Integration and Russification

As the Russian state expanded its territorial holdings steadily from the six­teenth century to the eve of the First World War, “the addition of its separate parts never constituted a well-integrated whole.”⁴³ Instead of a unitary state, the Russian government established an unwieldy empire containing dif­ferent regions, religions, traditions and cultures, social groups, and proto­national bodies.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Romanov dynasty - which hitherto had not identified itself completely with the Russian nation - now played the “Russian card.” Haunted by the failure to integrate the Poles into its empire and following the example of Bismarck’s 1871 unifi­cation of Germany (which unleashed a major campaign against its Catholic and Polish minorities), the Russian Empire became a nationalizing state. Under its last three tsars (Alexander II, Alexander III, and Nicholas II), Russia’s political and cultural elites identified Russia as the ethnocultural core of the empire and claimed that the Russians occupied a weak cultural, economic, and demographic position within the state and within Eurasia. In order to overcome these handicaps, they gradually advocated policies favouring the language, culture, and political hegemony of the Russians over the non-Russians, especially in the empire’s borderlands.⁴⁴

The Russian Empire never pursued a policy of totally assimilating its en­tire non-Russian population into the Russian nation, but it benefited from long-term natural and voluntary Russification. Building on this natural Russification, administrative Russification followed a different blueprint. In creating its empire, Russian leaders followed a pattern of conquest and acquisition, incorporation and assimilation.⁴⁵ Once an internationally un­disputed territory came under effective Russian control, administrators soon introduced and extended the social and administrative system preva­lent in Russian provinces.

The conquest and incorporation of the Baltic provinces, Finland, and the Congress Kingdom of Poland (established by the Congress of Vienna in 1815), however, followed a different playbook. Because “the original acquisition had been accomplished through military conquest ratified by international treaty, the imperial government began by guaranteeing a spe­cial status to the newly conquered lands and by promising to respect the autonomy and privileges of the local ruling classes.”⁴⁸

These “special status” regions created a complex problem for the impe­rial authorities at the end of the nineteenth century. Their very existence “undermined the concept of the unitary nature of the Russian state and raised questions about the sovereign, who was the constitutional Grand Duke of Finland and the King of Poland, while remaining the autocratic Emperor of all Russia.”⁴⁹ After suppressing the Polish revolt of 1863, the tsarist authorities sought to solve this political contradiction by introduc­ing Russian institutions, laws, and the Russian language into schools and the local bureaucracy in order to bind the Congress Kingdom, the Baltic provinces, and Finland tighter into the empire. Despite enormous resis­tance, the distinctive features of the “special status” regions eroded. Under Alexander III, Russian authorities introduced similar policies among the Armenians, the Volga Tatars, the Georgians, and other groups.

Advocates of cultural Russification aspired to move beyond social and administrative uniformity - to assimilation.

Although the Russian authorities tolerated the Ukrainophile movement in the Ukrainian provinces in 1845-6, 1859-62, and 1869-75, the tsarist government systematized its efforts against those who identified them­selves as Ukrainians, not Little Russians (the official designation of the second-largest East Slavic group in the empire). In June 1847, after the arrests of the members of the Cyryllo-Methodius Society (which included Taras Shevchenko), A.F. Orlov, Tsar Nicholas I’s chief of police, ordered his subordinates “to prevent teachers and writers on both sides of the Dnieper River from putting rodina (the motherland, region of birth) ahead of otechestvo (the fatherland, the state as a whole).”⁵¹ In July 1863, Petr Valuev, the minister of internal affairs, banned all scholarly, religious, and pedagogical publications in the Ukrainian language. Only poetry and fic­tion could appear in the “Little Russian dialect.” Valuev declared that the Ukrainian language “never existed, does not exist, and shall never exist.” With the Ems Decree of 1876, Tsar Alexander II officially forbade the publication and importation of Ukrainian books and prohibited the use of Ukrainian on stage and in the elementary schools.⁵² This ban lasted until early 1905, when the Council of Ministers accepted the Russian Academy of Sciences’ recommendation to eliminate these restrictions.⁵³

The tsarist government prohibited Ukrainian works “not because of their contents (the same books could have appeared in another language), but because of their language.”⁵⁴ (Although conservative tsarist censors allowed the publication of The Communist Manifesto in Russian, they prohibited the Bible from appearing in Ukrainian).

According to official tsarist imperial interpretations, Ukrainians formed the Little Russian part of the all-Russian, Orthodox nation, which possessed three branches (the Russian, Little Russian, and Belarusan lines). The Little Russians and Belarusans spoke mutually comprehensible East Slavic dialects and shared the Orthodox Christian faith (even the Ukrainian-speaking Greek Catholics in the Habsburg Monarchy had a similar liturgy).⁵⁵ Because the cultural differences among the East Slavs appeared to them to be small, au­thorities claimed that the Russians constituted approximately 66 per cent of the total population.⁵⁶ In reality, the Russians comprised only approximately 43.3 per cent of the total population of the empire in 1897 (the Ukrainians 17.1, and the Belarusans 4.6).⁵⁷ The discrepancy between the official under­standing of these statistics and the numbers themselves represented the elites’ national security concerns in an age of international competition.

Russian authorities did not discriminate against men and women of Little Russian origin who did not attempt to politicize their identity and who recognized their role within the “all-Russian” political landscape. Russian officials, historians, and public commentators interpreted the his­tory of “Little Russia” as an integral part of mainstream Russian history; they perceived the “Little Russians” as “nashi” (ours). In contrast, the gov­ernment repressed all individuals who demonstrated a distinct Ukrainian identity “in the political or cultural sphere.”⁵⁸ The authorities considered the act of identifying oneself as a Ukrainian instead of a Little Russian as a political and anti-governmental act.

The tsars, according to David Saunders, feared the subversion of the empire’s Ukrainian community by outside powers and sought “to stamp out the proto-nationalist activities” of a small number of nationally con­scious Ukrainian intellectuals.⁵⁹ In light of the constant competition among the European powers in the nineteenth century and Russia’s seemingly permanent internal insecurity, the empire’s political elite aspired to keep the Great Russians, the Little Russians, and the Belarusans together, by force if necessary.

As Saunders pointed out, Ukraine’s geographic location in the empire and its population explosion influenced these Russian anxieties. Located at the Western borderlands, Little Russians constituted the second-largest East Slavic group and the second-largest Orthodox population within the empire. Most importantly, they participated in a hereditary land tenure system, not a repartitional communal one as did most Russian peasants.⁶⁰ Primarily a peasant group, they possessed nearly half of the total non­Russian peasants in the empire. Most importantly, from the perspective of those always concerned about the prospect of a peasant uprising, the em­pire’s Ukrainian-speaking provinces experienced disturbing demographic changes in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Shortly after the emancipation in 1861, the peasants experienced small improvements in the availability and quality of rural health care, which made them embrace new ideas about their economic future. Although the size of the average household (between five and six members) did not de­crease, the number of households did increase dramatically. This growth in population, combined with the gentry’s ability to retain their lands, sharply reduced the average peasant’s landholdings. In 1861 the amount of land per peasant averaged 2.9 desiatiny; by 1906, it had declined to 1.4. Peasant holdings in Kiev, Podolia, and Volhynia comprised the smallest in the Russian Empire.⁶¹ The peasants in the Ukrainian-speaking provinces, like those throughout the empire, ascribed their land hunger to the vast­ness of the landlord holdings.⁶²

Although the emancipation of the serfs did not lead to a complete capi­talist transformation of the Russian and Little Russian rural areas, by 1905 the Ukrainian-speaking provinces had become the breadbasket of Europe.

Following the same post-1861 trends within the empire, which pro­duced one of the highest rates of growth in the world, the population in the Ukrainian-speaking provinces nearly doubled between 1870 and 1914. By 1897 the provinces possessed the highest population density (at 55 per square kilometre) in European Russia.⁶⁵ The Little Russians steadily in­creased their share of the total population in the nine provinces. By 1897, most Ukrainian speakers were under twenty years of age, and this cohort represented nearly 40 per cent of the entire population. At the turn of the century, this youth bulge grew rapidly, strengthening the Ukrainian­speaking majority in Russia’s southwestern provinces.⁶⁶ Most precarious­ly, almost all of these men and women engaged in agricultural pursuits. If these trends continued, the Ukrainian-speaking provinces would become a very crowded social and political tinderbox.

In light of this population explosion, the authorities “feared any effort to mobilize [this group] along national or social grounds” and introduced repressive measures to restrict the potential lines of communication be­tween the small Ukrainophile intelligentsia living in the towns and cities and the overwhelming majority of Little Russians in the countryside.⁶⁷ These edicts hampered the intelligentsia’s efforts to establish and institu­tionalize contact with the peasants and to overcome their illiteracy in their own language. By banning Ukrainian-language schools and publications, these decrees prevented the emergence of alternative communications net­works linking the cities with the countryside. The Ukrainophiles wanted to empower the peasants, but this mission challenged “the political phi­losophy of the tsarist regime.”⁶⁸

As the Ukrainian-speaking provinces industrialized in the late nine­teenth century, they attracted literate men from Central Russia to the new industrial centres but only a small number of Ukrainian-speaking peas­ants. This migration of Russian workers reinforced Russian as the lan­guage of work and of the cities. Industrialization, in effect, promoted an overwhelmingly Russian urban environment. The countryside remained a universe of spoken, but illiterate, Ukrainian.

The end of serfdom and the beginning of industrialization intensified the competition between Russian and Ukrainian. As the officially sanc­tioned language and as the language of modernization, Russian experi­enced an upsurge; Ukrainian, a decline. According to Ronald Wardhaugh, a language in decline is “likely to have a rural base only and to lack strength in towns and cities” and is “likely to have stronger associations with older, uneducated, and rural speakers and lack those of progress and modernity.”⁶⁹ Industrialization and Russification, then, tilted the urban language competition towards Russian. Migration and Russification re­oriented the migrants’ “culturally defined need to read and write.”⁷⁰ Migration into the cities made literacy a necessity and literacy in Russian essential. Learning to read and write in Russian made this national iden­tity and culture attractive to those who already possessed the predisposi­tion to change their social status. The mass illiteracy of the peasants who spoke Ukrainian and the governmental bans on Ukrainian-language schools and books hampered the Ukrainophile intelligentsia’s efforts in primary “nation-building,” which Ivan L. Rudnytsky defined as “the penetration of all strata of the population by the national idea, the trans­formation of an ethnic mass into a culturally and politically self-conscious national community.”⁷¹

In order to establish an imagined community of Ukrainians, members of this group had to agree on a common set of characteristics that consti­tuted their identity and its boundaries.⁷² According to nationalists, not only did the Ukrainian speakers need to clarify their own identity, they also had to define the “other,” especially the Russians, who remained cul­turally close to them. But in a hostile political environment and without Ukrainian-language schools, a mass-based literacy in Ukrainian, or Ukrainian publications, a mass dialogue on these critical issues could not develop. Without this vital discussion, the Ukrainian national movement could not attract the masses necessary to move from Hroch’s academic stage to the cultural and nationalist stages. Without this exchange, mem­bers of the Ukrainian national movement could not form a consensus de­fining themselves and their compatriots.