New Opportunities and Options

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, a new generation of Ukrainian activists emerged within the Russian Empire. In the summer of 1891, a group of Ukrainian university students formed the secret Brotherhood of Taras (Bratstvo tarasivtsiv), which condemned the Ukrainophile move­ment for engaging only in cultural, not political, matters.

Unlike the young men and women who entered the universities in the 1870s and 1880s and who enthusiastically joined the all-Russian student movement, this new generation formulated their Ukrainian identity and formed their own secret groups. When student protests escalated through­out the Russian Empire in 1899 and politicized most students, they creat­ed the Union of Ukrainian Students (Students’ka hromada). In 1900, a branch of this student group in Kharkov established the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party (RUP). In the same year, RUP published Mykola Mikhnovsky’s pamphlet Samostiina Ukraina (Independent Ukraine), which presented a program for “a single, united, indivisible, free and inde­pendent Ukraine from the Carpathian to the Caucasian mountains.”⁹⁶ Although Mikhnovsky did not precisely define this territory, he vehe­mently declared “Ukraine for Ukrainians.” He asserted that even “if one foreign enemy remained in this territory, we do not have the right to lay down our weapons.”⁹⁷ Although this pamphlet represented a minority view among the small number of nationally conscious Ukrainians, the is­sue of Ukrainian independence emerged. However far-fetched an idea at the beginning of the twentieth century, the tsarist authorities could not stamp out this radical political option.

The idea of Ukrainian independence had developed slowly. Due to the overwhelming concentration of Ukrainian speakers in the countryside, the high level of rural illiteracy, the Orthodox religious faith, and the govern­ment’s prohibitions against publishing in Ukrainian, the Ukrainian move­ment within Russia remained locked in the academic and cultural stages for nearly fifty years. Patriotic agitators, mostly intellectuals from the cit­ies, could not establish a mass national movement in the countryside, the location of its largest potential base of support.

Only as a result of the massive unrest unleashed by the Russian Revolution of 1905 did the tsarist government stop enforcing the discriminatory mea­sures against the Ukrainian language. That year the Imperial Academy of Sciences identified Ukrainian as a language separate from Russian. Spurred by the revolution and official tolerance, activists established many Ukrainian-language newspapers and journals, although readership re­mained small due to the illiteracy and poverty of the majority of the popula­tion. Nevertheless, the Ukrainian national movement slowly gained the sympathy and adherence of the rural intelligentsia, the so-called “Third Element,” in the cooperative movement. They, in turn, attracted some of the peasants. Although the government’s repressions after 1907 circum­scribed the Ukrainian movement’s gains, the rapid expansion of the coop­erative movement in the urban and rural areas before the outbreak of the First World War helped the Ukrainian-speaking peasants to identify with the Ukrainian national movement.⁹⁸

In March 1914, on the centenary of Shevchenko’s birth, popular dem­onstrations with thousands of participants took place in Kiev and Kharkov. These demonstrations - however impressive in light of the Ukrainian movement’s recent history - did not yet represent a socially integrated mass movement.