The Historian as Nation Builder
'Ïèøó Âàì ïî-ðóññêè, íå óìåÿ ïèñàòü ïî-ìàëîðîññèéñêè, è äóìàÿ, ÷òî íåïðèÿòíî Âàì áóäåò, åñëè íàïèøó ïî-ïîëüñêè.' Nevill Forbes to Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Oxford, 27 June 19111
Most of Ukraine's history since the early modern period has been determined by its location between the two major political, economic, and cultural powers of Eastern Europe, Poland and Russia.
Their competition for the 'lands between' naturally involved military, political, and economic dimensions, but our concern here is with culture, particularly questions of religion, language, literature, and history, which became especially pronounced in the nineteenth century, after the destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The nascent Ukrainian national movement was profoundly influenced by the clash between Ukraine's two powerful neighbours. Inspired by the ideas of Poland's 'Great Emigration' of the nineteenth century, it also took advantage of the Russian imperial struggle against Polish cultural influence in the wake of the Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1863. Ukrainian activists, who were persecuted in the Russian Empire, found better conditions for their publishing activities in the Habsburg province of Galicia, which was largely controlled by the Poles in the last decades of the nineteenth century. To survive and extend its influence over the Ukrainian masses, the Ukrainian national movement had to make its way between the two East European cultural giants, who regarded the Ukrainians as raw material for their respective nation-building projects. The task facing the Ukrainian national 'awakeners' was never easy and always full of internal contradictions. But without finding the right course between Ukraine's West, represented by Poland, and its East, represented by Russia, the Ukrainian national project would never have come to fruition.Among Ukrainian activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, no one was more involved in negotiating Ukraine's political course and formulating its historical and national identity vis-a-vis Poland and Russia than Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866-1934), the greatest Ukrainian historian of the twentieth century and the first head of an independent Ukrainian state (1918).
Hrushevsky was born in the Kholm region of the Russian Empire. His father, a prominent Ukrainian pedagogue, was sent to the Ukrainian-Polish borderlands to de- Polonize and Russify the local Ukrainian population in the aftermath of the Polish uprising of 1863. The young Hrushevsky obtained his historical education at Kyiv University, where his professor was the well- known Ukrainian historian Volodymyr Antonovych (1834-1908). Antonovych forsook Roman Catholicism for Orthodoxy and abandoned the 'high' Polish culture of his home to embrace the 'low' Ukrainian culture of the local peasantry and become one of the leaders of the Ukrainian national movement in the second half of the nineteenth century. Upon graduation from Kyiv University, Hrushevsky accepted a position in East European history at Lviv University, where he taught Ukrainian history from 1894 until the outbreak of the First World War. During that time, he served as president of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv, founded the Ukrainian Scientific Society in Kyiv, and edited Ukraine's most influential monthly of the period, Literaturno- naukovyi vistnyk (Literary and Scholarly Herald).2Hrushevsky had been regarded as the leader of the Ukrainian cause by its proponents and opponents in the Habsburg Monarchy and the Russian Empire alike. What helped him cross the boundaries between the two empires and the two branches of the national movement as easily as he did was that for all the differences in tactics, the movement had a common ideology and long-term goal: national-territorial autonomy within the respective empires. It was Hrushevsky, the recognized exponent of the Ukrainian movement on both sides of the border, who led it to the achievement of its immediate and prospective goals. Hrushevsky was a villain for Polish and Russian nationalists and a national prophet in the eyes of his followers. His friends were impressed with his ability to withstand continuous attacks from the Russian and Polish nationalist camps.
Hrushevsky moved into the public spotlight once he decided to abandon the realm of 'cultural' work and began to take part in politics. His insistence on the use of Ukrainian at the Russian archaeological congress in Kyiv (1899) and his participation in the founding of the Ukrainian National Democratic Party in the same year turned him into a symbol of the Ukrainian national revival. When in 1906 he joined the Ukrainian deputies of the First Russian Duma, they accepted him as their unquestioned leader and symbol of the unity of eastern and western Ukraine.3Hrushevsky's main achievement, the separation of Ukrainian history from Russian as a field of study, turned the Ukrainian historical narrative from a subnational into a national one and immediately plunged the historian into a maelstrom of controversy. The first to attack Hru- shevsky were representatives of Polish national historiography, who severely criticized his attempt to construct a Ukrainian national narrative at the expense of the Polish one. The latter continued to include significant parts of the Ukrainian past in both territorial and ethnocultural terms. While the confrontation between Polish and Ukrainian political elites in the Habsburg Monarchy before the First World War encouraged the critical assessment of Hrushevsky's works by Polish histori- ans,4 co-operation between Ukrainian national parties and Russian liberals in the Russian Empire often shielded him from attack by his Russian opponents.5 That situation changed in 1917, when Hrushevsky became a principal target of proponents of the all-Russian idea and was deemed the main culprit behind the efforts of the empire's foes to divide 'Russia, one and indivisible.'6
This chapter, which grew out of my work in the Hrushevsky Translation Project - the collective effort of an international group of scholars led by Frank E. Sysyn to make available to the English-speaking reader Hrushevsky's ten-volume History of Ukraine-Rus' - takes a close look at the historian's political writings during the first revolution in the Russian Empire (1905-7).
At that time, Hrushevsky tried to chart a middle course for the nascent Ukrainian national movement between Russian liberalism and Polish nationalism, applying different tactics in dealing with these two political currents. In discussing this stage of Ukrainian nation building, the essay seeks to attain a better understanding not only of the role played by Hrushevsky in this process but also of the challenges faced by the Ukrainian national revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Mykhailo Hrushevsky was elected to the chair of European history at Lviv University in 1894 owing to a deal between the Polish political elites of Galicia and the Ukrainian populists. Apart from the Austrian government, the Polish political circles of Galicia, and the Ukrainian populists, major actors in the 'new era' were the Ukrainophile leaders of Russian-ruled Ukraine, represented by Hrushevsky's mentors in Kyiv, Volodymyr Antonovych and Oleksander Konysky. They established good relations not only with the Ukrainian populists but also with the Polish political circles of Galicia. In the mid-1880s, when Aus- tro-Russian relations were deteriorating, the Kyiv Ukrainophile leaders even attracted the attention of the Austrian government and Polish politicians in Galicia, who were looking for possible allies in Russian- ruled Ukraine in case of war between the two states. Disillusioned with the prospects of a federative order in Russia, Antonovych and Konysky placed their hopes in the creation of a Central European federation of Slavic states. They also sought ways to circumvent the restrictions on Ukrainian publications and cultural activity in the Russian Empire, which became especially severe after the assassination of Emperor Alexander II in 1881.7
The plans worked out by Antonovych and Konysky, on the one hand, and the leaders of the Ukrainophile movement in Galicia, on the other, envisioned the transfer of Ukrainophile activities from Kyiv to Lviv and the creation of a 'Ukrainian Piedmont' in Galicia.
Consequently, it is not surprising that as soon as the Revolution of 1905 in the Russian Empire permitted, Hrushevsky sought to go beyond his Galician base and began to take an active part in promoting the Ukrainian cause in the Romanov realm. He even applied for a position in Russian history at Kyiv University, but the Russian nationalists who dominated Kyiv political life did all they could to prevent the appointment of a 'Ukrainophile' as a professor at Kyiv University. They claimed that his scholarly achievements were difficult to evaluate, as his works were written in the obscure dialect developed by the Galician Ukraino- philes, and that his desire to lecture in Ukrainian would provoke conflicts at Kyiv University. Some authors of anti-Hrushevsky articles even stated that there was no place for him at Kyiv University and that Kyiv, the 'cradle of Russia,' had never been and would never become the centre of an autonomous Ukraine.8 Nor did Hrushevsky's application benefit from his active participation in the 1907 campaign to establish chairs of Ukrainian studies at Ukrainian universities in the Russian Empire. During the first months of 1907, Hrushevsky raised his voice in support of the student movement for the introduction of such chairs and for the use of Ukrainian as a language of instruction. In a long article published in Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk, Hrushevsky discussed the teaching of Ukrainian subjects in the Habsburg Monarchy and advo-cated the establishment of chairs of Ukrainian studies (history, geography, language, literature, folklore, art, etc.) at the universities of Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa.9 A tsarist censor posited a direct link between Hrushevsky's article and student unrest at Kyiv University.10
Hrushevsky began his political activity in the Russian Empire by issuing a number of articles that advocated the lifting of the ban on Ukrainian publications. He addressed his writings to the broadest possible audience, but his primary target in the spring of 1905 was the Russian government, which was then giving consideration to lifting the ban.11 This was a continuation of the campaign that he had begun with demands to legalize the import into the Russian Empire of Ukrainian- language books published in Galicia, including his own works, especially the first volumes of the History of Ukraine-Rus'.
With the first signs of the liberalization of Russian censorship in 1904, Hrushevsky addressed the new minister of internal affairs, Prince Petr Sviatopolk- Mirsky, with a letter in which he tried to turn the anti-Polish sentiments dominant in Russian ruling circles at the time to the benefit of the Ukrainian cause. Concerning the ban on importing the latest volume of his History into Russia, he wrote as follows: 'I find it not only painful but, as a Russian subject, simply shameful to see that, for example, my university colleague's book on the history of Poland and Lithuania in the fifteenth century, which appeared at the same time as the fourth volume of my History, has been allowed to circulate in Russia without restriction because it is written in Polish, while my fourth volume, devoted to the same Polish-Lithuanian period of South Russian history, has been banned unconditionally, without even an inspection by the censors, merely because it is written in the Little Russian language.'12 The revolution hastened the liberation of the Ukrainian word in the Russian Empire. The prohibition was silently dropped from the new regulations on publishing activities issued by the government in the spring of 1906. Hrushevsky, like other activists of the Ukrainian movement, had every reason to celebrate.13The language question, however, was only one of the issues on the activists' agenda. Dubbed 'the resolution of the Ukrainian question,' that agenda envisaged the achievement of territorial autonomy for the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire. However, with the opening of the First Duma in the spring of 1906, the government was no longer prepared to entertain any demands from the Ukrainian movement. The only hope of resolving the reformulated 'Ukrainian question' was to convince the opposition parties in the Duma - the representatives of liberal Russia - to put the national question on their political agenda. The Russian liberals, not the government, became the primary audience of Hrushevsky's articles, though the proponents of Russian nationalism continued to be the object of his attacks. Particularly worrisome to Hru- shevsky were the arguments of the Russian rightists, who were attempting to convince the public that the liberalization of political life would result in the disintegration of the Russian Empire, as the non-Russian nationalities would take advantage of the newly granted freedoms to secede. In the spring of 1906, Hrushevsky travelled to St Petersburg to advise Ukrainian deputies of the Duma and stayed there into the summer. Through his numerous contributions to the Ukrainskii vestnik (Ukrainian Herald), the mouthpiece of the Ukrainian Club at the Duma, he influenced political debate on the Ukrainian issue in Russian soci- ety.14 In his article 'Unity or Disintegration,' published in June 1906, Hrushevsky sought to calm the Russian liberal public. He acknowledged that political independence was indeed the ultimate goal of any national movement but stated at the same time that 'a nationality does not necessarily require political independence for its development.' The only way to save the Russian state, according to Hrushevsky, was to adjust it to the demands of the national movements and turn it into a 'free union of peoples.' Hrushevsky wrote: 'Aspirations to establish one's own state can only be held in check by the awareness that membership in a given political union offers too many advantages and conveniences. The absence of restrictions on the full and universal development of national forces; the absence of their exploitation by the state for the interests of others or for unproductive ends is a necessary condition for such consciousness.'15
For Hrushevsky, such conditions could be achieved only through the restructuring of the Russian Empire on the basis of autonomy for its constituent nations - an idea that he put forward in the summer of 1905 in the debate then taking place on the future Russian constitution. At that time, Hrushevsky proposed to apply the principle of national-territorial self-government, which had previously been discussed only in relation to the Polish provinces of the Russian Empire, to the empire as a whole. He envisioned the Russian state divided into national regions governed by local diets.16 Hrushevsky also continued to promote the idea of Ukrainian territorial autonomy in a number of articles published in Ukrainskii vestnik in the spring and summer of 1906. There he legitimized his demand for the federalization of the Russian Empire by noting that in the spring of 1905 the congress of Russian journalists had adopted a resolution calling for the decentralization of the Russian state and the organization of its future political life on the basis of self-governing national territories.17 Hrushevsky also referred to the history of Ukrainian-Polish relations in Galicia, claiming that what the Ukrainians needed was not just regional autonomy, which might leave them subject to another nationality, but national-territorial autonomy, which could ensure their dominance in a given autonomous unit and guarantee their future national development.18
In August 1906, Hrushevsky specifically addressed the issue of the Ukrainian intelligentsia's duty to serve its own people, discussing it in relation to the authorities' dissolution of the First Duma and the prospects of the liberation movement in the Russian Empire. One of his articles dealing with that theme, 'On the Following Day,' appeared in the eleventh issue of Ukrainskii vestnik on 2 August 1906.19 Another, 'Against the Current,' was written for the fifteenth issue of the same newspaper, which was never published.20 Hrushevsky's main purpose was to convince the liberal Ukrainian intelligentsia, which had supported Ukrainian aspirations during the first stage of the revolution, not to abandon that cause in a period of official reaction and repression. He argued that in continuing to work for the liberation of Russia and opposing reactionary government policies, there was no need to forsake the Ukrainian cause. Service to broader goals did not contradict the idea of serving one's own people. Hrushevsky called on the Ukrainian intelligentsia to join the ranks of the Ukrainian movement in its effort to liberate Rus- sia.21 He argued that the alleged sacrifice of the Ukrainian intelligentsia for the benefit of the 'all-Russian' cause in fact amounted to a betrayal of the interests of the Ukrainian people and that the long tradition of such Little Russian 'self-sacrifice' earned the Ukrainian intelligentsia no respect in Russian liberal circles, while the Poles earned such respect by serving the interests of their nation. Hrushevsky maintained that the Russian government and Russian progressive circles did not differ greatly in their attitude to the Ukrainian movement, which they saw as naturally subordinate to all-Russian/Great Russian culture and society, intended to serve as building material for the development of both.
The significance of the ideas that Hrushevsky expressed in these two articles went far beyond the specific circumstances created by the dissolution of the First Russian Duma. In 1907, Hrushevsky reprinted both articles in The Liberation of Russia and the Ukrainian Question. They touched not only upon the enormously important question of the loyalty of the Ukrainian intelligentsia to its own people, without which the Ukrainian movement was doomed to extinction, but also on the interrelation between Ukrainian, Russian, and so-called all-Russian culture and society. In his political and historical writings of 1905-7, Hrushevsky postulated the 'Ukrainian question' as part of the national question in the Russian Empire in general, while divorcing it from the 'all-Russian' context. That postulate had highly important consequences for the future of the Ukrainian movement, but for the time being the consciousness of the Ukrainian intelligentsia remained predominantly 'Little Russian,' regarding the Ukrainian people and culture as part of the all-Russian nation and culture. Hrushevsky's strategy under the circumstances was not to counterpose the goals of the Ukrainian and allRussian (all-imperial) movements for the 'liberation of Russia' but to present them as complementary. The Ukrainian movement was too weak to set goals antithetical to those pursued by the Russian liberal intelligentsia, or even significantly different from them.
Hrushevsky adopted a different strategy in dealing with the Polish movement in the Russian Empire. As early as May 1905, Hrushevsky had raised the alarm about the unequal treatment of Russia's nationalities in connection with an imperial edict permitting the use of the Polish and Lithuanian languages in the secondary schools of the western gubernias.22 While welcoming the edict in general, he noted that it was rather limited in scope, excluding elementary schools, as well as languages other than Polish and Lithuanian. Hrushevsky argued that the Ukrainians of the western gubernias were just as entitled as the Poles and Lithuanians to be taught in their own language. He made reference to the opinion of the Imperial Academy of Sciences that the 'all-Russian language' was in fact Great Russian, which was foreign to the Ukrainian population of the empire.23 Hrushevsky considered an imperial policy that helped Polonize the Ukrainian masses not only harmful to the Ukrainians but also absurd from the government's own viewpoint, asking the rhetorical question: 'Is a Polonized Ukraine less dangerous to Russia than a Ukraine loyal to her own nationality?'24
Hrushevsky's trip to the Russian Empire in the spring of 1906 and his sharing of the experience of the Ukrainian cultural and political struggle in Galicia with the Ukrainian deputies of the First Duma caused alarm among the Polish political elite in Austria, resulting in the publication of a number of articles commenting on Hrushevsky's visit to St Petersburg. It was implied there that Hrushevsky's efforts to strengthen links between Russian and Austrian Ukraine were dangerous to the Austro-Hungarian state. Readers were also reminded that the Shevchenko Society was receiving subsidies from the Galician diet and that Hrushevsky would do well to remember that the Poles were still masters in Galicia. The real concern of the authors of those articles was that by disseminating information about the abuses suffered by the Ukrainian movement at the hands of the Polish masters of Galicia, Hrushevsky could compromise Polish prospects in the Russian Empire. Hrushevsky, who did not attempt to conceal his dissatisfaction with Polish attacks on him and the Ukrainian movement in general, made the whole story public in St Petersburg.25
In 1907, when plans for granting autonomy to the former Congress Kingdom of Poland were being widely discussed in the Russian Empire, Hrushevsky published a number of articles in which he once again discussed the history and current status of Polish-Ukrainian relations in Galicia, protesting plans to include the Kholm region in the prospective autonomous realm. Hrushevsky's essay on the issue, 'For the Ukrainian Bone (The Question of the Kholm Region),' was printed in Ukrainian in the Kyiv newspaper Rada (Council), then appeared as a separate brochure, and finally was included in Russian translation in The Liberation of Russia and the Ukrainian Question.26 The essay was a response to an article published by one of the leaders of the Polish National Democratic Party, Count Antoni Tyszkiewicz, in the newspaper Rech (Speech), the mouthpiece of the Russian Constitutional Democrats. Tyszkiewicz argued against the Russian government's attempts to make the Kholm region a separate province, claiming that the whole enterprise had been thought up by Russian nationalist circles and local elites that would benefit from the elevation of Kholm to the status of a provincial capital. Tyszkiewicz was certainly right in his evaluation of official intentions: facing the prospect of having to grant autonomy to the lands of the former Kingdom of Poland, the government wanted to save the Ukrainian population of the Kholm region for the 'all-Russian' cause. It is hardly surprising that Tyszkiewicz's argument found support in the oppositional Constitutional Democratic circles, whose representatives argued that the whole issue should be taken out of the hands of the government and submitted to the State Duma for decision.27
Hrushevsky, for his part, was clearly alarmed that the Polish National Democrats and the Russian Constitutional Democrats might reach an agreement at the expense of the Ukrainians. In his article he rebuffed Tyszkiewicz's argument, pointing out that by playing the pan-Slavic and liberal cards, it failed to take into account the interests of the local population, which was neither Russian nor Polish and had the right to separate national and cultural development. Hrushevsky argued that granting autonomy to Poland within its ethnic boundaries was a just cause, but not within the boundaries of the former Congress Kingdom of Poland, which included non-Polish ethnic territories. Hrushevsky believed that Russian and Polish policies towards the Ukrainians were intended to promote the assimilation of the Ukrainian population to their own cultures and societies. Nevertheless, along with a significant number of Ukrainian activists, he continued to believe that there were better prospects for the development of Ukrainian culture under Russian than under Polish rule. Once again, the interests of the Ukrainian movement and those of the central government in St Petersburg coincided on the issue of Polish dominance in the ethnic Ukrainian territories, but this time, unlike after the Polish Uprising of 1863, the Ukrainian activists did not have to hide their true intentions. They no longer presented themselves as proponents of the all-Russian cause; instead, they joined the battle under their own flag.
A close reading of Hrushevsky's political writings leaves no doubt that during the Revolution of 1905 in the Russian Empire his main goal, like that of the whole Ukrainian movement, was the achievement of Ukrainian autonomy. The strategies that he adopted to achieve it depended on whether he was dealing with Russian liberals or Polish nationalists. In the first case, he subscribed to the broadly defined goals of the democratic movement throughout the empire, arguing that the 'liberation of Russia' required a solution to the empire's national question and the granting of territorial autonomy to the ethnic minorities. By posing the 'Ukrainian question' as part of the 'national question' facing the empire as a whole, Hrushevsky gave new legitimacy to the Ukrainian demands for autonomy, even as he sought to persuade the Ukrainian intelligentsia within the ranks of the 'liberation of Russia' movement that it had not only 'all-Russian' but also specifically Ukrainian goals at stake in the success of that movement.
The self-awareness and political maturity of the Polish national movement served as an example to the nascent Ukrainian movement in the Russian Empire, and Polish activists were important allies in the struggle for federalization. But they were also dangerous competitors in the contest to 'nationalize' the empire's western borderlands and outright enemies of the Ukrainian movement in Austrian Galicia. As Hrushevsky considered developments in the Russian Empire from the perspective of Polish-Ukrainian relations in Galicia, he became more alarmed than his Kyivan colleagues at the prospect of Russia's solving its 'Polish question' at the expense of the Ukrainians. The introduction of Polish as a language of school instruction in lands where ethnic Ukrainians constituted the majority or plurality of the population would mean further cultural Polonization of the Ukrainian peasantry unless the schools were Ukrainized. If the Kholm region were included in autonomous Polish territory, Polish culture would again become dominant in that traditionally Ukrainian land. Official 'accommodation' of Polish political and cultural demands rather than those of the other nationalities would diminish the prospects of national 'autonomists' in Russian politics.
Hrushevsky's proposed solution to the complex political dilemmas that faced the Ukrainian movement in its dealings with its much stronger Russian and Polish counterparts was quite simple. During the Revolution of 1905 he emerged as a formidable supporter and tireless propagandist of the unity of all democratic forces in their struggle for the 'liberation of Russia.' For Hrushevsky, that slogan implied the achievement of territorial autonomy by the non-Russian nationalities. There was no place in this struggle for any separate deals between individual members of the anti-autocratic camp or between them and the government. Hrushevsky believed that the 'liberation of Russia' would bring freedom not only to Russia and Poland but to Ukraine as well.
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