Socioeconomic developments
The large body of pre-World War I Austrian statistical data with specific sections by province on demography, banking, commerce, trade, and communications is still the most important source for analyzing socioeconomic developments in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Galicia.[409] As for secondary literature, there are a few general works and several specific studies dealing with the peasantry, the cooperative movement, emigration, the growth of industry, and the socialist movement.
Among the best general works on all aspects of the Galician economy after 1848 are a brief economic history and a monumental two-volume description of the province’s economy published by the Galician-Polish scholar Franciszek Bujak. during the first decades of the twentieth century.[410] More recently, the Polish social historian Jozef Buszko has described the change in Galicia’s socioeconomic structure during the second half of the nineteenth century, while Volodymyr Osechyns’kyi has provided the Soviet view of these decades by stressing the negative aspects of Polish domination over all aspects of the economy in eastern Galicia.[411]
The peasantry has been the focus of particular attention, and rightly so, since as late as 1900, ninety percent of the population in eastern Galicia lived in the countryside. Although the serfs were legally freed from bondage in 1848, they remained economically bound to their landlords. This situation is largely due to the fact that the right of the peasants to use the gentry-owned woods and pastures (the traditional “servitudes”) was revoked. Now they had to pay for the use of woods or pastures and were forced to rely only on their limited amount of land (constantly being subdivided), so that they became chronically in debt and were in effect transformed into “economic serfs.” Despite continual demands by Ukrainian leaders for a favorable resolution of the “servitude” issue and for more equitable distribution of the land, the Polish gentry, most especially in eastern Galicia, successfully opposed (at least until the end of the century) any real reform; thus by 1900 as much as forty percent of the farmland remained in the hands of large landlords (each owning at least 100 hectares).
The plight of the peasantry in eastern Galicia during the last half of the nineteenth century is discussed in three extensive studies by the Soviet Ukrainian scholar My kola M. Kravets’.[412] The problem of the government’s policy toward land division throughout Galicia was first surveyed in 1898 in a book dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of the repeal of serfdom; it was a kind of apologia for the Austrian regime.[413] A more balanced discussion of the problem is found in a monograph by the Polish scholar Katarzyna Sojka-Zielinska.[414]The vicious cycle of indebtedness, the subdivision of land into smaller holdings (in 1905 the vast majority of landowners-52,000-held only two to five hectares of land), and rapid demographic growth (the population rose 45 percent between 1869 and 1910)-factors only partially alleviated by emigration to America-led at the turn of the century to a series of agricultural strikes, the largest of which took place in 1902, involving an estimated 200,000 peasants. The history of peasant protest in eastern Galicia during the two decades before the outbreak of World War I and especially the revolt of 1902, which finally prompted some land distribution on the part of the gentry, are discussed in several studies.[415] The widespread practice of usury is also carefully analyzed in a contemporary study by Leopold Caro.[416]
In an attempt to alleviate the conditions of the peasantry, the new secular- oriented Ukrainophile populist intelligentsia created a strong cooperative movement which, beginning in the 1880s, led to the formation of numerous agricultural and dairy cooperatives, trade and credit associations, and insurance companies. Such developments in Galicia are described in comprehensive histories of the Ukrainian cooperative movement by Illia Vytanovych and Lev Olesnevych.[417] When all else failed, another outlet for peasant frustration was emigration to America.
Encouraged by steamship agents who visited the Galician countryside, the first emigrants began to depart in the 1880s. Having heard about the success of their brethren through avidly read letters, others established a pattern of chain migration that reached large-scale proportions during the first decade of the twentieth century. By 1914, an estimated 420,000 Galician Ukrainians emigrated to the New World, mainly to the United States and Canada. Several studies by Austrian and Polish scholars provide important statistical analyses of the greatest years of emigration (1904-1914),[418] while the Galician-Ukrainian political thinker luliian Bachyns’kyi published, in 1914, what has become the classic book on the Ukrainian immigration, with valuable descriptions of the causes of emigration as well as the life of the early immigrants in America.[419] Subsequently, a considerable literature on the Ukrainian immigration (most of which concerns Galicia, the source of three-quarters of all Ukrainian emigrants) developed. It describes life in the New World as well as the conditions in the homeland that prompted the emigration.[420]The reluctance of the large landowners in eastern Galicia to change the economic status quo (which assured them an unlimited supply of cheap labor) and the general Austrian policy that considered Galicia to be an agricultural zone and marketplace (a kind of “internal colony”) for products from the industrially advanced western provinces (Bohemia, Silesia, Lower Austria) are factors that caused the province to remain an economically underdeveloped territory.[421]
Hence, while Galicia accounted for 25 percent of the land area in the Austrian half of the monarchy, it had in contrast only 9.3 percent of the industrial enterprisesand most of these were in western Galicia. A few sawmills, tanneries, and brick factories existed in eastern Galicia, and in the 1890s oil fields near Drohobych were developed, but the small enterprises were in the hands of Jews, who made up as high as 75 percent of the population in the towns, while the oil industry (which by 1905 accounted for 5 percent of world production) was in the hands of foreign investors (English and Austrian).89
The industrial aspect, however small, of the economy in eastern Galicia, and the concomitant rise of an industrial proletariat (which numbered 12,900 in 1890) are traced in great detail in several studies by Soviet scholars like Hryhorii Koval’chak and Mykola Kravets’.90 Marxist writers are particularly anxious to
Ukrainian Settlements in Canada 1895-1900: Dr.
Josef Oleskow's Role in the Settlement of the Canadian Northwest (Toronto: University of Toronto Press for the Ukrainian Canadian Research Foundation 1964); Michael H. Marunchak, The Ukrainian Canadians: A History (Winnipeg: Ukrainian Free Academy of Sciences 1970).88 On the large landowners and peasants, see Maurice Lair, “La noblesse polonaise et les paysans ruthenes,” Annates des sciencespolitiques, XVIII (Paris 1903), pp. 553-572, 707-717 and XIX (1904). pp. 185-205. On the economic policies of the Galician Diet, see Eljasz Wojtanowicz, “Polityka agrarna sejmu galicyjskiego w cyfrach budzetow krajowych,” in Studja z historiji spoiecznej i gospodarczej poswigcone prof. dr. Franciszkowi Bujakowi (L’viv 1931).
89 For an early survey of industry in Galicia, see Waclaw Saryusz-Zaleski, Dzieje przemyslu w b. Galicji 1804-1929 (Cracow: S. Zieleniewski 1930). On the budding oil industry, see Stanislaw Bartoszewicz, Historia i stan przemyslu naftowego w Galicji (L’viv 1905); and several Soviet studies by S.D. Garkavenko, “Neft Vostochnoi Galitsii na neftianom rynke Zapadnoi Evropy (1900-1918 gg.)” and “Kontsentratsiia proizvodstva i voznikonovenie monopolii v neftianoi promyshlennosti Vostochnoi Galitsii pri Avstro-Vengrii (1892-1918),” Nauchnye zapiski L’vovskogo sei'skokhoziastvennogo instituta, IX (L’vov 1959), pp. 285-351; I.S. Khonihsman, Pronyknennia inozemnoho kapitalu v ekonomiky Zakhidnoi Ukratny v epokhu imperializmu (L’viv; LU 1971).
For a discussion of Galician industry in the context of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, see Helena Madurowicz-Urbariska, “Die Industrie im Rahmen der wirtschaftlichen Struktur der Donaumonarchie,” in Studio austro-polonica, vol. I, in Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego, CCCCLXXXII, Prace Historyczne, LVII (Warsaw and Cracow 1978), pp. 157-173.
90 H.I. Koval’chak, “Rozvytok kapitalistychnoi promyslovosti skhidnoi Halychyny v pershi desiatyrichchia pislia skasuvannia kriposnoho prava (1848-1870 rr.),” in Z istorii zakhidnoukrains'kykh zemel', vol.
II (L’viv: AN URSR 1957), pp. 108-123; idem, “Rozvytok kapitalistychnoi promyslovosti v Skhidnii Halychyni u 70-80-kh rokakh XIX st.,” Z istoriizakhidnoukrains'kykh zemel’, vol. Ill, ed. I.P. Kryp”iakevych (Kiev: AN URSR 1958), pp. 3-22; H.I. Koval’chak, “Rozvytok fabrychno-zavods’koi promyslovosti v Skhidnii Halychyni v kintsi XIX-ïà pochatku XX st.,” Z istorii zakhidnoukrains’kykh zemel’, vol. V uncover any indication of worker protests and strikes[422] [423]-some ostensibly under the influence of the 1905 Russian Revolution and Leninist ideas[424]-in order to point out the insuperable weakness of eastern Galician society as well as Austria- Hungary as a whole, during what is considered the era of world imperialist crisis.Although Ukrainians comprised only 18 percent of the small industrial proletariat in eastern Galicia, some of their leaders, like Ivan Franko, Mykhailo Pavlyk, and Ostap Terlets’kyi, took an active part in the Galician socialist movement from the very beginning. Besides the discussions found in many of the Soviet works mentioned above, Volodymyr Levyns’kyi has written two works on the history of Ukrainian socialism in Galicia, in particular its evolution into the Ukrainian Social Democratic party (est. 1900).93 The relations between Ukrainian socialist leaders and their Polish counterparts as well as their repeated arrests and trials between 1877 and 1892 are also the subject of separate studies.94