Modernism (from the 1890s to the First World War)

The period of the quarter-century before the First World War does not have a fixed name in Ukrainian historical literature. But there is no doubt that it marks a separate and important step in the development of Ukrain­ian national consciousness and political thought, clearly distinct from both the previous populist epoch and the following one of the Ukrainian Revolution.

Two factors had an exceptional influence on the Ukrainian cause at that time. The first was the progressive weakening of tsarist absolutism and of the Russian state apparatus; the second was the economic flower­ing OfRussian Ukraine, its rapid industrialization, and the rise in the gen­eral standard of living of the population. The undoubted economic prog­ress had a sinister side, however, in the proletarianization of the landless peasants on the one hand and in the mushrooming of speculative capital­ism on the other, which sharpened the social contrasts in the country.

The intelligentsia continued to be the principal channel of the Ukrain­ian movement. But in the 1890s a new generation appeared, one which, in comparison with its populist fathers, was not only numerically stronger, but also, as a result of the general change in the political atmo­sphere, more courageous and energetic. From this generation arose a gal­axy of gifted persons who were later destined to play a leading role in the Ukrainian revolution. Probably the most representative figure of that generation was Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the great scholar and organizer of scientific studies, the outstanding politician and journalist.

In that epoch Dnieper Ukraine saw the beginnings of Ukrainian party differentiations and organizations. The first attempts to organize politi­cally in the new way were made by the Brotherhood of the Disciples of Taras (Shevchenko) (Braterstvo Tarasivtsiv) in 1892.

INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF MODERN UKRAINE activity, since both times the Dumas were dissolved soon after election. After the government’s arbitrary alteration of the electoral laws there was no organized Ukrainian group in the third and fourth Dumas, although there were still Ukrainian sympathizers. In any case proof had been given that, with a chance for free expression, the Ukrainian people were ready to give preference to Ukrainian parties and Ukrainian electoral platforms.

The most important achievement of the period was the breaking down of the artificial walls which tsarism had sought to impose between the Ukrainian intelligentsia and the masses. Even after the abolition of serf­dom in 1861, Russian law continued to treat the peasants as a separate class without full rights. But with the spread of elementary education, with the increase in trade between the cities and the villages, and with the growth of a class of well-to-do and “capitalistically” minded peasants, the legal sequestration of the peasants became an anachronism. The Rev­olution of 1905 led to the repeal of at least the crudest forms of discrimi­nation against the peasants. The villages began to awaken to modern po­litical consciousness, and began to support the Ukrainian national idea.

Though everything Ukrainian was forbidden, the social develop­ment was creating an increasingly favourable soil for the national movement by the growth of a rural intelligentsia and a “semi­intelligentsia.” These groups were almost entirely Ukrainian in their consciousness, and when the revolution of 1905 came the movement was in their hands.... After 1907, and especially dur­ing the war, the national movement again became the object of per­secution and suppression. But by that time it was irrepressible. When the pressure of tsarism was lifted it became apparent that practically all the democratic intelligentsia and “semi­intelligentsia” of south-western Russia was conscious of itself as Ukrainian, that the peasants were on the verge of becoming con­scious of the same, and that the Ukraine was going to be an inde­pendent nation.⁷

The national idea also reached, though more slowly, the other classes of society.

In the course of the quarter-century before the First World War the character of Ukrainian literature changed. With the appearance of such writers as Kotsiubynsky, Lesia Ukrainka, Vynnychenko, and others, Ukrainian literature could no longer be regarded as purely “popular”; it had begun to fulfill the sociological requirements of a national literature, i.e., one able to satisfy the many-sided spiritual interests of a diverse modern society.

In that same period, the foundations were laid for scholarly and techni­cal terminologies in Ukrainian. Up to the end of the nineteenth century, Ukrainian literature had been limited, with few exceptions, to poetry and fiction, with subjects taken from country life. Even conscious patriots wrote most of their scholarly and political works in Russian. It was only now that the Ukrainian language became an instrument of scholarship, journalism, and politics.

It is no wonder that about 1905 the idea of the complete class structure of Ukrainian society was formulated.

the Polonized nobility of the Right Bank to return to the Ukrainian na­tion. At first glance this seems like a simple continuation of the khlopomany movement of the 1860s, which had desired the return of the nobility to the people as a radical break from the interests and traditions of the class to which they belonged. But Lypynsky’s position was dif­ferent. Although he certainly did not dream of preserving the anachron­istic class privileges of the aristocracy, he did believe that if the nobles were to place their experience and their cultural and political potential­ities at the service of the Ukrainian cause, they would thereby obtain the moral right to be reintegrated into the new national elite of renascent Ukraine. The essential value of this concept transcends its immediate oc­casion. In seeking the national reorientation of the Polonized or Russified Ukrainian nobility, Lypynsky basically asserted that Ukraine should be composed of all the classes and social groups which every modem nation possesses. This was a true revolution against the political philosophy of the populists, who saw the essence of Ukraine in its plebs.

The progress of national consciousness was reflected in the develop­ment of Ukrainian historiography and historical evaluation. With Hrushevsky and his school, a true turning point was reached in this field.

The aspect of Hrushevsky’s writings which had the greatest ideologi­cal significance was his vindication of the continuity of Ukrainian na­tional development from Kievan Rus’ through the Galician-Volhynian Kingdom, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Cossack state to mod­ern Ukraine. The medieval Kievan state, which had been neglected by Ukrainian historians of the populist school and annexed by Russian his­toriography, was once again integrated into Ukrainian tradition. Since the period of old Rus’ had been the epoch of Kiev’s imperial glory and the climax of its importance in Eastern Europe, this enhanced the Ukrain­ian feeling of national self-esteem.

The second historian to introduce a new viewpoint was Lypynsky, whom we have already mentioned. His studies of the Khmelnytsky pe­riod completely revolutionized the habitual conceptions of the Cossack age. Lypynsky demonstrated that the Khmelnytsky Revolution was not only a peasant and Cossack uprising, but also a political movement of the upper strata of Ukrainian society. It was precisely the aristocratic ele­ments, the nobles and Starshyna who had been treated with suspicion by the populist historians, who had, according to Lypynsky, provided the leadership in the revolution and in the creation of the Cossack state, and who were responsible for the bold and constructive plans and acts of the Khmelnytsky era. Lypynsky introduced into Ukrainian historiography the problems of power, leadership, and the elite.

The growth of national consciousness found its natural culmination in the formulation of the idea of an independent Ukrainian state. By the turn of the century, in 1900, a pamphlet by Mykola Mikhnovsky ap­peared under the self-descriptive title, Samostiina Ukraina. The pamphlet ended with the slogan, “A single, united, free and independent Ukraine from the Carpathians to the Caucasus.” But until 1917 the idea of separatism did not find general acceptance. For one thing, the argu­ments adduced by Mikhnovsky in support of Ukrainian statehood were not ones to impress his contemporaries very deeply. Mikhnovsky, a law­yer by profession, utilized as his chief premise the legal argument of the inalienable political rights of Ukraine in relation to Russia, as fixed in the Treaty of Pereiaslav (1654); as a practical program Mikhnovsky pro­posed a struggle for the revalidation of the “Constitution of Pereiaslav. ” But too long a time had elapsed since the downfall of the Hetmanate for such a policy of legitimism to be practicable. Moreover, Mikhnovsky, unlike Drahomanov and Lypynsky, neither formulated his ideas in pon­derous tomes nor gathered a group of disciples about himself. Thus his raising of the separatist banner remained, at least in Russian Ukraine (in Galicia the situation was somewhat different), an isolated act. The gen­eral drift of the Ukrainian national movement indicated that the issue of statehood was bound to be raised sooner or later, but no one could fore­see that this was to be the case in the comparatively near future. For the time being tsarist Russia, decadent though it was, appeared Unchallenge- ably powerful in comparison with the young Ukrainian forces. For this reason the spokesmen of the Ukrainian cause contented themselves with the traditional call for an autonomous Ukraine in a decentralized and fed­erative Russia. The paramount immediate aim, the struggle against tsar­ism, necessitated an alliance with the Russian democratic groups. Finally, the highly inflamed class conflicts, very perceptible in that pe­riod, delayed the crystallization of the feeling of national solidarity and of a basic community of interests of all Ukrainians, which were neces­sary prerequisites for the creation of a Ukrainian state.

From the days of Shevchenko and the Cyrillo-Methodian Society, the social element had played a tremendous role in the ideology of the Ukrainian movement, in which protest against social injustice was at least as strong a battle cry as that against national enslavement. In the era of modernism this old social tendency definitely took the shape of a so­cialist idea. The overwhelming majority of the younger generation was socialist. It is even possible to speak of this as an ideological fashion, which in many cases was never more than a rather superficial and passing youthful enthusiasm. But behind this fashion there were also quite seri­ous, objective factors: the proletarianization of the landless peasants, the development of industry, and the general sharpening of social contrasts. Thus the ground was prepared for the growth of the socialist movement. But the budding Ukrainian Social-Democratic Labour Party (USDLP)

INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF MODERN UKRAINE did not create an original program corresponding to Ukrainian conditions and clearly differentiating Ukrainian socialism from Russian. There had been very promising beginnings of a specifically Ukrainian school of so­cialism in the 1870s and 1880s in the pioneer work done by Drahomanov and his friends, Serhii Podolynsky and Mykola Ziber. But the emigre character of this group and the breach betwen Drahomanov and the Kiev Hromada had the result that this experiment was practically lost. When, in the 1890s, the Ukrainian movement again raised its head in Russia, its socialist wing did not continue Drahomanov’s line but adopted, from Russian sources, the ready-made formulas of international socialism. One of the results of this Russian influence was an insufficient apprecia­tion of the value of political constitutional freedom. Another negative ef­fect was the fact that the Ukrainian socialists did not know how to inte­grate the socio-economic and national sides of the program. Marxism in general, and the Russian brand in particular, paid very little attention in its doctrine to problems which were of burning importance to Ukrainians as members of a subjugated nation. Of course this does not mean that Ukrainians who were converted to Marxism lost their patriotism. But in their thinking they developed an undigested amalgam of the formulas of a simplified Marxism and a naive, romantic patriotism. On the political scene there appeared the type of revolutionary youth with Marx’s Communist Manifesto in one pocket and Shevchenko’s collected poems, Kobzar, in the other. To be sure, the talented Mykola Porsh, the spiritual leader of the USDLP, tried to adapt Marxism to local conditions, and de­fended the demand for autonomy from a socialist position. But in general the young generation of socialists, the most dynamic force in the Ukrain­ian movement, demonstrated a high degree of confusion in their think­ing, combined with great emotional excitability. These traits, explicable by the immaturity of the group and their lack of a balanced education and of practical experience, were harmless enough as long as their political task was mainly negative, that of undermining the foundations of tsar­ism. It was to be hoped that in due course most of these childhood dis­eases would be outgrown. Nobody could have predicted the tremendous scope of the problems the Ukrainians were to be faced with as a result of the sudden collapse of the Empire in 1917.

The period preceding the First World War was probably the happiest one in all of modern Ukrainian history. This was the time of the rapid and well-rounded growth of the Ukrainian national cause. The obstacles in its path were high enough to serve as a stimulus, but not sufficient to stop progress. Though the destruction of the Cossack state and the Russifica­tion of the Cossack aristocracy had reduced Ukraine to the level of a poli­tically amorphous ethnic mass, now, from this mass, the Ukrainian na­tion was beginning to re-emerge. But the huge dimensions of Ukrainian

territory, the great size of its population, the complexity of the internal and international questions involved, the stern repressive policy of the Russian government and the despotic character of the Empire, which handicapped any free civic activity—all this made the process of rebirth longer and more difficult than for other peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. When the First World War started, the Ukrainian movement in Russia already presented a factor of real power, but it was still only a “movement.” It was not as yet a crystallized nation, as were the Poles, Czechs, or Finns. It was during the Revolution that the modern Ukrain­ian nation was created.