Don’t Educate the Peasants! Intelligentsia and Ukrainian Activism

Peasants, unexpectedly, turned out to be able to exert formidable pressure on governments if they could be organized, which next happened under the leadership of those “illiterate peasants” who managed to get degrees.

Kharkiv University, founded in 1805, became the bastion of Ukrainian cultural resistance. It produced Ukrainian scholarship, and was a center for publishing in Ukrainian and for the international academic community. Two other “Ukrainian” universities were set up in Kyiv (1834) and Odessa (1865). They were sponsored by Russia, but they could legitimately focus on Ukrainian culture and history. Literature on all things Ukrainian became available in the Ukrainian language, and was eagerly consumed by an increasingly knowledgeable and nationalistic audience.

These books stimulated a burgeoning self-awareness amongst Ukranians in the 1800s. Taras Shevchenko was one key author. A group of Ukrainian artists had bought him out of serf-bondage as a child, as he showed so much promise in drawing. Although he indeed became an important painter, his most influential role was as a poet. His poetry has the flavor of William Blake—surreal and rural, epic and fantastic, religious and excoriatingly “prophetic” (political). He was the poet of a free Ukraine; a visionary whose powerful Ukrainian verse entered the soul of the subjugated, and put fire in the belly of revolutionaries.

This did not sit well with the authorities. A new ban on Ukrainian literature was imposed. At every level of education, Russian language instruction was reintroduced and enforced. The Russians arrested Shevchenko and exiled him to the Ural Mountains, where he instantly became a martyr to the cause of Ukrainian self-determination. His work circulated illicitly, and banning his work made it all the more treasured among true Ukrainian patriots. Unsurprisingly, Ukrainian language and poetry thrived underground.

Austrian-controlled Ukraine then became the center of Ukrainian publishing, with proscribed literature smuggled back to secret readers in the east. Galicia, the former Polish province with its large Ukrainian population, became the main supporter of insurrection in Russian-occupied Ukraine.