The Impact of Habsburg Reforms on West Ukrainians

While the Habsburg reforms of the late 18th century applied to the entire empire, their impact was especially great on Galicia, which was in greatest need of improvement. Joseph II’S developed an especial interest in the province, which he viewed as a kind of laboratory in which he could experiment with various means of restructuring society and, specifically, of improving its productive capacity.

The administrative reorganization of Galicia was accomplished quickly and effectively. By 1786, Austrian laws replaced Polish ones and the nobles’ assemblies were abolished. To soften the blow to the old elite and to give it a voice in government, Vienna instituted an Assembly of Estates composed of nobles and clergy. But the assembly had no real decision-making power of its own, for it could only address petitions to the emperor. Real power lay in the hands of the imperial bureaucrats. The entire province was divided into eighteen regions (their number rose to nineteen with the addition of Bukovyna), each of which was headed by an official appointed by Vienna and his German-speaking staff. At the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy was the governor, personally appointed by the emperor. The entire bureaucratic apparatus was based in Lviv, or Lemberg as the Austrians called it, which became the administrative and judicial center of the province. The reforming emperor

Of Joseph II’s many reforms, the most important dealt with the peasantry. In 1781, realizing that he could not improve socioeconomic conditions in Galicia if he did not alleviate the plight of the peasants, the emperor decided on a bold policy that called for the dismantling of serfdom.

These were momentous changes. No longer was the Galician peasant someone who was ignored and unprotected by the law. He now became an individual with certain legal rights. This is not to say that these reforms made peasants equal to the other classes. In many ways the peasant remained subordinated and dependent upon his landlord. However, his condition improved from being mere chattel to being something like a hereditary tenant whose relationship with the landlord was regulated by law. The bold and progressive nature of these reforms is all the more evident when we realize that at exactly the time they were being implemented, Joseph II’s fellow monarch, Catherine II of Russia, was imposing serfdom on the peasantry of Left-Bank Ukraine.

The Greek Catholic church also benefited greatly from the new policies. From the start, Maria Theresa and Joseph II applied the principle of parity in dealing with the Greek and Roman Catholic churches. For the Greek Catholic clergy, which had long been discriminated against under the Polish regime, this principle represented a marked improvement. No longer could Polish landlords interfere in the appointment of parish priests, who now enjoyed equal legal rights with their Roman Catholic counterparts. Moreover, the economic status of the Greek Catholic clergy was elevated by the payment of modest government salaries. The crowning measure was the renewal of the office of metropolitan of Halych in 1808 after a hiatus of about 400 years.

A major reason for the growing confidence of the Greek Catholic clergy was the educational reforms initiated by Maria Theresa. In 1774, the empress founded the Barbareum, a Greek Catholic seminary in Vienna that provided West Ukrainian students not only with systematic theological training, but also with an invigorating exposure to Western culture. In 1783, a larger seminary was founded in Lviv. As usual, Joseph II carried his mother’s measures a step further: anxious to obtain more well-trained bureaucrats and priests, he founded a university in Lviv in 1784. It was the first such institution of higher learning on Ukrainian soil. About 250 students, mostly Poles, but also a sizable minority of Ukrainians, enrolled in its four faculties. Because the professors, most of whom were Germans, lectured in German and Latin, which the Ukrainians could not understand, a separate faculty, called the Studium Ruthenum, was organized for the Ukrainian students. Its language of instruction was an artificial and stilted language that combined Church Slavonic and Ukrainian vernacular.

Elementary education was practically nonexistent in Eastern Galicia. The few one-class schools that could be found in the villages were usually the domain of half-literate deacons who did little more than teach their pupils the rudiments of the alphabet and the Holy Scriptures. As early as 1774, to improve this situation, the Austrians introduced a system of three types of schools: parochial, one-class schools, using the native language of the region; three-class schools, using German and Polish; and four-year schools, preparing pupils for further training in the high schools (gymnazia) and universities. The old secondary schools that a number of Catholic monastic orders had maintained for the sons of the nobility were abolished.

Impressive though they appeared, Joseph II’s reforms were in reality more an indication of what he attempted rather than what he actually achieved. In Galicia, as elsewhere in the empire, many of the measures encountered insurmountable obstacles.

The reforms were also hampered by the nobles, who seized every opportunity to subvert them. Angered by the confiscations of its land and the reduction of its role in education, the Roman Catholic church was also slow to cooperate. Finally, opposition to change reached a critical point when the Hungarians, incensed by the centralizing and Germanizing policies of Vienna, threatened to revolt. Frustrated and disillusioned, Joseph II was forced to revoke many of his measures. When he died in 1790, he left behind the bitter epitaph: “Here lies Joseph II who failed in all his endeavors.”

In the early 19th century, Habsburg rulers, especially the conservative Francis I, continued to retreat from the position taken by the reforming emperor. Most notably, many of the improvements in the position of the peasantry were revoked and serfdom was reinstituted in effect. However, some of the changes dealing with the church, education, and law remained in force. Without them and the other enlightened precedents set by Joseph II, the liberalization of the empire that was to come in the late 19th century would have been difficult to achieve.

Although limited and incomplete, the reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II nonetheless improved the conditions in which the West Ukrainians – one of the most downtrodden peoples in the empire – lived; and they affected not only the conditions of their material existence, but their views and attitudes as well. As might be expected, the reforms evoked a deep sense of gratitude among Ukrainians to the Habsburgs in general, and Joseph II in particular. This loyalty to the dynasty became so deeply rooted that the Ukrainians were called “the Tyrolians of the East.”

This deep dependence and even subservience to the Habsburgs had its negative effects. It bred the so-called rutenstvo, a set of attitudes that came to prevail among the West Ukrainian elite well into the 1830s. Its proponents – mostly priests – were characterized by an extreme provincialism that identified Ukrainians exclusively with Galicia, Greek Catholicism, and the priestly caste.

The new conservatism that held sway in Vienna reinforced the suspicion of innovation and of new ideas that was inherent to the West Ukrainian clergy-elite. Aping the Polish nobility (even to the point of adopting the Polish language), the rutentsi practiced a pseudo-aristocratism that included looking down on the peasants and their “swineherd language.” Having had its status elevated by the Habsburgs loosened the clergy’s identification with the peasantry among whom it lived. The clergy began to look only toward Vienna, servilely accepting all that the capital deigned to grant it and posing no demands of its own. For generations, this rutenstvo mentality helped to maintain West Ukrainian society in its oppressed and backward state and discouraged Ukrainians from taking any initiative to improve it. Thus, in Austrian-ruled Ukraine, just as in Russian-ruled Ukraine, many members of the native elites helped to keep their own countrymen firmly set in the imperial mold.

Imperial rule exposed Ukrainians to much tighter, more extensive, and intrusive forms of political, social, and economic organization than they had ever known before.

Another feature of the imperial age was that it highlighted the existence of two distinct Ukrainian societies, one in the Russian Empire and the other in the Austrian Empire. True, Ukrainians had lived in two very different political systems since 1654, when Moscow extended its overlordship over the Left Bank while most of the Ukrainian lands remained in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. But the political, cultural, and socioeconomic significance of the West Ukrainians in the latter stages of the Commonwealth’s existence reached such a low point that it was almost imperceptible. As we shall see, in the 19th century and under Austrian rule, this position changed dramatically, and West Ukrainians again assumed a prominent role in the history of their people. Consequently, the course of modern Ukrainian history has largely been the tale of two parallel paths, one tread by the West Ukrainians in Austrian Empire and the other by the East Ukrainians in the Russian Empire.