­where. Rich emigrants could come to their assistance. The Ukrainians had nothing of this. Franko might look forward to the independence of his people with the downfall of the Empires, but even he could hardly think of the way to put his country’s cause before the world. Ukraine entered the First World War as the forgotten nation, but the century and a quarter since the new revival started had changed it from an inchoate mass of serfs, as it was at the time of the extinction of the old traditions, into a fairly well concen­trated group of people with a strong core and a strong self­consciousness that could not be ignored and that would not perish without striking a blow in its own behalf.