Methodological Approaches

In studying Ukrainian prerevolutionary history, stress ought to be placed primarily on socio-economic developments and on the evolution of social thought; a politically oriented historical investigation would be relatively unproductive.

Not having an independent state or even such a semi-independent autonomous body politic as, for instance, the Poles possessed in the Con­gress Kingdom, the Ukrainians were unable to participate in politics on a governmental level: they were not directly connected with the great world of diplomacy and military affairs. The international order estab­lished in Ukrainian lands in the last third of the eighteenth century by the Russian annexation of the Black Sea coastal areas as well as of the Right Bank (i.e., of the territories west of the Dnieper), and by the annexation of Galicia to the Austrian Empire, remained basically unchanged until 1914. This long period of stability made any idea of international change seem remote and unrealistic to contemporaries.⁶

Conditions in the Russian Empire were such that an overt political life on a non-governmental level was also impossible, at least until 1905. In this respect, Ukrainians in Austria had a great advantage over the major­ity of their compatriots, who lived under Russian rule. After the 1848 Revolution, Galician Ukrainians took part in elections, possessed a par­liamentary representation, a political press, parties, and civic organiza­tions. In Russian Ukraine political strivings could be expressed only through illegal channels, namely, through underground groups, whose activities were necessarily of limited scope. In the long run it was, how­ever, inevitable that changes of social structure and intellectual trends were to have political effects.

The two great stages in prerevolutionary Ukraine’s social development were the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and the rise of modern industrial­ism toward the end of the century.

Agrarian overpopulation and the harsh lot of industrial workers led to a sharpening of social tensions in Ukraine. A characteristic of the Ukrain­ian scene, a phenomenon to be found also in other “non-historical” countries, was the overlapping of social and national conflicts. The great landowners, capitalists, and industrial entrepreneurs were predominantly members of the local Russian, Polish, and Jewish minorities, or foreign­ers. Thus the coming revolution was to be simultaneously a social and a national one. The Ukrainian national movement was not limited to any one social class. It had individual supporters among members of the up­per classes, and it reached into the class of industrial workers. Still, it found the strongest response among the middle strata: the prosperous peasantry, the rural intelligentsia and semi-intelligentsia, the emerging native petty bourgeoisie of the towns. Close links existed between Ukrainian nationalism and the co-operative movement, which was grow­ing at great speed in the years preceding World War I. The larger cities retained a predominantly Russian character, and this was to be a great handicap to Ukraine during the Revolution.

The impact of the economic policies of the Russian government on Ukraine must also be considered. Some economic historians active dur­ing the early Soviet period (M. Slabchenko, M. Iavorsky, O. Ohloblyn, M. Volobuiev) used the term “colonialism” to define Ukraine’s position in relation to the former Empire. This concept, borrowed from the Marx­ist arsenal, was not altogether well chosen. Tsarist Russia possessed gen­uine colonies, such as Transcaucasia and Turkestan, but Ukraine could not be counted among them. The administration looked rather on Ukraine as belonging to the core of the “home provinces’’ of European Russia. The economic progress of Ukraine (“South Russia’’) was in many respects faster than that of the Great Russian center. Nevertheless, the economic policies of the government were mostly adverse to Ukrain­ian interests. Ukraine, for instance, carried an excessive load of taxation, since the revenues collected in Ukraine did not return to the country but were spent in other parts of the empire. The construction of railroad lines, which was dominated by strategic considerations, as well as the existing system of freight rates and customs duties, failed to take Ukrain­ian needs into account. Contemporaries were well aware of the issue. It is noteworthy that the industrial groups of the “South’’ —who were of non­Ukrainian background and had no connections with the nationalist move­ment-tended to form regional syndicates and associations for the defence of the area’s economic interests, neglected by the government of St. Petersburg.⁹

The other major field of prerevolutionary Ukrainian history was social thought. It is a well-attested historical rule that in countries that lack po­litical liberty there exists a tendency toward an “ideologization” of politics and, simultaneously, toward a politicization of cultural and intel­lectual life.

The magnitude of the task facing Ukrainian intellectuals can hardly be exaggerated. The consistent policy of the tsarist government—which, in this respect, found full support in Russian public opinion, including its left wing —was to deny the very existence of a Ukrainian nationality. Those elements of the Ukrainian heritage which could be assimilated were declared to belong to the “all-Russian” nation, of which the “Little Russians’’ were a tribal branch; the other elements of the Ukrain­ian heritage, which were unfit for such an expropriation, were systemati­cally suppressed and obliterated. For instance, determined to relegate the Ukrainian language to the level of a peasant dialect, the Russian govern­ment imposed in 1876 a general prohibition of all publications in Ukrain­ian. Against these tremendous pressures, Ukrainian linguists and ethnog­raphers defended the idea of a Ukrainian ethnic individuality on an equal footing with the other national groups of the Slavic family; Ukrainian historians, from Kostomarov to Hrushevsky, demonstrated the continuity of their country’s past development from prehistoric times to the present.

A national consciousness implies not only a system of ideas of a more or less rational, cognitive nature but also an emotional commitment, which is more likely to be stimulated by poets and writers than by scholars.

As far as the Ukrainian political program is concerned, its foundations were laid in 1846—7 by a circle of young intellectuals in Kiev, known under the name of the Cyrillo-Methodian Society. Gradually revised and elaborated, it remained the platform of the the Ukrainian movement until the Revolution. Its classical exposition is to be found in the writings of the outstanding Ukrainian thinker of the second half of the nineteenth century, Mykhailo Drahomanov. Divergencies of views between indivi­duals and groups were inevitable, but there was in the Ukrainian move­ment a far-reaching consent on essentials. These included: a strong in­sistence on radical social reform, but without the spirit of fierceness and exclusiveness of many Russian revolutionaries; emphasis on political liberty and Western-style constitutionalism; a program of federalist re­construction of the Empire as a means of satisfying Ukrainian national aspirations without necessitating a complete break with Russia. How­ever, from the 1890s on, there existed an alternative program of separ­atism and state sovereignty of Ukraine. It gained the acceptance of the Galician Ukrainian community, but in Russian Ukraine the majority of the spokesmen remained faithful to the traditional federalist programme. They depended on the hope that a future democratic Russia would be able to divest itself of the tsarist traditions of imperialism, centralism, and national oppression. The final conversion to the idea of Ukraine’s in­dependent statehood was effected in 1917, under the impact of experi­ences with Russian “revolutionary democracy.” The evolution of Ukrainian political thought from federalism to separatism resembles the development of the Czech national program from Palacky to Masaryk.

It is important to take notice of the ideological terms in which Ukrain­ian thinkers defined their nation’s opposition to the Russian Empire. The first to formulate the issue was the former leader of the Cyrillo- Methodian Society, Mykola Kostomarov: he contrasted the Kievan tradi­tion of liberty and individualism with the Muscovite tradition of author­itarianism and of the subordination of the individual to the collective.¹⁰ Stripped of Kostomarov’s romantic terminology, the problem was re­peatedly restated by later Ukrainian publicists and political theorists. They saw Ukraine, because of its deeply ingrained libertarian attitude, as an organic part of the European community of nations, of which despotic Muscovy-Russia had never been a true and legitimate member. “Most of the national differences between Ukraine and Muscovy can be explained by the fact that until the eighteenth century [i.e., until the establishment of Russian rule] Ukraine was linked to Western Europe. In spite of the handicaps caused by the Tatar invasions, Ukraine participated in Europe’s social and cultural progress.’’¹¹ These words OfDrahomanov, a left-wing liberal and socialist, are paralleled by those of a conservative thinker, V. Lypynsky: “The basic difference between Ukraine and Moscow does not consist in language, race or religion,... but in a dif­ferent, age-old political structure, a different method of organization of the elite, in a different relationship between the upper and the lower so­cial classes, between state and society.’’¹² Ukrainian thinkers believed that the emancipation of their country, whether through federalism or separatism, would accelerate the liberalization of Eastern Europe as a whole. According to their conviction, the Centralistic structure of the empire was the base on which tsarist despotism rested. The break-up of this monolithic unity, whose maintenance required a system of universal oppression, would release the creative, libertarian forces of all peoples, not excepting the Russians.

An investigation of Ukrainian pre-revolutionary intellectual history should not omit those scholars of Ukrainian origin who worked at Rus­sian universities, published their works in Russian, and are therefore usu­ally regarded as Russian. Let us name but a few of these men: the philos­ophers P. Iurkevych (Iurkevich) and V. Lisevych (Lesevich); the econo­mists M. Ziber, M. Iasnopolsky, and M. Tuhan-Baranovsky (Tugan- Baranovsky); the sociologist M. Kovalevsky; the jurist B. Kistiakovsky; the linguist O. Potebnia; the literary scholar D. Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky; the military theorist M. Drahomyrov (Dragomirov). The list could easily be expanded. The question arises: with what right can these “luminaries of Russian science’’ be claimed for the Ukrainian intellectual tradition? In studying the lives of these men we find that while skirting an overt identification with the Ukrainian cause, which would have been catas­trophic for their careers, they remained in touch with the nationalist movement, as its “secret disciples.’’ If that were all, their Ukrainian connection would be of only biographical relevance. More important is the fact that the structure of thought of these scholars betrays their Ukrainian bias, although it is often expressed in a subtle way, not imme­diately perceptible to an outsider. One example which illustrates the point must here suffice. It refers to F. Mishchenko (1848-1906), the brilliant student of ancient history who was particularly concerned with the questions of Greek communal self-government and federalism. Ac­cording to a recent Soviet study, “in this stubborn insistence on the fed­eralist principle we can detect the influence of the ideas of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism. ’¹³

The emergence of the modern Ukrainian nation may be understood as the outcome of an interaction of social forces and ideas. The social trans­formation taking place in Ukrainian lands in the course of the nineteenth century prepared the people for the acceptance of the nationalist ideology elaborated by several generations of intellectuals. The policy of tsarist Russia consisted in containing the activities of the intellectual circles while upholding a system of paternalistic supervision over the masses, which was to protect them from “contamination” and to keep them in a state of perpetual civic infancy. This policy was relatively successful in that the formation of the modern Ukrainian nation was delayed for dec­ades. But it could not be prevented, as the emergence of an independent republic in 1917 was to prove.