The Russian and the Ukrainian Idea in Galicia

In 1848 the Galician Ruthenians broke away from the idea of “historical” Poland. The next step in their search for national identity was the defining of the contents of their recently rediscovered Rus’ individuality.

This question permitted two alternative answers: “All-Russian” or “Ukrainian.”⁴³ We have seen that the Supreme Ruthenian Council was in favour of the Ukrainian thesis, but that this decision carried little internal conviction. The issue had indeed a certain air of unreality. Galicia’s contacts with the Russian Empire, including Ukraine, were tenuous, and the intellectual outlook of the Ruthenian intelligentsia, despite an abstract preference for either the All-Russian or Ukrainian ideology, was primarily Austrian and provincial Galician. The question of selfidentification overlapped with that of a conservative or liberal-populist orientation in civic and educational work. As early as 1848, in the Assembly of Ruthenian Scholars, the issue came up in embryonic form; the partisans of the vernacular clashed there with those advocating the restoration of Church Slavonic as the language of literature. The problem was not resolved at that time, and for many years the life of the Ukrainian community was bedevilled by linguistic and orthographic controversies, which assumed a partisan political character.

The Old Ruthenian, or Russophile (“Muscophile”), current crystallized in the 1850s. It was nicknamed the “St. George Circle” (svia- toiurtsi'), after the Greek Catholic cathedral in Lviv, where several leaders of the group were canons. Support of the Old Ruthenian trend came from the Greek Catholic clergy, and the whole movement was clerical-conservative. The Old Ruthenians wished to oppose to the Polish language not the lowly vernacular, but another language of equal gentility. Church Slavonic seemed the obvious candidate, but the utter impracticality of the scheme soon became evident.

Some Old Ruthenian leaders began to point to literary Russian as the linguistic norm, with the argument that natives of Little Russia from seventeenth-century Kievan scholars to Nikolai Gogol had contributed to the making of the Russian literary language. The leading Old Ruthenian publicist, Bohdan Didytsky (1827-1908), devised a theory that Great and Little Russia should have a common written language, pronounced in two different ways, each of which would be admitted as correct.⁴⁴ This was suggested to Didytsky by the circumstance that educated Galicians were able to read Russian, but could not speak it. The idiom the Old Ruthenians actually used in their publications was an odd mixture of Ukrainian, Church Slavonic, and Russian, with Polish and German additions, ironically called iazychiie (jargon) by their opponents. This macaronic language remained the hallmark of the Russophile party for many years.

Another important feature of the Old Ruthenian ideology was the insistence on such formal traits of the Rus’ identity as the Byzantine liturgy, the Julian calendar, and the Cyrillic alphabet with the historic “etymological” spelling. The Russophiles believed that only by upholding these venerable traditions would their people succeed in resisting Polish wiles. The Austrian administration had indeed tried to impose the Latin script on the Galician Ukrainians during Goluchowski’s governorship. This attempt was beaten off by the St. George Circle.⁴⁵ A typical expression of the Old Ruthenian mentality was the “ritualist movement” (pbriadovyi rukh) of the 1850s and 60s; its purpose was to purge the Greek Catholic ritual of all “Latin accretions.”⁴⁶

At first, the Old Ruthenians had a certain general, rather vague sympathy for Russia. The ritualistic traits of the Rus’ tradition, which they valued most highly, were common to the entire East Slavic world. Their lack of first-hand experience masked the differences between Russia proper and Ukraine.

Their ingrained conservatism made them admire the mighty monarchy of the tsars. But the decisive factor in their Russophilism was an anti-Polish animus. They felt that whatever weakened the unity of the Rus’ world played into the hands of the Polish enemy, and they suspected their populist opponents of collusion with the Poles. The rupture with Polish society was so difficult that the generation of Ruthenian intellectuals which had effected the break tended to lean to the opposite direction. The anti-Polish resentment induced even the surviving member of the Ruthenian Triad, Iakiv Holovatsky, who in his 1846 article had spoken as a Ukrainian “separatist,” now to assume a proRussian stand. Appointed in 1848 to the newly created chair of Ruthe- nian literature at Lviv University, he was forced to resign his professorship because of his participation in the Moscow Slavic Congress of 1867 and ended his days in Russia.

Political events in the 1860s speeded the transformation of Old Ruthenianism into outright Russophilism. The rapprochement between the dynasty and the Poles was a terrible shock to the St. George Circle. It not only destroyed their hopes, but also outraged their moral sense. They felt let down by the emperor and the Vienna government, whom they had loyally served since 1848. In the face of the impending Polish takeover in Galicia, only one hope seemed left: salvation from the East. There was a saying among the Galician Ukrainians: “If we are to drown, we prefer the Russian sea to the Polish swamp.’’ Austria’s critical international situation made the disintegration of the Empire look probable. At the height of the Austro-Prussian war, in the summer of 1866, several articles appeared in the Old Ruthenian newspaper, Slovo (The Word), which, while stressing loyalty to Austria, at the same time proclaimed the doctrine of the ethnic and cultural unity of the Russian nation “from the Carpathians to the Urals.”⁴⁷

At about the same time, individual Russophile leaders entered into relations with the Russian Pan-Slavists.

The liaison man was the Reverend Mikhail Raevsky, chaplain of the Russian embassy in Vienna. He organized a salon for Ruthenian and other Slavic intellectuals and students in the Austrian capital, and through his hands flowed subsidies from the Slavic committees of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The sums which reached Galicia were not large, but this dependence on secret Russian aid helped to keep the key figures of the Russophile party “in line.”⁴⁸

The spontaneous growth of pro-Russian sentiment in the 1860s was not limited to the Galician Ukrainians. All the Slavic nationalities of the Habsburg Empire, with the exception of the Poles, reacted similarly to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise. Even the linguistic theories of the Old Ruthenians, odd as they may seem, were not without parallels among other Slavic peoples. For instance, the Slovak writer and publicist L’udovit Stur proposed the adoption of Russian by all Slavic peoples as a common literary language.⁴⁴ Yet to the Ukrainians the issue possessed certain especially ominous aspects. For them Russophilism was not simply a question of political orientation; it contained a threat to their national identity. The bulk of their people lived within the boundaries of the Russian Empire, which denied the existence of a Ukrainian nationality. The Ukrainian movement there could maintain itself only with difficulty against persecution by the tsarist government and against tremendous societal pressures. If the section of the Ukrainian people who lived outside Russia, and to whom the opportunity of free choice was given, had embraced the ideology of a Russian nation, one and indivisible, this would have doomed the prospects of Ukrainian nationalism. If, on the other hand, the nationalist trend prevailed in Galicia, this was bound to have serious repercussions in east-central Ukraine.

The opponents of the Russophiles were referred to as the Young Ruthenians, or, more commonly, the populists (narodovtsΓ), the Ukrain- ophiles, or simply Ukrainians.⁵⁰ Even in the 1850s, voices were raised against the reactionary linguistic policy of the St.

George Circle, in favour of the vernacular as a literary language, in accordance with the precepts of the Ruthenian Triad. The populist movement was born, around 1860, under the inspiration of the poems of Taras Shevchenko (1814-61), which were received by young Galician intellectuals as a prophetic revelation: they “enthusiastically read Shevchenko, the first and greatest peasant poet of all Europe.’’⁵¹ A programmatic pamphlet published in 1867 summarizes the main points of the populist philosophy: “We are the upholders of the great testament of our unforgettable bard, Taras Shevchenko.... We are proud of belonging to a nation of fifteen million, whose name is Ruthenians or Ukrainians, and whose country’s name is: our Mother Rus’-Ukraine.... Our sworn enemies are the Polish nobility and the Muscovite government.... We shall always stand on the side of our poor, rag-covered peasant people.”⁵² The pamphlet professed loyalty to the Greek Catholic Church and the Austrian Empire, but rejected clericalism and servility toward Vienna.

In the 1860s there was an air of youthful romanticism about the narodovtsi. This showed, for instance, in the sporting of Cossack costumes. The first organizational expressions of the movement were semi-secret circles (Jiromady) among university and Gymnasium students. The populists were joined by a few veterans of the 1848 generation who disapproved of the reactionary policy of the St. George Circle: the Reverend Stefan Kachala (1815—88), Iuliian Lavrivsky (1821-73), and Ivan Borysykevych (1815-82). The leading figures among those who entered public life in the 1860s and 70s, and who may be regarded as the founders of modern Ukrainian nationalism in Galicia, were Danylo Taniachkevych (1842-1900), Omelian Partytsky (1840-95), the brothers Volodymyr (1850-83) and Oleksander Barvinsky (1847-1927), the brothers Omelian (1833-94) and Oleksander Ohonovsky (1848-91), Natal Vakhnianyn (1841-1908), and Iuliian Romanchuk (1842-1932).

It is noteworthy that although some were priests, most were not: this was the first generation of Galicia’s Ukrainian lay intelligentsia. The majority became teachers of secondary schools, and the narodovtsi assumed the character of a “professors’ party.”⁵³

Until the 1880s the “Old” party controlled the metropolitan’s consistory, the major Ruthenian institutions (for example, the “National Home” in Lviv, founded in 1849), the leading newspaper Slovo, and the parliamentary representations to the Reichsrat and the Galician Diet. The narodovtsi did not yet feel ready to venture into “high politics,” and concentrated their efforts in the educational field. They were supported, from the outset, by the great majority of the elementary school teachers in the countryside. The populists tried at first to work through the older institutions, controlled by the Russophiles, but co-operation proved impossible. Their first major organizational undertaking was, in 1868, Prosvita (Enlightenment), an association for adult education, which founded reading halls in the villages and published popular literature. Prosvita was the parental body from which, in the course of years, sprang other institutions and organizations. Populism gradually spread among the masses and laid a firm organizational groundwork. The first populist periodical, in 1862, failed, as did repeated later attempts. Only in 1880, thanks to the initiative of Volodymyr Barvinsky, were the narodovtsi able successfully to launch a representative newspaper, Dilo (The Deed), transformed into a daily in 1888. Its title implied a polemic against the Russophile paper, Slovo (The Word).⁵⁴

The dynamism of the populists contrasted with the stagnation of the “Old” party, whose reliance on outside aid had imbued it with a quietist spirit. The turning point came in 1882. The high command of the Russophiles was affected by the treason trial against some of its best-known personalities, among them Adolf Dobriansky (1817-1901), a native of Carpatho-Ukraine, and the Reverend Ivan Naumovych (1826-91), the party’s chief orator and journalist. The trial actually ended in an acquittal, but it showed, at the same time, the duplicity of the Old Ruthenian leaders, who publicly had always asserted their allegiance to the Austrian Empire and the Catholic church while secretly favouring Russia and Orthodoxy.⁵⁵ After the trial, the most compromised defendants, especially Naumovych, emigrated to Russia, thus weakening the movement in Galicia. As another result of the 1882 trial, the Austrian government asked for and obtained the resignation of Metropolitan Iosyf Sem- bratovych (1821-1900), blamed for having tolerated Russophile propaganda. This was the beginning of the end of the “St. George Circle.” Many ordinary patriots of Old Ruthenian persuasion became painfully aware that Russophilism represented, ideologically and politically, a blind alley. By 1890, the leadership of the Ruthenian community in Galicia had definitely passed to the “Ukrainians,” while the Russophile camp showed signs of disintegration.

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Source: Rudnytsky I.. Essays in modern Ukrainian history. Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies University of Alberta,1987. — 500 p.. 1987

The Russian and the Ukrainian Idea in Galicia

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