Conclusion
Despite their large numbers spanning the borderlands of two major empires, the Ukrainian-speaking population of East Central Europe on the eve of the twentieth century represented an ethnographic mass, not a single national community.
According to the Austrian historian Andreas Kappeler, this group had three serious political, social, and cultural handi- caps.99 First of all, this large body of people did not possess an upper class representing their own group. Inasmuch as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth destroyed the Cossack elite and the Russian Empire coopted it, the Ukrainian-speaking population (with the exception of those on the Left Bank) had an “incomplete” social structure.100 Although most of the ambitious Ukrainian speakers joined the Russian world, they did not necessarily become Russians. Some “retained a double loyalty, a Little Russian as well as a Russian identity,” which could shift in emphasis depending on the social or political situation.101 Some of these Left Bank nobles preserved the autonomist traditions of the Hetmanate, celebrated a Little Russian regional patriotism, and provided most of the Ukrainian national movement’s activists and sponsors. But they never approximated the unity (much less the power) of the Polish nobility within the empire.Second, the Ukrainian speakers in both empires formed “an ethnic unity, but not an independent political unit.”102 At the end of the nineteenth century, Ukrainian speakers were politically divided, living in three different administrative jurisdictions: the “Little Russians” in the Russian Empire, the “Ruthenians” in Austria, and the “Rusyns” in Hungary. The “Ukrainian homeland” also served as the homeland for many other groups.
Third, this large mass of Ukrainian speakers did not possess a standardized language common in both empires.
According to George Y. Shevelov, a prominent linguist, a certain norm of usage existed, but “it was not codified, nor even exhaustively described, and there was no authority to prescribe it.”103 Despite regional dialectical differences, the leaders of the two Ukrainian national movements in Austria and Russia agreed that “all Ukrainians should have the same standard literary language and that that standard should be based on the Central Ukrainian (Kiev-Poltava region) dialects upon which the language of the most influential classical writers, Taras Shevchenko and Marko Vovchok (1834-1907), was built.”104 This goal was easier proclaimed than implemented.According to the Russian imperial census of 1897, 81 per cent of Ukrainian speakers over the age of ten could not read or write, which constituted the second-highest illiteracy rate among the peoples of the western Russian Empire (only the Moldovans were more illiterate).105 The situation was only slightly better in Austria-Hungary’s Ukrainian-speaking territories. In 1900, 74 per cent of the adult population of Galicia, Bukovina, and Transcarpathia could not read or write.106 This illiteracy undermined the diffusion of the Ukrainian idea, as did the 1863 and 1876 tsarist bans on the public use of the Ukrainian language. In an age without electronic mass media, Ukrainian activists could not spread their message very effectively without a literate population and without Ukrainian-language publications. They, moreover, had a difficult message to propagate.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Ukrainophiles in Austria- Hungary sought to persuade Ukrainian-speaking peasants that they formed part of a larger Ukrainian world, not a local isolated identity (the Old Ruthenian movement) or a branch of the Russian people (the Russophile movement). Despite the social and economic handicaps they encountered, especially in Transcarpathia (a small geographically isolated area), the Ukrainophiles in the Austro-Hungarian Empire possessed an easier challenge than did their compatriots in Russia.
Ukrainian activists in the Habsburg Empire presented a vision of a “larger Ukraine” to their compatriots. But those in the Romanov Empire manifested a “smaller Ukraine.”
In contrast to the Greek-Catholic Ukrainians in Galicia, who clearly perceived their differences with the Roman Catholic Poles, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainian-speaking peasants in the Russian Empire saw themselves as part of the overall Orthodox religious majority within their imperial domain. Ukrainophile agitators in the Russian Empire possessed the unenviable task of convincing Ukrainian-speaking peasants that they “belonged” to a different, but smaller world (the Ukrainian one) rather than to the larger peasant, Orthodox or Russian worlds. They had to persuade their intended brethren that their homeland encompassed only the nine Ukrainian-speaking provinces (not the entire Russian Empire) and the Austrian Ukrainian-speaking areas of Bukovina, Transcarpathia, and Galicia. In an environment of poverty, illiteracy, and political powerlessness, it proved difficult, but not impossible, to attract the masses to this new vision of their homeland.