Conservatism
The first expression of modern Ukrainian conservative thought was Istoriia Rusov (the Rusy being the Ukrainian people, as heirs of old Kievan Rus’), an anonymous historical-political treatise written about 1800.
In the form of a historical narrative, embellished with fictional features, this work formulated a concept of Ukrainian “historical legitimism’’: by the Treaty of Pereiaslav (1654), the Ukrainian nation voluntarily accepted the suzerainty of the Russian tsar under a guarantee of full self-government; the agreement was violated many times by Russia, but this did not affect Ukraine’s imprescriptible claim to the restoration of its constitutional rights, which the author equates with the traditional liberties and privileges of the Cossack class. The Istoriia Rusov, widely circulated in manuscript form, enjoyed great popularity and exercised a lasting influence on Ukrainian historical and political thinking. This influence can be traced in the programmatic documents of the Cyrillo- Methodian Society and in the writings of Shevchenko. The work was representative of the way of thinking of a large part of the nobility in Left-Bank Ukraine, descendants of the former Cossack officer class. Dreams about the restoration of an autonomous Cossack state lingered on in those circles until approximately the middle of the century.During the second half of the nineteenth century, Ukrainian landowners inclined toward conservatism found an outlet in the institutions of zemstvo local self-government; they also financially supported Ukrainian cultural activities and kept in touch with the moderate elements of the hromady movement. However, the conservative forces were unable to oppose the dominant democratic-populist trend with any consistent political program of their own. Historical legitimism and the concept of “state rights,” based on the Treaty of Pereiaslav, had become obsolete, and no new idea was found to take their place.
This failure can, perhaps, be explained by the Ukrainian nobility’s dynastic loyalty to the Russian throne; such allegiance did not preclude Ukrainian territorial patriotism, but it deprived the nobility’s political thinking of a focal point located within their own nation.An exception to the intellectual sterility of conservatism in that era was Panteleimon Kulish (1819-97), a brilliant and versatile writer. A former Cyrillo-Methodian, Kulish gradually adopted a rightist position from which he criticized the comrades of his youth, Shevchenko and Kostomarov. Kulish was sensitive to the weak spots of populist ideology: the naive adoration of the peasant, the condoning of destructive and retrograde popular revolts, and the prejudice against the elitist elements that are necessary for the cultural and political life of a civilized community. However, he was unable to provide a constructive alternative to populism, and his idiosyncratic and bitter polemics only caused his isolation.
An interesting attempt to revive the historical-juridical program of the Istoriia Rusov was advanced, at the turn of the century, by Mykola Mikhnovsky (1873-1924), a lawyer from Kharkiv. In his pamphlet, Samostiina Ukraina (Independent Ukraine, 1900), he called on his compatriots to resume the struggle for the restoration of the “Pereiaslav Constitution.” His appeal, however, met with only a very limited response because of the populist preference for natural rights based on ethnic nationalism over historical rights and legalistic arguments.
In Galicia, where the Greek Catholic Church was the main Ukrainian national institution, conservatism was stronger than in east-central Ukraine. The Greek Catholic clergy formed a semi-hereditary class, which in its way of life resembled a lesser gentry. The Galician Ukrainians made their political debut during the 1848-9 Revolution. Their leadership was at that time predominantly clerical, and their policy was pro-Habsburg and socially moderate.
The so-called Old Ruthenians or Russophiles were an expression of the conservative trend in the second half of the century. The rise of populism and modern Ukrainian nationalism gradually reduced the Old Ruthenian faction to insignificance. But the more moderate elements among the narodovtsi were also tinged with conservatism. The same can be said of their successors, the National Democrats, Galicia’s leading Ukrainian party, organized in the 1890s. Galician conservatism was not so much a deliberate philosophy as a mental attitude which could go hand-in-hand with democratic principles. This attitude was revealed in a dedication to legal, parliamentary methods of political struggle, a down-to-earth sobriety, and an instinctive respect for established authority. The Galician conservative mentality manifested itself during the years of Revolution and struggle for national independence. The “Western Provinces of the Ukrainian People’s Republic” of 1918-19 officially adhered to the same democratic-populist principles as the Ukrainian People’s Republic on the Dnieper, but in practice the government of Western Ukraine pursued a moderate policy, avoided extremist social experiments, and showed a high regard for law and order.The culmination of the conservative trend in east-central Ukraine was the regime of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky in 1918. The Hetmanate undoubtedly owed its existence to the German occupation, but it also enjoyed the support of the conservative and moderate strata of Ukrainian society, which were dissatisfied with the radicalism of the Central Rada. One has to take into account that after the fall of the Russian monarchy conservative elements in Ukraine had become free from the bond of allegiance to the Romanov dynasty and were now able to direct their loyalty to a Ukrainian state which claimed to be a revival of the traditional Cossack body politic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Upon the withdrawal of the German army, the Hetmanate was easily overwhelmed by a new surge of democratic-populist forces, but conservatism had at least asserted its presence in the spectrum of Ukrainian political trends.
One of the surprises of recent Ukrainian history is the sudden flowering of conservative thought during the inter-war period. This movement of ideas took place in the western Ukrainian lands outside the USSR and in the Ukrainian diaspora of Western Europe and North America. The development was largely due to the impact of Viacheslav Lypynsky (1882-1931), who belonged to the Polish nobility of the Right Bank and early in life had identified himself with the Ukrainian national cause. In his historical writings, some of which were published before the war, Lypynsky advanced a startlingly new interpretation of Ukrainian history. Populist historians from Kostomarov to Hrushevsky had viewed the great anti-Polish revolt of the mid-seventeenth century, headed by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, as an elemental rising of the masses. Lypynsky, on the other hand, stressed the contribution of the upper classes, the Ruthenian gentry of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth who provided the Cossacks with an educated and politically sophisticated leadership, and he interpreted the Khmelnytsky revolution as a process whose goal was the creation of a Ukrainian Cossack state. The experiences of the 1917 Revolution and the failure of Ukrainian independence turned Lypynsky into a sociologist and political thinker. His sociological concepts, although essentially original, in certain ways resemble those of Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca; his underlying philosophy, however, is close to that of Burke and Tocqueville. Lypynsky insisted on the irreplaceable function of the elite in any organized community, and especially in every state. He believed that healthy social development requires a balance between the forces of change and stability, liberty and authority. His vision of the future independent Ukraine was that of a constitutional monarchy with a differentiated class structure under the hegemony of a class of prosperous farmers. While some of Lypynsky,s ideas were obviously anachronistic (for instance, his advocacy of the claims of the Skoropadsky family), many of his deep insights ought to be considered a durable enrichment of Ukrainian political and social thought. Lypynsky was the central figure of a group of distinguished intellectuals among whom the following deserve to be mentioned individually: the historians Dmytro Doroshenko (1882-1951), Stepan Toma- shivsky (1875-1930), and Vasyl Kuchabsky (1895-1945) (all of whom were also active as publicists), and Osyp Nazaruk (1883-1940), probably the most brilliant Ukrainian political journalist of the inter-war era.
Thus we can state the paradox that of the four major trends of Ukrainian political thought, conservatism, which was the weakest in physical strength and mass support, was the one that made the greatest intellectual contribution in the course of the present century.