National Minorities in Ukraine

Another important feature of the socioeconomic modernization of Ukraine was the great changes that it brought about in the ethnic composition of its population. As long as the economy of the land was almost exclusively agrarian, its population remained overwhelmingly Ukrainian.

Since the union with Moscow in 1654, Russians were a common sight in Ukraine, but they had never been very numerous. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the most numerous category of Russians in Ukraine was the soldiers on garrison duty. In fact, the word moskal (Muscovite) by which Ukrainians designated Russians was synonymous with “soldier.” Smaller subgroups of Russians included nobles who had been granted estates in the south, tsarist bureaucrats, and, on the Left Bank especially, merchants. In the late 18th to early 19th centuries, when land became available in the south, a steady although by no means massive, stream of Russian settlers, mostly religious dissenters such as the Old Believers, moved into the new territories. Only in the late 19th century, in connection with the industrial boom, did Russians come to Ukraine in great numbers, particularly to the industrial and commercial centers of the south. Voluntary Russification, especially widespread among the Ukrainian gentry, also enlarged the number of Russians. As noted earlier, by 1897 they constituted 11.7% of the land’s population.

Convinced that Ukraine was essentially a Russian land and that theirs was a superior culture, Russians generally made no effort to master the Ukrainian language and showed little respect for or interest in Ukrainian customs and traditions. They insisted on the Russification of all aspects of Ukrainian life and, in the large cities at least, they attained their goal. By and large, the attitude of the Ukrainian peasantry toward the Russians was not sharply antagonistic. Because Russian newcomers were concentrated in the cities and factories, contacts between them and the Ukrainian countryside were limited. Furthermore, Ukrainian peasants realized that Russian peasants and workers were exploited as mercilessly as they were. Finally, a common Orthodox religion and the similarity of languages made the gap between the two peoples easier to bridge. This is not to say that Ukrainian peasants were not keenly aware of the distinctions between themselves and the northerners. They frequently referred to Russians, many of whom wore beards, by the derogatory katsap (like a billygoat), while Russians returned the compliment by referring to Ukrainians with the equally contemptuous khokhol (a lock of hair on a Cossack’s shaven head). It was, however, among the Ukrainian intelligentsia that the resentment against Russian cultural hegemony was most keenly felt. The Poles

Poles had lived in Ukraine much longer than the Russians. In the 16th and 17th centuries they participated in the colonization of the Ukrainian frontier and although the uprising of 1648 drove them from the Left Bank, they managed to retain control of the Right Bank. They viewed this region as an integral part of Poland – even after the integration of the area into the Russian Empire in 1795. Their great influence on the Right Bank certainly did not depend on their large numbers: in the mid 19th century they totaled only about 500,000 and their share of Ukraine’s population dropped from 10% in 1795 to 6.4% in 1909.

Even the emancipation failed to shake the hold of such fabulously wealthy Polish magnates as the Potocki, Czartoryski, Branicki, and Zaslawski families, each of which owned lands totaling hundreds of thousands of acres. With vast capital at their disposal, they easily switched to hired labor and mechanized farming when the need arose. But the great majority of Polish nobles found the transition to commercial farming difficult. By the late 19th century, many of them had sold their estates and moved into towns and cities where they became bureaucrats, merchants, and members of the liberal professions. Nonetheless, in 1904, over 46% of the private landholdings and 54% of the industrial output on the Right Bank were still in Polish hands.

Tensions between Polish landowners and Ukrainian peasants had always been great. The emancipation ameliorated the situation somewhat. Later, when the Poles rebelled against the Russians in 1863, some of them made an effort to win the Ukrainian peasants over by issuing the so-called golden decrees whereby the rebels claimed that they, not the tsar, were granting the peasants land and freedom. In general, the results of these efforts were minimal. Few Ukrainian peasants joined their Polish lords, and about 300,000 volunteered for police duty against the rebels.

Some Polish nobles had an interest in Ukrainians that was not politically or economically motivated. They and their ancestors had lived in Ukraine for centuries. Consequently, in the mid 19th century, a few nobles developed a predilection for things Ukrainian. For example, Tymko Padura took to writing folk poetry in Ukrainian, and the “Ukrainian school” of Polish writers from the Right Bank, which included the famous Juliusz Slowacki, often wrote on Ukrainian themes.

Of all the larger minorities in Ukraine, the Jews had lived there the longest. Already present during the Kievan period, they moved into Ukraine in great numbers in the 16th and 17th centuries under the aegis of Polish nobles. But while they were ancient inhabitants of Ukraine, they were relatively new subjects of the tsars. Only in 1795 was the Right Bank, where almost all the Ukrainian Jews lived, incorporated into the Russian Empire. The tsarist government adopted a unique policy towards its large number of new Jewish subjects: in order to prevent them from competing with Russian merchants, it forbade Jews to reside in Russia proper. The Jewish zone of residence, called the Pale of Settlement, was limited to their original homelands in the newly acquired western borderlands of Lithuania, Belorussia, and much of Right-Bank Ukraine. Despite some modifications, the Pale remained in effect until 1917.

Throughout the 19th century, especially in its latter part, the Jews experienced a tremendous rise in population. Between 1820 and 1880, while the general population of the empire rose by 87%, the number of Jews increased by 150%. On the Right Bank, this rise was even more dramatic: between 1844 and 1913 the number of its inhabitants rose by 265% while the Jewish population increased by 844%! Religious sanctions of large families, less exposure to famine, war, and epidemics, and a low mortality rate because of communal self-help and the availability of doctors largely accounted for this extraordinary increase. Of the 5.2 million Jews in the empire at the end of the 19th century, over 2 million lived in Ukraine. The disproportionately large number of Jews living in Ukraine is evident from the fact that although in the empire as a whole they constituted 4% of the population, in Ukraine they were 8% – and on the Right Bank 12.6% – of the population.

Traditionally, the Jews were an urban people. Tsarist restrictions against their movement into the countryside reinforced this condition. Therefore, it is not surprising that over 33% of the urban inhabitants of Ukraine were Jewish, and in the small towns (shtetls) of the Right Bank, the percentage reached as high as 70–80%. Tight-knit, insular, traditionalist Jewish shtetl communities were a world unto themselves. There, Jewish Orthodox religion, culture, and language (Yiddish) dominated. Rabbis and communal self-governing bodies (kahals) were most influential, and contact with the “outside” world was restricted to economic transactions. The poverty and overcrowding of the shtetls was proverbial, for the Jewish communities simply had more people than their economies could support. To survive in the teeming provincial towns, which had limited opportunities for earning a living and intense competition, required industry, marketable skills, and quick wits.

About three-quarters of Ukrainian Jews made their livelihood as petty traders and artisans. Although by no means wealthy, these shopkeepers, tavern owners, tailors, shoemakers, and jewelers constituted the Jewish “middle class.” The unskilled laborers, many of whom barely subsisted on odd jobs and charity, accounted for only about 20% of their labor force. The elite consisted of two subgroups: on the one hand were the rabbis and other greatly respected “men of the book” who exerted great influence in the community and, on the other, the wealthy capitalists. In 1872 these wealthy Jews owned about 90% of Ukraine’s distilleries, 56% of the saw mills, 48% of tobacco production, and 33% of the sugar refineries. As educational opportunites improved, many Jews joined the secular, Russified, intelligentsia, especially in such fields as law and medicine. And as industry developed, great numbers of Jews (38% by some estimates) found work in the factories.

But changes also increased the difficulties that confronted the Jews of the empire.

In general, the relationship between Ukrainians and Jews was not – nor could it hardly have been – a friendly one. For centuries, the two peoples found themselves in structurally antagonistic (yet mutually dependent) positions. To the Jew, a Ukrainian represented the backward, ignorant village; to a Ukrainian, a Jew epitomized the foreign, exploitative city that bought his produce cheaply and sold him goods dearly. Ukrainian peasants feared Russian officials and hated Polish landlords; Jews, for want of other means of making a living, often acted as their representatives or middlemen. Culturally, the Jews and Ukrainians had little in common, and their religions only widened the gap between them.

The relationship between their respective intelligentsias was hardly better. In terms of national orientation, the Jewish intelligentsia saw only two options: either to assimilate into the dominant Russian culture or to work to develop a separate Jewish identity. Developing closer ties with the Ukrainians, who had little to offer Jews culturally, economically, or politically, seemed hardly worthwhile. The Ukrainian intelligentsia, for its part, resented the tendency of Jews, who had lived among Ukrainians for centuries, to identify with the stronger Russians. Although there were attempts at mutual understanding and even cooperation – such as those made by Mykhailo Dra-homanov and Aron Liberman or Symon Petliura and other Ukrainian socialists on the one hand, and the prominent Zionist Vladimir Zhabotinsky on the other – they had little impact. Thus, the two communities continued to live in close proximity but in almost total isolation from each other. Moreover, many of their members were more inclined to harbor old resentments than to cultivate common interests and mutual understanding.

Three major features characterized the socioeconomic development of Eastern Ukraine in the late 19th century: economic stagnation in much of the countryside, dramatic industrialization in Kryvyi Rih and the Donets basin, and the growing presence in the land of non-Ukrainians. As we have seen, it was the non-Ukrainians, largely Russians and Jews, who were most closely associated with industrial expansion and urban growth. For their part, the Ukrainians remained in the countryside. Consequently a socioeconomic bipolarity emerged: Ukrainians were identified, even more so than before, with the stagnant, backward village, while non-Ukrainians dominated the dynamic, modernizing sectors of the society. To a considerable extent this crucial division still exists today.