Internationalization of Intra-Imperial Conflicts

In the course of the war, the Ukrainian provinces within Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire became the object of broader geopolitical projects envisioned by the warring powers to weaken, if not revise, each others’ territories.

In the course of this brutal conflict, the leaders of all warring parties de­fined their enemies in national as well as state and imperial terms, stereo­typing their opponents as completely evil and untrustworthy. Propagandists constantly highlighted the differences among the various national groups, always disparaging their enemies, including civilians among them. Even on the home front, the German authorities did not consider all of their compa­triots loyal sons and daughters of the fatherland, especially the socialists.

The Russian government abolished the Pale of Settlement on 4 August 1915 and allowed Jews who had fled during the chaotic retreat from Poland and Galicia that spring to settle outside the former Pale. But at the same time, the military command denounced Jews, Poles, and Germans living within the boundaries of the empire as disloyal elements and sought to expropriate their landholdings.⁵⁴ In 1915, the Russian army deported over 200,000 German settlers from the provinces of Volhynia, Kiev, and Podolia to Siberia and Central Asia.⁵⁵ Even though these German settlers had lived on their homesteads for several generations, Russian generals could not imagine that they would ever become loyal members of the Russian politi­cal community.

Tsarist officials also suspected Ukrainians of treason. Despite the Ukrainian national movement’s declarations of loyalty and overall support for the Russian war effort, the government closed down all Ukrainian cul­tural and educational institutions shortly after the empire’s declaration of war.⁵⁶ The authorities arrested a number of the movement’s most prominent leaders, including Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who shortly after the war broke out had returned to Kiev to prove his loyalty and that of the Ukrainian na­tional movement. (Although he had lived in Austria since 1894, teaching at the University of Lemberg, he still retained his Russian citizenship.)

Russia’s authorities did not recognize the separate existence of the Belarusans and Ukrainians from the Russian people. Due to the hysteria ignited by the war, they remained suspicious of anyone who identified him­self as a Ukrainian, not as a “Little Russian.” But by 1914 most Ukrainian speakers from Galicia or Bukovina identified themselves as Ukrainians, not Ruthenians or Little Russians. This conflict between assumptions of what should constitute the political norm for Ukrainians/Ruthenians/ Little Russians/Rusyns made many Russian nationalists uneasy about the Austro-Ukrainian refugees and about the local relief organizations created to help them.⁵⁷

Russian leaders’ concern about Ukrainians and the Ukrainian national movement were not completely misplaced. In Austria, on 3 August 1914, representatives of the three main Ukrainian political parties in Austria formed the Supreme Ukrainian Council (Holovna Ukrains’ka Rada, or HUR), which issued an appeal to the Ukrainian people calling for unity against the autocratic tsarist empire, “the greatest enemy of Ukraine.”⁵⁸ For leaders of these political parties and for Ukrainian political emigres from Russia, the Russian Empire represented not only an existential threat, but also a danger to the constitutional rights and freedoms they enjoyed in Austria.

In order to prevent this, HUR created a Ukrainian Military Command, which would oversee the organization of the Sich Riflemen (Ukrains’ki sichovi striltsi), a group of Ukrainian volunteers that would fight on behalf of the Dual Monarchy.⁶⁰ Consisting primarily of nationally conscious stu­dents, peasants, and workers, they sought to protect Ukrainians within the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the war. In 1915, the General Ukrainian Council (Heneral’na Ukrains’ka Rada), HUR’s successor, published a declaration, envisioning a free, independent Ukrainian state carved out of Russia and territorial national autonomy for the Ukrainian people within the borders of Austria.⁶¹ In September 1916, the General Council asserted that this whole territory encompassed 850,000 square kilometres and con­tained thirty-five million people, a highly contested claim in a nationally mixed East Central Europe.⁶²

On 4 August 1914, a group of Ukrainian political emigres from the Russian Empire living in Austria organized the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (Soiuz vyzvolennia Ukrainy - SVU), which espoused the vic­tory of the Central Powers and the creation of an independent Ukrainian state on the ruins of the Russian Empire. SVU’s inaugural platform advo­cated that this state possess a constitutional monarch, a democratic politi­cal system, a single legislative branch, and civil, linguistic, and religious rights for all national groups and faiths, with an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church.⁶³ HUR and the General Ukrainian Council cooperat­ed closely with the SVU.

As rational political actors, the leaders of the Ukrainian national move­ment in Galicia understood that a full-scale war between two major European military alliances could bring them new political opportunities. The victors would rearrange the continent’s boundaries, especially in the disputed terrain of East Central Europe. HUR and SVU leaders grasped that an autonomous Ukraine, much less an independent one, would not emerge ex nihilo without the approval and support of the war’s victors. They calculated that Russia (due to ideological reasons and national secu­rity concerns) would not tolerate such an outcome and that if Russia and its allies won the war, the Romanovs would destroy the Ukrainian na­tional movement as it had within its own borders. Austro-Hungary and Germany would not. HUR and SVU leaders perceived, in short, that the war would determine the very survival of the Ukrainian national move­ment and all Ukrainians (as opposed to Little Russians).

Emperor Franz Joseph’s long reign since 1848 made him a beloved fa­ther figure, if not an institution, among Ukrainians, who placed their po­litical bet on the ultimate triumph of the Central Powers. Even their non-Galician colleagues, the members of the SVU, agreed with their as­sessment of the overall political situation and future possibilities. Their common support for the Central Powers presupposed important conces­sions from Austria-Hungary.

HUR and the Main Ukrainian Rada repeatedly urged the Austrian gov­ernment to create a separate administrative unit for Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia. In late 1915 and early 1916 Austria’s prime minister promised the General Council that Galicia’s Ukrainian-speaking area would become a separate province. Emperor Franz Joseph nullified this pledge just before his death on 21 November 1916.

The Ukrainian movement acquired official approval of its own self­definition as a people and also won vague assurances concerning regional autonomy for its people. These official vows and their reversals demon­strated how Galicia and plans for a resurrected Poland became a political football during the war. Not only did Austria and Germany espouse the creation of an independent Poland when Russia occupied this territory, Russia did the same when the Central Powers conquered Polish areas. Inasmuch as almost all Polish political leaders imagined that Galicia and Right-Bank Ukraine belonged to Poland, Poland’s future determined Ukraine’s fate. And Ukraine’s overall political destiny, not just in Galicia, influenced Poland’s.

Despite the Austrian political leadership’s efforts to appease the empire’s non-German and non-Hungarian peoples, its military command suspected large numbers of Czechs, Serbs, Romanians, and Ukrainians in their ranks of disloyalty. The war unleashed a torrent of hysterical lies, misrepresenta­tions, and defamations, not always expressed in public. Since the Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia possessed compatriots across the border in the Russian Empire and because the Austrian generals exaggerated the influence of the Russophile orientation among them, these military leaders assumed at the outbreak of the war that the Ukrainians sympathized with or would ac­tively collaborate with the Russians. Acting on these false assumptions, they sent thousands of Ukrainians far from the front. The Hungarian gov­ernment also suspected their Romanian, Serbian, and Ruthenian/Rusyn/ Ukrainian populations, especially those who lived in or near the war zones.⁶⁶