Peasant World
As subjects of two large, contiguous, and multicultural empires, most Ukrainian speakers worked the land, lived in poverty, and did not possess a clear sense of national identity.
The elites promoting modernization lived in the towns and cities, and most identified themselves as Russians or Poles or Jews. But the peasants, a socially conservative group, could not imagine themselves as anything other than men and women working plots of land. They embraced this challenge. Bound closely to the soil, they remained unable or reluctant to move into the neighbouring cities long after their emancipation from serfdom in Austria (1848) or in Russia (1861). Instead, when given the opportunity to improve their economic situation, many preferred to travel long distances, even across continents and oceans, in order to gain larger and better plots.Between 1871 and 1916, nearly 1.5 million peasants left the Right Bank and the Left Bank and settled in southern Siberia, today’s Kazakhstan, and the Far East.5 Their brethren in the Austro-Hungarian Empire responded in the same way. Although small numbers found work in Eastern Galicia’s oil fields, large numbers took advantage of opportunities to go to the United States or Canada.6 Between 400,000 and 700,000 Ukrainian speakers emigrated from Austria-Hungary and the tsarist provinces of Volhynia, Grodno, Siedlce, and Lublin to North America before 1914.7 This complete commitment to the peasant way of life excluded urban and industrial possibilities.
In the Russian Empire, Ukrainian-speaking peasants defined themselves as members of the Orthodox faith who possessed a language different from others (officially: Malorossiiskii, or Little Russian) and whose origins belonged in the distant past. If pressed to identify himself, the peasant - much like Dovzhenko’s father - would most likely reply: “tuteshnyi” (from here) or “pravoslavnyi” (Orthodox).8
As a pre-modern group, peasants retained a solidarity with their own kind.
They defined themselves “not by reference to their own characteristics, but by exclusion, that is, by comparison with ‘strangers.’”9 Very few could clearly assert their group identity; most knew who they were not. They recognized that they were not Jews or Poles. But were they Russians? Although Russians spoke a different (but related East Slavic) language, they remained brothers and sisters in the Orthodox faith.In the Austrian Empire, Ukrainian-speaking peasants in Galicia, Bukovina, and Transcarpathia also identified themselves through the prism of their religion until the late nineteenth century, when the Ukrainian national movement made inroads into the countryside.10 In these areas, it was easier for the Ukrainian-speaking Greek Catholic peasant in Austria-Hungary to differentiate himself from Poles, Germans, and Jews than it was for the Ukrainian-speaking Orthodox peasant in the Russian Empire to distinguish himself from Russian speakers.
The confusion regarding the peasant self, the “other,” and the criteria for distinguishing between the two emerged at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, when the agrarian Ukrainian provinces within the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires embraced industrialization, urbanization, and modernization. This ordeal - psychologically and economically - disoriented the peasants.