Hearts and Minds
At the outbreak of hostilities, most citizens and subjects of the belligerent powers - including the Ukrainian speakers in both empires - enthusiastically embraced the war and their respective governments.
With the major exception of the Bolsheviks (the radical wing of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party), most Europeans saluted their own country’s flags and sang national anthems with booming voices. But the front lines shifted often, conscripting, killing, and displacing not only millions of soldiers, but also millions of civilians. Enormous battlefield losses and the widespread destruction of villages and towns on the ever-shifting front disillusioned millions of soldiers, refugees, and civilians, even those far from the zones of engagement. By mobilizing “official” mass national identities and by forcibly evicting hundreds of thousands from their homes, these governments undermined the old pre-war imperial and dynastic loyalties. Radical, anti-imperial, and nationalist allegiances replaced them.14On 1 January 1914, the Russian Empire possessed a population of
167.7 million; approximately 120 million lived in European Russia’s fifty provinces. From 1 August 1914 until 1 April 1917, the authorities called up
13.7 million men, who joined the ranks of its peacetime army that numbered 1,423,000 at the start of the war. Approximately 90 per cent of the total number of men conscripted in European Russia came from its overpopulated rural areas, a disproportionate share of the empire’s peasant pop- ulation.15 From 1914 to 1 September 1917, the military drafted approximately 2,885,000 men from the nine Ukrainian-speaking provinces, a total that did not include recruits from Bessarabia, Kursk, and Orel, which also possessed large Ukrainian-speaking populations. Of these men, nearly two million may have identified themselves as “Little Russians,” but we may never know for certain.16
The tsarist authorities did not properly coordinate their inflow of peasants into the military.
In the course of the war, the military recruited up to 40 per cent of the empire’s able-bodied male population and requisitioned horses necessary to work the farms.17 Peasant families in Novorossiia and the southwest provinces close to the front experienced extensive military and labour conscription. By 1917, nearly 40 per cent of all peasant households in some provinces, such as Kharkov, did not possess adult males to work the fields.18 Although women stepped into the breach, the delicate inter-regional balance of grain production and railway transport encountered intense pressures and broke down.19Approximately two million soldiers serving in the Russian army (nearly 10.5 per cent of those mobilized during the war) died on the battlefield or from wounds or diseases experienced there.20 Although it is difficult to ascertain the national identities of those who died, one American scholar estimated in the 1960s that within the Russian army nearly 450,000 men from the Ukrainian-speaking provinces perished, as did nearly 120,000 from Austria-Hungary’s Ukrainian provinces.21 Recently, scholars at the Ukrainian Institute of Demography in Kiev asserted that in the Ukrainianspeaking provinces of Russia and Austria-Hungary some 1.3 million men, women, and children died prematurely during the First World War. Another 2.3 million “excess deaths” occurred during the post-1917 civil and national wars, the brief Polish-Soviet War of 1920, the famine of 19212, and the subsequent cholera, diphtheria, dysentery, and typhoid epidemics which followed wartime conditions and shortages.22
These statistics may not include birth deficits or emigration, but even without those, the losses are staggering. Most importantly, this long continuum of mass violence decimated an entire generation of young men from the Ukrainian-speaking provinces and even killed large numbers of civilians.
The survivors became disillusioned with the authorities and with the status quo.
High attrition rates, the duration of the conflict, and the uncertainty of a speedy victory created an irreconcilable breach between (1) the soldiers, non-commissioned officers, and recently promoted junior officers and (2) their senior officers and generals. The frustrations in the lower ranks inspired them to find salvation in various radical national and social causes after the February Revolution.23Even prisoners were not immune. The armies on the eastern front captured unprecedented numbers of prisoners of war and relocated them in isolated places far behind military lines. In addition to feeding their own men, European militaries spent scarce resources to guard and provide food for millions of their adversaries. By employing propagandists in the camps, the captors hoped to turn them against their former imperial masters. In summary, the war caused enormous social and economic upheavals, especially for those living in the Ukrainian-speaking provinces closest to the shifting front. It radicalized the masses and encouraged many Ukrainian speakers to imagine themselves as Ukrainians and to explore a new political concept, national independence.
Vincent Shandor, an important official in Transcarpathia in the interwar period, remembered his family’s first encounter with Ukrainian speakers from the Russian Empire. During Shandor’s childhood in the Great War, lulian Bebeshko, a prisoner of war from the Russian army, lived with and worked for his family. According to an account recorded by Raymond Smith, Shandor’s editor,
The family soon discovered that they understood the language spoken by Bebeshko and the other prisoners from Eastern Ukraine far better than the language spoken by those from Moscow and other Russian regions. As Shandor relates the story, it was these prisoners who enabled the local Ruthenians to “perceive their linguistic and historical closeness to those who were from Ukraine. The prisoners were the first to talk openly about Ukraine, its history, traditions, and culture.” The Ukrainian songs they learned “from the captured Russian Army soldiers of Ukrainian origin gave a strong impulse to the self-identification of Ruthenians from Transcarpathia, spurring national revival and development.” After World War I, Shandor’s father became politicized as a Ukrainian nationalist. In January 1919, the elder Shandor took part in a Congress in Khust that endorsed the unification of [Transcarpathia] with the rest of Ukraine, one of several political acts which provoked an angry response from local Hungarian officials.24
To the consternation of the imperial powers on the eastern front, the war accelerated the transmission and diffusion of the Ukrainian idea, even in the most backward regions.