The 1848 Revolution

Immediately following the outbreak of the Viennese revolt, the Poles staged large-scale patriotic demonstrations in Galicia. On 18 March 1848, they addressed a petition to the emperor, demanding extensive autonomy for Galicia, which they treated as a purely Polish land.

Some of the more important acts of the Galician Ukrainians during the revolutionary period were the following: the formation of a network of thirty-four local branches of the Rada throughout the country; the found­ing of Zoria halytska (The Galician Star), the first Ukrainian-Ianguage newspaper not only in Galicia, but in all Ukrainian lands; participation in the Slavic Congress in Prague in June 1848; a campaign for election to the first Austrian Reichstag and participation in parliamentary work; for­mation of a Ruthenian National Guard and military detachments, which took part in the war against insurgent Hungary; organization of public meetings; presentation of addresses to the provincial and the central gov­ernment; collection of signatures under petitions; and the holding of an Assembly of Ruthenian Scholars (Sobor Ruskykh Uchenykh), 19-26 October 1848, to determine guidelines for cultural and educational policies.

The Supreme Ruthenian Council was launched with the blessing of the governor of Galicia, Count Franz Stadion. This brilliant eccentric has been called “a conservative reformer in the style of [Baron von] Stein and Robert Peel,”¹⁸ an exponent of “enlightened conservatism in the spirit of a revised and refined Josephinism.

The position of the Galician Ukrainians was analogous to that of the smaller nationalities of Hungary, who also made common cause with the dynasty and the Vienna government against the brand of “liberty” of­fered them by the Magyar gentry. In the Austrian half of the monarchy the Ukrainians stood closest to the Czechs, those chief defenders of a united empire reorganized on Austro-Slavic lines.²⁰

During the Slavic Congress in Prague a deadlock occurred within the Polish-Ruthenian Section. The Czechs, working behind the scenes, me­diated a compromise resolution, adopted by the section on 7 June 1848: the Ukrainians agreed to postpone the issue of Galicia’s division, and the Poles conceded the principle of the equality of the two nations in all ad­ministrative and educational matters.²¹ The subsequent forced dissolu­tion of the Slavic Congress buried the resolution of 7 June. Yet it re­mained, until the reform of the electoral law for the Galician Diet in Feb­ruary 1914, the only instance of a Polish-Ukrainian compromise.

In the Austrian constituent Reichstag, in Vienna and Kromefiz, the Ukrainian deputies usually followed the example and advice of their Czech colleagues. During the debates of the Constitutional Committee, the Pole Florian Ziemialkowski had called the Ruthenians “an artificial nation, invented last year.” He was vigorously refuted by the Czech spokesmen, Frantisek Palacky and Frantisek Ladislav Rieger.

The question of national identity was answered by the Supreme Ruth- enian Council in the “Ukrainian” sense, that is, by asserting the distinct­ness of their people not only from Poland, but from Russia as well. The Rada’s manifesto of 10 May 1848 stated: “We Galician Ruthenians {rusyny halytskι) belong to the great Ruthenian people who speak one language and count fifteen millions^ of whom two and one-half inhabit the Galician land.”²³ It is, however, noteworthy that in all the pro­nouncements of the Rada and of its individual leaders we do not find any specific reference to the condition of their compatriots in Russia and to the reciprocal relations of the two parts of the nation, divided between the Russian and the Austrian empires. The politically sophisticated Czech leaders realized the international implications of the Ukrainian revival in Galicia. Rieger said in the Constitutional Committee: ‘‘The liberty of the press [in Austria] will give full scope to the Ruthenian ele­ment. Their freedom-breathing literature will bring about the melting of the rigid ice of Russian absolutism.... This, gentlemen, is the most im­portant thing in the question: the fall of the European despot, the enemy of liberty, is near at hand, once this people enters the ranks of the Slavic peoples.”²⁴ Yet such wider perspectives were absent in the thinking of the leaders of the Supreme Ruthenian Council, men of good will, but timid and provincial in their intellectual outlook.

Another blind spot in the thinking of the Supreme Ruthenian Council was its neglect of social and economic problems. The abolition of the corvee and ‘‘hereditary tenancy” still left many issues unsolved: there was the question of indemnity to be paid to the landowners and the ques­tion of forests and pastures, which previously had been used jointly by the manors and the villagers and which now were claimed by the former as their exclusive property.

The emergence of the Supreme Ruthenian Council was a direct chal­lenge to the Polish claim that Galicia was an organic part of Poland. Pol­ish leaders tried to undermine the Council’s position by opposing to it a body which was supposed to represent a pro-Polish current among the Ruthenians. On 23 May 1848, a Ruthenian Assembly (Ruskyi Sobor) ap­peared, composed of a handful of Polish noblemen whose families were of Rus’ extraction and of a few Polonized Ukrainian intellectuals. The Sobor started the publication of a paper, in Ukrainian, but with Polish characters, and engaged as its editor Ivan Vahylevych, the former com­panion of Markiian Shashkevych. But the experiment folded quickly. The bulk of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, grouped around the Rada, denounced the Sobor as a sham. Polish patriots of Ukrainian back­ground, on the other hand, aspired to full membership in Polish society. An irreversible result of the 1848 Revolution was the permanent separa­tion of the Poles and the Ukrainians into two distinct national communi­ties.

The primary practical goal of the Supreme Ruthenian Council was the separation of the Polish and the Ukrainian areas of Galicia into two prov­inces, formed along ethnic lines. The issue had originally been raised by the Austrian government itself, without any regard to Ukrainian de­mands, as a punitive measure after the Polish revolt of 1846 and in con­nection with the annexation of the former Republic of Cracow.

Radical proposals of a new administrative structure based on ethnic principles, like the one submitted to the Reichstag’s Constitutional Com­mittee by Palacky, raised a host of conflicting interests and claims.²⁷ The Constitutional Committee decided to retain the historical provinces, but, as a concession to the ethnic point of view, to create within the frame­work of the provinces new, ethnically homogeneous, self-governing units, named Kreise. These provisions were taken over in the constitu­tion proclaimed, after the forcible suppression of the Reichstag, by im­perial fiat on 4 March 1849. After the collapse of its architect, Stadion, however, the constitution of 4 March, like its parliamentary predecessor, remained a dead letter. The historical provinces survived the revolution­ary crisis; the compensating Kreise never became a reality. During the neoabsolutist era the government continued for a time to toy with plans for a territorial reorganization of Galicia, but nothing came of it.²⁸