Did the Austrian Empire govern its Ukrainian lands differently?
The dominant ethnic group in the Habsburg Empire, Austrian Germans, constituted only a small minority of its population and could not hope to assimilate the rest. Their preferred nationality policy was exploiting the tensions among the major ethnic groups.
This approach was particularly evident in the empire's Ukrainian lands. The Habsburg emperors acquired Galicia in 1772, during the partitions of Poland; two years later they annexed the Bukovyna region from the Principality of Moldavia, an Ottoman vassal.Neither region was ethnically homogenous. Ukrainian (or "Ruthenian" in the parlance of the time) peasants constituted an overwhelming majority of the population in eastern Galicia, whereas in the western part of this region, the Polish population predominated. Today these two halves of Galicia are divided by the Polish-Ukrainian border; western Galicia, whose main city is Cracow, is Polish, and eastern Galicia, with its center in Lviv, is Ukrainian. However, under Habsburg rule the political elites in all of Galicia were predominantly Polish, because the native Rus nobility had been assimilated long ago. The Habsburg balancing act, therefore, required giving some political voice to Ruthenians as well, in order to undermine Polish political domination in the region. The only educated class among the Ruthenians was the Ukrainian Catholic clergy, which adhered to Eastern Christian rites and thus (except for monks and bishops) could marry and have children. The political leadership of the Ukrainian movement in the Austrian Empire thus fell by default to the clergy, supplemented in the next generation by lawyers and teachers, who often hailed from clerical families.
When the Galician Poles rebelled during the Revolution of 1848, the Austrian governor encouraged the loyal Ruthenian bishops to create, as a counterweight, their own representative body, the Supreme Ruthenian Council.
Thus began the history of Ukrainian political and cultural organizations in the Habsburg Empire. Unlike in Russia at the time, they could exist legally. The Ruthenians also acquired experience in electoral politics during periodic elections to the national parliament and local legislatures. During the second half of the nineteenth century, a Ukrainian press and a network of reading rooms developed in the countryside. A full spectrum of Ukrainian political parties came into existence in the 1890s, when the Ruthenian activists also accepted the ethnic designation “Ukrainians” for their people. By that time the Austrian authorities, apprehensive of the possibility that the Ruthenians could become a fifth column in a likely conflict with Russia, actively discouraged a pro-Russian cultural orientation among the Ruthenian intelligentsia. They also made sure that the language used in school instruction in eastern Galicia was modern Ukrainian and not some antiquated church vernacular closer to Russian. By the 1900s, patriotic activists in Galicia made great advances in mobilizing the peasantry for the national cause, but their main demands, such as a separate Ukrainian crown land or a Ukrainian university, remained unfulfilled by the imperial government.Developments in neighboring Bukovyna just to the south paralleled those in Galicia, with one important distinction. Instead of the Catholic Poles, the ruling class there was Romanian, and it had little influence in Vienna. Because Romanians were also Orthodox Christians, the Uniate church did not take hold in Bukovyna, where the Ukrainian peasants remained Orthodox. However, like Galicia, this historical region was ethnically divided. Ukrainian peasants predominated in northern Bukovyna (part of present-day Ukraine) and Romanian ones in its southern part (part of present-day Romania). The third ethnic Ukrainian historical region that came under Habsburg rule, Transcarpathia, which is southwest from Galicia across the Carpathian Mountains, had been under Hungarian rule since the twelfth century and part of the Habsburg Empire since the sixteenth.
There, the ruling stratum was Hungarian, and the Ukrainian national movement (led by Uniate priests) did not make much headway until 1867, when the Austrian Empire officially became Austro-Hungarian after the 1867 constitutional compromise empowering the Hungarian nobility. After that, the Hungarian authorities closed down Ukrainian organizations and promoted creeping assimilation of the local peasantry.When the European empires went to war in 1914, Ukrainians in Austrian Galicia in particular identified with the conflict as a means to liberate their brethren in Russia from the oppressive tsarist regime. They established a Ukrainian volunteer unit in the Austro- Hungarian army. Approximately 28,000 men volunteered, but only 2,000 were accepted by the Austrian authorities. As the war dragged on, however, Ukrainian patriots on both sides of the Eastern Front understood that what would benefit them most would be the defeat of each of their respective imperial masters.