Local Identities
Given the military operations of the First World War and the soldiers' absence from home, regional identity - feelings of closeness to compatriots and loyalty to the rodina, which in our sources more often meant a small fatherland than a great state - took on particular significance.
In such a context, group loyalty took shape according to the formula: family (first immediate, then extended, including godparents, and so on), village, county, gubernia. In the case of our authors who participated in the First World War (here we should also include Andrii Rubel, from whose letters his brother Vasyl quotes generously in his 'History'), their compatriots were above all fellow villagers (from Bilozirka, Petrovka, and other settlements), then those from the same county (Melitopol), followed by those from the same gubernia (Tavriia). Andrii Rubel found it difficult to part with the boys from his village.15 Oleksandr Zamrii and Ivan Yaroshenko also write about informal contacts and mutual assistance among compatriots.16 Throughout his military career, Mikhail Alekseev stayed in close touch with his compatriots and even impressed his superiors by agreeing to command a platoon feared by other young commanders and made up mostly of 'Tavriians.' Compatriots whom the authors of the Zaporizhia collection concordantly identify as having come from the Tavriia gubernia are contrasted with those from other gubernias and regions of the empire: residents of Penza, Siberians, Muscovites, and so on. At times they are also contrasted with representatives of other ethnic groups, especially Moldavians and Poles, but as a rule national differentiation among compatriots themselves remains little articulated. The compatriots include people with both Ukrainian and Russian surnames, and the authors' attitudes to them are not determined by ethnic or national solidarity. Andrii Rubel, for example, was extraordinarily glad to encounter a Jewish compatriot.17Not only did the category of compatriots not accent ethnonational and religious differences among those who came from the same area, but it was also potentially capable of giving rise to a system of loyalties in which people from Katerynoslav would be as 'foreign' to Tavriians as those from the Kursk gubernia. The next storey, or even roof, in such a structure is not a modern national but a transnational one, or an imperial identity. Our authors associated that level of identity with the term 'Russia' or rodina when the matter at hand did not concern the small fatherland (the village) but the defence of the state. In the context of the war, Russia stood opposed to Germany and Austria, and the cases noted by our authors in which 'Austrians' spoke Ukrainian, 'Russian Germans' fought on the side of the tsar, 'Russian Poles' readily went over to the 'Germans,' and 'German Poles' spoke Russian with a Polish accent remain in our sources with no particular explanation.18 In the soldiers' mentality, wartime conditions and official propaganda tended to level national differences within the same political and military camp while highlighting differences of state and policy with regard to the opponent, who was constantly 'othered' and demonized under conditions of military conflict.
In the Romanov army, the idea of defending the larger rodina was popularized, and the formation of imperial identity proceeded at an accelerated pace. Conditions for the development of the pan-Russian project were thus particularly favourable. For example, an officer imputed to Andrii Rubel that his surname sounded German. Ultimately, in one of the letters notifying Rubel's family of his demise, he was given an authentically Russian name, Porublev. Andrii, who initially complained in his letters from the army that the soldiers were being 'driven' into battle, later began to write that the rodina, Holy Rus', had to be defended and generally noted that he was leading a hero's life. Having found it so difficult to part with his fellow villagers at the beginning of the war, he later enjoined his younger brother not to long for his village comrades - after all, everyone was a comrade in the army. And indeed, when Andrii was killed, there was not a single Tavriian among the comrades who notified his family of his death.19