Eastern Galicia: A Bastion of Ukrainianism

Ukrainians began to organize themselves politically. The Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood (a secret society) operated from Austrian-controlled Galicia. Founded in 1845, it promoted social equality, and held a vision for a “United Slavic States,” drawing all the Slavic Nations in the region into a commonwealth (led by the Ukrainians, of course).

Tsarist suppression was never able to meld the unwilling Ukrainians into a greater Russia. From the 1850s onwards, independent secret societies called hromadas started to spring up all over the place. Because they were not centrally controlled, they were impossible to wipe out. Student-led hromadas soon took a more openly radical stance, and eventually one Kharkiv hromada formed itself into the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party. Its motto in 1900 was “one, single, indivisible, free, independent Ukraine'' (Encyclopedia Britannica, 2022).

The Russian revolution of 1905 did impact Ukraine, but it was an essentially internal Russian struggle of communists against Tsarists. Ukrainians might have been agitating for freedom, but independence for Ukraine was never on the agenda of a communist movement that aimed at world-wide imposition of its vision of society.

The children of those early Vikings had nowhere to go. They could not row back up the Dnieper and find refuge in the Northern fjords; that ship had sailed. Ukrainians had to stand their ground, marshall their forces, and bide their time.