Galicia’s Occupations

According to Machiavelli, “a prince should make himself feared in such a way that, though he does not gain love, he escapes hatred, for being feared but not hated go readily together.” In order to prevent hatred, Machiavelli advocated that a prince should not touch the property of his citizens and subjects or insult their sense of honour or dignity.²⁵ Russia’s political and military leaders did not heed his advice.

Shortly after the Russian army captured Galicia and Bukovina for the first time in late September 1914 (and held the provinces until 22 June 1915), officials annexed these territories into the Russian Empire. They made plans to integrate the occupied territories into the empire’s legal and administrative framework and to build “new Russian-gauge railroads ty­ing Galicia to the Russian heartland.”²⁶ They extended the tsarist imperial model of provincial administration to “the old Russian land” of Austria’s Lemberg, Tarnopol, Czernowitz, and later Przemysl. These newly ac­quired territories (which had been part of Kiev Rus, but not Muscovy or the Russian Empire) were subordinated to the headquarters of the south­west front in Kiev, which became “the defacto wartime capital of the new­ly united Ukrainian lands.”²⁷

The Russian occupational regime operated in a highly arbitrary manner and quickly became unpopular. The commander of the southwestern front, General Nikolai Ivanov, ordered the expulsion of large numbers of Jews and German peasants who had settled in Galicia several generations earlier, accusing them of espionage, subversion, and sabotage.

Ivanov, moreover, tolerated hostage taking and did not punish his troops who engaged in brutal pogroms against Jews, Germans, and other civilians in the front military zones.²⁹ The new regime viewed the Jews of Galicia, who had long enjoyed legal equality in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as subversive elements, spies, and traitors and condoned the military’s anti- Jewish violence throughout the winter of 1914-15.³⁰ Count Georgii Bobrinskii, the second military governor general during Russia’s first oc­cupation of Galicia, perceived the province as an integral part of the Russian Empire and replaced the Austrian officials with Russian bureau­crats from Kiev, Podolia, Volhynia, or Warsaw, or with the few remaining local Russophiles. Persecuted by the Austrian government before 1914, these Russophiles enthusiastically served the Russian administration in Galicia.³¹

Despite claims to adhere to international agreements concerning the oc­cupation of foreign territories in wartime, the new rulers in Galicia quick­ly introduced Russian as the only language of instruction in the schools and government offices, and closed long-standing Ukrainian organiza­tions, clubs, bookstores, and newspapers. They prohibited the sale as well as the private possession of all books in the “Little Russian dialect” and barred the use of this language in all private and public organizations, courts, and bureaucracy.³² They also arrested thousands of prominent civ­ic, cultural, political, and religious leaders, such as the Greek Catholic Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, and deported them deep into the Russian interior. They also persecuted the members of the Greek Catholic Church and attempted to convert these believers to Russian Orthodoxy by force.³³ These brutal anti-Ukrainian measures far surpassed those the Polish no­bility introduced under Austrian rule.³⁴ Just as most Ukrainians in Galicia and Bukovina realized that they had lived far better under Habsburg rule than their compatriots in Russia, Emperor Nicholas II travelled to his Lvov on 9 April 1915 in order to meet his “Russian” subjects and to re­affirm Galicia’s long-standing “historic ties” with his realm.³⁵

A few months later the Austrians and Germans counter-attacked.

In June 1916, Russia’s military regained the territories on the eastern front and reoccupied much of Bukovina and one-third of eastern Galicia for the next few months.⁴⁰ Its troops controlled the area around Tarnopol (now Ternopol), a large eastern Galician city near the Austro-Russian bor­der, from September 1914 to the end of 1917.

The new civilian and military authorities then launched a vicious anti­Semitic campaign and persecuted Germans but modified the anti­Ukrainian policies of 1914-15. Continuing their Great Russian project (reuniting Russians, Little Russians, and Belarusans into one state led by Russia), they did not ban the Ukrainian language or shut down all Ukrainian-language publications and institutions.

The Russian language still served as the official language. Although the new governor general allowed the use of some of the local languages (Polish and Ukrainian, but not German or Yiddish) in the schools, the tsar’s min­isters in Petrograd objected. The authorities abandoned efforts to convert Greek Catholic believers to Russian Orthodoxy, but fought all manifesta­tions of “Ukrainophilism,” a very broad pejorative term.⁴¹ Having suffered through the first Russian occupation and its scorched-earth policy the year before, the local population remained hostile to the Russians and sympa­thetic to the Austrians. They, after all, had been among the most loyal sub­jects of the Habsburg Monarchy since the late eighteenth century.

Shortly after Nicholas Il’s forced abdication in February 1917, the Provisional Government appointed Dmytro Doroshenko, a prominent Ukrainian activist from the Russian Empire, as the regional commissar (with powers of governor general) for occupied Galicia and Bukovina.⁴² This deci­sion reflected the plans of Pavel Miliukov, the Provisional Government’s first foreign minister (from February to May 1917), to merge Austria-Hungary’s Ukrainian districts with Russian Ukraine.⁴³ Doroshenko persuaded the Provisional Government to appoint three more Ukrainian activists as com­missars for Volhynia, Czernowitz (now Chernovtsy), and Ternopol. This group of governors started to promote local Ukrainians into regional bu­reaucracies just before Alexander Kerensky, the new head of the Provisional Government, launched his late June 1917 offensive against the Germans and Austrians. The Central Powers counter-attacked and temporarily reclaimed most of Eastern Galicia in August, but the Russian army retook some of the territories it had lost.⁴⁴ Because of the breakdown of military discipline in the months before Russia withdrew from the war in December, this last Russian conquest became even worse than the first two.⁴⁵ Despite Doroshenko’s ef­forts to alleviate the consequences of the devastation the people of Galicia had experienced over three years of the war and two Russian occupations, he could not. He had no authority over the military. The demands of the Russian front-line army in his province took precedence over the needs of the civilian population he governed.

Overall, governments on both sides adopted measures which “either privileged or disadvantaged one ethnic group over another in matters of lan­guage and schooling, religious practice, military service obligations, prop­erty rights, and other economic welfare measures.”⁴⁶ Such actions activated national and even nationalist counter-responses from the local populations.

If, on the eve of the 1914 invasion, “strong pro-Russian sympathies [ex­isted] among Galicia’s Ukrainians, with a quarter of them voting for Russophile candidates to the Austrian parliament,” these feelings quickly evaporated.⁴⁷ Russia’s occupation of Galicia and Bukovina, its retreat, and the creation of a major refugee crisis ignited the Austro-Ukrainian hatred against Russia and Russians. By the end of 1915, the Russian military cre­ated approximately 400,000 refugees, most of them Ukrainians from Galicia, shepherding them eastward to Kiev and to the larger towns and cities in the Ukrainian-speaking provinces. By mid-1916, for example, they comprised 25 per cent of the population in Ekaterinoslav and other cities.⁴⁸

Settling these refugees behind Russian lines undermined the political or­der by introducing large numbers of diverse groups with alien ideas to the local Orthodox Christian population. In hopes of preventing fraud by vari­ous relief organizations, the Russian authorities gave each refugee a green book recording his or her name, place of origin, and ethnic affiliation.⁴⁹ These registration books (a precursor to the Soviet internal passport system introduced in 1932) set the refugees apart from the local population.

The refugees from Galicia encountered new, foreign environments and often compared - consciously and unconsciously - their old and new sur­roundings. Displaced hundreds of kilometres from home, they were forced to interact with other refugees and local populations and experi­enced feelings of otherness, estrangement, and, at times, solidarity. The predominantly Greek Catholic Ukrainians from the Austrian Empire had the opportunity to assess their similarities with fellow Ukrainian speakers of the Orthodox faith and to see how they differed from the Russians. In the struggle for food and shelter, these evacuees also thought about how - and in what language - to educate their children. Inadvertently, they - as a group - took on the role of missionaries for the Ukrainian cause.

In turn, many locals who encountered these refugees had to reassess their own identities. For the first time, many Ukrainian speakers in the Left Bank, Right Bank, and Novorossiia met a nationally conscious Ukrainian population, which highlighted the idea that the Ukrainian­speaking territories of Austria and Russia constituted a single whole. This enormous group of involuntary migrants and their encounters with the host populations disrupted the old, often acquiescent patterns of behav­iour, forcing the refugees, the local population, and the local and dislodged intelligentsia “to forms of action and ways of thinking that had been im­possible to conceive” before the war.⁵⁰

All of the refugees experienced a common trauma. Both the educated intel­ligentsia and ordinary men and women had suffered the same exposure “to the dehumanizing and debilitating consequences of refugeedom.”⁵¹ Sharing memories of their expulsion from their homelands, the elites and masses identified themselves with each other, as never before. This assessment rang as true for the Ukrainian refugees as it did for the Poles, Jews, and Germans, also forcibly removed from Galicia. The war’s violence and dispersions made each group see the world through national (not just local or imperial) lenses. The majority of uprooted Ukrainian speakers from Galicia and Bukovina, along with many of their compatriots in the Russian Empire, recognized that the rulers and the ruled “should hail from the same peo­ple.” In the wake of this mass removal and psychological rupture, their identities became nationalized. This new politicized national identity be­came not only “a perceptual framework through which they (could) define their interests and identify their (potential) alliance partners,” but also the “organizational means through which individuals struggle to gain pow­er.”⁵² They started to interpret Russian rule (whether tsarist, democratic, or Bolshevik) emanating from Petrograd or Moscow as “alien” rule.