Regional Variations

Pre-revolutionary Ukraine did not possess territorial unity. In each of the two great empires, Russia and Austria-Hungary, several Ukrainian lands with strongly developed sectional traits may be distinguished.

We may differentiate between those principal Ukrainian lands in which the nationalist movement had taken root in the prerevolutionary era and those which were passive in the process of nation-making. We shall call the latter category marginal Ukrainian lands. The difference be­tween the two was not determined by size, as some of the principal terri­tories (e.g., Bukovyna) were Smallerthan some of the marginal group.

Limitations of space do not permit a discussion of the marginal lands, which included the Kuban territory of Northern Caucasia, the Chelm (Kholm) area in the Congress Kingdom of Poland, and Carpatho-Ukraine (Subcarpathian Ruthenia) in Hungary. There are the following principal Ukrainian territories: in Russia, the Left Bank, Slobodian Ukraine, Southern Ukraine, and the Right Bank; in Austria, Galicia and Bukovyna. Since Ukrainian history is so often approached from a cen- tralistic Moscow-St. Petersburg perspective, an attempt will be made to give special attention to those Ukrainian lands which do not fit into the framework of Russian history and which for this reason are often over­looked by Western scholars.

Left-Bank Ukraine (i.e., the Ukrainian territory east of the Dnieper) corresponded with the area of the former autonomous Cossack State, the so-called Hetmanate. Vestiges of the old institutions survived here until the reign OfNicholas I: the governor-generalship of Little Russia was dis­solved in 1835, and the traditional Ukrainian civil law abolished in 1842; the self-government of the towns, based on the Magdeburg Law, had been suppressed in 1831.

The Ukrainian cultural revival found its first important centre further to the east, in Slobodian Ukraine (Slobozhanshchyna). In the seventeenth century this territory belonged to Muscovy, but was largely uninhabited. It was settled by refugees from Dnieper Ukraine, who brought with them the Cossack system. The Cossack regiments of Slobodian Ukraine re­mained under the direct control of the central government, and did not share in the turbulent political history of the Hetmanate. But Kharkiv, the capital of Slobodian Ukraine, was to become in 1805 the seat of the first modem university in Ukrainian lands. This was achieved with contribu­tions from the local gentry and burghers.¹⁴ In the 1820s and 30s, a group of writers and scholars connected with Kharkiv University laid the foun­dations of Ukrainian vernacular literature and of Ukrainian ethnographic and folkloristic studies. The motive was non-political, but the enthusi­asm for the “folk,” inspired by the Romantic school of Kharkiv, was to become a constituent element of modern Ukrainian nationalism, one of an importance hardly inferior to the traditions of political autonomy which originated in the Left Bank.

Southern Ukraine (the steppes) consisted of the former territory of the Zaporozhian Sich and the possessions of the Crimean Tatars and Turkey. In the eighteenth century this was still largely an uninhabited “no man’s land,’’ and until well into the nineteenth century the territory preserved the character of a frontier country. Besides Ukrainians, the territory at­tracted numerous other settlers: Russians, Germans, Greeks, Bulgarians. No other section of Ukraine had so many ethnic minorities as the South. The Ukrainians of the steppes and of the Black Sea coast, most of whom had never known serfdom, displayed a spirit of self-reliance and enter­prise. It was no accident that during the Civil War peasant anarchism, represented by Nestor Makhno, found many supporters in the South. The South’s participation in the nationalist movement was relatively small; its contribution to the making of modern Ukraine was predominantly eco­nomic. Under the Old Regime the Right Bank was economically, as well as politically, connected with Poland, while the Left Bank and Slobodian Ukraine were turned toward Muscovy. The frontier on the Dnieper sepa­rated the western and the eastern half of the Ukrainian ethnic area. This changed with the opening of the Black Sea ports. Now the trade of both the Right and the Left Banks became oriented toward the South. This was a decisive step toward the economic integration of Ukrainian lands and toward the formation of a unified Ukrainian national economy. The South also became, from the 1880s on, the scene of a mighty develop­ment of mining and heavy industry in the Donets and Kryvyi Rih basins, which induced some writers to call that territory—with some exaggera­tion—a “Ukrainian America.” The South became the economic center of gravity of modem Ukraine.

The historic individuality of the Right Bank (territory west of the Dnieper) was determined by the fact that even after the Russian annexa­tion of 1793 the Polish nobility remained the socially dominant element in the land, and to a large extent preserved this position until 1917.

In turning to the Ukrainian territories of the Habsburg Empire, we shall first mention Bukovyna. This small land, acquired from Moldavia by Austria in 1774, had a diverse population. The Ukrainians predomi­nated in the north, the Romanians in the south; there were also numerous Germans and Jews and a sprinkling of Armenians and Gypsies. German served as a lingua franca among Bukovyna’s motley inhabitants. The easternmost university with German as a language of instruction was at Chernivtsi, the capital of Bukovyna; the city itself seemed a cultural out­post of Vienna. Some local Ukrainian writers started their literary careers in German.

Perhaps the most striking feature in the rebirth of Galician Ukraine was the unique role played by the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church. “This is the only national church which is not a state church, the only one which, while a branch of the Church Universal, is, at the same time, entirely national.... Even unbelievers love the national church, which they regard as a vehicle of incomparable efficacy in the political struggle.”¹⁸ The Eastern Rite drew a clear-cut demarcation line that sep­arated its adherents from the Poles, and the allegiance to Rome was a bul­wark against Russian influence.¹⁹ At the beginning of the nationalist movement, the clergy provided a ready-made leadership for the Ukrain­ian community. This was clearly displayed during the 1848 Revolution, when the Galician Ukrainians (Ruthenians, in the terminology of that time), guided by their bishops and priests, made their political debut. Of utmost sociological importance was the fact that the Greek Catholic clergymen were married, and formed a quasi-hereditary class; in their style of living they resembled a lesser gentry.²⁰ In later times, toward the end of the century, this ecclesiastical hegemony was felt to be inadequate to the needs of a modern society, and was increasingly resented; this led to a strong anti-cIerical, secularist trend. But the lay intelligentsia, who gradually assumed the leadership of the nationalist cause, were largely sons of clerical families. A handicap of the Ukrainian movement in Gali­cia was the poverty and economic backwardness of the land, and even more crippling was the circumstance that political power had rested, since the 1860s, in Polish hands. In a settlement comparable to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise, the Viennese government turned over the administration of Galicia to the Polish ruling class, sacrificing the interests of the Ukrainian nationality.²¹ The Poles used their dominant position to block, by all possible means, the progress of the Ukrainian community. For instance, Polish resistance prevented the creation of a separate Ukrainian university, although at the University of Lviv (Lem­berg) there were several Ukrainian chairs. Still, Austria was a constitu­tional state, and this enabled the Galician Ukrainians to apply civic self­help. In this they achieved signal successes. The country was covered with a dense and ever-expanding network of economic, educational, and gymnastic associations, branching out to every village. The peasant masses, who owed to this work not only an improvement of their living conditions, but also a new feeling of human dignity and civic pride, be­came deeply imbued with the nationalist spirit. The discipline and mili­tancy of the movement were hardened through stubborn, protracted polit­ical warfare against the dominant Polish administration. Gradually, the balance of forces between the two communities began to shift. A turning point was the introduction of universal manhood suffrage by the Austrian electoral reform of 1907; a large Ukrainian representation appeared for the first time in the Vienna Parliament, and the central government was forced to adopt a new policy toward the Polish-Ukrainian dispute. Polish control over the Ukrainian majority in eastern Galicia could no longer be maintained, short of physical violence, and the reform of the province’s constitution appeared to be only a question of time.²² In contrast with Russian Ukraine, where the nationalist movement, although advancing quickly, had not yet succeeded in encompassing the whole people, the Galician Ukrainians were already, before 1914, a fully crystallized na­tional community.

The fact that nineteenth-century Ukraine lacked territorial integration was a sure sign that a Ukrainian nation, in the full meaning of the word, did not exist at that time. But there were many symptoms indicating that the historical trends of the various sections were converging.

All parts of Ukraine (excepting the “marginal” lands) passed through the same stages of growth, which might be labelled the “Age of Nobility,” the “Populist Age,” and the “Modernist Age.” No full presentation of this periodization scheme will be attempted here.²³ But one or two points might be stressed. During the first epoch, which lasted approximately until the middle of the century, the leadership of the soci­ety rested with the nobility of Cossack descent on the Left Bank and in Slobodian Ukraine, with the Polish-Ukrainian nobility on the Right Bank, and with the Greek Catholic clergy, which also formed a sort of hereditary gentry, in Galicia. Populism was strongest in the Ukrainian lands east of the Dnieper, where it partly overlapped with Russian revo­lutionary populism; but analogous currents existed also in the Polish- Ukrainian society of the Right Bank, in the shape of the khlopomany (peasant-lovers) movement, and in Galicia, where its first wave was rep­resented by the narodovtsi (national populists) of the 1860s and 70s, and the second by the Radicals of the 1880s and 90s.

As time went on, co-operation among various Ukrainian lands in­creased steadily. The founding of the first modern nationalist organiza­tion, the Cyrillo-Methodian Society, in 1846 was the result of an inter­penetration of the autonomist tradition of the Left Bank with Slobodian Ukraine’s cultural revival. The integrating economic function of the South has been mentioned. By the turn of the century, the old sectional differences among the Ukrainian lands in the Russian Empire had either disappeared or lost most of their importance.

Differences remained between Galicia and Dnieper (Russian) Ukraine as a whole, and they were deep enough to create considerable political friction during the Revolution. Nevertheless, the relations between Dnieper Ukraine and Galicia offer eminent examples of inter-regional co­operation. Galicia was intellectually rather arid. The ideas which in­spired the Ukrainian rebirth in Galicia came almost without exception from Dnieper Ukraine. The work of outstanding leaders of east Ukrain­ian origin, such as M. Drahomanov and M. Hrushevsky, was closely as­sociated with Galicia and had profound, durable impact there. On the other hand, after the ukase of 1876, which suppressed all overt Ukrainian activities in the Russian Empire, Galicia became the sanctuary of the entire Ukrainian nationalist movement. Works of eastern Ukrainian writers were published in Galicia and smuggled into Russian Ukraine. Tangible nationalist achievements in Galicia served as an encouragement and model to Ukrainian patriots under Russian rule. Galician Ukrainians, while fighting for equality of rights with the Poles, were thinking not only of themselves: they believed that their homeland was destined to be­come the “Piedmont” of a future independent Ukraine.

No issue facing the Ukrainian people in the nineteenth century was more portentous than the dilemma of choosing between assimilation in an all-Russian nation or assertion of separate national individuality. The far-reaching Russification of Ukraine was an obvious fact, and it could not be explained entirely by the repressive measures of the tsarist govern­ment. Russia radiated the tremendous prestige of a great power and of a brilliant imperial civilization. Many Ukrainians, dazzled by this glory, were eager to participate in it. How humble and pitiful appeared what the Ukrainian patriots dared offer in opposition to the splendid juggernaut! How preposterous was the disproportion of forces between those which stood at the disposal of a huge and despotic state and those of a handful of dreamers, armed with nothing but faith! Little wonder that the spokes­men of the Ukrainian movement instinctively adopted a protective col­ouring and tried to appear as harmless as possible. They often presented their cause as a non-political, cultural regionalism, comparable with the Provengal Felibrige. When formulating a political program, they did not go beyond the demand of a federalistic reorganization of the Russian Empire, which, after all, might have been acceptable to some Russians. Ukrainian patriots were, certainly, sincere in these protestations of politi­cal innocence. But the tsarist administration saw the situation in a dif­ferent light: firmly convinced that the rebirth of Ukraine presented a deadly threat to the future of Russia as a great power in Europe, it waged a war of annihilation against even the most innocuous expressions of Ukrainian nationalism, while at the same time offering to “loyal Little Russians” tempting opportunities of career, recognition, and material rewards. The spell of Russia reached those Ukrainians living outside the frontiers of the Empire. In Galicia there existed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a pro-Russian current. The Galician Russophiles (called “Muscophiles” by contemporaries) favoured the adoption of Russian as the language of literature.²⁴ At one time the majority of the land’s intelligentsia seemed to lean to the Russophile side. The contest between the Russophiles and the nationalists dealt with apparently trivial questions of language, grammar, and orthography, but in truth the entire future of the Ukrainian cause hinged on the outcome. Galicia was the proving ground where the partisans of national abdication and of national self-assertion measured their strength. The issue was of course relevant to the whole Ukrainian people, but only outside Russia could the contest be waged overtly, and by means of persuasion, without the tsarist police officer appearing on the scene. To both Galician currents came aid from beyond the frontier: the Russophiles received subsidies from St. Peters­burg, while the nationalists had the moral support of Dnieper Ukraine. In a slow, tenacious effort the Russophile group was pushed back, grad­ually reduced to an impotent faction, and at last completely absorbed by the growing nationalist movement. This was a turning point in the his­tory of Russo-Ukrainian relations, and the effects were soon felt also in Dnieper Ukraine. The trend toward Russification was reversed. By 1917 the entire Ukraine was swept by the torrent of national revolution.

Notes

1. It is significant that the Third Universal (Manifesto) of the revolutionary Ukrainian parliament, the Central Rada, which proclaimed the formation of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (20 November 1917), and the Fourth Universal, which declared Ukraine a sovereign state completely separate from Russia (22 January 1918), avoided any reference to historical rights and were completely based on the principle of democratic self-determination. Since the president of the Rada and the originator of these two acts was the dean of Ukrainian historians, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, this omission was not fortuitous. It reflected an essential trait of the ideology of the Ukrainian movement.

2. A parallel situation may be found at the transition from the first to the second epoch of Ukrainian history. The Cossack state was not a direct continuation of the Kievan state, but neither was it without connections with this predecessor. The Ukrainian (“Ruthenian,” in the nomenclature of the time) gentry, burghers, and clergy, among whom the traditions of Kievan Rus’ remained alive even under Polish domination, provided the Cossack military organization with a religious-political program, and partly also with a leading personnel, which lifted the anti-Polish revolt of 1648 to the level of a war of national liberation. This is the point in which the Ukrainian Cos­sacks radically differed from similar Russian communities of frontiersmen, the Don and Ural Cossacks.

3. Ie. Chykalenko, Spohady (1861-1907) (New York 1955), 337.

4. Limitations of space do not permit bolstering these statements with proper refer­ences. Two short examples must suffice: the memoirs of V. Debagorii-Mokrievich and the first part of those of I. Petrunkevich, the former for a presentation of revolu­tionary populism, and the latter for one of zemstvo liberalism, in Ukraine of the 1870s. Both men were of Ukrainian descent, but regarded themselves as members of the Russian nation, and wrote in Russian. Nevertheless, they were quite aware that the people among whom they were working differed in many essential respects from the Great Russians and had to be approached in a different way. An unmistakable Ukrainian aura pervades these reminiscences.

5. Only in some backward areas, such as Carpatho-Ukraine (Subcarpathian Ruthenia), was the crystallization of a modern national consciousness delayed until the 1930s.

6. It is, however, to be noted that each of the major international conflicts in which the Russian Empire was involved—the Napoleonic, Crimean, Balkan, and Japanese wars—had definite repercussions in Ukraine. In each case movements arose which attempted to take advantage of Russia’s predicament for the betterment of Ukraine’s position.

7. An early Ukrainian Marxist, Iuliian Bachynsky, developed in his essay Ukraina ir­redenta (1895) the thesis that while the industries of Congress Poland were working for and dependent on the Russian market, Ukrainian industry was rather competitive with that of central Russia. From this he drew the prognosis that Ukraine was more likely than Poland to secede from Russia. This reveals the shortcomings of a purely economic interpretation Ofhistorical events, and for this Bachynsky was criticized by such outstanding contemporaries as M. Drahomanov and I. Franko. Still, the facts pointed out by Bachynsky were certainly significant.

8. One may recall that Prague and Riga preserved well into the nineteenth century a pre­dominantly German outlook.

9. The greatest wrong which tsarist Russia committed against the Ukrainian people in the field of socio-economic policies was the introduction of serfdom in 1783. As long as the Cossack officers showed an inclination toward political separatism, the tsarist policy was to pretend the role of “defender” of the common people against the local upper class. Later, when the danger of separatism had diminished, the inter­ests of the peasantry were sacrificed in order to reconcile the Ukrainian gentry with the loss of their country’s political autonomy. Russian-Style serfdom was introduced in Ukraine at a time when it was already on the way toward extinction in other parts of Eastern Europe, and when even in Galicia it was being restricted by the policies of the Austrian “enlightened despots,” Maria Theresa and Joseph II.

10. Cf. Kostomarov’s essay, “Dve russkiia narodnosti,” originally published in the St. Petersburg journal Osnova, no. 3 (1861).

11. M. P. Drahomanov, Vybrani tvory (Prague 1937), 1:70. The passage quoted is from his “Avtobiohrafiia,” originally published posthumously in 1896.

12. V. Lypynsky, Lysty do brativ-khliborobiv (Vienna 1926), xxv.

13. M. V. Nechkina, ed., Ocherki istorii istoricheskoi nauki v SSSR (Moscow 1960), 2:307.

14. The founders of Kharkiv University came from a circle influenced by the ideas and example of the philosopher and spiritual reformer Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722- 94).

15. The case OfFinland might be used here as an illuminating contrast. The upper classes of Finland were Swedish. But they did not try to bring the country back, in the name of “historical rights,” under the rule of Sweden. Rather they united their forces with those of the native Finnish majority for the common defence of the liberty of the homeland. This co-operation was to be eminently beneficial to both Finland and Sweden, and to the Swedish-Finnish minority as well.

16. An example of this is the idea of a Polish-Ukrainian political writer, F. Duchinski, according to whom the Russians were not really a Slavic people, since they were of Ugro-Finnic stock which had become linguistically Slavicized; this implied a deeper ethnic difference between the Russians and the Ukrainians than the close affinity of the two East Slavic languages would suggest. This conception, whatever its scholarly merits, enjoyed considerable popularity in Ukrainian circles.

17. Three men merit mention in this context: Volodymyr Antonovych (1834-1908), historian and archaeologist, the founder of the “Kievan historical school,” the leader of the secret organization Hromada and of the Ukrainian movement in Russia during the most difficult period of reaction in the 1880s and 90s; Viacheslav Lypynsky (1882-1931), eminent historian, political philosopher, and conservative leader; and the Metropolitan Andrii Sheptytsky (1865-1944), for forty-four years the head of the Greek Catholic Church in Galicia and the outstanding Ukrainian ec­clesiastical figure of the century.

18. S. Smolka, Les Ruthenes et les problemes religieux du monde russien (Berne 1917), 225 and 228.

19. The Uniate (Greek Catholic) Church had been suppressed in Right-Bank Ukraine by the Russian government in 1839. Tsarist Russia at all times showed an implacable hostility to Ukrainian Catholicism of the Eastern Rite, and this attitude has been in­herited by Soviet Russia.

20. In works of fiction dealing with the Anglican clerical milieu, for instance, in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, one encounters an atmosphere strikingly similar to that which used to prevail in the patriarchal homes of the Galician priests. There was, however, one major difference: the clergymen of the Church of England were the social allies of the English aristocracy, while those of the Greek Catholic Church stood in radical opposition to Galicia’s Polish aristocracy.

21. The crownland “Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria” also included, besides the ter­ritory of the Old Rus’ principality of Halych (from which its name was derived), an ethnically Polish area, west of the river San. In the Ukrainian, eastern part of Galicia there existed, as in Right-Bank Ukraine, a socially privileged Polish minority of landowners and town dwellers. In the province as a whole the numerical strength of the Polish and the Ukrainian groups was approximately equal, but the aristocratic character of the Austrian constitution and Vienna’s policy favoured the Polish ele­ment. From 1848, and to the last days of the monarchy, the Ukrainians strove for a partition of the province on ethnic lines, but in vain.

22. A new electoral law for the Galician Diet was adopted early in 1914, but the out­break of the war prevented its implementation. The Ukrainians were to receive some 30 per cent of the seats in the Diet and a share in the autonomous provincial adminis­tration. This still fell short of what the Ukrainians demanded on the basis of their nu­merical strength, but the Polish monopoly of power was at last broken.

23. The writer has tried to do this in the article “The Intellectual Origins of Modern Ukraine,” Annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the U.S. 6, no. 3-4 (1958). See pp. 123-41 of this volume.

24. The Russophile movement emerged in the 1860s as a reaction to the hegemony which the Poles had achieved in the province. It was also fed by conservative senti­ments which saw a special value in the traits of the cultural heritage common to all Eastern Slavs: the Slavonic liturgy, Cyrillic script, Julian calendar, and the tradi­tional name of Rus’, which could easily be identified with Russia.