The Administrative and Socioeconomic Structure of Ukrainian Lands in the Austrian Empire, 1849-1914

Following the revolutionary era that began in March 1848 and ended decisively in August 1849 with the defeat of the Hungarians, Austria entered a period of neo-absolutism during which the imperial administration in Vienna attempted to undo the achievements of the 1848 revolution and to restore the absolute power of the emperor.

Administrative structure

Already during the revolutionary era, the Kremsier parliament was disbanded (March 1849) and its constitutional proposals scrapped. Even the more centralized constitution decreed the same month by the emperor was never put into effect, and it was eventually annulled, on 31 December 1851. Hence began a period of neo-absolutism, in which there was no thought of an Austrian parliament. Instead, the Habsburgs ruled the empire directly from the imperial court in Vienna and, in some areas, including Galicia and Hungary, through martial law administered by the imperial army. Martial law in Galicia lasted until 1854, after which an imperial civil administration was set up, headed by a viceroy (German: Statthalter, Polish: namiestnik; Ukrainian: namistnyk) who was appointed by and responsible only to the emperor.

MAP 30

UKRAINIAN LANDS IN AUSTRIA-HUNGARY, circa 1875

Administrative and Socioeconomic Structure, 1849-1914 445 district administration. Besides the districts, there were also two self-governing cit­ies, L’viv and Cracow.

The status of Bukovina remained uncertain. While the imperial constitution of 4 March 1849 proposed that Bukovina be a separate province, that constitu­tion never went into effect. As a result, it was not until 1854 that Bukovina’s full administrative separation from Galicia occurred. In i860, however, that move was rescinded and Bukovina once more became part of Galicia. As for Transcarpathia, it, like the rest of Hungary, was under martial law, although one of the military dis­tricts was centered in Uzhhorod, and part of the Transcarpathian population thus effectively united under the nominal rule of its local leader, Adol’f Dobrians’kyi. The Uzhhorod, or “Ruthenian,” District lasted only five months, however, and after its dissolution in March 1850 the Transcarpathians had no separate administrative status. Their homeland continued to be divided into several Hungarian counties (Hungarian: megye; Ukrainian: komitaty or zhupy), each headed by a Magyar official.

In Galicia, the first viceroy to function under the new centralized system of Aus­trian rule was the Polish count Agenor Goluchowski. Goluchowski was a wealthy landowning magnate from Galicia and a confidant of Emperor Franz Joseph and his immediate entourage. Goluchowski also represented what initially was a small group of Polish leaders who felt that the future of the Polish cause did not lie in revolutionary activity, but rather in organic cultural and economic work with the broader mass of the Polish population and in cooperation with the three imperial states that ruled Polish territory.

A dominant figure throughout this whole period, Goluchowski served as Gali­cian viceroy three times between 1849 and 1875 and as Austrian imperial min­ister of internal affairs between 1859 and 1861. The emperor needed a reliable administrator, and he trusted Goluchowski. Goluchowski knew this, and, taking advantage of Vienna’s weakness at certain times, he was able to advance the Polish cause and transform Galicia into an area in which Poles monopolized the upper echelons of the administration, the educational system, and economic life - a state of affairs that was to last at least until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. During the period of imperial administrative rule before 1859, Goluchowski successfully foiled Vienna’s inclination to divide Galicia into two provinces, a division which would effectively have meant a Polish and a Ukrainian province. He also succeed­ed in having many German officials removed, in having Polish replace German in secondary schools (gymnasia), and in restricting the further spread of Ukrainian schools. He even tried to introduce the Latin alphabet for Ukrainian publications in 1859, although this effort failed after strenuous protests by Ukrainian leaders.

International developments and Austria's internal politics

The year 1859 was a crucial turning point for Austria, since it lost a war with

France and its ally, the expanding Italian nation-state of Sardinia-Piedmont. This loss underlined Austria’s internal weaknesses, and plans were made to restruc­ture the empire. It was evident that centralized rule from Vienna had failed. Influenced by Count Goluchowski, who was now imperial minister of internal affairs, the Austrian government proposed a new solution in February 1861.

The next important turning point in Austrian history came in 1866. In that year, neighboring Prussia, under the dynamic leadership of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, defeated Austria in a war that lasted no more than six weeks. With this victory, Prussia eliminated Habsburg influence over the Germanic lands in cen­tral Europe. Five years later, in 1871, Bismarck united the smaller German states under the leadership of Prussia to form the German Empire. Austria’s defeat by Prussia in 1866 was attributed to the failure of the Hungarians to cooperate in the war effort. Consequently, Vienna was once again forced by external events to try to resolve the Hungarian problem as well as to respond to the continuing demands of the empire’s other nationalities.

The result was a compromise reached with the Hungarians in May 1867 and known as the Ausgleich. According to the Ausgleich, the Hungarian Kingdom was left to govern itself except in foreign affairs, some economic matters (currency, tariffs), and the military, all of which were to be the common concern of the whole empire. As for the other “kingdoms and lands represented in the parliament” - the official if rather awkward name for the Austrian, or non-Hungarian, territories - a revised constitution was promulgated in December 1867. This document guar­anteed individual citizens equality before the law; freedom of the press, speech, and assembly; and protection of the interests of the various nationalities, including equal rights for all languages in local use in schools, administration, and public life.

Meanwhile, Count Goluchowski was back in office as viceroy in Galicia follow­ing Austria’s defeat by Prussia in 1866. Again, Vienna wanted his support, and again he was willing to give it so long as Polish interests in Galicia were served. While the Ausgleich may have resolved one problem in the empire, it inevitably prompted demands from other nationalities. After all, if Hungary could gain self­rule, why should not the “Polish” Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria or, for that matter, the “Czech” Kingdom of Bohemia-Moravia gain it too? The Poles put forth their program in the so-called Galician Resolution of 1868, which demanded wide-ranging political autonomy for the province, including legislative power for

Austria’s Parliamentary Structure

When Galicia’s diet was established in 1861, it had 150 seats. After 1901, that number was raised to 161, and after 1911, to 228. The Bukovinian diet had 31 seats for most of the period until 1911, and thereafter it had 63. Deputies to the provincial diets were elected according to the curia system, which allotted to four social strata a specific number of deputies. Among the deputies in Gali­cia in 1861 were 44 elected by the great landowners, 3 elected by the cham­bers of commerce, 23 elected by the cities, and 80 elected by small towns and rural communes. Provincial diets also included several ex officio members. In Galicia after 1875, they included seven bishops (3 Roman Catholic, 3 Greek Catholic, 1 Armenian); 2 university rectors and, after 1900, the president of the Polish Academy of Sciences; and the rector of the polytechnical school in L’viv. Finally, each diet was presided over by a marshal and vice-marshal appointed by the emperor. The diets had limited authority and were basically concerned with local agricultural and, later, industrial development, hygiene, and elementary and secondary schools.

Austria’s central parliament also came into being in 1861. It consisted of two houses: a House of Lords (Herrenhaus), made up of members appointed by the emperor; and the more important House of Deputies (Abgeordnetenhaus). Until 1873, the members of the House of Deputies were elected by the provincial diets; then, by voters according to the curia system; and finally, after 1907, by universal male suffrage. The number of deputies in the Austrian parliament steadily increased, from 203 in 1861 to 516 in 1907.

The heritage of Viceroy Goluchowski’s rule in Galicia was strongly felt in the new administrative structure. Although Ukrainians made up close to half the province’s population, by the demise of the empire in 1918 they had never elected more than one-third of the deputies in the Galician diet. (Their larg­est representations were 66 of 228 deputies in 1914, and 49 of 150 deputies in 1861.) In Bukovina, where Ukrainians also made up close to half the province’s population, they had no deputies at all in the provincial diet until 1890. There­after, their largest number was 17 of 63 deputies in 1911.

In the Austrian parliament’s House of Deputies, Ukrainians had at most only one-quarter of the seats allotted to Galicia (their largest representation was 27 of 106 seats in 1907). Moreover, from Goluchowski’s third term in 1871-1875 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, all subsequent Galician viceroys were Poles, all the marshals in the Galician diet were Poles, and all the district sheriffs were Poles.

the local diet, a separate supreme court, and responsibility on the part of the vice­roy to the diet. Vienna was not prepared to go so far, fearing - and rightly so - that meeting these demands would encourage similar demands by other nationalities and lead to the disintegration of the empire. If Goluchowski was to continue to support Vienna, however, he needed something to appease the supporters of the Galician Resolution. Accordingly, the Austrian government agreed to permit sev­eral administrative changes in the province. Polish became the language of inter­nal administration, secondary schools, and L’viv University; and the Provincial School Board, which theoretically was subordinate to the Galician diet, became an independent body and instrument of further polonization within the educa­tional system. Also, in 1871 the Ministry of Galician Affairs was created in Vienna to represent the interests of the province directly with the imperial government. From the ministry’s establishment in 1871 until the empire’s demise in 1918, all ministers of Galician affairs were Poles.

Hence, while it is true that Ukrainians participated in the political system and were guaranteed certain legal rights with respect to the promotion of their national culture, the realities of Austrian political life, on both the domestic and the inter­national front, forced the central government in Vienna to depend on the leading stratum in Galicia, which was made up almost exclusively of Poles. In effect, the Ukrainians became a minority in Galicia, forced to struggle for any advance in their national life, more often than not in the face of intransigent Polish opposi­tion. This state of affairs, which lasted until 1918, is perhaps best summed up by the Ukrainian-Canadian scholar Ivan L. Rudnytsky:

The dominant position of the Poles was bolstered by the social privileges of the landed nobility and the upper middle class. Conversely, for the Ukrainians the struggle for nation­al and social emancipation was one and the same. In addition to the clash between the social interest of the two nationalities there was an invidious conflict on the psychological plane. The outlook of the Polish intelligentsia and middle class was largely derived from the gentry tradition. The origins of the Ukrainian intelligentsia were plebeian; every educated Ukrainian was only one or two generations removed from either a parsonage or a peas­ant hut. Thus even those Polish and Ukrainian groups whose formal education and living conditions were similar displayed divergent social mentalities. Both communities viewed the present conflict as if it were similar to the great seventeenth-century wars between the Polish aristocracy and the Ukrainian Cossacks.¹

Social structure and economic developments

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Galicia was an underdeveloped agrarian region whose raw materials were exploited by the more industrialized provinces in the western part of the Habsburg Empire. This characterization is true also for the second half of the nineteenth century. Some industrialization took place dur­ing the very last decades of the century, however, and changed Galicia’s economy somewhat from one dependent exclusively on agriculture.

The size of Galicia’s population increased substantially during the second half

The Problem of Statistics

During the second half of the nineteenth century, several European countries began to undertake censuses every ten years. These censuses produced a wide variety of statistical data. Among the most controversial questions, in partic­ular in multinational Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire, were those concerning national identity. Actually, the question asked by both Austria- Hungary and Russia concerned native language (“mother tongue,” “language of daily use”), but the answers to the question were generally used by contem­porary political activists - and are still used by scholars today - to describe the national composition of these states. Not surprisingly, spokespersons for each nationality were interested in arriving at the highest figure possible for their group in order to justify demands for greater political representation, more schools, and social and cultural services that might otherwise go to another national group.

The census question about language was useful if one wanted to know about languages spoken. Difficulties arose, however, when language data was used as a basis for arriving at national affiliation. For instance, the Austrian statistics on language for Galicia in 1910 were the following:

When these figures are used to describe the number of Poles or Ukrainians in Galicia - as they frequently have been used - serious discrepancies present themselves. For instance, there turn out to be no Jews, even though we know from the statistics on religion that there were 856,000 Jews recorded in Galicia in 1910. The same statistics tell us that the vast majority of Jews (808,000) gave Polish as their language, thereby inflating the number of “Poles,” and that a smaller number of Jews gave German (26,000) or Ukrainian (22,000) as their language, thereby increasing the number of these nationalities, if only slightly. Similarly, 235,000 Greek Catholics recorded their spoken language as Polish, even though a significant portion were probably of Ukrainian ethnic­ity. Table 34.1 attempts to correct these discrepancies by using statistics on both language and religion to gauge the approximate numerical size of Gali­cia’s nationalities.

The operative word is approximate. This is because all statistics, especially those relating to national identity in multinational states, must be treated with great caution. One should never assume that numbers are wholly accurate; at best, what they provide is an estimate.

TABLE 34.1

Nationality composition of Galicia, 19102

of the nineteenth century, from 4.9 million inhabitants in 1849 to 7.9 million in 1910. The numerical relationship between the province’s two leading groups - Poles and Ukrainians - also changed, although not to the degree suggested by Austrian governmental statistics, which used spoken daily language as the criterion for national identity. Table 34.1 provides a more realistic estimate, based on a com­bination of statistics on language and on religion. These revised statistics suggest that between 1849 and 1910 the percentage of Poles in Galicia remained the same (just under 46 percent), while that of Ukrainians declined slightly, from 47 to 43 percent. The decline in the percentage of Ukrainians was even greater in eastern Galicia, from 71 to 62 percent. The reasons for this proportional change were (1) an increase in Polish colonization from western to eastern Galicia, and (2) the large-scale emigration of Ukrainians abroad beginning in the 1880s.

Despite the enormous overall increase in Galicia’s population, its socioeconom­ic status did not change substantially. Although the population of the provincial capital, L’viv, quadrupled in size during the second half of the nineteenth century, in 1910 it was still a relatively small city of only 207,000 inhabitants, over 80 per­cent of whom were Poles or Jews. The next-largest cities in eastern Galicia were PrzemySl and Kolomyia, with fewer than 40,000 inhabitants each, and Ternopil’ and Stanyslaviv (today Ivano-Frankivs’k) with fewer than 30,000. As is clear from these figures, the vast majority of Galicia’s population remained rural.

In fact, more than three-fifths of the province’s inhabitants were engaged in agricultural pursuits. Although the serfs were legally freed from bondage in 1848, in a sense they remained economic serfs. There were several reasons for this. The right of the peasants to use the gentry-owned woods and pastures (the traditional servitude) was revoked with the emancipation, and now the peasants had to pay for the privilege. Their only source of income was their plots of land, but these were too small to provide a sufficient income. The peasants were forced to borrow and before long experienced chronic indebtedness. This state of affairs was only made worse as landholdings were repeatedly subdivided among offspring. In 1859, 66 percent of those who made up Galicia’s agricultural sector fell into the category of small-sized landowners (owning less than 14 acres [5.7 hectares]), and another 25 percent were middle-sized landowners (owning up to 28 acres [11.5 hectares]). In subsequent years, the average size of a peasant holding steadily decreased, from 12 acres (5 hectares) in 1859, to 7 acres (3 hectares) in 1880, and finally to 6 acres (2.5 hectares) in 1900. There was a slight increase in the total amount of arable land available, but it proved insufficient to offset the increasing demographic growth. There were some areas of Galicia, such as the former Podolia in the prov­ince’s far southeastern corner, where the economic status of the peasantry stabi­lized and improved during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Throughout most of the province, however, the peasants seemed to be caught in an inescapable cycle of indebtedness, land subdivision, and rapid demographic growth.

The difficult economic situation gave rise to frequent peasant strikes, especially at the beginning of the twentieth century. Many peasants also sought relief by emi­grating abroad. Beginning in the 1880s, Galician peasants sought their fortunes in the New World, where they settled in the alien industrialized environment of the northeastern United States. By the turn of the century, emigrants were also departing for Canada and Brazil, although in these countries they settled primarily in agricultural regions that provided for a way of life more similar to the one they had had at home. Between 1881 and 1912, an estimated 430,000 Ukrainians left Galicia and Bukovina, and another 170,000 left Transcarpathia. Emigration grew to such proportions that both the Austrian and the Hungarian authorities, fearing the complete depopulation of certain areas, tried - although with little success - to control the exodus.

The only real way to stop emigration was to improve the Galician economy. Although the general Austrian principle of treating Galicia as a source of raw mate­rials for the empire’s western provinces as well as a market for the latter’s indus­trial goods had not changed, the beginnings of industrialization were embarked upon. In the 1880s in particular, industrial development was encouraged by the dynamic marshal of the Galician Diet, Mikolaj Zyblikiewicz. Railroad construction had already begun in the 1860s, and by 1914 Galicia, together with Bukovina and Transcarpathia, had a rather well developed network totaling 2,294 miles (3,700 kilometers). As in other parts of central and eastern Europe, however, the coming of the railroad at least initially had a negative effect on local economies. Hence, in 1861, when L’viv was connected via Cracow to Vienna, a larger supply of goods from the western industrialized regions than before was dumped on the Gali­cian market. Provincial administrators tried to overcome such economic imbal­ances, and among other measures they encouraged the development of a credit and banking system for Galicia. Investors were solicited not only from Vienna, but from abroad, especially from France, England, the United States, and Canada. Emigrants also began to send money home, which helped to increase the amount of investment capital in the province. By 1900, foreign investments in Galicia amounted to 1.3 billion crowns, at a time when the province’s entire budget was only 20.5 million crowns.

As a result of these developments, modest industrial growth took place in Gali­cia. By 1902, there were 335 plants (with at least twenty workers each), employ­ing 26,000 workers; by 1910, these figures had increased to 448 plants, with 36,000 workers. The workers were employed in food processing (34 percent), lumber and wood processing (20 percent), clothes manufacturing (16 percent), mineral - mainly oil - extraction (15 percent), and machine building and metal-

The Ukrainian Diaspora

Migration is nothing new to the peoples of Ukraine. In the sixteenth cen­tury, ethnic Ukrainians discontented with Poland’s economic and cultural policies emigrated eastward to Muscovy. In the early eighteenth century, the first political emigration, associated with the Cossack hetman Pylyp Orlyk, fled westward from Muscovite rule. At the beginning of the nineteenth cen­tury, individuals from Transcarpathia who sought better careers than they could pursue at home emigrated to the Russian Empire. A few decades later, Ukrainian cultural activists led by Mykhailo Drahomanov were forced by political persecution to emigrate from the Russian Empire to western Europe.

There was also extensive out-migration from Ukraine to other parts of the tsarist realm. The imperial capital of St Petersburg became in the course of the nineteenth century the place where for various reasons the nationalist intelligentsia settled and concentrated its energies on behalf of Ukrainian culture. This group was somewhat of an exception, however, since numeri­cally the largest ethnic Ukrainian diaspora, which emigrated eastward to cen­tral Asia and southern Siberia, established no specifically Ukrainian institu­tions to preserve and promote their native heritage.

This is in stark contrast to the massive emigration of ethnic Ukrainians, vir­tually all from Ukrainian-inhabited lands in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who beginning in the 1890s went across the ocean to North America. They differed from all previous emigrations both quantitatively and qualitatively. Those who left Ukrainian lands in this newest emigration, which was to number about 600,000 by 1914, established distinct community structures in the United States and then Canada. These structures still exist over a cen­tury later.

The American and Canadian experience also served another important function with regard to national development. Most East Slavic emigrants from Galicia and Bukovina had little or no sense of a national identity when they left home. It was only in the United States and Canada, where they were surrounded by peoples from all over Europe and the world, that they embarked on their own nationality-building process, learning about their Ukrainian identity and passing it on to their children and grandchildren.

The Ukrainian nationality-building process in North America was initially carried out by secular organizations, the oldest and still the largest of which is the Ukrainian National Association (Ukrains’kyi Narodnyi Soiuz), estab­lished in 1894 in Jersey City, New Jersey, across the river from New York City. This and similar organizations not only functioned as insurance compa­nies to protect immigrant workers who might be struck by illness or injury, but also promoted Ukrainian culture and national awareness through the organization of cultural events and the publication of Ukrainian-language newspapers, annual almanacs (kalendari), and books.

Among the most important Ukrainian institutions in North America were the churches. Although concerned with saving souls, it was not long before the churches in North America began to serve the same function as in the western Ukrainian homeland, particularly Galicia. That is, the churches and their parish priests became as interested in preserving the Ukrainian lan­guage and fostering a Ukrainian identity as they were in sustaining purely religious activity. The earliest Ukrainian churches were almost all Greek Catholic. This is because as many as 80 percent of the pre-World War I immi­grants came from Galicia and Transcarpathia, where Greek Catholicism was the predominant religion until 1918.

Quite apart from the Orthodoxy brought by the few Bukovinian immi­grants, the 1890s witnessed the beginning of an Orthodox movement in the United States, which over the next three decades attracted tens of thousands of Greek Catholics. These Orthodox converts initially joined the Russian Orthodox Church in North America, as members of which they gave up or never developed a Ukrainian identity. Ukrainian Orthodoxy per se did not really take hold until the 1920s, when Ukrainians already in North America together with new immigrants joined parishes associated with the Ukrain­ian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (only recently established in Soviet Ukraine), or with a new body, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in America, under the jurisdiction of the ecumenical patriarchate in Constantinople. The Ukrainian diaspora, particularly in North America, was to function for most of the twentieth century as the only environment in which certain Ukrainian churches could survive, especially after the Soviet Union’s ban against the Autocephalous Orthodox Church in 1930 and against the Greek Catholic Church in 1946.

An integral part of the Ukrainian nationality-building process in North America was an ongoing interest in the European homeland. That interest, moreover, was not simply a passive, informational one. Ukrainian immigrants and their descendants hoped to influence economic and, in particular, politi­cal developments in Ukraine. Ukrainian immigrants were especially active in lobbying the United States and Canadian governments and in supplying economic assistance to various pro-independence political factions in the course of the Ukrainian revolution and of the diplomatic negotiations that led to the realignment of borders following World War I. During the interwar years, the immigrants turned their attention to the shortcomings of Polish rule in Galicia, and they tried to bring the world’s attention to the 1921 and 1933 famines in Soviet Ukraine. On the eve of and during World War II, they protested against the Hungarian occupation of Carpatho-Ukraine and the Soviet annexation of eastern Galicia. When the Soviet Union and the United States became wartime allies, the anti-Soviet views of most Ukrain­ian immigrants were no longer appreciated by the American and Canadian governments. But, with the coming of the Cold War era, the immigrants were successful in bringing thousands of displaced persons (DPs) - many of whom had fought the Soviets - to North America. Among the DPs were eth­nic Ukrainians from “eastern” or Soviet Ukraine, which was a relatively new phenomenon for the diaspora in North America, which until then had been

dominated by “western” Ukrainians from Galicia and Bukovina. For nearly four decades, until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, this larger and more territorially representative east-west Ukrainian diaspora undertook a virtual unending public relations campaign against the “Soviet occupation of Ukraine.” Finally, with the beginning of the Gorbachev reform era in 1985, the Ukrainian diaspora was mobilized to help victims of the Chornobyl’ nuclear disaster, to assist pro-independence movements like Rukh, and to provide support for the various churches which were again allowed to func­tion legally in the homeland.

The large-scale emigration of ethnic Ukrainians to North America that had characterized the decades before World War I was not to be repeated. There were several reasons for this: United States government restrictions against southern and eastern European immigration implemented in 1924; the nega­tive impact of the world economic depression of the 1930s; and the strict con­trols against emigration imposed by Soviet authorities on territories under their control.

Aside from the masses of emigrants who left their homeland primarily for economic reasons, the twentieth century also saw a steady stream of Ukrainian political and religious leaders who sought refuge abroad, either in North Amer­ica or, more often, nearer home, in central and western Europe. Among the numerous exiles were refugees from tsarist, Soviet, and Polish rule, including Viacheslav Lypyns’kyi and Dmytro Dontsov before World War I; Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi, Symon Petliura, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Pavlo Skoropads’kyi, Dmytro Doroshenko, Nestor Makhno, levhen Petrushevych, and levhen Konovalets’ during the interwar years; Andrii Mel’nyk, Stepan Bandera, Msty- slav Skrypnyk, Ivan Kedryn-Rudnyts’kyi, George Shevelov, and Volodymyr Kubiiovych during World War II; and Iosyf Slipyi, Valentyn Moroz, Leonid Pliushch, and losyp Terelia during the last decades of Soviet rule.

Particularly because of the high profile of these and numerous other political, religious, and cultural figures, the Soviet government maintained continual surveillance of the Ukrainian emigration wherever it was located, whether from listening posts at home or through the widely spread Soviet espionage networks abroad. The reason was simple: at a time when the Sovi­et regime was denying the validity of certain aspects of Ukrainian culture, outlawing Ukrainian churches and religious orders, suppressing information about certain historical events, and banning movements that promoted the idea of independent Ukrainian statehood, these very same elements were being kept alive and well among Ukrainian immigrants and their descend­ants in the diaspora.

The diaspora fulfilled its role as a preserver of Ukrainian culture and national consciousness through the creation in western Europe and North America of several educational and scholarly institutions, such as the inter­war Ukrainian Free University, begun in Vienna and later continued in Prague and Munich, and, from the post-World War II years, the Shevchenko Scientific Society and Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in New York City; the St Clement Ukrainian Catholic University in Rome; the Ukrainian encyclo­pedia project in Sarcelles, outside Paris; the Ukrainian Studies Program at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada; and the Chair of Ukrainian Studies and English-language Encyclopedia of Ukraine project at the University of Toronto, Canada. In short, the Ukrainian diaspo­ra, despite numerous internal conflicts, maintained for posterity all those ele­ments of the Ukrainian cultural patrimony that in Soviet times were being suppressed in the Ukrainian homeland.

It was not until independence came to Ukraine in 1991 that the diaspora was able to establish relatively unhindered relations with its ancestral land. Those relations have taken several forms: economic investments; financial support for cultural projects and political activity; and even the return of indi­viduals, some of whom have taken up posts in independent Ukraine’s gov­ernment and church institutions.

working (10 percent). The most remarkable growth was in the oil industry, follow­ing the discovery in the 1870s of fields in eastern Galicia near Drohobych and Boryslav. Financed and operated by Austrian, French, and English companies, oil production increased eightyfold between 1875 and 1910. In fact, by the outbreak of World War I in 1914, eastern Galicia accounted for almost 4 percent of the world’s oil production. Conversely, Galicia’s small iron ore and coal production decreased by almost 50 percent between 1858 and 1889.

In the end, despite some industrial development, Galicia remained an eco­nomically underdeveloped agrarian society under Austrian rule. To an even great­er degree, so did the other Ukrainian-inhabited regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bukovina and Transcarpathia: in those regions, there were virtually no industries prior to World War I.

Other peoples in eastern Galicia and Bukovina

Most of the administrative, commercial, and industrial development in late nine­teenth-century Galicia was directed not by Ukrainians, but rather by Poles and Jews. The Poles’ numbers continued to increase, not only west of the San River but also in the province’s eastern, “Ukrainian” half. The reason for the rather dramatic increase was a steady migration of Poles from western to eastern Galicia. They set­tled in agricultural communities in the midst of Ukrainians as well as in towns and cities, especially L’viv. By 1890, one-third of all Poles living in eastern Galicia had immigrated from west of the San. By 1910, there was a total of 890,000 Poles in east­ern Galicia. In terms of socioeconomic composition, 68 percent were peasants; 16 percent were engaged in industry; 8.5 percent were engaged in trade and transport; and 7.5 percent were engaged in administration, the professions, and servicejobs.

Not only did the Poles dominate the administration and economic life of Galicia as a whole, they also transformed much of eastern Galicia, especially its cities, into oases of Polish culture. Accordingly, in relatively liberal Austria, L’viv (or Lwow, as it was known among Poles) became one of the leading centers of the Polish national revival among the lands carved out of the pre-partition Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Besides a host of Polish newspapers, publishing houses, theaters, cultural societies, and schools, L’viv boasted its own Polish-language university, the Polish Historical Society, and a distinguished library and research center known as the Ossolineum. The city also became home to some of Poland’s leading historians (Oswald Balzer, Michal Bobrzynski), philologists (Alexander Brückner), ethnogra­phers (Waclaw Zaleski, Pauli Zegota), and writers (Jan Lam, Jan Zachariasiewicz), and from eastern Galicia came the leading author of Polish theatrical comedies, Count Aleksander Fredro (the maternal grandfather of the future Greek Catholic metropolitan, Andrei Sheptyts’kyi).

Galicia was also a crucially important center for Polish political life in general during the late nineteenth century. Whereas Cracow was the stronghold of con­servative politicians (the Stanczyks) loyal to the Habsburg Monarchy, eastern Gali­cia and L’viv became the center for more socially oriented and nationalistic move­ments, including the Polish Social Democratic party (est. 1892), the Peasant party (Stronnictwo Ludowe, est. 1895), and the Galician branch of National Democratic party - the Endecja (est. 1905). It was in eastern Galicia that the movement for Polish independence headed by Jozef Pilsudski found a home during the decade before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and where the para-military Union of Active Struggle (Zwigzek Walki Czynnej) and the Riflemen Association (Zwigzek Strzelecki) were set up to train young Poles for a future armed struggle Russia.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Poles in nineteenth-century Austria quite nat­urally considered L’viv - and, for that matter, all of Galicia - an integral part of the Polish patrimony. The idea that “things should remain as they always have been” (naj bude, jak buwato) was most adamantly promoted by a group of Polish landown­ers from eastern Galicia known as the Podolians. These self-styled representatives of Galician autonomy were convinced that the future of the province would best be guaranteed if political as well as economic power - based on land, not on any experiments with industrialization - remained in the hands of the Polish nobility.

The other influential people in Galicia, the Jews, also continued to expand in size and economic influence during the second half of the nineteenth century. Whereas in 1849 there were 328,000 Jews, by 1910 their numbers had more than doubled, to 872,000, a figure that represented 11 percent of the total population of the province. Three-quarters of Galicia’s Jews (660,000) lived in the eastern half of the province, in both cities and small towns (76.2 percent) and in the surround­ing Ukrainian countryside. The number of Jews grew as a result of a high birthrate and in-migration of refugees from pogroms in the neighboring western provinces of the Russian Empire.

The Jews remained an important factor in the Galician economy. By 1910, 77 percent of the group were engaged in commerce, industry, and small handicrafts. With the beginnings of industrial development during the last decades of the nine-

Ukraine’s Other Diasporas

The formulation Ukrainian diaspora almost always refers to communities of eth­nic Ukrainians and their descendants living in various places outside Ukraine. But since Ukraine was - and is - home to many different peoples, it has gener­ated several Ukrainian diasporas or, more precisely, diasporas from Ukraine. Among the most important of these other Ukrainian diasporas are those repre­sented by Crimean Tatars, Jews, Russians, Carpatho-Rusyns, Poles, Germans, and Mennonites, each of which has maintained in various ways and in differing intensity relations with their ancestral homelands in Ukraine.

The first group to experience large-scale emigration from Ukrainian lands were the Crimean Tatars. Some scholars have suggested that between 1783 and 1922 no less than 1.8 million emigrated to the various lands of the Ottoman Empire. Their exodus began in 1780s in connection with the collapse of the independ­ent Crimean Khanate and was to continue for nearly a century, reaching a high point in the 1860s when, of the 784 villages from which emigrants left, 330 were completely abandoned. As Muslims, the Crimean Tatar emigrants sought refuge in the relatively nearby sacred “land of the Caliph,” that is, the Otto­man Empire. However, as the Ottoman Empire itself was in the course of the nineteenth century steadily being reduced in size, the Crimean diaspora was before long to find itself in new countries. Hence, the Crimean Tatars who first went to Circassia and the Bujak, eventually found themselves in the Russian Empire, while those who settled in the Black Sea coastal region of Dobruja were by the late 1870s living in Romania and Bulgaria. Such political changes prompted in 1877-1878 a second emigration from Dobruja, when between 80,000 and 100,000 Crimean Tatars moved to the Ottoman heartland of Anato­lia, which itself was transformed into the secular Republic of Turkey in 1924.

Wherever they went, the Tatar emigrants from the former Crimean Khanate maintained distinctions between their two subgroups: the nomadic Nogays from the steppe, who continued to practice herding and livestock raising; and the sedentary Tats from the southern and coastal Crimea, who in the diaspora as at home were farmers or urban artisans, traders, and workers. In general, the Crimean Tatars who settled in Ottoman Anatolia tended to assimilate with the surrounding Turkish population, while those who settled and remained in Dobrudja retained a distinct identity in contrast to the dominant Christian inhabitants of Romania and Bulgaria. Still today Tatars/Nogays are an officially recognized national minority in Romania (25,000) and Bulgaria (5,000).

Despite strong assimilationist tendencies, the Crimean diaspora has at cer­tain times generated political and cultural movements directed at the group’s former homeland. An early example of this was evident among the 8,000 strong Crimean diaspora, including part of the Giray dynasty, which fled southeast­ward and settled in the Circassian lands in the Caucasus Mountains. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the Girays and their supporters in Circassia promoted efforts (all in vain) to unseat Russian rule in the Crimea and to return to their homeland. Giray princes also served in the Balkan prov­inces of the Ottoman Empire, where military regiments were formed among Crimean Tatar emigres who fought in conflicts against the Russian Empire. This included participation in the Allied (British and French) landings on the peninsula during the early stages of the Crimean War (1854).

Even more important as a Crimean diaspora center was the Ottoman capital of Istanbul. There, under the leadership of Noman Qelebi Cihan and Cefer Seydahmet, the Crimean Students Association (Kirim Talebe Cemiyeti, est. 1908) and the Vatan/Fatherland Society (Vatan Cemiyeti, est. 1909) were set up to support the Crimean Tatar national revival in the homeland. The under­ground Vatan Society was the first to call for Crimean independence. Until that goal was achieved, and for nearly a decade beginning in 1908, several enthusi­asts returned from the Ottoman Empire to Russian-ruled Crimea, bringing with them books and other nationalist literature which they distributed as teachers in Ismail Gaspirali’s New Method school system. The most famous of these cultural enlighteners was the renowned Crimean Tatar patriotic poet S evki Bektore. Exile political activity increased during World War I, when activists in Istanbul lobbied the Ottoman government and tried to galvanize support from the Tatar diaspora to create an independent Crimean state allied to the Ottoman Empire. Despite the subsequent opposition of Ataturk’s Republic of Turkey toward the political aspirations of Crimean exiles, this did not deter individuals like the anti-Communist Cafer Seydahmet, who until his death in i960 continued to lobby international organizations and foreign states in an effort to dislodge Soviet rule from the Crimea.

Nonetheless, the Crimean diaspora (estimated at anywhere between two million to five million persons) was never able to change Turkey’s basic accept­ance of Soviet rule in their homeland, nor to generate any serious protests on the part of the Turkish government against the wholesale deportations of Tatars from the Crimea to Soviet Central Asia in i944. During the post-World War II decades, one Crimean Tatar exile writing in Turkish, Cengiz Dag ci, did man­age to keep the memory of the Crimea alive in the minds of his increasingly turkified Crimean Tatar countrymen. Dag ci’s quite popular writings did seem to have some impact in helping to raise cultural awareness among Turkey’s Crimean Tatar diaspora and to prepare it for the unexpected changes that were to occur in their homeland following the collapse of the Soviet Union in i99i.

The next numerically significant “other diaspora” from Ukraine are the Jews. Hundreds of thousands of Jews from Ukrainian lands in Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire began emigrating to North America, in particular to the northeastern cities of the United States, between the i880s and i9i4. During those early decades, the Jews founded numerous organizations (landsmanschaftn) that brought together immigrants from specific communities. For instance, in the 1940s there were in the United States as many as 31 separate organi­zations of Jews from the city of Odessa alone, which were among the nearly 800 groups that formed an umbrella body known as the National Conference of Ukrainian Jewish Organizations. The National Conference was particularly active in trying to help the relatives of its members in Soviet Ukraine during World War II through the Jewish Council for Russian War Relief.

A few prominent Jews from Ukraine have been able to maintain contact with the non-Jewish culture of their geographic birthplace, which they invariably identify as “Russia.” This has been particularly the case with musicians, such as Nathan Milstein, the world-renowned violinist from Odessa, and Vladimir Horowitz, the Kiev-trained piano virtuoso, who after six decades of living abroad was finally able to fulfill his dream during the late 1980s by returning home to perform in what he called “my Russia.” Others had professions which enabled them to have ongoing direct relations with Ukraine, even during the years of Stalinist rule, when contacts with the West were severely restricted. Sol Hurok, for instance, was a New York impresario who for several decades after World War II brought to the West numerous performing ensembles from the former Soviet Union (including from Ukraine). Even more prominent was Armand Hammer, an American-born member of a family of successful entre­preneurs in pre-World War I southern Ukraine and himself a wealthy business­man who invested in industrial development in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and again after World War II.

Another type of Jewish emigrant from Ukraine consisted of those who remained in Europe. Some, like the French novelist from Kiev, Irene Nemi­rovsky, the French painter and fashion designer born near Kremenchuk, Sonia Delaunay (Sarah Shtern-Terk), or the British publishing magnate and Labor party member of parliament, Robert Maxwell (Ludwig Koch), a native of Trans­carpathia, functioned exclusively in the society of the countries to which they immigrated. Others remained linked to their homeland. Of the latter category, some retained that link through their writings, such as the German-language writers Manes Sperber (from eastern Galicia) and Paul Celan (from northern Bukovina), who since the 1930s enriched Austrian literature with works con­taining themes inspired by their birthplaces - small Jewish shtetlakh in Ukraine. Others, like Simon Wiesenthal, a native of eastern Galicia, set up in Vienna after World War II a Documentation Center devoted to research on the Holo­caust and the worldwide pursuit of Nazi war criminals.

These musicians, businesspeople, writers, and civic activists were the excep­tion, however, with regard to their views of their ancestral homeland, what­ever they may have called it. Before 1914, most Jews emigrated from Ukraine because they were seeking to improve their economic situation, but their diaspora-born descendants have tended to remember the pogroms and other forms of persecution as the primary cause forcing their own ancestors, and by association all Jews, to seek refuge abroad. The view in the Jewish diaspora of the ancestral homeland in Ukraine and other parts of central and eastern Europe became clouded further by the massive destruction of entire families and communities during the World War II Holocaust. As a result, today the popular image of Ukraine among people of Jewish heritage living in North America and other countries tends to be negative. Such an attitude has at times contributed to friction between Jewish and Ukrainian organizations and spokespersons on the rare occasions when the two diaspora communities have been brought together by political issues, such as emigration policy from the former Soviet Union or the prosecution of alleged war criminals, which in the 1970s and 1980s were of concern to the United States, Canadian, and Israeli governments.

There is, of course, a Jewish diaspora from Ukraine in Israel. Among the earliest immigrants were small groups, often Zionists, who arrived in Palestine during the interwar years of the twentieth century. The most prominent of these individuals was a native of Kiev, Golda (Mabovitch) Meir, later prime minister of Israel, and Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Odessa-born Zionist leader who was exceptional in that he supported the idea of an independent Ukraine. Much larger numbers of Jews from Ukraine, this time mostly survivors of the Holocaust, arrived in Palestine and the newly created state of Israel in the years just after World War II. These people have maintained links with their homeland through numerous community organizations (landsmanschaftn) based in various Israeli cities and towns that try to keep alive the memory of their pre-Holocaust communities in Ukraine. There are also the followers of several Hasidic dynasties. While the Hasidim focus their lives around religion and may show little interest in the “old country” from which they were forced to flee, their lifestyle - including year-long winter dress in the tropical Israeli climate - is a constant reminder of traditional life in the shtetlakh of Ukraine.

An entirely new group comprise Jews who were allowed to leave the Soviet Union after political pressure was put on that country by Western powers, in particular the United States. In the 1970s alone, over 46,000 Jews from Soviet Ukraine emigrated to Israel. After a lull because of Soviet restrictions in the early 1980s, the numbers increased dramatically during the last years of Soviet rule and especially the first decade of independent Ukraine. Between 1989 and 2001 no less than three million Jews from Ukraine arrived in Israel. For the most part, these former Soviet citizens are Jews in name only. They speak Rus­sian, associate with Russian culture, have little knowledge of the rich Jewish heritage of the world they left behind, and certainly have no affinity with the idea that Ukraine may be something distinct from Russia and worthy of interest in itself. As always, there are exceptions, and in this case two exceptional ones in Israel are: Iakov Suslensky from Odessa, an author and civic activist best known for his promoting the cause of ethnic Ukrainians who helped Jews dur­ing the Holocaust; and Moisei Fishbein, a distinguished Ukrainian-language poet and self-styled Ukrainian nationalist.

Another significant diaspora from Ukraine is represented by people of East Slavic heritage - in many cases individuals born into Ukrainian-speaking fami­lies - who consider themselves Russian. Wherever these people have lived, they have retained the hierarchy of multiple loyalties that was commonly held throughout Ukraine during the nineteenth century. In other words, they are Russians, or Little Russians, from Ukraine.

Most of these Little Russians were part of the massive emigration from the Russian Empire that occurred after the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War (1917-1920). They created no specifically Little Russian organiza­tions, but instead integrated fully with the rest of the Russian immigrant com­munity, whether in central and western Europe or in North America. Several adapted easily and made distinguished careers in their new homelands, such as the aviation designer Igor Sikorsky, the biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, the chemist George Kistiakowsky, and the historian Michael T Florinsky in the United States, and the diplomat George Ignatieff in Canada. Others, like the Yale University historian George Vernadsky (the son of the first head of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences) and the Orthodox priest and theologian Georges Florovsky, who taught for many years in Paris and at Harvard and Princeton Universities, devoted much of their scholarship to developments in Ukraine. They invariably described it, however, as “West Russia” and there­fore as an integral part of a single Russian civilization.

Often the Little Russian immigrants regarded and wrote nostalgically about Ukraine as their “Russian” homeland, which might be occupied by the Bolshe­viks but one day would be brought back into the fold of a “one and indivisible” democratic Russia. There were also Little Russians less tolerant of and indeed openly hostile to the notion that Ukraine could ever become a sovereign state, denying even that Ukrainians existed as a distinct nationality. Such views were propagated in a spate of books and pamphlets that were popular in certain circles of the Russian immigration, with self-explanatory titles such as The Ukrainian Question: The Historic Truth Versus the Separatist Propaganda (1920), by Prince Aleksandr Volkonskii; Leplus grandmensonge du XXsiecle: I’Ukraine (The Greatest Lie of the Twentieth Century: Ukraine, 1939), by Vasilii Shul’gin; and Ukraine, a Russian Land (1940), co-authored by Sergei Obolenskii. During the Cold War, a time when Russian patriots abroad felt their entire heritage was being unjustly associated with Communism and the Soviet enemy, some reacted by criticizing American political leaders who, as they saw it, accepted the “propaganda of Ukrainian emigre specialists” and recognized Ukraine as a legitimate if occupied national entity and as a full-fledged member of organiza­tions like the Munich-based Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.

Little Russians have been particularly active in the various jurisdictions of the Russian Orthodox Church that have flourished in western Europe and North America both before and after the Bolshevik Revolution. During the interwar years, many Russian emigre clergy either were from Ukraine or had functioned there as hierarchs before the civil war forced them to leave. Among the latter group were Metropolitan Antonii (Aleksei Khrapovitskii, reigned 1920-1927), the head of the Synod Abroad, based at the time in Sremski Kar- lovci, Yugoslavia, and Metropolitan Evlogii (Vasilii Georgievskii, reigned 1921­1946), the head of the Exarchate for Western Europe, based in Paris, which was first under the Patriarchate of Moscow and later under the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Metropolitans Antonii and Evlogii were typical of other clerics from “Little Russia” who denied that Ukrainians exist as a dis­tinct people and who condemned as superfluous and uncanonical all efforts to create an autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox church. To this day, the Orthodox Church in America (formerly the Russian Orthodox Church in North America) and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (the Synod, based in New York City) are made up largely of clergy and faithful who themselves or whose parents came from Ukraine but who identify themselves as Russians.

Another East Slavic diaspora are the Carpatho-Rusyns. They derive from the Transcarpathian oblast (historic Subcarpathian Rus’) of Ukraine and the imme­diately neighboring areas of Slovakia (the Presov Region) and southeastern Poland (the Lemko Region). Whereas some sought work in western Europe­an countries (France, Belgium), the vast majority went to North America, in particular to the United States, where an estimated 225,000 arrived between the 1880s and 1914. Thereafter the numbers were much smaller, about 25,000 to the United States and at most 20,000 to Canada. When Carpatho-Rusyns first arrived and from the 1880s settled in large concentrations in the industrial regions of the northeastern United States they interacted closely with other Rusyns (Ukrainians) from eastern Galicia through their Greek Catholic faith.

Already before 1900, however, different attitudes toward national and reli­gious identity resulted in the evolution of a distinct Carpatho-Rusyn commu­nity with its own secular organizations and church jurisdictions, both Greek Catholic and Orthodox. At this time a large number of Carpatho-Rusyns together with some Galician Rusyns converted to Orthodoxy; as part of that process they also adopted a Russian national identity and, together with “Lit­tle Russians” from Ukraine, they formed the backbone of the Russian diaspora in North America for much of the first half of the twentieth century. Among such “Russians” were two Carpatho-Rusyns from the Presov Region in Slova­kia who were particularly predominant in church life: St Aleksei (Alexis Toth), hailed “the father of Orthodoxy in America” for his proselytizing efforts before World War I; and Metropolitan Laurus (Vasyl’ Shkurla), the primate of the Rus­sian Orthodox Church Abroad (the Synod), who was instrumental in healing the breach with the Russian Orthodox Church - Moscow Patriarchate at the outset of the twenty-first century.

Those Carpatho-Rusyns who maintained a distinct identity and communi­ty structures have at times played an important role in developments in their ancestral homeland. This was particularly so after World War I, when organi­zations like the Greek Catholic Union and the American National Council of Uhro-Rusyns lobbied successfully for the incorporation of Subcarpathian Rus’ (present-day Transcarpathia) into Czechoslovakia (see chapter 41), and more recently in the years since the Revolutions of 1889 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, when American-based organizations like the Carpatho-Rusyn Research Center and the Carpatho-Rusyn Society have assisted the revival of a Carpatho-Rusyn identity in Ukraine and neighboring countries.

A relatively newer diaspora from Ukraine comprises Poles from the Zieme zabrane, or “territories taken from Poland” after World War II. Among these were Poles from eastern Galicia and western Volhynia who were forced into exile between 1939 and 1946 after their “Polish” homeland was forcibly annexed to the Soviet Union. Most of the nearly half-million Poles remaining at the close of World War II in what by then was Soviet Ukrainian territory were, according to an agreement with the Soviet Union, resettled in postwar Poland, especially in Silesia and other territories annexed from defeated Germany.

The former Germanic city of Breslau in Silesia, ruled for centuries by Czechs and later Prussians and then renamed Wroclaw in 1945, became a major destina­tion for Poles from Ukraine. In many ways, postwar Polish Wroclaw became a “new Lwow,” where some of the most important Polish institutions formerly in L’viv were reestablished, including the Ossolineum Library and the monu­mental panoramic painting of the 1794 Battle of Raclawice, created in 1894 as the symbol of the Polish peasantry’s contribution to the heroic but ultimately unsuccessful struggle to maintain Poland’s independence in the late eighteenth century. So pervasive has the “easterner’s” presence become that there are today guidebooks and phrasebooks which point out the ongoing impact of the “Lwow dialect and pronunciation” on the Polish spoken language of Wroclaw.

World War II also displaced thousands of Poles from Galicia and Volhynia to various parts of Europe and North America, where they were to remain per­manently. For example, immediately after the war, a contingent of the Polish diaspora from Ukraine, specifically from the city of L’viv, established in Lon­don, England, the L’viv Circle (Kolo Lwowian) to perpetuate through lectures and publications the memory of Polish Lwow. Almost without exception, the Poles from L’viv and other eastern territories (kresy) resented the Ukrainians, who, they believed, usurped their Polish homeland with the aid of Soviet pow­er. Such attitudes have from time to time caused friction between Poles and Ukrainians in the diaspora, especially when the subject of the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) is discussed in the Polish press and other publications abroad.

The Poles from Ukraine who found themselves in postwar Poland were for decades forbidden by the pro-Soviet Polish authorities to discuss publicly the fate of their homeland. Privately, however, the “easterners” shared with other Poles their resentment against the Soviets and, by default, against Ukrainians, who, from their perspective, had taken possession of their Polish patrimony. The suppression of public memory about Galicia and Volhynia came to an end with the political changes brought about by Gorbachev in the mid-1980s. Since that time, Poland has experienced an outburst of interest in its former eastern lands. Numerous books, pamphlets, reprintings, and journals devoted to “Polish” western Ukraine have appeared. L’viv, in particular, has been the focus of attention through publications, media reports, and the activity of over a dozen Friends of Lwow societies founded throughout Poland since 1989.

It seems that members of the Polish diaspora from Ukraine, as well as their descendants and sympathizers, are finally resigned to the reality that the inter­national boundaries established in 1945 are not going to change. They hope, however, that by supporting independent Ukraine and bringing it closer to the European Union that they will be able to contribute to the restoration of Polish monuments there and to encourage a positive reappraisal of the Polish contri­bution to the history and culture of western Ukraine.

Finally, there are many Germans who have emigrated from Ukraine and whose descendants still live in the mid-western agricultural states and provinces of the United States and Canada where their forebears first settled. A descendant of one of these settlers, Edward Schreyer, reached the highest government office, serving as Governor-General of Canada in the early 1980s. In general, the late- nineteenth-century immigrants and their descendants have been absorbed into the large German-American and German-Canadian communities, or they have identified themselves and their organizations as “Germans from Russia.”

The Mennonites, too, have generally referred to the place they emigrated from as Russia (technically the Russian Empire), even though the vast majority left lands within what is present-day Ukraine. The numerous scholarly centers for Mennonite studies, among them the Chair of Mennonite Studies and Men­no Simons College at the University of Manitoba and Conrad Grebel College at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, invariably focus their work on com­munities who trace their origins to Ukraine. Although the Mennonite diaspora continues to emphasize its origins as being “from Russia,” and although there are virtually no Mennonites left in the farmlands of southern Ukraine, several diasporan groups began after independence in the 1990s to visit their ancestral villages in Ukraine and to send humanitarian aid there, knowing full well that the recipients were local ethnic Ukrainians (or in some cases Russians), but not Mennonites.

teenth century, a few Jews were able to amass substantial wealth in Galician bank­ing, oil, trade, industry, and even large-scale landowning. These achievements were exceptional, however. The vast majority, in part because of rapid demograph­ic growth and the province’s relatively limited economic opportunities, remained poor. For these reasons, Galicia’s Jews, like its Ukrainians, began to emigrate en masse, first to neighboring Hungary (Transcarpathia and eastern Slovakia), then to the imperial capital of Vienna, and finally to the northeastern United States, where between 1881 and 1910, 237,000 Jewish Galitsiyaner (173,000 from eastern Galicia alone), as they were known, sought to improve their economic status.

Despite emigration, Galicia in the second half of the nineteenth century

Administrative and Socioeconomic Structure, 1849-1914 465 remained the center of a vibrant Jewish political and cultural life. Jews had their own political parties which cooperated with Polish parties, and they had members in both the Galician diet and the imperial parliament in Vienna. They were par­ticularly well represented on regional and urban councils. Although they initially cooperated with the Poles, by the beginning of the twentieth century many Jewish candidates were cooperating with the Ukrainians in order to counteract Polish political dominance.

While the vast majority of Galicia’s Jews remained Hasidic traditionalists who eschewed contact with the gentile world, the cultural elite favored assimilation. In a sense, the members of the Jewish elite were similar to those Ukrainians who accepted the principle of multiple loyalties. For them, dual identity meant being a German or a Pole of Jewish religious background. The Ukrainian option was less desirable, although in 1910 over 22,000 Jews declared that their native language was Ukrainian and therefore were classified as Ukrainian. Ukrainophile Jews were in the minority, however. As for the Germanophiles and Polonophiles, the latter group prevailed after the 1870s. Jewish Polonophiles attended Polish schools and adopted a Polish national identity.

In politics, some Jewish Polonophiles wholeheartedly embraced the Polish national cause (Wilhelm Feldman), while others allied themselves with Polish and Ukrainian socialists whose primary interest was the transformation of Gali­cia’s socioeconomic system. Still another faction rejected any expectation that real improvement for Jews could ever be achieved in Galicia, or, for that matter, any­where else in central and eastern Europe. These were the Zionists, who, from the time their first Galician organization was established in Przemysl in 1874, looked to only one avenue to Jewish salvation - emigration to Palestine. Given the reality of Ottoman rule, emigration to Palestine was not immediately possible, and before long some Galician Zionists had formulated the concept of self-emancipation through participation in local politics in order to improve the status of Jews while they still remained in Europe.

One of the aspects of self-emancipation was a new attitude toward the indige­nous Yiddish culture of Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as elsewhere in central and eastern Europe. Neighboring Bukovina, in particular Chernivtsi, was the home of the founder of Yiddish theater, Avrom Goldfadn, and the site of the first world congress of Yiddish language and culture. Organized by Nathan Birnbaum and other Zionist leaders, the Chernivtsi language congress, notwith­standing fierce opposition on the part of the supporters of Hebrew, set in motion a process whereby Yiddish was finally codified as a distinct literary language.

Late-nineteenth century Galicia and Bukovina also produced several accom­plished writers who, while living most of their lives well beyond the world into which they were born and to which they had initially been acculturated, continued to find artistic inspiration in their native Jewish heritage. The writer and editor Karl-Emil Franzos, who spent most of his life in Vienna and Berlin, depicted Jewish life in Galicia and Bukovina in several of his German-language novels and short sto­ries. Two other Galician-born Jews were to make their literary careers after World War I, by which time Austria-Hungary had ceased to exist: the German-language

Austrian novelist Joseph Roth, whose writings are imbued with themes from life during the last years of the Habsburg Empire; and the Yiddish- and Hebrew-lan- guage Israeli writer and Nobel laureate, Shemu’el Yosef Agnon, several of whose novels are set in eastern Galicia. Thus, the Jews of Galicia, most of whom lived in the eastern part of the province, during the last seventy-five years of Austrian rule engaged in a broad spectrum of political, socioeconomic, and cultural activity, sometimes in cooperation and at other times in competition with the Ukrainians and Poles among whom they lived.

Chernivtsi was also the main center for Bukovina’s Romanians. Although in 1900 they constituted only 14.3 percent of the city’s population, Chernivtsi (in Roma­nian, Cernau(i) had by that time become the home of several Romanian schools, cultural organizations, newspapers, and political groups. Among the articulate portion of the Romanian population, the large landowners, led by the Austrian officials Eudoxiu Hurmuzaki and Alexandru Petrino, were quite content with centralized Habsburg rule. They were challenged, however, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century by a movement of intellectuals who in 1892 founded the Romanian National party. The party urged the implementation of greater autonomy for Bukovina and an improvement in the economic status of the province’s Romanian peasantry.

The oldest and most important cultural organization was the Society for Roma­nian Literature and Culture in Bukovina (Societate pentru Literatura si Cultura Romana in Bucovina), founded in Chernivtsi in 1863. Over the next half century, it published literary journals (Foaia, 1865-69; Aurora Romana,, 1881-84), provid­ed scholarships for Romanian gymnasium students, encouraged the creation of a Department of Romanian Language and Literature at the newly established Uni­versity of Chernivtsi (1875), and, in 1897, opened a printing shop for a wide vari­ety of Romanian-language books, school texts, and newspapers. As well, the soci­ety continually pressed the Austrian government to extend Romanian-language education in Bukovina, with the result that by 1900, classes were taught in Roma­nian in 115 elementary schools, that is, in 37 percent of all elementary schools in the province.

During the last three decades of Habsburg rule, Romanian leaders were con­cerned primarily with two issues. The first was the growth of the local Ukrain­ian movement, which they feared was displacing them in their “own province.” The other issue was Romanian irredentism from neighboring Romania. Moldavia and Walachia had united in 1858 and then, two decades later, as the Kingdom of Romania, had become independent of the Ottoman Empire. Irredentists saw that achievement as only the first step toward the eventual reunification of all “Romanian” lands, which meant adding to the Romanian Kingdom three terri­tories: Transylvania from Hungary, Bessarabia from Russia, and Bukovina from Austria. Nonetheless, despite such irredentist calls from the south, the Romanians in Bukovina remained for the most part satisfied with the increasing cultural and administrative autonomy they enjoyed under Habsburg rule.