Populism (1840s to 1880s)

Beginning with the 1840s, the leadership of the Ukrainian movement passed into the hands of a new social group, that of the intelligentsia, composed in part of declasse nobles, in part of elements risen from the lower classes.

The standard-bearer of this new epoch was Shevchenko, the poet of genius who, born a serf, was an artist by profession. Shevchenko synthesized national pathos and social protest with a deeply religious (though radically Undogmatic and unorthodox) yearning for the ethical regeneration of man and society. Shevchenko’s thinking was strongly in­fluenced by the ideas of the previous epoch, such as the conception of Ukrainian history presented in Istoriia Rusov. What was new with him was his revolutionary passion, his implacable condemnation of that mod­ern Babylon, tsarist Russia. He sharply criticized the Ukrainian nobles who, he felt, had dishonoured themselves by their submissiveness to the tsar and by their support of serfdom. Of course it would be wrong to look for a systematic political program from a poet. Nonetheless Shev­chenko’s role was not simply that of an influential literary figure; as a great spiritual leader he might better be compared with the Hebrew prophets. His steadfastness under persecution gave Shevchenko the halo of a martyr. In his person the Ukrainian national movement of the nine­teenth century achieved for the first time a dimension which surpassed the limits of Little Russian regionalism.

Two consecutive stages of development may be distinguished during the populist epoch, the “Romantic” (the generation of the Cyrillo- Methodian Society) and the “positivist” (the generation of the Stara Hromada [Old Community]).

It must be pointed out that fundamentally the populist epoch placed its emphasis on the “people,” which was equated with the peasantry. From this comes the very designation of populism Qiarodnytstvo), which came into current usage in the 1860s. It is no accident that the favourite field of scholarly study of the time was ethnography, which also influenced the historiography of the period. The historians of the populist school, from Kostomarov to Lazarevsky and Antonovych, interpreted the past of Ukraine as a series of elemental popular movements for social freedom and especially for the free possession of the soil. The retrospective na­tional consciousness of the aristocratic period, facing backward to the former Cossack statehood, had been helpless against the reality created by the incorporation of Ukraine into the Russian Empire. Now the center of gravity was shifted to a living object of great promise—the people. The populist intelligentsia felt the call to contribute to the emancipation of the people, who had only been freed from serfdom in 1861, and to the raising of their social and cultural status.

The failure of the 1830-31 insurrection had spurred a great deal of soul-searching among Polish patriots. Accusing voices were raised call­ing attention to the aristocratic character of the revolution and the lack of popular support as the chief reasons for the catastrophe. So a new politi­cal movement was bom among the Poles, one which attempted to win “the people” for the national cause by hoisting the flag of the emancipa­tion of the peasants. The underground activities of this new Polish move­ment spread also to Ukrainian lands. The conspirators did not let them­selves be deterred by the fact that here, in Ukraine, the people whom they tried to approach had no use for Polish patriotism.

The concentration on the “people” led to a certain weakness and one­sidedness in the populist ideology. Aspects of the Ukrainian cause which did not correspond to the “popular” were neglected. For instance, the medieval Rus’ of the princes was largely effaced from the historical horizon; in studies of the Cossack epoch, the efforts of the Hetmans and the Starshyna to create a state were deprecated, while even clearly destructive whims of the masses were condoned.

The narrowness of the social base of Ukrainian populism was the cause of its weakness in practical politics. The Ukrainian movement, or

INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF MODERN UKRAINE ^{t t}Ukrainophilism, ” as it was called at that time, wished to carry its mes­sage to the masses, but in fact its influence was limited to scattered groups here and there, composed almost exclusively of representatives of the intellectual professions: teachers, students, zemstvo officials, etc. The Ukrainophiles, who were a minority even among the educated classes of Ukraine, had a very limited influence on the great social changes that were taking place in the Ukrainian lands at that time. The transition to capitalism did not produce a nationalist Ukrainian bour­geoisie; on the contrary, the development of railroads, industry, and commerce linked Ukraine more closely to the Russian Empire. In this re­spect there was a retrogression in comparison with previous decades, when the wealthiest and socially leading class in Left-Bank Ukraine—the nobility—still had a certain traditional feeling for Ukraine. But in the second half of the nineteenth century the Russification of Ukraine reached its apogee, particularly in the cities. And yet, it was at this very time that, in the darkness, the seeds of 1917 were being sown.

The weakness of Ukrainophilism was reflected in the modesty of its practical platform:

All the dreams of the Ukrainophiles were limited to the furthering of Little Russian literature and the publication of educational mate­rials in the Little Russian language in order to extend useful knowl­edge among the people.⁵

In an article by Kostomarov, published anonymously in Herzen’s Kolokol, and therefore free from tsarist censorship, we find a brilliant apology for the independence of the Ukrainian historical process from Russia and Poland, but the political desiderata are limited to two points: the unhindered development of Ukrainian literature and the use of the Ukrainian language in the elementary schools.

In spite of the modesty of these aims, it was precisely during the populist epoch that the tsarist government began its systematic persecu­tion of the Ukrainian movement. Its first victim was the Cyrillo- Methodian Society, which was suppressed in 1847. The Polish uprising of 1863 was the occasion for further repression, even though all vocal Ukrainians had opposed Polish claims to Right-Bank Ukraine. However, there can be no doubt that, in trying to suppress the Ukrainian move­ment, the Russian bureaucrats were, in their own way, showing far­sightedness. Behind the actual weakness of the Ukrainian populist move­ment lay a great potential force which could have been developed almost instantaneously once the movement spread from the intelligentsia to the masses. Even during the few years between the Crimean War (1855) and the Polish uprising (1863), symptoms of the beginning of the penetration of Ukrainian ideas among the masses multiplied. For instance, educa­tional and other literature in Ukrainian sold to the peasants many times faster than did writings in Russian. The Russian chauvinists, including some Russified Ukrainians, excited by the Polish insurrection of 1863, launched a furious campaign against the phantom of “Ukrainian sepa­ratism.’’ These incitements led to the Valuev ukaz of 1863 (named after its author, then minister of the interior), which forbade popular educa­tional and religious publications in Ukrainian. It aimed at creating a wall between the Ukrainophile intelligentsia and the peasants. This and simi­lar measures, although unavailing in the long run, did delay the forma­tion of a modern Ukrainian national consciousness for decades.

During the relatively liberal reign of Alexander II the Ukrainian move­ment made further progress, and during the 1870s it took on a definitely political hue. A network of conspiratorial communities (hromady) under the leadership of the Kievan (or Old) Hromada covered all the principal cities OfUkraine. The Ukrainian movement created a position for itself in scholarly associations (The South-Western Section of the Imperial Rus­sian Geographical Society) and in the press (the daily Kievskii Telegraf, published, of course, in Russian). The literary, and especially the scholarly, production of those years was important. One might even speak of the beginnings of Ukrainian foreign policy: the regulation of re­lations with Galicia and the action taken in connection with the Balkan Wars. At the same time contact with the Russian opposition, both revolu­tionary and liberal, was intensified, and both obtained considerable sup­port in Ukraine. Many of the members of the terrorist Narodnaia volia organization, including its leader, Andrei Zheliabov, were Ukrainians by birth. The Ukrainian zemstvos, particularly those of Chernihiv and Kharkiv, were tinder-boxes for the Russian constitutional movement. In 1879 a secret conference took place in Kiev; the leaders of the Hromada offered their mediation between zemstvo liberals and the terrorist “Executive Committee.’’ The purpose was to create a common front of all forces of opposition to autocracy. The conference failed, but this event shows that in the 1870s there was already a tendency among all democratic groups of “South Russia’’ to unite on a platform provided by the Ukrainian national movement. This foreshadowed the situation of 1917.

These many-sided and successful activities gave the Ukrainian patriots a feeling of assurance and self-confidence. Leading the effort to make the Ukrainian movement political was Mykhailo Drahomanov, the author of its first systematic political program. Drahomanov envisaged the solution of the Ukrainian problem in the democratization and federalization of Russia and Austria-Hungary, and in an alliance of Ukrainians with the progressive forces of all the peoples of Eastern Europe, the Great Rus-

INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF MODERN UKRAINE sians not excluded, but under a guarantee of the organizational indepen­dence of the Ukrainian movement.

Deeply disturbed by this development, the Russian government pro­ceeded to an anti-Ukrainian counterattack in 1875-6. In a series of well- planned measures, the legal forms of social and cultural activity were de­stroyed, the Ukrainian language banned in publications (Ukase of Ems), and the leaders banished. The first Ukrainian reaction was resistance; the Russian opposition was approached more closely, and Drahomanov was sent abroad to create a political center for propaganda in the West. But the Hromada’s hopes that the storm would soon blow over, and that the Russian Empire would be transformed into a constitutional regime, were not fulfilled. On the contrary, Alexander Ill’s accession to the throne sta­bilized absolutism and reaction. Under the blows of repression, the morale of the Ukrainian movement collapsed. The exuberant optimism of the 1870s was replaced by depression and passivity. As the slogan of the times, the old one of the “apolitical and purely cultural” character of the Ukrainian movement was again taken up. In the 1860s this had been suited to the immaturity of the movement, but after the great upswing of the 1870s it was unquestionably a retreat. But by this withdrawal the Ukrainophiles at least managed to preserve the continuity of scholarly work in various fields, even if these studies were written in Russian and treated problems innocent of any suspicion of immediacy (cf. the review Kievskaia starina). But the national movement became isolated from so­ciety at large. For the loyalist and conservative elements, its reputation for political unreliability and democracy made it suspect, while its politi­cal colourlessness made it lose control of the radical youth, which fell under the influence of the Russian revolutionaries. As a publicist of the next generation expressed it, “The tactics of the Ukrainophiles were such that they alienated the entire young generation of Ukraine, while at the same time they did not know how to win the sympathies of old Ukraine [i.e., of the nobility].”⁶ In the 1880s the Ukrainian movement shrank to a narrow rivulet, but it did succeed, under the cautious leadership of An- tonovych, in preserving the kernel of the Kiev Hromada and an em­bryonic organizational network throughout the land.

From Switzerland Drahomanov continued his brilliant journalistic and propagandistic activities. His efforts gave the Western public their first authentic information about the Ukrainian movement and its persecution in Russia. But Drahomanov⁵S sharp attacks against absolutism seemed inopportune to the Kiev Hromada, because they aggravated the govern­ment and contradicted the Hromada’s policy of appearing politically in­nocuous. This led to a break between Drahomanov and his Kiev sponsors in the mid-1880s. The little emigre group clustered around Drahomanov

was the seed of the Ukrainian socialist movement, but at that time its direct organizational influence reached only Galicia.