The Impact of Austrian Enlightened Despotism
Ethnic nationality was of no political consequence in the eighteenth century. At the time of the annexation of Galicia to the Austrian Empire in 1772, the nobility of the land had been Polonized for a long time.
Thus it is not surprising that properly speaking the Austrian government had at first no “Ruthenian policy.” Although the legal pretext used at the time of the First Partition of Poland was the alleged right of the Habsburg dynasty to the inheritance of the medieval Rus’ Galician-Volhynian Kingdom, the newly acquired province was, for all practical purposes, treated as a slice of Polish territory. However, the Ukrainian population of Galicia was soon to feel the impact of the new regime. The reform measures of the Austrian “enlightened” monarchs, Maria Theresa and Joseph II, directly affected the two social groups that had retained their Rus’ identity: the peasants and the Uniate clergy.The most important measures enacted by the Austrian government between 1772 and 1790 in favour of the Galician peasantry were the following: the limitation of the corvee to a maximum of three days a week, and of 156 days a year, from a peasant household, with a decreasing scale of services from the poorer groups of villagers; a strict prohibition of any additional exactions beyond the statutory corvee; the creation of a cadaster and the securing to the peasants of the possession of the plots actually held and cultivated by them; the organization of villages into communities with elected officers; the granting of certain basic personal rights, such as the right to marry without the master’s permission and the right to complain and appeal against the decisions of the landowner to the organs of state administration.2
One has to recognize the limitations of these reforms. The Austrian government did not aim at a condition of civic equality.
The empire was to remain a hierarchical “society of estates.’’ The peasant, technically no longer a “serf,’’ still continued to be a “hereditary tenant’’ of the dominium (manorial estate). Besides the right to the peasants’ unpaid labour, the dominium also retained important prerogatives of an administrative, judicial, and fiscal nature. After the death of Joseph II in 1790, and with the beginning of prolonged wars against France, further reforms were discontinued. The conservative tenor of the post-Napoleonic period made administrative practice more sympathetic to the landowners’ interests. Still, the Galician peasant had become “at least an object of law, and not, as before [under the old Polish regime], outside any law.’’3 Writing on the eve of World War I, Ivan Franko stated: “Our people have not forgotten him [Joseph II], and they still speak of his wise and humane treatment of his subjects.”4 The pro-peasant reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II laid the foundation for the dynastic loyalty of the Ukrainian masses in Galicia, which was to last until the end of the monarchy.The Greek Catholic, or Uniate, Church occupied a crucial place in the history of the Galician Ukrainians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.5 The Austrian government granted the Uniate church and clergy equal status with their Roman Catholic counterparts, which had been denied them by the former Polish regime. In 1774, Maria Theresa decreed a new official term, “Greek Catholics”; the purpose was to stress the parity of the “Greek” and the “Roman” rites. This principle of parity, repeatedly emphasized by Maria Theresa, Joseph II, and Leopold II, was implemented by a series of practical measures: the improvement of the legal and economic position of the Greek Catholic clergy, the creation of seminaries, and the creation of cathedral chapters in Lviv and Przemysl, whose members were to assist the bishops in the administration of their dioceses.
The crowning reform, in 1808, was the elevation of the Lviv bishopric to the rank of Metropolitan See of Halych.6 This had been originally suggested, as early as 1773, by Bishop Lev Shep- tytsky of Lviv (1717-79) with the argument that a Galician “Greek” metropolis would extend Austrian political influence among the Uniates of Western Ukraine, still part of Poland (until the Second Partition of 1793), and help to counter Russia’s “schismatic” propaganda there.7Polish cultural influence among the Greek Catholic clergy, which had its roots in pre-Partition times, increased during the early decades of Austrian rule. The lifting of the social and educational status of the clerical class made its members more susceptible to the tempting example of the way of life of the Polish gentry. But in spite of the dominance of the Polish language in Ruthenian clerical families, which was to last well into the second half of the nineteenth century, there were early symptoms of an anti-Polish political attitude. In 1809, when Galicia was temporarily occupied by the forces of Napoleon’s Polish satellite, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, Metropolitan Antin Anhelovych (1756—1814) refused to participate in any Polish patriotic demonstrations, and suffered for his loyalty to the Habsburg cause.8
The struggle of Cossack Ukraine for political independence in the seventeenth century was closely associated with the defence of Orthodoxy against Islam and Roman Catholicism. The Uniate church appeared at that time as an adjunct of alien Polish domination. By the nineteenth century, a curious reversal of roles had taken place. After the subordination of the Metropolitan See of Kiev to the Moscow Patriarchate (1685), the Orthodox church in Ukraine lost its autonomy, and gradually became completely Russified. The Uniate church, suppressed in the Russian Empire (1839), was limited to the Habsburg domains. But here it experienced a remarkable resurgence. The beneficial reforms sponsored by the Austrian government raised the educational and civic standards of the Greek Catholic clergy above those of the contemporary Orthodox clergy. At the same time, the impact of Austrian “Josephinism” enabled the Greek Catholic Church to rid itself of the Polish connection. It was now in a position to assume the role of a Ukrainian national church. From 1848 on, the Greek Catholic clergy provided the political leadership of the Ukrainian community in Galicia. Later, the leadership gradually passed into the hands of the lay intelligentsia, many of whom were, however, sons of clerical families.