Small peoples.

The concept is not quantitative: it points to a condition; a fate; small peoples do not have that felicitous sense of an eternal past and future; at a given moment in their history, they all passed through the antechambers of death; in constant confrontation with the arrogant ignorance of the mighty, they see their existence as perpetually threatened or with a question mark hovering over it; for their very existence is the question.

Milan Kundera¹

In his notebooks from the 1950s, the Soviet Ukrainian film director Alexander Dovzhenko, a native of the Russian Empire’s Chernigov (Chernihiv) Province, recorded a conversation he had with his father in his childhood:

My father... did not know to which nation he belonged, nor did his friends and co-workers before the [1917] revolution.

But the Russian people, in his view, represented a different nation (than ours). Rafts from the Orlov Province floated down the Desna River. “Those are Russians,” he said. “And who are we?” we small children asked. My fa­ther. did not know how to reply. “we are peasants, tillers of the soil, simple people, only peasants”. We kept quiet for a while. My father held his tongue. We were the only people in Europe who did not know who we were. And I belonged to these people.²

Written by a man who formulated his view of the world in the cauldron of the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, Dovzhenko’s passage highlights the ambivalence over identity that prevailed in the densely pop­ulated and majority Ukrainian-speaking provinces of the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.

Before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the Ukrainian­speaking population of East Central Europe formed one of the largest groups in Europe without a state of its own. Of the approximately twenty- five million Ukrainian speakers in 1900, 84 per cent of the total lived in the Russian Empire and 16 per cent in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.³ They represented the second-largest language group in the Russian Empire (constituting approximately 18 per cent of the 125.6 million total popula­tion) in 1897 and the sixth-largest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (com­prising 8 per cent of the fifty-one million of the Dual Monarchy’s residents) in 1910.⁴